Authors anticipate ‘magic’ at third annual Tremont Writers Conference

Karen Spears Zacharias was 40 years old when she published her first book, but the seed that swelled into her latent identity as a writer was planted decades earlier, in the summer of 1966. After her father died in the Vietnam War, Zacharias, then nine years old, was sent to Tennessee to stay “in the way back holler of a place called Christian Bend” with her great-Aunt Cil.

“There wasn’t a lot to do there other than to spend time with Aunt Cil, listening to her stories,” Zacharias said. “I believe it was the storytelling that I heard that summer that got rooted within me.”

The war continued to rage, but both at home and school, silence prevailed. Neither her siblings nor their mom ever spoke about the father they had lost, Zacharias said; later, when she had children of her own and reached the age her mother had been when Zacharias’ father died, “all of that began to bubble up.” She began writing “about things that I couldn’t talk about.”

Today, Zacharias is the award-winning author of many novels and nonfiction works, including her most recent title released in March, The Devil’s Pulpit and other Mostly True Scottish Misadventures, based on the experiences she had and the people she met while studying at the University of the West of Scotland in 2022.

As one of four workshop leaders for the 2025 Tremont Writers Conference in the Great Smoky Mountains, jointly created and coordinated by the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont and Smokies Life, Zacharias is excited to help fiction writers of all experience levels discover and develop their own authorial voices. Novelist David Joy will lead another fiction cohort, with cross-genre writer Crystal Wilkinson facilitating the nonfiction cohort and Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet Maurice Manning returning to guide the poetry cohort for the second year running. Applications are open through May 15.

“I’ve been to writers conferences where, let’s just say, the competitive spirit is palpable. Ours is not that way at all,” said Jeremy Lloyd, Tremont’s manager of field and college programs, who creates each annual event in partnership with Smokies Life Creative Services Director Frances Figart. “It’s more intimate because it’s smaller. It takes place in the outrageously beautiful Smoky Mountains. And because of all this and more, relationship-building is one of the key ingredients. Writers come away with a group of peers who, in many cases, continue to elevate one another’s writing long after the conference ends.”

Conference participants will spend their mornings in small-group writing workshops and optional one-on-one mentoring sessions with their cohort leaders. Zacharias looks forward to opportunities to spark creativity in her cohort, something she finds “every bit as thrilling” as receiving compliments on her own work.

“You don’t know what that thing is that will light in another person,” she said, “but unless we expose ourselves to those opportunities for creativity, we don’t know what we’re capable of.”

Following morning workshop, writers will spend their afternoons accompanying Tremont naturalists on excursions exploring the region’s natural history. Evenings will be occupied by group dinners, fellowship, and readings from cohort leaders—an intentional cultivation of community.

“I think that there’s value in the solitude that we often have as writers, but there’s an equal amount of value exploring your ideas with like-minded people, people who love and value words and want to make their words better,” said Wilkinson. “I wouldn’t be the writer I am without my various writing communities.”

Wilkinson, a recent Kentucky poet laureate who is also the author of multiple books, short stories, poems, and essays—including her 2024 culinary memoir Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts—is excited to see the “magic that can happen” with the convergence of place, people, and purpose she expects to find at Tremont.

Wilkinson will encourage her cohort members to explore the tools available to them across genres, and the “wild possibilities” these diverse forms offer. As a writer of fiction and poetry as well as nonfiction, Wilkinson has a deep appreciation for the depth these disciplines can offer when drawn on together.

“I used to put my poet self in one compartment, my nonfiction self in another compartment, and my novelist/fiction writing self in another one,” she said. “One of the things I’ve learned lately is that it is possible to have them all present, and I think it’s necessary. You can have access to rich language, you can have access to details and storytelling, and you can have access to the facts and archival research.”

In addition to workshopping manuscripts, Wilkinson said, presenting writers with real-time writing exercises to complete is an effective way to help develop these skills.

“The word ‘exercise’ is so important, because that’s exactly what it is,” she said. “It’s almost like stretching a muscle you didn’t even know you had.”

Wilkinson can’t imagine a better place to stretch those muscles than the Tremont campus, nestled within the dazzlingly diverse landscape of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

“I think even if you don’t have an inclination toward nature, being in it, suddenly there are myriad possibilities that you can add to your work,” she said.

A native of rural Kentucky, Wilkinson has always paid close attention to the natural world, finding meaning in its rhythms and dramas. These insights have frequently inspired and illuminated the narratives arcing through her work, whether the medium be fiction, nonfiction, or poetry.

“You can understand a sense of place through exploring animal life and the natural world,” she said. “I think that one of the things that comes up in my work is nature’s propensity to heal.”

This tendency is often evident in Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts. A tribute to the five generations of Black women who came before her in the corner of rural Appalachia where she was raised, the book is both memoir and cookbook, exploring the lessons Wilkinson’s grandmother taught her about nature and how to live harmoniously within it.

“There are moments where I’m even thinking about what enslavement would have been like for my fourth great-grandmother and also thinking about being out there in the woods and having those moments of respite, listening to the birds sing, depending on nature to fortify after a hard winter in Appalachia,” she said.

Zacharias, also, feels a strong connection to the mountains and valleys flowing from Tremont. Though she has lived in Oregon since 1975, returning to East Tennessee “always feels like coming home.”

“No matter what I’m writing about, all of it began there for me, in that house on stilts, in that backwoods holler,” she said. That’s true even when she’s writing about a place as far away as Scotland. “That connection across the pond carries from that place in East Tennessee all the way to that place in west Scotland. The storytelling that I heard from my aunt about her neighbors then becomes the storytelling I do about the people I met in Scotland.”

The first thing Zacharias did after receiving her advance for After the Flag Has Been Folded, her first book deal with Harper-Collins nearly 20 years ago, was to travel to Christian Bend, Tennessee, and purchase a headstone for her great-Aunt Cil. It was inscribed with the phrase “words rise up out of the country.”

“I’ve lived a lot of places, and I don’t think we talk enough about how it’s the geography of a place and the personality of a place that shapes us and shapes our stories and shapes our worldview,” she said. “That is the beauty of travel to me, is that you get out of the one-mindset worldview.”

Whether they’re traveling from Townsend or Tucson, writers receive an opportunity to experience a new type of wildness at Tremont, an abrupt shift in context capable of knocking loose new forms of creativity—allowing each writer to leave better equipped to express their own unique voice.

“There’s a renewing in the spirit when you’re around other writers,” Wilkinson said, “and you can’t help but be anxious to get back to that solitude, to get back to the page, with this new vigor, with this new unlocked imagination, this new whatever it is. There’s always something new.”