The greatest thing about the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival that takes place every year on the campus of East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, is the community. The festival is constructed around 20-minute reading sessions that run for two and a half days, and inbetween those sessions, we writers get together and talk – about the readings, about what we’re reading, about life. This was my fourth year attending, and I loved being able to read this year from my new chapbook W/Make (Bottlecap Press). It’s such a rejuvenating experience. I recommend it to anyone interested in good writing that can get there in April.
And on one evening, after having returned from the festival’s activities and walking out of a gas station, I heard the city’s sirens going off. I thought, I probably shouldn’t be out here. Sure enough, when I returned to the hotel, almost all of the occupants were in the long hallway of the ground floor, waiting out a tornado warning. We stayed and talked for about an hour and a half, until we found that the tornado had passed us a few miles to our south. Despite the impending danger, it was certainly a time of good fellowship.
At every author’s reading I write down lines and ideas that impact me in some way. So here, I would like to share my favorite lines by several of the authors I heard (and link to their web pages where possible). If a line peaks your interest, I encourage you to go check out their work!
“We say goodbye to things we should have fought for,” Cody Baggerly
“I am no longer the woman folded into my passport,” Ann Howells
“The impossible task of not looking back,” Paul Juhasz
“He said his hobby was silence,” Zhenya Yevtushenko
“Frogs would be important on the journey ahead,” Ky George
“She would not say the house was burning while she stood outside in the ash,” Sarah Webb
“You loved wandering the meandering streets of this town you grew up in,” Denise Tolan
“Teaching love and all the problems that came with it,” Nathan Brown
“He leaves me a birdhouse so we may have something outside ourselves,” Jessica Willingham
Corbett Buchly 