Stories Have a Way of Bringing Us Home: The Pat Conroy Literary Festival
The 11th Annual Pat Conroy Literary Festival will be held on Thursday, October 22, through Sunday, October 25, as a series of free and ticketed events in Beaufort, South Carolina, featuring author discussions, writing workshops, a screening of a film adaptation of one of Pat’s beloved novels, and more. Held in locations throughout Beaufort and surrounding Lowcountry, this is sure to be an amazing journey.
Stories Have a Way of Bringing Us Home: Pat Conroy’s Legacy
by Robert Gwaltney, executive director of the Pat Conroy Literary Center
I first discovered Pat Conroy as a teenager growing up in Cairo, Georgia, a small town tucked into the rural southwest corner of the state. I loved where I came from, but I also understood early that there were certain ways a Southern boy was expected to be, certain boundaries drawn around belonging. I never fit comfortably within them. Books became both refuge and passage, places where I could encounter lives larger and more complicated than the one I knew, and where difference did not always have to be explained.
Then I found Pat Conroy.
Here was a Southern writer who understood that the places we come from can be both beloved and complex. He wrote about family and longing, cruelty and tenderness, belonging and separateness. He understood home could be the place that made you and the place you sometimes had to escape to understand yourself. His language was lush. Fearless. But beneath its beauty was something even more important to me: truth.
For a young person still learning how to inhabit his own skin, Pat’s books offered permission. Permission to feel deeply. To question what I had been taught about the world and my place within it. To imagine a life beyond the boundaries I could see. And, eventually, permission to believe that a Southern boy with stories of his own might become a writer.
That is the extraordinary legacy of Pat Conroy. It lives, of course, in The Prince of Tides, The Lords of Discipline, The Water Is Wide, Beach Music, and the other books generations of readers continue to discover. But a literary legacy cannot survive on a bookshelf alone. It must remain alive.
That is the work we are privileged to do at the Pat Conroy Literary Center in Beaufort, South Carolina.
Through programs serving students, teachers, readers, and writers, we honor Pat not simply by remembering what he wrote, but by carrying forward what he believed about the transformative power of story. Through programs such as Camp Conroy and Storybuilders, young people are encouraged to find their voices, exercise their imaginations, and see themselves as storytellers. Perhaps somewhere among them is another child who feels a little outside of things, waiting for a story to tell them that their voice matters.
This October, we will gather in Beaufort for the 11th Annual Pat Conroy Literary Festival, a celebration of books, writers, readers, and the enduring power of story. This year carries particular significance as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Great Santini, Pat’s novel about family, love, violence, and the complicated terrain between them.
Fifty years later, the book still provokes conversation because Pat was willing to venture into challenging places—the places where love and pain coexist and where families clutch their deepest secrets.
I could never have imagined, reading Pat Conroy as that teenager in Cairo, that one day I would be entrusted with helping preserve his literary legacy and introduce his work—and his belief in the power of stories—to another generation.
There is something beautifully Southern about that circle.
Stories have a way of bringing us home.
Robert Gwaltney is executive director of the Pat Conroy Literary Center, where his love of story and community comes together with more than 25 years of nonprofit leadership. An award-winning Southern writer, he is the author of The Cicada Tree, named the 2023 Georgia Author of the Year for First Novel, and Sing Down the Moon, winner of the IPPY Award for Best Regional Fiction—Southeast. A 2022 Pat Conroy Writers Residency recipient, Gwaltney is honored to help carry forward Conroy’s legacy by nurturing readers, writers, students, and teachers—and ensuring the transformative power of story reaches generations to come.