Motorsports Park regularly hosts Kart racing, too
April 3, 2013
Andrew Calise Freeman
April 8, 2013
Local interest in writing books, whether fiction or not, is on the rise, says the owner of a local bookstore.
Although Bent Pages owner Molly Bolden is reluctant to attribute the increase to the Jambalaya Writers’ Conference, which turns 10 this year, she contends south Louisiana’s preeminent mingling of authors and readers this side of the Tennessee Williams Festival is an asset to be used by enterprising authors.
“I recommend all the time to authors or people in the process of writing, it’s such a sedentary and private kind of a thing that you do for a living … you tend to lock yourself in a room and not come out,” she says. “By coming out and going to these types of things, it gives you a whole new feeling a fresh air within your system.”
Bolden, who helps organize the conference through her contacts in the literary world – literarily, world – says self-publishing is the likely driver of the increased book penning. So long to query letters and literary agents and years of waiting and top-down marketing strategies – anyone willing to shell out cash can see his or her work in bound print and do whatever with it once finished.
But the process of writing a book that is captivating and challenging has not eased. The blank white page remains, as does the paralyzing disbelief in some that the manuscript on the shelf for months now isn’t quite fit to print. Writing ain’t easy.
“(The Jambalaya Writers’ Conference) is a way for writers and book enthusiasts to connect with one another,” says Rachel LeCompte, another of the event’s principal organizers. “It’s a place where they share helpful hints with one another for publication and writing skills, and they’re often very willing to share advice because wherever you are in your career as a writer, you’ve been there before.”
LeCompte, public relations coordinator with the Terrebonne Parish Library System, agrees that the event holds as much value for writers as it does for readers.
“I think it’s always good for writers to step outside themselves and look to others for guidance and inspiration,” she says.
And it doesn’t hurt that world-class authors bequeath such guidance and inspiration. Last year it was Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Rick Bragg keynoting the conference, and this year it’s the acclaimed storyteller Tim O’Brien, author of “The Things They Carried,” who humps the torch.
O’Brien, whose aforementioned book is being read throughout southeast Louisiana as a selection for The Big Read, a National Endowment for the Arts program, is joined by nationally acclaimed peers, per the norm for this event.
The book, set mostly in Vietnam during the war in which O’Brien was a drafted soldier, is a collection of stories that broach the joys of storytelling and the horrors of battle, love and hate, and the value of distorting the truth to reveal truth.
Robert San Souci, a children’s author who wrote the film story of Disney’s “Mulan,” is scheduled to attend, as are two New York Times best-selling novelists, Louisianan Jennifer Blake and Floridian Heather Graham, who returns to the festival year after year. Hank Phillippi Ryan, an award-winning investigative reporter for Boston’s NBC affiliate and best-selling author of five mystery novels, gives an address. Non-fiction authors Carolyn Long and Shirley Laska and poets Ava Leavell Haymon, Jay Udall and William Bradford Clark are also slated for attendance.
At least 250 registrants will attend the daylong event, LeCompte says.
For the writers who want to measure up against peers, the conference hosts novel-excerpt and poetry-writing contests.
For the novel contest, participants submit 1,500 words of a novel’s opening for the chance to win $50 and a session with a New York editor. Poets are asked to submit no more than 100 lines of poetry and can win $50 and publication.
As the deadline neared, LeCompte said she expected to receive between 80 and 100 submissions in both categories.
Although not a participant in the conference, Patterson native Rhonda Dennis has used self-publishing to become one of the more prolific writers in the region. The 38-year-old published her first book in May 2011 – the manuscript of which she wrote over the course of a weekend – and has followed it with four more in her Green Bayou Novel Series.
“I wanted to portray south Louisiana in a way that was true and realistic and not sensationalized, like a lot of the shows are doing around here,” says Dennis, whose novels about the bayou country paramedic Emily Boudreaux are part-mystery, part-romance.
Dennis says she learned to write from creative writing classes she took at Nicholls State University before graduating in 2009. She has also picked up tips for writing and self-publishing from the Internet.
“I kind of pretty much did it all on my own,” she says. “My draw to self-publishing was the fact that I maintained control over everything.”
In late February, Dennis released ‘Deceived,” the fifth book of her continuing series.
Although the Jambalaya Conference can serve as an asset to local writers like Dennis, its offerings extend to those enthused readers.
“You learn a tremendous amount just as a reader by sitting down and listening to these people talk about the process of writing,” Bolden says. “It makes you appreciate so much more what you’re reading when you realize what the person is going through in order to get it down on that paper and get it published and get an agent and go through all of that stuff.”
Pulitzer Prize winning author Rick Bragg speaks with and signs books for fans during last year’s Jambalaya Writers’ Conference. Keynoting this year’s event is Tim O’Brien, author of The Big Read selection “The Things They Carried.”
