The WCU English Department held its annual Spring Literary Festival featuring multiple writers coming to campus to talk with students about writing and how to get published.
According to the Literary Festival website, the Spring Literary Festival was originally the Visiting Writers Series before it became the Literary Festival, which was the oldest series in North Carolina.
“The festival seeks to secure that the area’s rich literary history holds a prominent place on the nation’s literary stage,” said Emily Naser-Hall, an associate professor of English at WCU, at the screening for the film “Big Fish.”
There are many different reasons that people find the Literary Festival exciting and informative for students.
“It’s so exciting or students to be able to interact with these authors and hear about their process and their inspiration,” Naser-Hall said. “Also that these authors come from this region and are rooted here.”
Naser-Hall talked about how these people who came from this region used the area to become a place they love.
“They made something that they love and a place that they love, their career that can eventually be represented on screen,” Naser-Hall said.
The Literary Festival is also helpful to the writers, according to visiting author Daniel Wallace.
“I love to have opportunities to share my work with people outside of my home area, and it’s great to come to beautiful places in North Carolina that I have never been before,” Wallace said.
Wallace is the author of six novels, with the most famous one being “Big Fish,” which was adapted into a Tim Burton film in 2003. When Wallace presented, he read stories from his new book full of short stories called “Beneath the Moon and the Long Dead Stars.”
“The book that you love the most is the one that you just finished or that you’re just about to start,” Wallace said.
Wallace was not the only writer there, but other big names visited WCU and talked about their books. A few other names that stick out are Hanif Abdurraqib, Crystal Wilkinson and Jill McCorkle. All of the authors are excited to share their work.
Another planned event was a panel on how to get published. There were three visitors for the publishing panel: Meg Reid, the Executive Director of the Hub City Writers Project, Alyson Sinclair, the publisher of “The Rumpus,” and Alice Martin, a fiction writer from North Carolina and soon to be assistant professor of English studies at WCU.
There were four creative writing competitions: The high school competition, the undergraduate writing competition, the graduate student writing competition, and the new “Beyond the Frame” short story competition.
The high school competition was divided into three sections: poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. “Where I’m From” by Ava Albright won for poetry, “Rest In Peace” by Amelia Amadio won for fiction, and “The 1st Sunlit Day, Ending with Adrianne Lenker’s Zombie Girl” won for nonfiction.
The undergraduate writing competition was also divided into three sections. The winner of the poetry section was “The Levity of Construction” by junior Andrew Baker.
“It was surreal because I’m a psychology major,” said Baker. “Writing poems was something I’ve been doing since middle school and I just kept them in a folder.”
The winner of the fiction section was “Naomi Fritz” by Lottie Lannigan. Naomi Fritz is a story about a young girl learning about her sexuality and facing the reality of people’s disdain towards the LGBTQ community.
“I want people to read my story and understand how hard it can be for queer people in religious environments to come to terms with their identity,” said Lannigan in an email.
The winner of the prize in literary nonfiction was “Hard Lessons/Tough Love” by Michael King. It is a piece about the trauma that King had experienced during their first time during college with an emotionally manipulative relationship.
“Things are messy sometimes, and when messy things happen to you, it’s okay to have messy responses to those moments,” King said.
The Beyond The Frame short story contest also unveiled its winner, called “Between the Cracks” by Avery Luft. “Between The Cracks” is about a girl named Ellie who has to explore an abandoned house because of a dare from two other girls.
“The message I want people to have is that loneliness is evident and everywhere, even if we don’t talk about it or see it,” Luft said. “People are lonelier than we think, and I’d like to break the stigma that it’s embarrassing to seek connection in each other.”
All of these stories will be published in the Nomad, WCU’s literary magazine.
With all of these events, English students are being shown all of the ways that they can be successful as writers in the future.
