Joseph E. Dabney, whose Smokehouse Ham, Spoonbread, and Scuppernong Wine won the James Beard Foundation 1999 Cookbook of the Year Award (and “has a four-possum rating” in his locale), enlightens a forum with Appalachia-meets-the-media stories of promotional encounters that attended his book’s international celebrity. Jo Carson, playright [e.g. Daytrips, most recently performed at the Barter Theatre], teller and poet, explores the means and assemblage of oral histories into public performances. Amongst many questions unanswerable perhaps is that of how to elicit and reflect the realities of Appalachian experience without exploiting its native peoples of varying origin and socio-ecology. The showing of Appalshop’s Stranger with a Camera captures remembrances of Kentuckians and Canadians relating to the observer eye, in that case a photographer’s lens, with a range of emotion from violence to cooperation. Winner of the 1999 AWA Book of the Year Award for The Sound of Distant Thunder, Jack R. Pyle outlines “dos and don’ts” for building suspense and interest in mystery writing. Its most important rule, he says, is: don’t cheat readers by introducing the true villain and motive toward the end so all the other clues discerned become irrelevant and a waste of previously-invested mental energy.

First, we are invited in his forum to write the name of a favorite object; later we are asked to write a related cinquain and share it with the group. Next, we are passed a box of assorted found objects gathered from out-of-doors and directed to write five attributes of the item we chose. I describe my rock as: gold, brown, uneven, pocked, and cracked. Okay, says the founding editor of CASS Now & Then magazine, write five lines of free verse incorporating your words. Mine comes down as: “Borrowed Stone/ The years were gold,/ nights soft brown/ and our loves uneven,/ pocked with crises and cracked,/ like parched ground.”

And there you have it, on-the-spot creation under the tutelage of the well-reknowned. It’s a lot of fun after a lot of work coordinating and planning and spreading the word around by president Thomas Alan Holmes, program chair Theresa Lloyd, secretary Pat Shirley, and editor Barbara Eberly, the outlining of gracious presentations by workshop and forum speakers, and ground efforts by ETSU staff members to assure a smooth-running event. At Saturday evening’s banquet, Dr. Holmes announces Year 2000 awards -- Book of the Year to Gap Creek: A Novel by Robert Morgan, Outstanding Contribution to Appalachian Literaure to Lee Smith -- and contest winners Mary O'Dell for poetry, Jan Barnett for fiction, and Ann Adkins for essay -- and announces that next year the presidency will pass to Theresa Lloyd for AWA’s Conference 2001.