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Welcome back!
As we wrap up this evening, we want to take a moment to thank you for writing with us and allowing us to share our beautiful home. We felt that Sandra Belton described how we feel about West Virginia so eloquently.
Here’s what she shared:
“West Virginia gives you something rich in your spirit. It gives you something deep to draw from. I cannot imagine having grown up in a more spiritual place, actually. Something about the mountains. There’s a gentleness, there’s a calmness. Maybe it’s a realization of being there among things that are so clearly defined by things greater than human beings.”
Tonight, we focused on things larger than ourselves. Nature and environment, work and community, outmigration and the movement of people, and rebelling against injustices in our world. Our state, like life, is full of contradictions: beauty and destruction, life and death, freedom and constraint. Our goal this evening was to provide you some context for why these contradictions exist and push back against the idea that West Virginia is a monolith. Like everywhere else in the world, we are nuanced and complex. As you continue to move through your current place in life, we invite you to notice the contradictions around you and add them to your writer’s notebooks, for it is from this nuance that great writing emerges.
Speaking of great writing, we would like to take a moment and ask you to share a Golden Line with us. Please, take a moment to read through what you wrote and share with us a line you are proud to have written. We plan to put these together into a larger poem to share on our website.
Thank you for sharing with us. You’re a writer!
We hope you will join Write Across America next month, on November 14th, in Illinois.
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