Meacham Writers’ Workshop is a series of readings and workshops which operate each semester, the most recent of which took place last Thursday, October 23 through Saturday, October 30.
Katie Christie, Meacham student coordinator and Memphis senior, said of the workshop that “It is the best opportunity that people in Chattanooga and in the surrounding area have to meet published authors and people who have already achieved something that they are working towards.”
Workshop director, Dr. Richard Jackson of the English department, spoke of Meacham’s impact as a whole. He said “What any literature does is change the normal way you think about things—it’s not necessarily the themes, but just the ways of thinking. This is the big humanizing thing about literature or any painting.”
Jackson uses examples of some of the visiting writers to explain. “A writer like Keith Flynn who is so music based with the way the reads as well as gospel song along with it—you see that this is a guy who thinks not so much in terms of big ideas but in terms of the music. And you look at someone like William Gay and you see a guy that is thinking about your average, everyday person, but pulling out of that something that is really interesting.”
Even the language and the speaker falls victim to the flux in Pamela Uschuk’s new collection, Crazy Love, from Wings Press.”I will be the torture rack/that stretches out my own truth,” she writes. Her poetry is both wrought by war and tended for its beauty, both bitter with “regret’s venom” and exuberant with love. After all, “What is the tender palm without the tough skeleton/forming the back of the hand,” she asks in the poem, “Geometry Lesson.” The persistent voice of these poems speaks of the tension of the dance between violence and benevolence, man and woman, nature and humanity, as well as the hesitation after the music has stopped. Here, in Uschuk’s world of encounters, nothing is complete, and everything is moving, extending, reaching, growing. Even the buck, the chickadee, the tigrita lily sway in the gust of Uschuk’s rhythmical words, and the reader has no choice but to follow suit.
Sebastian Matthews, a graduate of the University of Michigan’s MFA program, teaches part-time at Warren Wilson College and edits Rivendell, a place-based literary journal. He is the author of the memoir, In My Father’s Footsteps, and co-editor, with Stanley Plumly, of Search Party: Collected Poems of William Matthews. His poems have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, New England Review, Post Road, Seneca Review, Tin House, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Matthews was a recent Bernard De Voto Fellow in Nonfiction at Bread Loaf. His chapbook, Coming to Flood, was published by Hollyridge Press in 2005 and a collection of poems, We Generous, was published by Red Hen Press in February 2007. 
A work of art is like a gem. Important elements of the world are compressed together to create a concise and beautiful artifact. Like the notes of a song, every word is important to a written work’s aesthetic appeal, not one too many or too few. Marc Fitten uses this description of art in a writer’s workshop he teaches for students at the UTC Meacham Writer’s Conference. “Bathe in art”, he tells them. “It’s important to experience artistic expression outside of your own expertise. If you are a fiction writer, go to poetry readings and fine art exhibitions.” There is a social dialogue mingling amongst all of the arts. Though each of us may have an independent form of expression, we must keep others works in consideration when creating our own.
It is with an appetite, even after the feast, that Gaylord Brewer writes the poems of Exit Pursued by a Bear, the 2004 collection from Cherry Grove. Beyond the innocuous fruit fetishes, the near pornographic pole beans of “Co-op Girl,” Brewer dines on the ironies of interaction, and likewise, in assuming the authority of speaker, he chooses, with great immediacy and poignancy, what words to swallow, what to leave out of his lyrics. He writes, “and though I believe/I am correct, I couldn’t identify about what.” It is in these silences that the uneasiness, the regret, surfaces much like oil on still water and nudges the reader towards “some saner madness.”
