By David Teems, @DavidTeems

WEEKS AGO, in conversation with a friend, I accidentally referred to the BRMCWC as the Blue Ridge Mountain Christian Writer’s Festival. A slip? Perhaps. I caught myself and made the correction, but I could not easily throw off the notion. To meet, to learn, to absorb, to exchange ideas, to expand, to dialogue with other writer/creators seems (present tense) to beg the word.

While writing the description for each class/workshop I will be conducting, I had to restrain my excitement the best I could which was not easy considering the titles I chose—FOR LOVE OF THE CRAFT and LANGUAGE IS THE ONLY HOMELAND. Writing about myself in the third person didn’t seem quite as creepy either when considering the prospect of five days in Asheville, the home of one of my chief literary saints, spent with other mortals as crazy as I am (about language and its higher uses, of course).

So, yeah, I come to the conference with festival in mind. I’m not sure that can be helped. Not a party, necessarily, but a celebration nonetheless, a celebration of language, of wordcraft, of that secret thrill you get when a line of text is as complete as a line of text can be complete, the one that has been sanitized, sifted of debris and excess, that has been reduced to its purest form, that says what you wanted it to say and with the charm with which you wanted to say it. Author and Asheville native Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) once danced in the rain in celebration of this very thing (that, and a 10,000 word count for that particular writing day), crying out at the top of his lungs with what he might have fondly called an “idiot joy.” Now that’s festival. Me? I hope to leave this conference soaking wet.

And I come as myself, fully and unapologetically me. That’s what you get. It may not sound like much, but in truth, and in such a world we have inherited, I think it the best we can hope for, and from any of us. Transparency, the throwing off of pretensions, the offering of our more guarded self. Trends change. Fashion is fleeting (pardon the alliteration). The instruction you receive today will change in a matter of a few months. That is the nature of fashion. But language? The well-conceived, well-written line? Whether we wish to admit it or not, our attraction to the craft, or part of it, is its reach toward immortality, that we put down in print what may remain and have life after us, that bled from us, that made us dance in the rain, remembering gleefully there was speech before there was light.

That said, to my class/workshop bring your questions, the brightest or the dullest you have. Bring expectation. Bring something you would possibly like to read aloud, something you are not afraid to expose to the elements. Like Wolfe, and, I suspect, like many of you, I get giddy about language. I was infected by it long ago. And whatever lies at the center of that oddest of emotions is the very thing I wish not only to discover and rediscover again and again for myself, but to offer, to impart as I am able. I come, as I hope you will, with anticipation and in the hope of discovery.

“Go,” Elijah said, “eat and drink, for there is the sound of heavy rain.” (1 Kings 18:41)

David Teems