Tag Archives: Hindman Settlement School

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Retreat To The Woods

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I spent the weekend in the woods, or almost in the woods, and perhaps more accurately on the edge of the woods that cover the hill which seemed like a mountain that rose behind the cottage where I stayed at Hindman Settlement School.  

I know of those who spent the weekend lallygagging poolside in Florida,  but I had on my calendar a writing retreat at the settlement school, one I signed up for in the sweltering heat of July. I signed up because I was hot and November seemed refreshing. I signed up because several of my friends had signed up, too.  It was a bit like junior high.  

Our pal, Silas, was facilitating the workshop, and he sent a text telling us the spaces would go quick and we eagerly enrolled, like adolescents going on a field trip.  It was better than any field trip, with all those writers, and with the author, Ashley Blooms there, too, running her own sessions.  I came home with some new people to call friends, and I suspect, so did most of us. 

I liked my new pals immediately.  For one thing, writers, at least my favorite ones,  are just funny,  They tell the best stories.  So, we sat around the first night laughing our heads off, as we rearranged the furniture a piece at a time to accommodate newcomers to the circle. I suspect, we also gathered in a bit because our hearts were slowly warming to each other. 

The thing I like best about a good story told by a writer is the clever turns of phrase they use…so we laugh, but we also repeat the phrase quietly to ourselves, catch the eye of someone doing the same thing, and we laugh all over again.  It’s like chili or soup that is better the next day. 

We had to show vaccination cards upon arrival and we socially distanced during craft workshops, each of us with a big table to ourselves.  But the rest of the weekend was … just normal.  Taking our mugs to Marianne’s room for her good coffee each morning.  Lunch and supper in the great hall, where Vivian fed us well and with the best and kindest of humor, retrieving her polenta recipe so I could take a picture of it.  

Until Hindman, I have been dismissive of polenta, remembering only my grandmother’s cornmeal mush, which she served when she’d get on a kick.  Out came Vivian with an Ina Garden recipe and her own notations written in the margins, and I was the hero of our table, because we had all rhapsodized about that polenta throughout the meal. 

Some in the group stayed mostly in their rooms, writing.  Some of us stayed mostly outside our rooms, making too much noise.  It was a weekend designed for whatever we wanted.  Silas did several craft seminars, and we could attend them or not. If we wanted to work on our writing in solitude, we could do that.  If we wanted to just relax and rejuvenate, show up for meals, we could do that.  If we wanted to do any combination of activities, go right ahead. 

One group, hardy souls that they are, walked the steep hill behind the school.  I am told the view from the ridge is wonderful.  And I am sure it was Saturday afternoon, too.  The late November light was slanting golden and warm, the trees almost bare after laying down a carpet of russet and ruby leaves for the hikers.  The pictures they posted were stunning.  All of them smiling, backlit and shiny, leaning in toward each other like comfortable old lawn chairs. 

I couldn’t make that hike the first time I tried it, the trail shoots straight up in a lung-busting trajectory. I wasn’t tempted even a little bit to join them Saturday afternoon.  But I waited for them to return, all rosy-cheeked and bringing the crisp fall air in with them, the woods trapped in their jackets and wool caps. We toasted them as they toasted each other, and it was perfect, as perfect as a moment can be.  Simple, warm, loving.

We created a little community as best we could in this time of almost past Covid.  I noticed the way we instinctively spaced ourselves in the dinner line and when chatting around tables after meals were over, or before sessions began.  That three foot spacing for public life. But then we went home to our little cottage in the woods, and friends from other cottages stopped by. And there were hugs, and heads bent together for gossip, and a glimpse of normal, and it felt good.

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A New Kind of Hindman

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 All this week I will be attending the Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman, while sitting at my dining room table. I wouldn’t have planned to attend this year, except Sonja Livingston, an essayist and memoirist whose work I greatly admire, is on faculty and teaching in my genre, Creative Nonfiction.  

So, here I am. 

Or rather, here I sit, while she sits in her home in Western New York, and my classmates are sitting in theirs, or at the beach, or wherever they are spending this week in late summer.  There is no trudging up and down hills for meals and class, no  gatherings and in person evening readings.

There is no dinner bell that echoes around the mountainsides when it calls us to come eat or to attend a session in the May Stone building.  There is air conditioning here, in my house, a constant 72 degrees, except in the afternoon when I get hot and crank it up, or is it down, to 68.  Hindman is air conditioned, too, but it seems spottier, somehow, with all that walking and all the damp that hangs around windows and drips from the kudzu. 

Books are important at gatherings such as this, and we have a bookstore at our disposal.  The Red Spotted Newt, in Hazard, has a pop-up shop on campus, and we have the website to order all the books our virtual carts can hold.  The owner, Mandi Sheffel, is on campus for the few participants who are staying there, but she is sticking around for the rest of us, too, just like at a regular writers workshop, only we see her at a distance in a tiny Zoom window.  We can’t walk up and chat like we normally would.  But we also do not  thumb every book she has brought, picking them up, putting them down, flipping through them again, so maybe she is happy, at least, to have more pristine stock to offer customers.

It’s weird seeing old friends and complete strangers in their tiny Zoom rooms, these people who have bared themselves on the page, the ones we are to give feedback to, receive feedback from, the angst and the tenuous trust of that. But, somehow in Sonja’s hands, it works.  The group, too, does its part, jumping in and braving the process, and my only let down was this. 

At Hindman, after the first session  we walk back to the May Stone building for lunch.  This takes a while, as we meander alongside a wide meadow and then over the small foot bridge, and it is one of my favorite parts of the day.  Up ahead are little clutches of classmates, their heads together, still discussing the workshop we have just left.  Someone behind me has told a funny story and now I hear nothing but laughing, and I am sad I missed it.  

My pals and I walk slowly, reveling in another first day at the forks of Troublesome Creek, with a general sense of love and well-being and a mild wondering of what is for lunch.  The heat may be bothersome, but in a minute we will be snaking our way down the lunch line, searching for and finding old friends from other years,  with squeals and hugs and much shushing because someone we can’t see has just started grace. 

Hindman is different this year.  Was different last year, too, with serious discussions about if, and how, to carry on in light of the pandemic.  This year, there was no discussion of if to have it.  The work it seems to me, was directed toward how to have it well, and the week is off to a great start. 

It has been a few years since I have attended, but the draw of working with a writer I admire was too important to forego.  So here I am, new notebook, my good writing pens.  But I’ll miss some things, too.

I’ll miss the after hours conversations, the socializing, the landmarks that let me know I am almost there: Yoders, the Amish store on the outskirts of town where we buy bread and cookies, the Midee-Mart, on the edge of campus, the new concrete bridge over Troublesome that replaces the old one that created a deadman’s curve. 

And then the settlement school, nestled in the crook of the creek.  Whenever writers gather, there are words upon words upon words.   And they are the point, those words, and here we all are, together, sharing them.

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Hiding From the World In Hindman

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At the time of this writing, ISIS was on the move in Northern Iraq, heading toward Baghdad, cease-fires were not holding in Gaza,  Malaysian flight 17 was still not recovered, spread over a nine-mile swath in the sweltering heat of a Ukrainian summer.

The weekend came and went and a new work week started, and still I refused to watch the news, broadcast or cable, and I turned my attention instead to old reruns of “The Middle”  and “The Andy Griffith Show.” And sometimes even Andy was too modern and I settled in for long evenings of British mysteries set in the 50’s, or costume dramas set in distant centuries.

Because I simply can’t take it anymore. The news is as distressing as I have ever known it, and I have lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy and King assassinations, the Challenger explosion, 9/11, natural disasters splayed all over every channel  on a continual loop, wars, famines, outbreaks of plague.

But never do I remember so many distressing things, so close together,  and a feeling of such utter helplessness and…I don’t want to say it…but hopelessness, too, on really bad days. Each crisis seems to beget another crisis which backburners yet another crisis that stews away until it boils over and some invisible chef rearranges the pots on the stove and it starts all over again.

My mother, who was too young to remember the depression but recalls clearly the war years, says right now is as distressing a time as she can remember. The worst, maybe. She will tell you, though, that they only saw the news at the movies, on carefully controlled newsreels, but the newspapers, big thick things with tiny print, were full of accounts as were the news reports on the radio.

As it is,  the 24 hour news outlets have done me in. I can’t watch any more. I can’t listen to one more “ping” as I receive a push notification of some on-line outlet updating me with news. I want off this ride.

So, I watch “Endeavor” and “Lark Rise to Candleford,” and maybe a Vera Stanhope mystery here and there. And yes, they are murder mysteries, but nothing gory or gratuitous and the plot just clicks along with Vera hurrrumping from one place to another in her baggy coat and unflattering hat.

th-4She calls everyone “pet” or “poppet” but she says things like, “aye, you might be the murderer.”  You gotta love Vera. She’s got issues but she is good at her job and all she wants to do is go home and put her feet up and enjoy her pint.

She looks out over the bleak Northumberland landscape and she seems, if not content,  at least resigned.  But we don’t live on the edge of the North Sea, where I am guessing television and cell reception is poor, and they are spared some of the bombardment of the news.

So, I have turned off the television. I allow myself visits to well-selected and respected web sites of new outlets where I read detailed reports and fair analysis of world events.

And I am looking forward to a week in the mountains, which might as well be Northumberland, at least as far as phone service goes,  And there are no televisions. None.

At all.

Do you know what a rare and lovely thing that is? Not just now, but in general?

I will be at the writer’s workshop at the Hindman Settlement School thand I should be learning a lot and reading good work, and laughing with my friends. We will make up things to laugh at. I call my mother a couple of times, check in with my messages off and on, and then don’t look at the phone for hours, days, because everyone I want to talk to is here.

I am looking forward to silencing the outside world more this year than any other I can remember. I might have reached my capacity for understanding world events. It’s all just too much, too complex, too something.

The forecast for Hindman is this. Temperatures in the 70’s, rainy but still, people, the 70’s. That has never happened. Almost every one of our group will be there, which also almost never happens. We haven’t seen each other in a while so that means pent- up stories begging to be told.

We will serve all our local delicacies at our impromptu late night th-2soirees, things like pickled bologna and fresh-made pesto.  I bring the hot olive cheese spread from J’s, and it goes quick.  I always take extra but they are just pigs, what can I tell ya.

Maybe if the music is fine and the laughter loud I might be able to come home and face the news. Let’s hope.

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For Mike

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FROM THIS PLACE TO THAT

“Mike Mullins”

Greta McDonough

If you were listening hard on Sunday,  you heard the sound of a thousand hearts breaking.  Appalachia lost a good friend and native son that night.    Hindman Settlement School lost its guiding light.  Writers lost their patron saint.

And of course, his family lost so much more.

Mike Mullins, executive director of the Hindman Settlement School, died suddenly at the age of 63.  He had been director of the school since 1977 and he directed the ship with a keen eye and a kind hand ever since.

I have written in the space about my experiences at the Hindman Writers Workshop.  I am not sure I have written specifically about Mike.  What you need to know is this.  It was Mike who gave the workshop breath, he had the vision for how the week should go, and he was the gruff but lovable camp director that made sure his vision was fulfilled.

Everyone washed dishes.

Everyone.

He said it was to help keep costs down, and I don’t doubt that.  But it also ensured that no one got too big for their britches.  Not the participants, not the important writers who served as faculty for the week.

At least twice during the week everyone donned their flimsy plastic aprons, bused the tables, manned the sprayer and put away hundreds of plates, glasses and flatware.

We took almost as much pride in being the best dishwashing crew as we did being the best writers in class.  Thank you for that, Mike.

He insisted that the faculty, established and famous writers all, sit with the participants at meals.  There was no staff table.  This meant that we each had a chance to eat cobbler with Lee Smith, or soup beans with Robert Morgan, Silas House, or Gurney Norman.

Mike insisted the faculty mingle informally with the participants.  If he heard that wasn’t happening, he got busy fixing it.

He insisted that returning participants befriend and make welcome all the first-timers.  At orientation he told us plainly that he expected that, and he meant it.  It was summer camp all over again, and we loved this little ritual, smiling while he spoke to us sternly.

Then he warned us about the snakes.

Big ones.

Poisonous.

He recounted the places on campus he had seen them, right where we would be stepping, right about this time of night, and we had better be on the lookout.  We loved this little ritual, too.  We waited for it, laughed when he brought it up, but we couldn’t begin a week at Hindman without hearing it.

One orientation  he forgot to mention the snakes and all the old-timers’ heads snapped up, looked around, blinking and disoriented. We teased him about the snake story and he was good-natured about it.  It was one more way in which he took care of his children at the forks of Troublesome Creek for one week every summer.

We aren’t the only ones who feel his loss.  The Daughters of the American Revolution have long supported Hindman Settlement School, and members of almost all chapters know him.  When I shared the news of his passing with friends who are in the DAR, they were as shocked and upset as we were.  He worked with DAR chapters all over the country, and they came to know and love Mike, too.

I thought he belonged to us alone.

Because he was ours, at least for a little bit, in the ways that mattered most.

We speak of our Hindman family, openly and unashamedly.  We call ourselves kin, and so we are.  We are the kin our hearts have chosen.  Mike created the space for that to happen.  We have gathered in. Wept. We have loved each other through his passing as only family can.

Friends have posted so many pictures of Mike these past few days.  Mike, always smiling, his arm around his sweet wife, Frieda, Mike with his children, grand babies in his lap.  A smiling Mike pushed back in his office chair, ready to chat about a new book or just any old thing.

And that was our Mike.  Constant and steady, a happy warrior, a man with a heart big enough for all his family.  A man who stood at the Forks of Troublesome and welcomed his children home.