Summer in Sewanee

This is my sixth summer in Sewanee, Tennessee. My first year here was 2006, when I attended the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Then I spent three great years teaching for the Sewanee Young Writers' Conference, which serves high school students, including my own little brother, Eric, in 2008. (Eric ended up deciding to attend University of the South for college, and he just completed his freshman year.) For the last two years I've been teaching for the Sewanee School of Letters, a brief-residency program offering both the M.A. and M.F.A. The summer session lasts six weeks--a long time to be away from home, but I've been very lucky both years to have both my husband and dogs with me. This summer we're staying in a little stone cottage about three miles out of town. It's situated on a rise, with a field stretching out behind it, where the dogs can play. It's a wonderful place to be in June and July.

View of sunset from our side yard

One of the many great things about teaching for School of Letters--and there is a long list that would probably have to be topped by the students, who are excellent--has been getting to know the Cumberland Plateau area better. With the conference and Young Writers, I barely made it off campus. There were too many activities crammed into the two weeks: daily classes, readings, meals at the dining hall. I remember, at my second Young Writers, leaving the mountain once for a Mexican meal in Winchester, and we acted like people who'd been denied years, not weeks, of good food and drink. That is, in a way, the delight of the experience. You come very quickly to feel isolated here, cut off--and it's a nice sort of cutting off. When I came to School of Letters last year and had the opportunity and means to travel out of town--to grocery shop in Winchester, See Rock City, shop for cast iron in South Pittsburg, walk around in downtown Chattanooga--it almost felt like cheating. Almost.

I've always found opportunities to hike portions of the Perimeter Trail here, or to run to certain favorite points, such as Memorial Cross or Morgan's Steep. Now, though, with Brandon to accompany me, I feel better about going on long excursions, and this summer we're seeing brand-new sections of the trail--brand new enough that I even took home a nasty case of poison ivy on my knee. We're bringing along the dogs for some of these walks, too, and it's fun, after so much time spent in a city, to be able to let them roam freely off-leash. Trails are ideal, because the human scent is so concentrated that they know where to go, usually, without being steered. The experience is surprisingly stress-free.

We also made it, finally, to Foster Falls, about twenty minutes's drive away, where we swam to the waterfall and stumbled around on rocks, including one where a snake of some kind was sunning itself. Foster Falls is the kind of gorgeous that I usually only encounter in movies--the long falls plummet into a rock-lined swimming hole, the water clear and very cold. We were beating ourselves up for not finding it sooner.

And thanks to a student in my workshop, a Sewanee professor who lives locally, we learned where we could gather wild raspberries. I've never had a raspberry that didn't come from the grocery store, and these are heaven.

We discovered that a bunch of blackberry bushes are growing near the cottage where we're staying, so we gathered a second bowl full, threw in some peaches, and made a cobbler. I don't have a lot of my cookware with me, so I used a cast iron skillet we brought, and that worked out perfectly. I may never cook cobbler in anything else from here on out.

Oh, and cicadas. Doesn't seem like a plague yet, but we've seen two, including this guy, who had just finished molting:

I hope you're enjoying your summer, wherever you are. Happy 4th of July.