Jennings to help writers solidify Northern Appalachia stylings
Writers and authors from Northern Appalachia may not have stylings as recognizable as regions like New England or the Midwest, but a writers group organized an event that will help some draw from a similar inspiration.
Writers on the Prairie will bring up to a few hundred writers to Jennings Environmental Education Center on Saturday and Sunday, July 19 and 20, for a “mini-conference” featuring workshops, peer critiques and tours of the park’s prairie.
The event is organized by the Writer’s Conference of Northern Appalachia, an organization founded by author PJ Piccirillo with a mission of bringing Northern Appalachian writers into the limelight. He said Jennings is a locale indicative of Northern Appalachian culture — and would be a good place for writers to draw inspiration from.
“We are creating a brand of people who have been writing about this place but they haven’t been recognized,” Piccirillo said. “You take Jennings, and it’s a unique place that’s a prairie in Pennsylvania, that just speaks to how resilient nature is.”
This will be the first event the conference is hosting at Jennings, but it has had other similar events at places like Cook Forest.
Kimberly McElhatten director of the Writers on the Prairie event, said these workshops also help up-and-coming writers meet with experienced writers, so they can network and learn tips about their craft and more.
“We like to hold these mini-conferences across Northern Appalachia so we can reach people in all the regions,” McElhatten said. “We aim to serve everybody because we think when we get seasoned writers in the room with emerging writers, it helps us grow the canon of Northern Appalachia.”
According to Piccirillo the conference has writers covering multiple genres, like fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, essay, short fiction and long fiction, “all creative genres and also your essays examining who we are.”
The conference is not a membership-based organization, but has a thousand, or so, people on its email list who are in regular contact with it, Piccirillo said.
The events the conference organizes are oriented to helping as many of those writers at one time in one place as possible. McElhatten said the added benefit of the meetings is getting to work in nature and learn about the environment, which can be beneficial to writing.
“It lends itself to writing,” McElhatten said. “People will naturally write about the prairie because they’ll be on it and they will be inspired to write.”
At the Writers on the Prairie event, there will be workshops for writers to learn from as well as peer critiques, which will pair less experienced writers up with longtime authors, to help them learn from one another.
Everyone there will get a good look at the prairie, too.
“We’ll have a guided tour by the expert, DNR staff, so they’ll give us some history and so we can understand where we are and the place we are writing about,” McElhatten said.
Jennings provides a combination of prairie and forest environs, which offer a wide array of resource and educational opportunities. One of the park’s main features is a 20-acre prairie ecosystem, which is home to distinctive prairie plants and the endangered massasauga rattlesnake. The most noteworthy and spectacular prairie flower is the blazing star, according to the park’s website.
McElhatten said she hopes that by learning about the prairie, writers can add natural and environmental science into their knowledge, which they can pull from in their future writings.
“We are going to do a workshop about how to enrich your writing with research, and then we’ll go back into the prairie doing a poetics in plein air workshop,” McElhatten said.
One of the other products McElhatten said could come out of the event is publishing opportunities for some of the newer writers who attend.
“I think the product of our conference is writers of our region are validated by sharing space with other writers and seeing their experiences be talked about,” McElhatten said. “I think it’s important to talk to people who have been published. Being in conversation with others it’s also a critical part of the process.”
Piccirillo said this event also will help solidify the identity of Northern Appalachian writers by getting a bunch of them in one place to hone their craft together.
“We need to talk about what’s neat about this part of America, like they do in the west,” Piccirillo said. “We try to give them that identity. How are we similar to this idea of a region of people who are unique in their interaction with this place?”
Piccirillo added that this event could take place at Jennings again, should it be a hit with the writers who attend.
“People know Kentucky writers, New England writers. You can think of Appalachian writers and usually you think of them as Southern Appalachian writers,” Piccirillo said. “That’s what we’re all about, is trying to get writers and build a brand.”
Participants can register for the full two-day experience for $94, or Saturday-only for $67. For more information about Writers on the Prairie, visit the Writer’s Conference of Northern Appalachia’s website at wcona.com.
