Great Smoky Mountains National Park Artist-in-Residence Statement of Purpose 2026
Yet there were many qualities of life that simply were never available for us. Through the years of my childhood, no vacations were ever known. Weekend activities, or any extracurricular activities for that matter, were scarce if ever made. Any such blessings of our lives were small and given freely by family. In the modesty of love, they were never acknowledged as anything special. Yet they were special to me. I remember every autumn somehow being treated to going to Carver’s family orchard on cool, foggy days to pick apples and delight in fresh homemade cider and apple fritters. Sometimes, on a special Sunday morning, we might be treated to a breakfast at the local favorite Mountain Lodge that always seemed to me a feast. Oh, the joy!
In this quiet life deep in the Smoky Mountain foothills of Pittman Center — nearby the schoolhouse built beside a low creek that would always flood when it rained as its waters ran toward the Pigeon River — though we lived right on the National Park Service boundary of the Great Smoky Mountains and its timeless, weather worn earth towered above (the only world I knew), still the depths of their beauty remained so distant from my world. My mother had not the time nor the confidence to explore the many trails with me near our home.
Though, in my young life there was one person to bless me with the beauty, history, and spiritual depth of the mountains of home. This person was my grandfather.
My grandfather, Michael Povia, was a man who loved the Great Smoky Mountains more than any person I have ever known. In the early 1990s, with his lifelong friend Lee, he hiked all six trails to the summit of his heart’s mountain, Mount LeConte, in under twenty-four hours. Throughout my childhood, my grandfather would take me into the mountains of our home to reveal to me the secrets and quiet beauty that lay within the natural world around us. On these days, my grandfather revealed to me the divinity within the cold flowing waters of Greenbrier, the subtle nuances of the yellow birch and poplar, sugar maple, and red maple that glowed in the faint sunlight and became softly ablaze every autumnal descent to Winter. My grandfather brought me into the wondrous worlds of the blackbelly salamander, the elk, the deer, and the black bear. In my grandfather’s fellowship with the natural world, the raven, turkey, warbler, and what seemed like an infinity of birds known and mostly unknown to me sang, foraged, and hunted within the bountiful depths surrounding the watershed of the fog-respirating mountains. This was how I experienced the natural world of our home as a child of the Great Smoky Mountains.
My grandfather’s influence upon me in finding the heart of our home did not end in childhood. As adulthood unfolded, I began communing on my own in the mountains, forests, and plateau of Tennessee. As I came of age and my spirit came to grow, like my grandfather I took refuge in the quiet stillness and divinity of the natural world.
In his later years, I witnessed my grandfather loving deeply the living memory of the land, as he found himself ever more deeply woven into it. As I became older, he shared with me deep histories of Appalachian settlers, of whose families still live in communion and shared memory within the Smoky Mountains today.
The last time my grandfather and I were together before his fatal heart attack, he took me one last time into our now shared Smoky Mountains. Off trail from Greenbrier, he showed me old homesteads of early settlers, remnants of chimneys and foundations now grown over by the forest wilds. Invisible as they were to most, in our last walk in the woods together, these old homes came alive again. As we walked through the cool autumnal brush of the forest, he told me about the people who lived here before the Park Service, including Dolly Parton’s early family homestead. In our final walk in the woods together, my grandfather continued to instill within me humility, reverence, wonder, and awe before the divinity of our diverse, precious and sacred mountain home. This lifetime of transmission became an eternal bond shared that, like a light, illuminates into the future.
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As I write to you, dear reader, I cannot help but be in tears remembering and being witness to these memories. For they are a small part of the evolving human continuum of the mountains of our heart. The seasons of this year mark my own entry into midlife. I have felt the emotional, physical, and spiritual powers of time call me toward this mortal knowing, beginning deep in the wilds of an Alaskan island where I wintered this year to write and to awaken new raw depths of the spiritual heart. This knowing continues to this moment. As I completed my second book manuscript this season, I became called into a new depth to explore in honesty, reverence, and heart this very awareness: the living memory and story of the Great Smoky Mountains that continues to unfold through me.
Slowly crossing my passage into mortal midlife, it is time to come home, to feel ever more deeply the living continuum of the Smoky Mountains that unites the architecture of its early homesteads and mills with the hearts of us who live today, to stand before the mountains of our home and honor the legacy of their wisdom that has been entrusted to us by our ancestors. Deep in the interiors of our hearts lay the reverence and spirit for their continuance. For it is in this deep reverence where preservation and conservation are natively known, and like my grandfather to me, despite great poverty and personal challenges, passed down to our children and our children’s children not as a task, but as a way of being in the world.
Proposed for this four-week artist residency is a mixed medium project of long form writing with accompanying original photographic images that together tell a single story: a deeply subjective and intimately known narrative embodying the transcendent, living human continuum of the Great Smoky Mountains. The writing will result in a novel manuscript, approximately 15-20,000 words in length, with photographic images enlivening the spirit of the Great Smoky Mountains. Weaving historical and natural history into a deeply intimate narrative similar in affect to Barry Lopez with a unique poetic sensitivity calling back to John O’Donohue, it is my intention that this project uniquely, truthfully, and sensitively represent our storied continuum of human presence within Appalachia: a deep ecology and living memory of the Smoky Mountains. These may either stand together as a visually inspired literary work (structurally similar to Wallace & Page Stegner’s American Places), or as Barry Lopez used his artist residencies, provide the foundation of a longer-form book expanding its themes.
What I hope to gain through this opportunity in partnership with the Park Service is a dedicated time and space of deep intention to allow the natural world of my heritage let this story be told. An opportunity to work in the park would provide a certain ineffability, a numinosity that can be known by no other way and is essential for this project I have so long desired to write. This much I have learned from my deep field work in previous long form writing: that there is an offering Nature provides our spirit when we surrender ourselves fully to her. The work that results is incomparable and simply can be authentically done no other way. To write of the Great Smoky Mountains with authenticity and depth of transmission, one must simply be there, within her stillness, her soft rains, her mornings of fog, her wildlife, and her cold, clear morning light. This project will be a living embodiment of the Great Smoky Mountains’ human continuum that is not a distant idea assigned to history but a breathing, transcendent reality lived and experienced within us. I have long meditated upon this project, a living Foxfire of memory, patiently waiting for its time to emerge. I have been waiting for my maturity to approach this journey with care. Now is this time.
To date, I have completed two books, one of which will be published later this year that focuses on transcendent and immanent dimensions of loss and grief. The second is an intimate journey into the spiritual heart through a season in the coastal old growth rain forests of the North American Northwest. This proposed work aims to continue to deepen with literary skill the living story of the Great Smoky Mountains, cascading the reader through the human and natural history of the Smoky Mountains woven by a living descendant and steward to its future.
Written communications have been a primary component of my professional and executive career for fifteen years. Additionally, I have completed more than 20,000 hours as a professional fine artist and working photographer through the medium of the photographic image. Over the years, my work of the natural world, including most national parks in the United States, has been published internationally in print and digital and viewed by millions. My photographic work has been described as impressionistic and dreamlike.
I have an education into the psychic depths of culture and memory spanning decades. I received my undergraduate in cultural anthropology in Tennessee. This season, I also successfully completed my Master of Arts in psychology, wherein I focused psychological inquiry into the spiritual, transcendent, and immanent domains of our lives through personal hardship. This will further support deepening sensitivity, honesty, depth, and personal connection to my writing.
I would be honored to share these creative contributions through the Great Smoky Mountains Artist-in-Residency program with visitors and the local community. It would be a pleasure to participate in talks and discussions about the living memory of the Great Smoky Mountains and our connection to the land’s past to foster visitor awareness and enrichment. A creative exhibit of photographic canvases could be produced and donated for display of the park at a venue such as Sugarlands Visitor Center representing an intimate lens of an artist for whom the mountains, rivers, and valleys resonate as deeply sacred, and as home. A preferred month for residency is October, a time of solace, quiet stillness, and subtle change toward Winter. I would also be amenable to an earlier month, should an opportunity be extended.
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Before I set out to write to you, dear reader, in silent contemplation I felt the presence of my grandfather. I asked him to please be with me through this proposal, and through this journey should it be accepted. This journey, finally, is ready to be explored and shared. And through its sharing, it is my sincere hope and intention that it might become within the reader a mirror, reflecting unique facets of each of our living embodiment and continuum with our ancestors and our natural world. Mine is found deeply within the Great Smoky Mountains.
Attached please find my accompanying artist resume and writing samples for your review. Thank you for your consideration of my proposal to join Great Smoky Mountains National Park as an Artist-in-Residence in 2026. It has been an honor to prepare this for you.
With heart,
Archie Carmel
I was born here. In the mountain foothills of southern Appalachia, life began. At least, it did for me.
My mother was young and idealistic. My father, spiritually and emotionally wounded, was unable to live truthfully. And through his addictions and secrecies, he was an abusive husband and father.
When I was eight years old, my mother discovered within herself the courage to leave her abusive marriage to make a better life for us: a life of love. She returned us to the home of her parents in the Great Smoky Mountains, the mountains of her childhood and of her father’s heart.
Eventually, my mother and I were generously offered a modest cabin styled house by members of our community to call home, deep in the wooded foothills of Pittman Center. My mother, a young woman without a college degree and independent for the first time, struggled constantly to make ends meet. Throughout my childhood, my mother worked three to four jobs at any given time just to keep us housed and with food to eat. Through these years, much of my time would be spent in the care of my grandparents in the mountains of nearby Gatlinburg.
Though childhood carried burdens of quiet, deep poverty, our lack never impacted our relationships at home. In what time we had together in daily life, my mother did the best she could. Through this, though much time was spent alone, introvert with mild autism that I was, it never seemed to bother me. I was blessed with a loving home.
