literary community wanted

I wasn't expecting to be so glad I decided to hand-deliver my grant application to the Tennessee Arts Commission today. Paintings I would have been glad for time to gaze at greeted me through TAC's glass doors before I arrived at the front desk just behind another man who had papers in his hands like I did.

He asked me if I was there for the same reason he was. "Are you competition?" he asked affably. ("He" turned out to be Kevin Chopson.)

We worked our way through the options to discover that fortunately we were allowed to talk to each other because he's a poet and I'm a creative non-fiction writer. We could both win a grant. I'm glad we figured that out because it would have been a shame to miss this chance to meet another of Nashville's writers.

You see, we're really quite an under-the-radar bunch it seems. Despite the attention hogged by our cousins gracing the music stages and street corners accompanied by their guitars, there exists a quiet bunch of writers around town who are something more than hobby-ists. We're just either not well-connected to each other, or I'm not connected to the connected ones.

We don't need to rival New York's popularity among the literary crowd; it's nice not to be so crowded (with competition for grants or other attentions) down here in the South. But writing being the often-solitary pursuit that it is, connection with other writers can be life-giving. Which is why my 20 minutes in TAC's office talking with Kevin and Lee, one of the grant coordinators, added some more wind to my writing sails.