Christian Writers and Artists’ Conference in Dayton, Virginia

“It’s taken me four years to get to this conference,” Lovina said as we pulled into the parking lot of Hickory Hollow School last Thursday. “Now I’m finally here.”

Christian Light Publications (CLP), a large conservative Mennonite publisher, has hosted the annual Christian Writers and Artists’ Conference in Dayton, Virginia, for the past fifty years. The planners invite well-known authors from the Mennonite ecosystem, as well as teachers and editors, to lecture on writing, poetry, music composition, photography, and other related topics. CLP’s own illustrators teach art classes.

CLP has plenty of critics, and I agree some of their work is biased and presents unrealistic worldviews. But their books, Sunday School guides, school curriculum, and homeschool materials have left their mark on our communities in a way that few publishers have.

I attended the conference last year and really liked it. This year, I asked Lovina, who works with me at Good’s, if she would go with me since she’s also a writer. It turned out that she had been wanting to attend the conference for a long time.

We listened to Mark Twain’s “Roughing It” about his stagecoach journey west to Nevada (before the transcontinental railroad) during our four-hour drive south. It was Lovina’s pick, and it was a good choice. Listening to Twain describe trying to sleep stuffed between mail bags on bumpy roads while an unsecured dictionary kept sliding around reminded me that the hardships of the I-81 aren’t so bad.

Lovina grew up as one of ten children on a farm, first in Wisconsin, then in the Kentucky hills, so she isn’t a complainer either— exactly the type of person you want to take on a road trip.

We arrived at Hickory Hollow School just after noon. Everyone first met in the gym for an orientation and welcome, then spread out to different classrooms for workshops. The two-day conference had seven workshop sessions, with about six options for each time period.

The first day, I took two workshops by CLP-published authors. One of them, Caleb Crider, is an old friend of my brother. Caleb and I both write for PCBE now. I enjoyed Caleb’s class on “The Ideal Article”, although he writes devotionals and inspirational articles on subjects like “getting along at work” and I write articles focused on specific small business, like “how White Magnolia Coffee got their mobile coffee trailer rolling.”

Loreen Plett Zehr taught a workshop titled “Effective Interviewing.” She’s an older woman who has interviewed many people to turn their life stories into books for CLP. She had warm, down-to-earth demeanor, which probably helps make her interviewees comfortable.

There were more than three hundred people at the conference, and I knew only a handful. I talked with one friend who I hadn’t seen in sixteen years.

The crowd was at least 80% female. I know more women than men are interested in poetry and watercolor, but the imbalance seemed remarkably high. “Maybe men can’t get off work on a Thursday and Friday in the summer?” I said to Lovina.

“Maybe men think they don’t need the help,” Lovina replied.

Many women seemed to come with friends, sisters, and other relatives. I saw several sets of women wearing matching dresses, and even a family with Mom and daughters were wearing matching dresses and Dad and the boys wore matching shirts.

In the evening, we met again in the gym and five speakers briefly introduced different art forms. My favorite was the graphic design topic: In 1930s, better graphic design changed the London Underground’s maps from a confusing, tangled map based on the streets and topography of world above to a simple map based on what mattered to the Tube riders. Metro maps still use a similar design today.

We stayed at a Motel 6 overnight. I like motels where I can park my car close to the door, and of course, Motel 6s are cheap. Who cares if there’s no carpet on the floor?

The next day, we were back at the school at 8:30 a.m. My first class of the morning was “Principles of Clear Style” by Josh Nisley, who teaches writing at Faith Builders College. I probably learned the most in this class, including the difference between cohesion and coherence.

Nisley said he once had a student who turned in a piece that was simply incomprehensible. When he asked her to write more clearly, she said, “But I don’t want to write like everyone else!”

Clarity should be every writer’s goal. Better to be clear than fancy. In “Roughing It”, Mark Twain visited Salt Lake City and ridicules the book of Mormon as the awkward attempt of a 19th century American trying to write in King James English.

The other workshop I took Friday morning was photo finishing. But since I have spent hours working with Photoshop at Good’s, the Lightroom course wasn’t very challenging.

I finished out the day with watercolor painting. We used fine cold press cotton paper, which lets you do amazing things with watercolors.

The conference ended about 4:30 Friday afternoon and we grabbed packed suppers for the road on our way out. After fifty years, the conference organizers have everything planned perfectly.

On the way home, Lovina told me stories about her growing-up years in the country, with a father who built a model train big enough to haul both wood and children. One of Lovina’s chores was to milk a goat that was so obstinate that the young neighbors came to watch the battle whenever Lovina went to milk the goat.

Later, Lovina assisted a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, who had a difficult set of students. The teacher motived the unruly class by dividing them into two “Oregon trail” groups. If one pupil misbehaved, his whole wagon train had to stay back.

No doubt that teacher knew about the Oregon trail because someone took the time to write about it.

Top photo: If you look carefully, you can see our name tags both read “Susan Burkholder”. The other Susan Burkholder is a CLP employee.