‘Grief and Gratitude’

Hellbender Gathering of Poets, postponed by Helene, 

has sights again set for Black Mountain retreat

Eastern Hellbender (Adobe Stock image)

When Hurricane Helene carved a late-September path of unprecedented destruction through portions of the Southern Appalachian region in 2024, many lives were taken and many more disrupted by an ecological disaster noted as one of a growing number fed by climate change. From a mix of interview conversations and written answers to questions provided in advance, this story profiles a gathering of poets that was reimagined, renamed, and moved to the region for several reasons, avoiding hurricanes being one. 

By Lacy Snapp  

Nickole Brown is a poet whose voice is a contemporary, vital presence in our Appalachian writing community as her poems often include a speaker who holds up a curious and reverent magnifying glass to the more-than-human world. Brown is the executive director of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, a new ecological writing festival (set for Oct. 5-11, 2026) that is the inspiration for our conversation. This nonprofit organization aims to nurture a community hellbent on finding the words that protect and repair our climate-changed world. The festival was originally set to debut in October of this year in Black Mountain, North Carolina, but was postponed due to the extensive damage from Hurricane Helene — an event demonstrating that even the Appalachian Mountains are no safe haven from tropical climate disasters. This discussion with Nickole Brown brings into focus the necessity of communities built through gatherings such as Hellbender, the reimagined role of the writer, and ways we can “hold grief in one hand and gratitude in the other.”  

The Old Gym building at the YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly, was among several structures damaged during Helene. Constructed in 1915 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the building was left standing. Efforts to stabilize the structure for repairs were unsuccessful, however, and the building had to be razed. (Photo courtesy of YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly.)

About Nickole Brown: She is the author of Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition issued in 2018. Her second book, Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. She teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she volunteers at several animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, Brown has been writing about these animals. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. She first attended the Palm Beach Poetry Festival — the forerunner of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets — in 2004 and returned nearly every year thereafter as either a participant or mentor. In 2021, she began envisioning the future of the festival with founder Miles Coon and became president in 2022. Visit her website here. 

Let’s talk about the Hellbender Gathering of Poets. In a world wrapped up with phones and computers, isolation is a complicated idea for writers because writing on the page is often a solitary act. We retreat, and yet then come to find how vital writing communities are, which can exist both in person and online.  

I know Hellbender’s main focus is a weeklong annual gathering, but the organization has also hosted a number of generative workshops, both locally and online. When things get hard — especially right now with so much noise in the world at large — many of us are retreating inward when creating connections can be one major place of solace. Can you talk about writing communities, how they exist in your life, why they’re particularly important during times like these, and maybe share a bit of what Hellbender is doing for writing communities? 

Yes, in the months after Hurricane Helene, we hosted a number of intimate, small-group workshops in person as we tried to help our local community process the trauma of that storm through writing. We’ve also held a number of virtual gatherings that have brought together large groups of people from all over. As always, these events have been free and open to the public, and we’ll continue to do this in one way or another, hopefully for years to come. 

Nickole Brown, author and president of Hellbender Gathering of Poets, opens a reading at Malaprops Bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina. (Photo by Tyler Barrett)

Our approach for these sessions is generative: we offer prompts for folks to write in the company of others, right there on the spot, then we set the stage for all involved to both share what they’ve written and bear witness to each other’s words. This happens in real time, without editing or revision, which lends a sense of play and solidarity. It’s intentionally designed this way because we want to offer something casual and improvisational, Something far removed from the sometimes-intimidating spaces of poetry readings and workshops. We also aim to quell the deep, and quite dangerous, isolation of this time, to have participants look each other in the eye, whether that’s across a room or on the screen, and say to one another, “I see you. I hear you. You’re not alone.” It’s a small moment of connection, but it’s one way we might hold each other up during this time. 

...It’s why, as Ross Gay says, joy is “a practice of survival.” ...Put simply, these generative workshops — as well as nearly everything we do — is about facilitating a joyful rising. It’s about poetry bringing us together and holding us together. 

You’ve said before: holding the grief in one hand, and then the gratitude in the other hand. Then, I guess in our arms, we’re also holding joy, too. 

I’d say you hold grief in one hand. You hold gratitude in the other hand, and then you feel joy, suddenly. It just arises out of it, and I'm not talking about distraction or even happiness, but just pure joy. 

And then I do think it’s like that … that connection. So, for Hellbender, the formula is very much: poetry plus environmental science equals a joyful rising in our climate-changed world. That is the mission statement sort of boiled down to its barest essentials. 

(The name Hellbender was chosen for the festival as a nod to the new location, and to raise awareness about Appalachia’s giant salamander, the Eastern Hellbender. Brown’s website calls the amphibian an indicator species — often revered as the last dragon — that must have cool, clean, uncontaminated water to survive. “The presence of hellbenders indicates a healthy ecosystem, something that all beings require. The name also gives voice to those who cherish this earth and are determined — hellbent — to heal and protect our planet.”) 

As an aside, it might be worth mentioning that as someone prone to despair, I’m trying to create something that I myself desperately need. A long time ago, a colleague of mine told me, when I was designing classes, to teach what you most want to learn. Because, as he told me, if you run a class the way it should be run, your students are going to teach you in return. I’m following that same philosophy now because I often feel overwhelmed by the state of things and quite overcome by grief. And in offering whatever support to our community that I can, I’m hoping we’ll grow together, with each of us bringing our own gifts to the table, providing for a deeper solidarity and understanding, for a more steadfast resilience in the face of loss and adversity. 

We do need each other. The premise of Hellbender is so cool. I wrote down the workshop’s description: “The power of poetry and environmental science, awareness, courage, and hope.” The combination of those things feels so different from other writing workshops where we get together to talk about craft, and maybe we’re also having these conversations with other interested parties who might be there. But Hellbender hopes to combine environmental awareness with talking about craft or writing.  

I want to know a little bit more about that. What activities might make this different from just a writing festival? How do those other layers start to get into the experience? 

The plan for our annual gathering is to come together at the beautiful YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly in Black Mountain, which was the original site for Black Mountain College before moving to Lake Eden. They have something we couldn’t quite find anywhere else: a lodge that offers affordable room and board, surrounded, no doubt, by acre upon acre of gorgeous forests. … Our hope is that once you get there, you won’t need your car and you’ll even be compelled to put away your phone. We want to offer a restorative, embodied experience to help those attending find the poems they most need to write.   

In addition to our poetry faculty — David Baker, Camille Dungy, Jane Hirshfield, and Tim Seibles — we have naturalists who will guide us in the mornings, compelling us to get to know the land there, to listen to what the trees and the birds have to say, to talk with the mushrooms and lichen and salamanders, to play in the dirt. We’ll be doing this in the mornings before our time in the classroom for workshop because we want to get everyone in their own bodies first, before turning to the more cerebral tasks of the page. And we’d like to end every day around a campfire in a primal, storytelling, firelit space where everyone might go to sleep with the smell of camp smoke in their hair. 

It’s also worth mentioning that we’re aiming to create a space that feels safe enough for those who may be wary of stepping into the woods. This includes urban writers perhaps unaccustomed to spending time among the trees, as well as those who simply feel uneasy outside. At one point, this absolutely included me, because I didn’t step foot in the woods until I was 40. But, mercy — once I did, an entire world I had missed out on all my life opened up to me. You see, in the working-class Kentucky in which I was raised, I was taught it wasn’t safe for a woman to be in nature alone. I was told that if I wanted to go on a walk that I should go to the mall.

It’s too much to go into here, but all this is to say that if you feel leery or ill-equipped or uninformed about experiencing nature, don’t worry. We get it. We’ve got your back. I mean, if you’ve never owned a pair of hiking boots, much less have stepped foot on a trail, that’s okay. Come as you are.

Maybe you’ve already mentioned it, but paying more attention to any place we inhabit is part of the experience with the festival, to find a new way of knowing and seeing things that we had not seen before. 

First of all, I think it’s important to mention the history of it, and the first thing on my list of intentions is that I hold very closely to the original vision of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival from the founder, Miles Coon, who fell in love with poetry when he was 60 years old and thus dedicated the last 20 years of his life to it. He simply wanted to deepen people’s appreciation and understanding of poetry. 

To me, that’s number one because Hellbender is growing out of the good soil cultivated all of those years by the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, and all of the hard work that Miles and the rest of his staff put into that. 

In terms of moving it, one of the quite ironic things is that I wanted to move it to the mountains of western North Carolina, where I live. It’s the land that I love. I love Appalachia. I didn't feel like there was enough here. There’s the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop conference in Hindman, Kentucky, as you know, but I was also hoping for a place that wasn’t in clear, present danger of hurricanes. 

As south Florida is. 

Sadly, yes. And Hurricane Helene showed me very clearly that in this time of climate catastrophe, no place is safe. It was a deeply painful but absolutely necessary lesson. 

The irony is not lost on me, either, that the first time you and I met in person was at Hindman at the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop the night before the flood of July, 2022. Then, we have Helene here in September of 2024, and I was in Los Angeles when the fires happened this past January. With things like climate change, you watch it from your screen until you’re watching it from your yard, or seeing it in your communities. A lot of people are still only watching it from their screens.  

I’m not saying it’s just the role of the poet, but it’s equally the role of the human that once you start seeing, actually seeing, you can’t exactly stop. Then there’s a realization that this is part of our reality, and the question arises of “what do we do with that?” I don’t know that there is an answer, but experiences like finding community and Hellbender can help us a little bit with at least not feeling so alone.  

Yes, I see Hellbender as a way to nurture community, to expand our network in the way that mycelial threads both nourish and protect. I also see Hellbender as a space that brings people back to their bodies, that returns them to their senses. For years now, I’ve told creative writing students that their first job as a poet is to pay attention, to simply notice. Often times, those new to writing think their first charge is to imbibe vocabulary and craft. That’s a part of it, but attention — and in particular the attention that we can give to an experience with our eyes and ears and nose and skin — is necessary to effectively translate experience to the page.  

Put another way, most might think that in order to bear witness to climate change, they’ll need all the facts about what is to come. They might charge head-first into a narrative that is overwhelming and sometimes impossible to fathom, much less write about. But simply going outside may be more effective, especially if you’re attuned to the many lives both human and not around you. It may be subtle at first, but if you get close enough, you’re likely to notice that the seasons aren’t happening as they were, that birds aren’t migrating in numbers as they were. I mean, noting the sharp fluctuations in temperatures alone will speak volumes, and our job isn’t to go inside and blast the air conditioning while we doom scroll and read about it. No, our job might just be to stand in that heat long enough to let our body register what’s happening and find a way to write about it.  

In terms of Hellbender, if more than one person does that, and those people start sharing with and supporting each other, a community begins to form. And with that gathering comes strength. Because if we bear witness together — and if we share that testimony with each other — we’re not speaking into the void. This is one of the reasons why, for years now, I’ve worn a pendant of a cicada around my neck. They survive because they emerge together — in massive numbers, all at once. Many might not make it, but the ones that do rise to the top of the canopy to join in a chorus of survival. What I hope for is that kind of choir, resilient and true.  

I think that’s important because not everyone’s a poet, but people read poetry. We all can only do what we can do, and it takes that coming together of the community, the chorus, each of us bringing our individual strengths and talents. And even if we each only have our one trick, then putting those all together is how we can exist and come to rely on each other again, because we’ve talked about isolation and pulling away when we need to be pulling together. 

I agree. And remember, what do people turn to, both in times of crisis and celebration? Poetry. We share poems at funerals, poems at weddings, poems at memorials — we share poems for all of those big moments in life. During these times and in the years ahead, we’re going to need all the poems to help hold us up. And Hellbender is trying to create a space in which participants might find in poetry solace and refuge, celebration and lament, a means by which we might document and speak out and share testimony, a means by which we might keen and howl and sing, by which we might again rise.  

Although the festival is postponed until October 2026, Brown has readings and discussions planned for this fall in Asheville, as well as online generative sessions in August and October. All sessions are free and open to the public. To learn more or to sign up for an email list, contact hellbenderpoetry@gmail.com.  

Lacy Snapp is a poet, professor, and woodworking artist in East Tennessee where she plans both university and community-based literary events. She is serving this year as interim poetry editor for Appalachian Places.