Jeanette Walls
Writers and Readers Day of this year’s Virginia Highlands Festival presents Jeannette Walls as the featured speaker related to this year’s theme, “Stories That Shape Us: Memoir Writing Across Genres.” The event is Friday, July 31, from 9 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. at the Sounthwest Virginia Higher Education Center in Abingdon, Virginia.
The event encourages attendees to transform their past joys, loves, storms and struggles into stories, poems, music or dramas. Acclaimed author Jeannette Walls, known for her gifted storytelling, delivers the keynote address, “The Challenges of Memoir Writing,” at 9 a.m. Breakout sessions led by writers like Steven James run throughout the day, covering topics like “Dusting off your Memories.” Barter Theatre actor Eugene Wolf explains how to make art out of your own life, while longtime local musician Mary Munsey discusses transforming life experiences into songwriting.
Other published authors share techniques for turning memories into compelling stories. As James notes, unexpected pivots and twists can help you discover surprises in your own narrative. As Tammy Robinson Smith, the co-chair of the event observes, “This immersion into the world of writing will satisfy aspiring and seasoned authors eager to turn life into fiction and explore how truth shapes a story. Readers, too, can enjoy a behind-the-scenes look at how writers capture life’s reflections.”
Walls is perhaps the best-known memoirist in the United States. “The Glass Castle” is a powerful account of her unconventional parents, Rex and Rose Mary Walls, and her challenging upbringing during which the family was constantly moving around the country. Published in 2005, it became an international bestseller, remaining a New York Times bestseller for a record of 421 weeks.
Walls followed up in 2009 with “Half-Broke Horses,” a fictionalized biography of her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. Told from the grandmother’s perspective, the book charts Lily’s Arizona upbringing on a ranch and her hard-scrabble life of breaking horses, and surviving a tornado, droughts, floods and the Great Depression.
Walls’s third book in 2013 was a novel, “The Silver Star,” about the struggles of two sisters in a small town, continuing to explore her fascination with family bonds and personal endurance.
Walls began her career as a journalist in New York City, working for several prominent publications, including New York Magazine, Esquire and USA Today. She was a gossip columnist and even published “Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip.”
In recent years Walls has resided with her husband John Taylor, also a writer, on a farm in Culpeper, Virginia, where she continues to write, offering voice to those who might otherwise have remained unheard. Her latest novel, “Hang the Moon,” is a historical novel set in Virginia during the Depression Era about a headstrong young woman who is banished from her family for several years and her struggles to rejoin the family. Throughout her work, readers have related to Walls’s books for their raw honesty, emotional depth and resilience in the face of hardship.
Registration can be done online at the Virginia Highlands Festival website, www.vahighlandsfestival.com. It is $40 for the day. Registration can be done at the event, beginning at 8:30 a.m. High school and college students are admitted free of charge with a valid student ID. Those who register early may attend by Zoom, if they wish.
