I’m writing from Arkansas Tech University’s second annual “Lit Fest.”

There are over 150 high-school-aged, aspiring writers gathered on our campus. They’ve travelled from all corners of the state to the land of the Wonder Boys and the Golden Suns to talk about — wait for it — books!

Johnny Wink on left, Eli Cranor on right; image by Sam Strasner, ATU

I asked my creative writing students to introduce our visiting authors. When one of them took the mic and shouted, “Humanities aren’t dead, y’all!” I almost lost it. I’m serious. I durn near shed a tear over the sheer enthusiasm these kids had about reading and writing.

This, however, is not the case for all students.

I learned this fact travelling to schools to talk about my novels. As I stood in basketball gyms, surrounded by hundreds of teenagers, I often had to mention my quarterbacking days, or that one year I spent in Sweden, just to keep their attention.

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But when those talks were over, there was always a small group who came up to me clutching composition notebooks tightly against their chests. They came with questions, and their questions led me to ask a question of my own:

What if I could get that same small group from every high school in Arkansas to come to our campus?

The answer to that question was “Lit Fest.”

This year’s festival boasted appearances from Porter Prize winning poet, Greg Brownderville, and New York Times bestselling author, Ayana Gray.

These two native Arkansawyers delivered talks that were straight from the heart. They opened students’ minds. They stoked the fire that led them to our campus.

The same fire that still burns inside of me, the small, flickering flame that was first lit by the man who also joined my talk.

Yes, I’m talking about the one, the only, Dr. Johnny Wink.

Dr. Wink was my professor at Ouachita Baptist University. He was the dude who steered my life down the road less travelled, a road that eventually led us both to the same stage at Lit Fest.

Johnny wowed the students with his knowledge of Shakespeare’s sonnets. His 81 years on planet earth, did not stop him from reciting line after line. The man is ageless, timeless, and it was a pleasure to watch him cast his spell.

At the closing ceremonies, after we announced the winners of our writing contest (Karys Foy, Russellville High School, earned the $500 grand prize; Christopher Wilkerson, Little Rock Catholic High School, and Rain Jack, Van Buren High School, both captured $250 runner-up prizes) I tried to explain why something like Lit Fest mattered, why reading and writing mattered.

I recited this Stephen King line about how books are “uniquely portable magic.” I took it a step further, though, and told the students that books are "empathy machines."

Tiny black symbols on a stark white page hold a strange power — they become a portal into someone else’s mind. Someone who may not look like you or be where you’re from.

And that, my friends, is the magic we harnessed at Lit Fest, the mystical spark Johnny Wink lit in my mind when I was the same age as these students are now.

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