Applications open for unique writing conference in the Great Smokies

Maurice Manning has led countless writing workshops over the course of his career, but the Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet experienced something special at the Tremont Writers Conference last October. The conference, now preparing for its third year, is jointly created and coordinated by Smokies Life and the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, and it takes place on Tremont’s campus nestled inside Great Smoky Mountains National Park, just as the fall leaves near their peak.

“The thing that stands out to me about the Tremont conference is that the Great Smoky Mountains is not simply a setting for the program,” Manning said. “It is an integrated feature of the program. I’ve long been a believer that the landscape, the natural surroundings, ought to be generative for one’s writing, and Tremont’s location makes that immensely possible.”

Manning led the poetry cohort during the 2024 conference and enjoyed the experience so much he’s filling the same role in 2025. This year’s conference, slated for October 22-26, is accepting applications from writers of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction through May 15. Attendees will participate in small-group writing workshops led by Manning for poetry, fellow Kentuckian Crystal Wilkinson for nonfiction, and two cohort leaders for fiction: journalist-turned-novelist Karen Spears Zacharias and David Joy, a novelist whose work is firmly rooted in the mountains of Western North Carolina.

“It’s a highlight of my year to help organize this conference, and I get just as much out of it as the participants,” said Frances Figart, creative services director for Smokies Life, who creates each annual event in partnership with Tremont’s manager of field and college programs Jeremy Lloyd. “I’m so thrilled that we have Maurice Manning returning, as he is just the epitome of a great teacher of poetry, with knowledge that easily extends to all genres. I also know it will be exhilarating to get to work with Wilkinson, Joy, and Zacharias for the first time.”

In addition to daily morning workshops and optional one-on-one mentoring sessions with their cohort leaders, participating writers will spend their afternoons accompanying Tremont naturalists on excursions exploring the region’s cultural and natural history, and their evenings enjoying group dinners, fellowship, and readings from cohort leaders. The spirit of community pervading the conference is “everything,” Manning said, the whole experience designed around the idea that everyone involved is working together toward the same goal—continual improvement of craft as they tweak lines and storylines “to where it’s just right, like a bird building a nest.”

Nature-based metaphors like this are easier to access when living life in close relationship to the complex and universal truths of the outdoors. Manning has published eight collections of poetry, including his most recent title Snakedoctor in 2023, and the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Common Man in 2010. His poems have been published in journals and magazines ranging from The Southern Review to The New Yorker, and The Grinnin’ Possum Podcast he produces with Steve Cody has released 11 episodes featuring original poetry, history, and old-time music. He teaches at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, as well as at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina, where he is a faculty member for the MFA Program for Writers. But he says the poems he writes “feel given to me” by the woods and hills of his Kentucky farm.

“I feel like I’m in a way living in a musical instrument,” he said, “and I just have to find the song for that particular moment and put it into words.”

The natural world also looms large in Joy’s work. He draws inspiration from the woods surrounding his home in mountainous Jackson County, North Carolina, just south of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

“I think that a lot of people try to create a fictional world, but it winds up being a distorted mirror of a real place,” he said. “For me, I knew Jackson County so well that it felt disingenuous to try to fictionalize it, so I just chose to hold very specifically to the place.”

Growing up along the Catawba River in North Carolina, Joy was “never cut out to be inside” and has been “obsessed” with fishing “since I could hold a fishing rod.” He moved to Jackson County at the age of 18, becoming closely attuned to the subtleties of the region’s natural landscape through countless hours spent hunting, fishing, and growing his summer vegetable garden.

Joy is the author of five novels as well as short stories and creative nonfiction pieces that have appeared in publications such as Garden & Gun and The New York Times Magazine. His 2024 novel Those We Thought We Knew won the 2023 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, the 2023 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction, and the 2024 Sir Walter Raleigh Award. His 2016 novel Where All Light Tends to Go was an Edgar finalist for Best First Novel and adapted into a film starring Billy Bob Thornton and Robin Wright.

In Joy’s novels, readers not only find the last names, patterns of speech, and landmarks familiar to those who know Jackson County well, but they also encounter precise descriptions of the natural rhythms that mark time in the mountains—the “thistle-colored flower” of a pink lady’s slipper “hanging from a thin green stem like a human heart,” in 2018’s The Line that Held Us; mountains that “took on the look of water” as seen from the top of a fire tower at nighttime in 2020’s When These Mountains Burn.

In considering the importance of accurately rendering such details, Joy referenced a piece of advice his mentor and fellow award-winning novelist Ron Rash once gave him: “You have to get the details right in order for the reader to believe the big lie.”

“Regardless of the place that you’re writing about or the people that you’re writing about or the situation that you’re writing about, all of it has to ring true,” he said.

Not all writers root their work in the settings that surround them each day, Joy said, but doing the work to understand the people and places being portrayed is vital to the success of any work.

Likewise, Manning consistently finds that ring of truth in the streams, wildlife, and ever-changing angles of light that fall across his Kentucky farm. But he believes that the rhythms of nature exert a universal pull on the human heart, regardless of place, and that writers can only benefit by better understanding them. The suffix “graphy” in the word “geography,” he points out, means “to write.” He thinks of the word as translating to “the written earth.”

“I often think that going out into the woods, walking by a stream, if we’re paying attention with all of our senses, and then maybe even a sixth sense, we’re reading that book,” he said. “It’s a great wonder that human beings have known about for centuries and centuries, but sadly, in more recent eras, we’ve lost our knowledge of that book and lost our sense of belonging to it. The Tremont program is a way to get that back.”