Frances Figart (Fié-gert), a runner up in the Q4 2025 Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest for Safeway,joins us today to tell us about shifting gears with her writing and what she's learned from other writers.
Frances grew up in east Kentucky and lived in both Canada and Costa Rica before settling near Asheville, North Carolina, in tiny Flag Pond, Tennessee. She edits Smokies Life Journal and directs the team of writers, editors, graphic designers, illustrators, and videographers creating a books, periodicals, podcasts, and videos produced by Smokies Life, a nonprofit partner organization supporting Great Smoky Mountains National Park since 1953. In 2020, Frances launched Word from the Smokies, an educational column that now appears weekly in several regional news outlets in North Carolina and Tennessee.
Her creative spirit has yielded three books for young readers: Camilla and the Caterpillars, Mabel Meets a Black Bear, and A Search for Safe Passage, each of which addresses a current conservation need in east Tennessee and western North Carolina, which share the country’s most visited national park. She manages the Steve Kemp Writers Residency. Though she has always worked as a writer and editor, she only began to explore creative writing for an adult audience in 2023 after hosting the first Tremont Writers Conference, an annual program she co-founded in the Smokies.
WOW: Congratulations on being a runner up in the Q4 2025 Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest for Safeway. It was a very interesting connection of your present and your past with a link to the natural world. Do you feel your beautiful surroundings influence your writing?
Frances: I work in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and live in a rural area with lots of protected, roadless land nearby. I suspect that my personal creative writing is indeed influenced by the creativity that comes from living and working in a natural setting. I can compose to the sound of water trickling into koi ponds, walk a trail by a small creek, or enjoy time in the middle of a stone circle that’s been erected on my property. I’m convinced that I wouldn’t have enough energy and inspiration left over from my fulltime job to work on my personal writing if it weren’t for having time immersed in the natural world. It’s restorative, regenerative, and healing in a way that nothing manmade can match.
At the same time, because roads are often our means of traveling through otherwise forested areas, there is much sadness that occurs in this day and age because of the wildlife mortality associated with roads. This topic of road ecology is one I’ve written articles about as well as the children’s book “A Search for Safe Passage.”
WOW: Your writing takes so many forms but recently you've tackled creative nonfiction. What influenced you to write for a new audience?
Frances: I’ve always been a writer and editor, and in my 30s my focus settled in the realm of ecology. My column “Word from the Smokies,” now bylined mostly by my talented staff writer Holly Kays, and my children’s books such as “Mabel Meets a Black Bear” and “Camilla and the Caterpillars” educate young people and their families about the need to protect wildlife. I have a compilation of essays entitled “Word from the Smokies” on deck to come out next year.
I’m not sure I’ve yet found the audience for the personal writing I’ve begun to work on over the past few years. I do it for myself, for the process, for the flow and stillness of mind that comes when I’m writing. I see it as a spiritual practice. I want to undergo a transformation, a shift in perspective, a new way of seeing that comes with an expanded view—and create that experience for others. I’m drawn to doing this through speculative fiction as well as creative nonfiction. The topics can range from childhood friendship to cultural reconciliation to loss of parents or partners, but I often seek to address a personal experience that I haven’t yet fully unpacked, and the writing allows me to lean into that place of resistance and explore it more deeply.
WOW: Aside from writing, you've taken on a new project for writers. Can you tell us a little about the Tremont Writers Conference?
Frances: There is an excellent outdoor writer named Ron Ellis, who wrote “Cogan’s Woods” and “Yonder: Tales from an Outdoor Life.” Ron has a cabin in the Smokies and is involved with the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont. He studied under Rick Bass at an intensive Writers Boot Camp and approached Tremont a few years ago suggesting that a writers conference in the Smokies could be a worthy undertaking. Tremont is a nonprofit park partner, and so is my organization Smokies Life, which has been assisting the nation’s most visited national park since 1953. My CEO asked me to partner with Tremont to create a conference.
My co-founder and co-organizer would be a field program director named Jeremy Lloyd. I’d met Jeremy before, but we really didn’t know each other and, frankly, I didn’t feel we had much in common. When we sat down to plan what the conference would look like, something he said reminded me of a line from my all-time favorite singer–songwriter: “When you know even for a moment that it’s your time, then you can walk with the power of a thousand generations.” When I said this, an expression of amazement came over Jeremy’s face. “Oh my God,” he gushed, “Bruce Cockburn is my favorite musician of all time too!" Bonding over our love for the Canadian Boy Dylan, we were off to the races.
We’ve created an intense, intensive, immersive experience that happens for 25 or so writers every October deep in the heart of a beautiful national park. Our author workshop leaders have included Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Richard Powers, poets Frank X Walker and Maurice Manning, and this year our nonfiction cohort was led by the incredibly talented multi-genre writer Crystal Wilkinson. These leaders and our participants say this is the most fulfilling writers conference they have ever attended. Our submissions window opens this month at writers.gsmit.org.
WOW: That sound like an amazing opportunity to learn from fellow writers. As a writer, do you think your craft improves from your spending time with other writers?
Frances: Absolutely. In addition to reading others’ work, physically being around other writers gives us encouragement to keep going and helps us hone our craft. Sharing about process, about literary choices, about what we have learned from others—all of this helps us to more clearly see why we write and to
understand that there is no one way to do it. You are always going to read your own writing from the maker’s perspective, which may not be anything close to what others receive when they read it. So getting another writer’s take on your piece is an amazing gift.
We all share the same struggle: to find ways to put our story on the page so that it unfolds for the reader in a way that will give them the experience we want them to have, so that they get that same chill of insight that caused us to sit down and pen the tale in the first place. It is extremely heartening to see my colleagues' smiles of understanding when we compare notes on the compulsion, burden, and reward of our creative endeavors.
WOW: Have you gotten any advice from the many writers and other creative people you work with that you could share with the WOW community?
Frances: Since 2023, when we started Tremont Writers Conference, and since I began attending North Carolina Writers Network events, I’ve learned so many great tips. Memoirist Jennifer McGaha says not to think about audience at all until after your first draft is vomited out. When she wants to emulate the style of another writer, Crystal Wilkinson types out forty pages of their work to feel what it’s like from the driver’s seat. Self-taught Southern fiction giant David Joy says if you are using too many adverbs, it’s because you haven’t chosen the strongest verb. Appalachian fiction award winner Karen Spears Zacharias, who discovered writing as a way to process losing her father in the Vietnam war, develops works in which places are characters just a strong as her human ones.
WOW: What about you personally, what are your tips for us?
Frances: As someone who never got an MFA, I’ve found the book “Beginnings, Middles and Ends” by sci-fi genius Nancy Kress profoundly instructive. Ronald Verlin Cassill published “Writing Fiction” the year before I was born, listing four timeless stylistic modalities: narrative summary, description, scene, and half-scene. Canadian Nicole Breit has a great online course called “Spark Your Story Lab” in which she teaches the power of channeling your writing into new unfamiliar structures as an approach to tough material. One form I’ve been practicing lately is the 100-word essay. It’s like a meditation and a good way to learn what all can be left out, which ironically can increase impact.
Go to conferences, take online classes, find a group of writers to workshop with, and learn all you can from those who have been able to turn their craft into a money-making endeavor.
But, in the end, listen to your own intuition and instinct. This commitment to writing is, ultimately, about your own compulsion to tell story, your own voice, your own process. No one else can tell you how to write what will be meaningful to you. Someone may tell you that your story would work better if told from a different point of view, but you may have written it from this character’s perspective because that was the way it meant the most to you. Be cautious about changing your work to conform to someone else’s standards. Write for yourself!
WOW: Thank for advice that is so simple and true and also so difficult at times. Write for yourself. I think we need that on t-shirts.
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