Guest post by Susannah Felts from the Porch
Susannah Felts, a writer of fiction from Nashville, Tennessee, had a residency at Hambidge in the summer of 2013 (as seen above, working in Son House Studio). Not long after her return home, she co-founded the Porch Writers’ Collective in January of 2014 with writer Katie McDougall.
Through the Porch, Susannah and Katie aim to inspire, educate, and connect writers of all ages through classes, youth outreach programs, and innovative events. In the process, they hope to nourish and energize Nashville's literary community, encouraging collaboration and creative mingling between writers and other artists and makers.
Since its founding 18 months ago, the Porch has organized writers’ retreats, poetry readings, a short story contest, an essay contest, book club meetings, guest speaker events, and workshops for writers of all levels: adults, kids, professionals and novices.
When someone, who is a writer herself, founds a nonprofit center for writing, it’s a clear indication that she thinks it an important and necessary endeavor. Such organizations require an enormous amount of time and work, and can make it challenging for a writer to find time for her own craft. I recently asked Susannah to share of few thoughts about the Porch and why she founded it.
Building the Porch: a blog for Hambidge
Writing often gets described as a solitary art. I get this, just as I understand the need to get away from it all to focus on one’s words—a gift that Hambidge has provided me and so many fortunate writers. But I also wonder: Is this not the full story? Is writing unduly pigeonholed as a solitary craft? Artists working in other mediums create primarily alone, but these art forms are not so culturally cast as isolated endeavors.
Writers, I think, need community as much as other artists, which is to say: plenty. We also need a lifetime of learning. We need to seek opportunities to hone our craft, to apply our visions to the work of other writers (in part to become better readers of our own work), to come at the work of writing from new angles, putting new voices and methods of practice in the mix. We need to shake things loose, seek motivating pick-me-ups, employ new strategies. We need to do these things in a supportive environment, one built not on competition but on mutuality. We need, in short, what a literary center can provide, and that is why my business partner Katie and I (and our glorious board of directors) are working so hard to build a nonprofit literary center for Nashville.
A key part of that work in the first year+ has been education: about the mission, the vision. Here’s how I contextualize the Porch for people who aren’t familiar with existing literary centers: Like me, you probably want to live in a city with a world-class symphony, a great art museum, a strong local music scene, a thriving theater community, a vibrant culinary landscape. Thankfully, Nashville has all of those features. Shouldn’t it stand out for its literary arts culture as well? Shouldn’t it have a place where people can study the craft of writing, a place that nourishes a local literary community and puts Nashville on the national map? Shouldn’t we be seeking ways to create innovative collaborations between the performing and visual arts and the literary arts? As a writer, you can bet that these are features I want in the city I call home.
What the Porch does, and what we seek to do on a larger scale as we grow, isn’t without precedent: both nonprofit and for-profit literary centers flourish in cities all over the country. We look to those centers as role models, as exemplars of what we hope to achieve as we evolve. We hope that we inspire others still to follow in our footsteps. And we hope that we encourage writers who are looking for the next place to call home to consider Nashville as a city that supports their art—a good place to live if you’re a writer-type, a place that offers so much beyond that solitary writer’s desk.
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