Welcome back. Glad you're here.

I'm writing this week from Tybee Island, where I ate my first oysters at Sea Wolf, an upscale hot dog restaurant, and got to talking with a couple from Louisville who are thinking about moving down there for good. Six hours from home, the two of them ended up teaching me something about Kingsport. So this week is about Charles Wright, the Poet Laureate who grew up here, and I'm a little embarrassed it took a trip to the coast to get here.

In today's post:

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Kingsport has always been a town that makes things. Acetate and paper, chemicals and ordnance, a century of shift work you could set a clock by. It is a lot of things. A literary town has never really been one of them. We had the industry. We did not have the museums.

Charles Wright went to Lincoln Elementary.

He went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and a term as the twentieth Poet Laureate of the United States. Twelve years ago this Friday, he gave his first reading in that job at the Library of Congress.

He was born August 25, 1935, at Pickwick Dam, which is about as far from Kingsport as you can get and still be in Tennessee. His father, Charles Penzel Wright, was a civil engineer building dams for the TVA, and the family moved with the work. Hiwassee. Knoxville. Corinth, Mississippi. During the war they landed in Oak Ridge, where his father worked on the Manhattan Project. When it ended, the family came east to Kingsport. His father took a job at Eastman and later ran his own small construction firm. His mother, Mary Winter Wright, had followed the dams from town to town for years. She stayed in Kingsport the rest of her life.

They called him Chuck. After Lincoln, he was sent off to school in the North Carolina mountains, first to a tiny school in Sky Valley with eight students, then to Christ School near Asheville, where he graduated in 1953. His mother had dated William Faulkner's brother at Ole Miss and talked about Faulkner constantly, so the boy read every Faulkner book before he finished high school. He admitted later he understood almost none of it.

He took a history degree from Davidson in 1957 and went into the Army. Nothing about that résumé says poet.

The Army sent him to an intelligence unit in Verona, Italy. It was the Cold War, and by his own account he sat at a desk the entire time and spent his leave going to places he had only read about. On one of those trips, at Lake Garda, he was reading a selection of Ezra Pound and came across a poem about the exact place he was standing. He had never written a line of verse. He started that year, 1959.

He has said he was a country boy from East Tennessee when he got to Italy, all Kingsport, and that the paintings and the countryside cracked the whole world open.

After the Army came the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1961, where he says he embarrassed himself the first week and then did not speak in class for two years. Then a Fulbright in Rome, where he started translating the Italian poet Eugenio Montale. That translation, The Storm and Other Poems, won the PEN Translation Prize. His first book of his own, The Grave of the Right Hand, came out in 1970. He taught at UC Irvine through the seventies and at the University of Virginia from 1983 until 2011.

Then the shelf filled up. Country Music shared the National Book Award in 1983. Black Zodiac won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Griffin Poetry Prize and the Bollingen came later. In June 2014, the Library of Congress named him Poet Laureate, and on September 25 of that year he opened the literary season in Washington.

He spent his California years writing about East Tennessee and western North Carolina. When he finally moved back East to get a better look at it, he started writing about California. His theory is simple. You write about wherever you aren't.

Which is probably why the town never left the work. He titled one poem "WKPT, Kingsport, Tennessee," after the radio station. Another, "Appalachian Farewell," names Surgoinsville. He is famous for saying he can't tell a story, the only Southerner he knows who can't, so the poems stack images instead, and critics who have spent whole careers on his books keep finding East Tennessee ridgelines under everything, even the poems set in Umbria or Montana.

Kingsport caught up eventually. An effort led by ETSU professor Scott Honeycutt put a marker for him on Broad Street downtown, erected by the City and ETSU's English honor society. It stands a few steps from the markers for Brownie McGhee and Lesley Riddle. In October 2017, Wright came to ETSU for a reading. Hundreds showed up. People sat in the aisles. On the drive home to Charlottesville, they stopped in Kingsport so he could see the marker and his childhood house.

His conversation on stage that day was finally published last year, and it's the best ten minutes you'll spend on him. Read the full 2017 interview here.

So next time you're on Broad, stop and read the marker. Then look up at the ridge on your way home.

It has been in the poems the whole time.

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A few things worth getting off your couch for:

Fall Folk Arts Festival | Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday noon to 5 p.m. | Exchange Place, 4812 Orebank Road The 1850s farm on Orebank Road runs its harvest festival for the fifty-fourth year, with artisans, old-time music, and sorghum cooked down the way it was done on the farm. Admission helps pay for the animals and the upkeep of the place. Details

Evening Meditation at Bays Mountain | Saturday, 5:30 p.m. | Bays Mountain Planetarium Theater Forty minutes of breathwork and meditation in the planetarium, led by a local yoga instructor. It falls on the same day as the park's Campfire Tales, so you can make a whole evening of the mountain. Details

Tennessee Lit Con | Friday and Saturday, starting at 10 a.m. | MeadowView Conference Resort & Convention Center About a hundred authors, a handful of audiobook narrators, and a room full of vendor tables, all at MeadowView for two days. Good week for it. Details

One place in this town doing the work.

Boys & Girls Club of Greater Kingsport After-school and summer programs for Kingsport kids, run out of the main club at 1 Positive Place and the Riverview Teen Center at V.O. Dobbins, with all-day care on school-out days. The club's foundation played its annual golf tournament at Cattails at MeadowView on September 17, and the money goes toward financial help for families and growing the club so it can take more kids. The tournament did well, and the club still has the ask right on its homepage: Kingsport needs more club kids. Give

2900 Cliffside Road, Kingsport, TN | 6 bed, 3 bath

Speaking of ridgelines.

This one sits on 1.7 acres, and the seller is motivated, which is the kind of phrase worth reading twice. The main level has the living room, dining room, and kitchen, two bedrooms, a full bath, and a sunroom. Upstairs are more bedrooms and another full bath.

Outside, you get a big yard with mature landscaping, a fenced backyard, and a detached two-car garage with room left over for storage. It's also close to shopping and schools, so the errands stay short.

Then there's the basement. It's finished, with its own kitchen, living area, bedroom, and full bath. Two kitchens under one roof means the in-laws, the grown kid who moved back, or the long-term houseguest all get a real place to land, and you still get your own kitchen back.

See the full listing for 2900 Cliffside Road, then come back and vote.

What do you think they're asking for 2900 Cliffside Road

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Talk soon,

Ryan