Welcome to my website!

Catching up:

It has been an amazing few years since LSU Press published What Travels With Us: Poems, quickly followed by the Free Press publication of my debut novel Sufficient Grace, both after I'd become a grandmother. I’ve been very lucky.The folks at Free Press sent me all over the southeastin 2006 with the hardcover of SG and then sent me out west with the trade paperbackedition in 2007. Recorded Books produced an unabridged audio edition of SG, read by Cynthia Darlow, and SG is now available for Kindle.

Then in 2007, the icing on the cake came when all four members of my NC writing group had books hit shelves in 2007: my paperback along with Lynn York’s second novel The Sweet Life, Pamela Duncan’s third novel The Big Beautiful, and Virginia Boyd’s debut novel One Fell Swoop. The 2007 Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance annual meeting hosted the first of many panels our group was asked to give, including at Kathy Patrick’s Girlfriend Weekend in Jefferson, TX, and The Southern Voices Conference in Hoover, Alabama, both wonderful annual celebrations of reading and writing.  This on-the-road reunion was great fun, particularly since Pam and I no longer live near Virginia and Lynn.

I’ve had a wonderful time traveling and talking to fans of WTWU and SG. I’ve gotten some great letters and email from readers.

I thank each and every one of you for the kind words and excellent reviews. Readers and book clubs are still discovering Sufficient Grace and What Travels With Us, and I’m still happy to talk to your book group by phone if my schedule permits.

I’m now a grandmother three times over. A lot can happen in four years! WTWU received the 2005 Weatherford Award for Appalachian Literature in the category of fiction and poetry and was named 2006 SIBA Poetry Book of the Year. Sufficient Grace received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly and was named a Book Sense Reading Group recommendation. Tennessee Writers Alliance honored my work by awarding me the title of 2007 Tennessee Writer of the Year. In 2009 I

received the Mary Frances Hobson Medal in

Arts and Letters.

A perpetual student, I've spent Fall 2007 - Spring 2009

aquiring an MFA in Creative Writing at University of Memphis. I worked with some outstanding writers, both faculty and fellow students. Thanks to Richard Bausch, Cary Holladay, and Tom Russell for strengthening my understand of fiction and my committment to teaching,  for bringing me back to the short story, and for requiring me to reread Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Evan S. Connell, Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut, and Sherwood Anderson, among others. Thanks to Kristen Iversen and Rebecca Skloot for teaching me that I do like writing creative nonfiction after all. And thanks to John Bensko for a better understanding of the evolution of poetry. I was also priviledged for a semester to be on staff of The Pinch, U of M's prize-winning literary journal, a journal I highly recommend. So you see, it HAS been an exciting ride.

Now I’m working on several projects, short and long, including a collection of poems and a novel. More on that in a few months. I’ve also been teaching creative writing at the Duke Writers Workshop, John C. Campbell Folk School, Hindman Settlement School’s Appalachian Writers Workshop, Highland Summer Conference, Humanities Tennessee’s Tennessee Young Writers Workshop, Learning Events, and more. I’ve developed an extended novel workshop, a level two revision workshop, and an extended memoir workshop, and offer those courses in collaboration with Sue Richardson Orr and Learning Events in Sweetwater, TN. And I've been speaking to a lot of groups, including the Two-Year College Association-Southeast Annual Conference. My Ford Escape wants a short vacation!

What's new at the website:

Because I'm both a writer and a writing teacher, there are features on this website for both readers and fans of Sufficient Grace and

What Travels With Us and also features for writers and aspiring writers. I hope most of what's here appeals to everyone. The new feature I'm most excited about is--my blog: Dancing with the Gorilla: Lyric Pontifications on the Kinetics of Reading, Writing, and Revising.

There's something in Dancing with the Gorilla for anyone interested in books or stories, or anyone curious about how some stories get written. I'm a big believer that really good books are the best writing teachers. The best way to become a good reader is to appreciate what other writers have accomplished on the page. Many of my adult writing students have told me if they never publish a book, they are better readers and read better books after taking a writing workshop. That's largely what this blog is about, no pun intended: to appreciate good reading and good writing.

Tuesdays and Thursdays posts will have regular writing exercises along with the blog entries. These two-day-a-week posts are the backbone of Dancing with the Gorilla. Additional posts may be about books, events, announcements, contemplations, discoveries, surprises. Somehow it will all tie back to reading and writing, two of my favorite activies.

I hope you take a peek at Dancing with the Gorilla and keep coming back, and I hope you find other interesting and useful surprises among the site's resources. And please join me on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and SheWrites, where I’m limping and lurching into the 21st century!

With warm regards,

Darnell