With an amazingly eclectic group of accomplished writers, the literary arts are thriving in Chattanooga. With support from organizations such as the Arts & Education Council of Chattanooga (AEC) and Chattanooga Writers Guild (CWG), writers have many venues to create talented works of creative writing art.
“The Arts & Education Council offers programs like the Conference on Southern Literature, Chattanooga Festival of Writers and education enrichment programs,” says Executive Director Susan Robinson. “These and other programs remain solid cornerstones of the organization’s purpose. The AEC provides unique opportunities for lifelong learning and participation in the arts for all members of the community.”
The Chattanooga Writers Guild (CWG) is a non-profit organization that promotes and creates a supportive, caring environment for writers. “It is good to have a network where professionals and new writers can share tips and improve writing skills,” says Jennifer Hoff, president.
The numbers of accomplished literary artists living in our area are numerous and too many to justly profile in one article. However, below are literary talents that are symbolic of the gifted and skillful writers that call Chattanooga home.
Sybil Baker
Sybil Baker spent 12 years teaching in South Korea and traveling extensively around the world – especially in Asia – prior to moving to Chattanooga to teach creative writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. During her travels, she says she became increasingly interested in the allure and alienation of American travelers and expatriates, which has heavily influenced her writing. Her novel, The Life Plan, was published in March 2009.
“Most of my writing is place-based,” Baker says. “The Life Plan takes place mostly in Thailand. Many of my short stories take place in other countries. I love being able to explore characters and the ‘what ifs’ of life.”
Baker completed her MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2005. Her fiction has appeared in upstreet, And Now for a Story and MOTIF: Writing By Ear. Her essays have appeared in Alehouse, The Writer’s Chronicle, Segue, and A Woman’s World Again.
Baker says that the development and writing of each piece is different. “For The Life Plan, I asked myself what would happen to a character that has mapped out her life, then her husband no longer wants to follow that plan?” she explains. “For the novel I’ve just finished, Replay, I asked myself if we can revisit or redo the mistakes or bad decisions that we made in the past. I sometimes start with a character or conflict and see where the piece takes me.”
Baker grew up in Northern Virginia and graduated from Virginia Tech, where she was the features editor and humor columnist of the student newspaper, The Collegiate Times. After a few years working in Virginia, she moved to Boulder, Colorado, where she earned her MA degree in English from the University of Colorado at Boulder. “I started writing stories in the first grade, and I’ve been writing ever since,” she says. “My first-grade teacher, Miss Hunter, first encouraged me to write.”
Baker says Chattanooga is a great town for writers and offers a lot of support. “UTC has one of the strongest undergraduate programs in the country,” she says. “The literary arts enable students and society to engage in and enter different worlds. They enable us to learn to love language and tell stories.”
David Magee
David Magee is an award-winning columnist and non-fiction author of eight books, including the just-released The South is Round and the upcoming How Toyota Became #1. His previous books include MoonPie and Turnaround.
Magee, who moved to Chattanooga in 2003, is co-owner of Chattanooga’s largest independent bookstore, Rock Point Books. He is also the founder of Jefferson Press, a niche publisher distributed nationally by Independent Publishers Group.
Magee’s writing has been featured in dozens of national and international publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Boston Globe. He also writes about issues facing the South in a column for the Chattanooga Times Free Press.
“I am just a storyteller,” says Magee, who has a degree in journalism from the University of Mississippi. “I try to tackle complex subjects and use a clear writing style to make an easy read out of a hard subject.”
Magee decided to focus on writing as a career in 2000, after getting out of journalism for several years while living in Oxford, Mississippi. He studied publishing for a year and decided non-fiction writing was his interest and style. He got an agent and his first contract with HarperCollins in 2002.
Magee says Chattanooga has the potential to be an exceptional community for writers – and artists of all types – because of its unique personality and cultural flavor. And he is encouraging to new and emerging writers. “(Writing) is a long journey if it’s a serious hobby or career,” he says. “My twelfth book, The Education of Mr. Mayfield, which comes out September 1, is a true story about an African American who was hired as a janitor at Ole Miss in 1949 so he could be taught secretly in the broom closet since he could not be enrolled as a student. It’s the story I always wanted to write, but it took my twelfth book to get there. So even when you’ve sold thousands of books all over the world, the road still does not get easy. It takes a long time, and a lot of hard work.”
Earl S. Braggs
Earl Braggs, writer and poet, says he was hooked on writing at an early age. “I had a tenth-grade teacher, Mrs. Hart, who handed me back a paper covered in red marks,” he recalls. “She wrote, ‘Earl, you are a good writer. You should consider writing as a career.’ She affirmed the perception that I had of myself.”
Braggs teaches creative writing, African-American literature and Russian literature at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He is the author of five collections of poetry, including Hat Dancer Blue, winner of the 1992 Anhinga Prize; Walking Back from Woodstock; House on Fontanka; and Crossing Tecumseh Street. In Which Language Do I Keep Silent: New and Selected Poems is slated for publication this year.
“I write about social concerns and deal with historical events,” Braggs explains. “My poetry is, more often than not, political. I like to write all sorts of things, but primarily I am a poet. Every one of my poems is a political love poem.”
“Writing is very powerful,” he says. “I see it as an interpretation of some aspect of life that has a creative spin.”
Braggs, who was raised by his grandmother in a small fishing community in Hampstead, North Carolina, went to undergraduate school at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and received his MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Besides his many prizes for poetry and fiction, Braggs has been named outstanding professor by the UT Chattanooga Student Government Association and outstanding teacher by the UT National Alumni Association.
Cathy Holton
“There was never a time in my life when I wanted to be anything other than a writer,” says Cathy Holton, author of Beach Trip, Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes and Secret Lives of the Kudzu Debutantes. “I was an avid reader as a child and had a vivid imagination. Sometime during grade school, I figured out that there were people out there writing books, and I wanted to be one of them.
“My parents always had lots of books around the house, so I had read most of the classics by the time I was in middle school,” she recalls. “But it was really not until I got into college and started reading Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty and others that I really began to understand what good writing really is.”
To Holton, writing is a rewarding, creative endeavor. “When I finish a book and realize that it will be here long after I am gone, there is a sense of accomplishment,” she notes. “I love historical fiction and short story collections. They are more difficult to write, but they are great training for a novelist.”
Being published by a major publishing house was the first milestone for Holton. She has enjoyed seeing her book profiled in USA Today and being listed on the Southern Independent Bestseller List.
“The literary arts are important to people,” says Holton. “We are bombarded by visual images today. When you read, you are co-creating with the writer - using your imagination. Reading is the cornerstone of education. You have to be able to read to learn anything else and to write. Writing will be extremely important for the future. The world is changing, but there will always be a need for good writing.”
Richard Jackson
“When you write, you are viewing that event from your own unique frame of reference and interpreting it in light of your personal philosophies and ideas,” says Richard Jackson, Alumnus and Professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. “Writing provides the opportunity to describe and interpret from your own views, but it has very practical applications. It develops critical thinking skills that are valuable in everyday life.”
“I write both poetry and prose, but poetry is my favorite,” says Jackson, who has published nine books of poems, two anthologies of Slovene poetry, a critical book, several chapbooks of translations and a book of interviews. “I make observations from everyday life, make notes, then go back and write about them. I like to view things from many perspectives.”
Jackson’s poems have been translated and published in 15 different languages. He won the prestigious Associated Writing Programs (AWP) George Garret Award and has earned numerous fellowships for writing, including Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships. He also received the Order of Freedom medal from the president of Slovenia for his humanitarian and literary work in the Balkans.
Jackson’s students are living proof of his commitment to developing outstanding poets and writers. His poetry students have won numerous awards and published approximately 50 books, and 100 percent of his UTC students have won fellowships to the best MFA programs in the country.
Jackson, who founded and directs the bi-annual Meacham Writers’ Workshop in Chattanooga, joined the UTC faculty in 1976 after earning his Ph.D. at Yale. He also founded the UTC Creative Writing Abroad Program, which takes 10 to 15 students for three weeks a year to meet writers and students in Europe.
Eleanor McCallie Cooper
Eleanor McCallie Cooper’s first book, Don’t Say “You,” Say “We”: The Story of the Founding of Girls Preparatory School, 1906-
1918, began her research of family and local history. Cooper and her cousin, William Liu, spent five years gathering materials and researching archives before writing the story of Grace Liu, their relative and a remarkable woman of courage who they portray in the book Grace: An American Woman in China, 1934-1974.
“I began writing very early,” Cooper explains. “I think the love of writing is scared out of us at an early age, like drawing and public speaking. We judge ourselves before we start, and feel inhibited and quit.”
Cooper grew up in Chattanooga, but says she got her northern accent from living in Florida when she started school. “(My accent) made me feel like an outsider, which is a good perspective for a writer - not really belonging, kind of a participant-observer,” she says. “I think I still feel that way as an adult.
“I like many kinds of writing,” she continues. “Once I started writing, I found additional pleasure from reading. I could see the craft of the writer more clearly, and it became pleasurable just to see what the writer was going to do. You realize that every word is constructed.
“Frank Smith (writer) says, ‘We learn from the company we keep, in person and in print.’ We identify with the characters in books and learn from them, much as we do from friends. Some people think we only learn when it’s difficult, but that’s not true. Reading and writing should be effortless and continual.”
A graduate of Agnes Scott College and the University of Alabama, Cooper taught English at Kinjo Gakuin University in Nagoya City, Japan. In addition to her writing achievements, Cooper has served Chattanooga in many capacities. She is the former chairman of the Arts & Education Council of Chattanooga. Additionally, as vice president of the Lyndhurst Foundation and then executive director of Chattanooga Venture, she conducted various activities related to the revitalization of Chattanooga. As assistant to the director, Cooper also directed the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Bicentennial Library’s Oral History Project.
These accomplished writers are representative of many other professional and emerging writers living in the Chattanooga area. Their writing reflects the power and creativity that exists in the human mind that ultimately serves to inspire and entertain and cause one to reflect on his or her personal beliefs and attitudes involving mankind and the world. Literary arts are just that, an art, and Chattanooga is home to some of the most talented literary artists.
For more information about the Arts and Education Council, go to www.artsedcouncil.org. For more information on the Chattanooga Writers Guild, go to www.chattanoogawritersguild.org.