Georgia's writers find new home at Special Collections

Once a year, the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame gathers authors, poets and their readers at the University of Georgia to induct new members into the state's literary memory.

But as the Hall, housed since its inception in 2000 in the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at UGA, has unloaded its archives into its new home in the Richard B. Russell Special Collections Library, this year's event focused instead on honoring past inductees and Georgia's rich literary tradition.

To celebrate the move, five members of the Hall - Coleman Barks, David Bottoms, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Terry Kay and Philip Lee Williams - met Thursday to discuss the writer's life in front of an audience that got the first glimpse at an exhibition of letters, manuscripts and notes by Georgian authors from the Hall's collections.

Toby Graham, deputy university librarian and director of the Hargrett Library, called the Hall of Fame the most extensive repository of books by and about Georgians in the nation. By moving into the Special Collections Library, Graham said the Hall could now grow not only in terms of its collection but also as a teaching aide for professors and students.

"We hope it will enrich the educational experience of students at the university," Graham said, noting the auditoriums, classrooms and multiple galleries now at the Hall's disposal.

Graham announced Thursday that the papers of Judith Ortiz Cofer, the current Franklin Professor of Creative Writing chair at UGA and a 2007 inductee into the Hall, would now be open to research.

Graham called the completion of cataloging of a writer's papers a "milestone." In Ortiz Cofer's case, Graham said they combed through 100 boxes of the writer's novel drafts, poems, notebooks, journals and correspondence.

During a salon-style discussion, Hall of Fame authors posed questions to each other in a conversation about writing.

Ortiz Cofer asked her fellow panelists how they identified the subjects that would become their life's work.

Coleman Barks, the internationally known poet famous for his translations of Sufi Mystic poet Rumi, recalled a black notebook he kept since he was a 12-year-old in which he recorded images he fell in love with, like "a boy stirring a spider web with his stick," as well as new words he discovered.

"The way I found my subjects is what I thought was beautiful," Barks said.

Terry Kay also admitted keeping a black notebook as a child, only his contained girls' names.

Philip Lee Williams asked the writers what they considered the hardest part of their craft that their audience didn't know about.

Kay, again with humor, said dealing with book agents.

The business side of writing is annoying, Ortiz Cofer said, but a balance must be struck between a writer's wants and her ability to connect with her readers. For writing to become art, she said, at least one person must be moved by the work.

Barks described his cumbersome creative process as brewing a "weird soup."

"I don't know if anyone wants to taste it," he said.

The current exhibition of the Hall of Fame's collection is on display until the end of the year in the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library gallery in the Special Collections Library located at 300 S. Hull St.

In conjunction with this year's celebration of past Hall inductees, the fall edition of The Georgia Review will be devoted to featuring 33 Hall of Fame members.

• Follow arts and entertainment reporter André Gallant on Twitter @andregallant and at www.facebook.com/GallantABH.