A Conversation With the Smokies’ Resident Writer
The hum of the world
Goes away in such moments
Wonder breeds wonder
— haiku by Sue Wasserman
In 2019, Sue Wasserman found out she’d been chosen to spend six weeks living in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park as the 2020 Steve Kemp Writer in Residence, a program funded by the Great Smoky Mountains Association. Then the pandemic hit, and her stay was postponed. This summer, Wasserman finally got to experience the adventure she’d been anticipating for more than two years.
A writer, nature photographer, teaching artist and book editor with a previous career in corporate communications and public relations, Wasserman’s byline has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Southern Living, American Style and the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
How did you become interested in writing about nature?
I was a fencer in high school and college, actually went to college on a fencing scholarship. Fencing is a crazy lopsided sport, and it kind of killed my back—I had back surgery when I was 30. But I was having another issue and I discovered these two healers in Asheville when I was on a vacation there. They started helping me, and I would come up every other weekend from Atlanta to work with these two. They said, ‘Go out in the woods and start walking.’ That’s when I swear the wildflowers started calling me. I had never noticed a lot of these flowers before. I had never been a flower person. There were lessons in some of the discoveries. Nature started teaching me, and so I started writing all these little snippets.
Your arrival as the Smokies’ resident writer was a long time coming. How did that saga unfold?
I was so psyched about the residency. It’s this sort of ‘pinch me, can this be real’ experience. I was so ready. Then Covid happened, and they just decided it had to be put on hold. When we finally came to this year, I said to them either we had to figure out a way to make it happen or I would let it go. Frances (Figart, GSMA’s creative services director) was awesome in thinking out of the box. Two weeks I’m staying at Zoder’s Inn, and the other time I’ll be staying in an apartment on the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, which is really pretty amazing for me. A lot of the writing I’ve done has been about the arts over the years, and I’ve been one of the teaching artists for the Penland School of Craft. The theme of my residency is perspectives on nature—one of the projects I want to do is creating a quilt.
How does staying in the Smokies impact your work?
The day that I arrived in the park, I took a walk at Porters Creek. I got out of the car and the first thing that popped into my mind was Robert Frost, the first two lines of his poem: “Nature’s first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold.” I started thinking of the word hue, and it’s a word I seldom use, but how many hues of green are there? From that I built my essay around it. There’s so much inspiration in the woods. The challenge will be putting it all together in ways that make sense.
What do you hope to get out of the experience?
I have this sense that new doors are going to open through the people I meet, the folks who read what I’m writing. I actually have been getting a lot of notes lately from folks who have been reading my essays in Smokies Live and how they have impacted them. Which always gives me more courage to write in this way, to write from my heart. When you’re writing articles, you’re writing understanding the publication you’re writing for and the audience that you’re writing for. It’s a little bit hard to share your voice in a way you’d really like to share it. This is an opportunity for me to really be who I am as a writer and explore that. Which seems a huge gift to me. It’s really nice, in a lifetime of telling other people’s stories, to be able to share my own.