Originally a stationary retreat that served sustainable gourmet to its guests for writing in isolation in the hills of southern Tennessee, Hill House Writers, having now grown into a community of mentors who intimately understand the writing process, are pleased to announce the genesis of a new and exciting opportunity—our ongoing writer’s retreat series—Hill House’s Movable Feast!…
Barry Lopez, born January 6, 1945, is an American author of fiction and nonfiction. He has published nine works of fiction and seven nonfiction including Of Wolves and Men, a National Book Award finalist. The San Francisco Chronicle has described him as “the nation’s premiere nature writer.” His fiction draws heavily upon his knowledge and…
If you woke up tomorrow, and your internet looked like this, what would you do? Imagine all your favorite websites taking forever to load, while you get annoying notifications from your ISP suggesting you switch to one of their approved “Fast Lane” sites.Think about what we would lose: all the weird, alternative, interesting, and enlightening…
Linda Hogan is a Chickasaw poet, novelist and essayist, a professor at the University of Colorado. She has won numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA grant and an American Book Award. She has published three books of poetry, four of fiction, a play and a work of non-fiction. She was born in 1947…
CONTESTS, GRANTS and SCHOLARSHIPS oh my Dear Friends of HillHouse, It has been a busy month here at the offices of HillHouse Writers Retreat. We have all sorts of exciting news. So rather than just post it in small bits as we have been, I decided to begin a monthly newsletter – in the truest…
So here, finally, is the feature on Casey Clabough’s, The Warrior’s Path–published in the Twisted South Magazine–faculty member Eric J. Wallace has been badgering you about for weeks on end. For those who contributed, thank you much. (There will be a follow-up on this featuring Zephren and Page Turner Studios, automatic 12 gauge shotguns, psychedelic…
My favorite author for writers is Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones, Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life). She tells writers to give themselves “permission to be lousy” so that they might free themselves from the demands of the internal editors that block the flow of the creative process. By freeing yourself from an internal…
Here’s a strange and somewhat shadowy transmission penned by my dear friend, and beloved midnight-hour acquaintance, Duke Gordon. I found it when visiting the hillside shithole apartment he, two years ago, in a fit of drunken paranoia, abandoned. On the top shelf of a dusty closet there was a shoe box with a calligraphic scrawl across a strip of camouflage duct tape: “Death Rattles…
When I teach I can’t seem to motivate myself to do it without having some ulterior motive. I have to be interested in the material, be personally invested in the learning experience. Which really means that I can’t teach unless I’m learning with my students. And as what I’m thinking about from moment to moment…
Jeff Eisenbrey: Mikhail Bulgakov penned his most highly regarded work, The Master and Margarita, sometime between the late 1920s and the 1930s. The book was not to be published until long after his death because it was literally too dangerous to stray so wildly outside the orthodoxy of state-dictated merit known as Socialist Realism. Joseph…
Friends, Family (blood, soul, or otherwise), HillHouse Supporters, and Conspirators, I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be penning a feature for the award-winning publication Twisted South on the prolific, brilliant, and adventurous Appomattox County native and Lynchburg College Professor, Dr. Casey Clabough. I’ll be partnering with photographer Annie Laura, of 621studios.com, and, to raise the…
Jon Dittman The eight stories that comprise Charles D’Ambrosio’s The Dead Fish Museum vary greatly in plot and content, but are tied together so cohesively by the effervescent metaphors and imagery that each story, though distinct, feels connected to one another. The images and metaphors used by D’Ambrosio are so powerful and poetic that they…
The New HillHouse Writer’s Retreat is LIVE. All sorts of promotions are in the works. Follow us on WordPress and subscribe to our mailing list (form at the right). Our first retreat is scheduled for October 30 – November 8. Check us out. Join us! The Retreat Itself ♦ Contact Us ♦ How To Use…
by Claudia L. Errington Writers, I suspect, need to be part psychiatrist in order to build believable characters. Unless the writer is creating a fantasy world where any behavior goes, creating characters in fiction requires that the writer know a little bit about human nature or the story might not resonate with the reader. In the…
Food as sustenance is in and of itself a mythic paradigm as is illustrated by the growing Slow Food movement’s response to our disconnection from our food sources resulting from the modern fast food diet. It is not by chance that writers use words reflecting a variety of states of hunger and feeding to describe…
Jayne Ann Phillips is an American author born in 1952. She has published four collections of short stories and four novels. She founded and is currently the head of the Rutgers-Newark Master of fine arts program in creative writing. This collection was her first to achieve critical acclaim. All of the works in this collection of short…
To learn and study the art of writing—and get better at it—requires a deep engagement with the art of reading. To become our work’s own ‘Best Editor’ demands that we put in the effort necessary to understand the ways our own style, voice, and tendencies for making textual decisions have come about. It’s important that we ask…
Lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the myriad ways artists can go about addressing our so-called audience (the human-beings that wind up encountering and hopefully experiencing the art) while also maintaining and honoring the sanctity of a process which, when it comes to literature, is by nature an enterprise of solitude. Without…