As the famed author Pat Conroy began his journey from this earth two years ago, he might have dreamed of weekends like this. To see one of his dying wishes realized — to continue his life’s work nurturing and mentoring readers and writers — he might have also found himself at a loss for words.
This would have been a rarity for a man who found so many words tumbling around in his head that he had to put them down on paper — literally and in longhand — to tell his stories. The result was a library of best-sellers, some of which became blockbuster movies, including “The Water is Wide” (“Conrack” in its film adaptation), “The Great Santini” and “The Prince of Tides.”
A long weekend Thursday through Sunday marked the third annual Pat Conroy Literary Festival in Beaufort, S.C., featuring book talks, Lowcountry tours, writing workshops, and strolls and carriage rides throughout Conroy’s beloved hometown, where he landed at age 15 when his father, a Marine pilot (famously portrayed by Robert Duvall in “The Great Santini,”) was stationed here.
Conroy fell in love with the marshes and waterways of this moss-draped, antebellum town and missed nothing of its wild grandeur. The combination of a tortured childhood, a brutal father, a mother whose “eyes were our keys to the palace of wildness,” his beloved high school English teacher, Gene Norris, as well as a wide cast of other characters and creatures inspired a body of work that introduced millions to a place that will always belong to the man who defined it.