Ozarks-born poet C.D. Wright, whose work was part country, part sophisticate, wrote that after she left Arkansas, she pined for "the speech of its citizens."
That speech, and Wright's legacy, are being celebrated at the inaugural C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.
The event, which opened Friday and continues today, came together in February 2016, a month after Wright died at age 67 in her home in Barrington, R.I.
Nan Snow, a central Arkansas author and professional, approached her alma mater about hosting the conference. She envisioned the event drawing women writers -- and women-identifying writers -- from all genres and levels of expertise to discuss their craft and swap industry tips.
UCA agreed, and two university foundations contributed $4,700, said Sandy Longhorn, an assistant professor of creative writing at UCA.
Authors and scholars involved in the conference's inception quickly decided to name it in Wright's honor.
"She was very present to many of us in the room," Longhorn said.
Wright taught at Brown University in Providence, R.I., for more than 30 years. Her work earned her two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur fellowship, commonly known as the genius grant.
Her husband, Forrest Gander, a writer and translator who also teaches at Brown University, said in an email he was "so pleased" the conference was named after Wright.
"I'm of course gratified, in as much as I can feel anything outside of grief, by the public response to her legacy, by the personal notes I've received about how much she and her work have meant to others," Gander wrote.
Wright was born Carolyn D. Wright on Jan. 6, 1949, in Mountain Home. She lived with her brother among reams of stenotype paper and books tucked under beds, as her father was a chancery judge and her mother was a court reporter.
There also was "plenty of loud talk at the table," Wright said in the preface to her 1986 collection Further Adventures with You.
Wright earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Memphis, but she returned to the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville in 1972 to complete a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing.
Though she left for San Francisco, and eventually for Brown University in 1983, the drawl and drama of Arkansas infiltrated Wright's more than a dozen works.
In her poem "The Ozark Odes," Wright offers a table grace for Southern peculiarities: "bless cowchips, bless brambles / and the copperhead, the honey locusts / shedding their frilly flower / on waxed cars"
In the preface, Wright wrote that she did not miss Arkansas' pervasive "tar-paper siding, segregation" and "religious disturbances." Nor did she understand the reign of football.
"Those HOGS were lost on me," she wrote.
Still, Arkansas offered four full seasons, the trill of mockingbirds, berry jellies and the Missouri Pacific line, Wright recounted.
She also wrote that she was made in the image of hardscrabble women, noting her parents were the children of dirt farmers and railroad workers.
Once, a man referred to Wright as "a real hillbilly."
"I thought he was a patronizing fart but I am, irrevocably, a purebred hill person," Wright wrote.
Wright journeyed back to Arkansas often. She helped craft a literary map of the state and co-edited a press formed in Arkansas, Lost Roads, with Gander for more than 20 years.
"She was a light," said Longhorn, who met Wright through the speeches she gave on university campuses. "She was a driving force for social justice on so many levels."
Longhorn pointed to Wright's 2010 book One With Others, a collection that chronicled the life of Wright's mentor, a woman she called "V."
V, or Margaret Kaelin McHugh, was a white, married woman from Arkansas who was exiled from the state in the late 1960s after taking part in a civil-rights march between Little Rock and Memphis.
After being disowned by her husband, an Arkansas state patrolman abandoned McHugh on a Tennessee roadside.
Wright's poetic recounting of V's life "uncovers layers of racism and injustice in Arkansas," Longhorn said.
"But at the same time, it really shows people who were working for good and who were trying to right those imbalances," she said.
Like Wright's work, the writing conference serves to amplify voices at the margins. Men are still favored in publishing, and mostly male names top mastheads, Longhorn said.
"We are inviting women to be our speakers and to let their voices be heard," she said. "But we are in need of male and male-identifying allies who will hear what we're saying and will help us work to change the system."
More than 120 people registered for the conference, and more than half are from out of state, according to Longhorn. Fifty-three UCA students also signed up, she said.
Authors Tayari Jones and Cara Brookins will serve as keynote speakers. Sessions today will cover topics like writing memoirs on illness and abuse, writing as a mother, and writing characters of color.
Friday's events began with a writing workshop at the Esse Purse Museum on Main Street in Little Rock.
Women examined the miscellany that spilled from 20th-century purses: hose mending kits, opera glasses, a Kotex-brand sanitary belt and World War II-era rations tokens.
Participants then wrote about the necessities, or luxuries, in their own bags: pepper spray, an unpaid bill, ginger candies and cheap red lipstick.
One North Little Rock woman told the group she had no writing qualifications but later revised her claim, producing business cards she had made after her husband died.
"This makes me feel good," she said. "It does."
Stephanie Vanderslice, a UCA professor and a member of the conference's executive committee, said she wanted this weekend to be a support network to which women can return. The conference will be held yearly, she said.
"This is the way to keep your writing alive," Vanderslice said.
It's also another way that organizations are keeping the memory of Wright alive. Both the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and Brown University have launched honors in her name, Gander said in an email.
Love for Wright and her work spanned continents, her husband said, recalling a young woman who had never met Wright but flew to New York for her memorial. She knew no one in the city.
On her way out, Gander wrote, the woman ran into their son, Brecht, and told him that Wright's work "had been so important to her, had opened possibilities to her for imagining innovative Southern poetry, had represented for her the power of a Southern woman artist.
"And then she walked out into the NY night."
Metro on 11/04/2017