Written by Christie Crawford
Clarksville, TN – Only 18 months apart and now in their 60’s, they continue to spar, talking over each other, refuting each other, and lovingly laughing at each other’s anecdotes. But that’s where the similarity to most brother-sister sibling relationships ends. These two, Margaret and Billy Renkl, are, as Billy said, “a finely calibrated brother sister novelty act”.
Margaret, an award-winning essayist, author and contributing writer to the New York Times opinion page, and Billy, a fine artist, illustrator, and full-time APSU professor, were the feature presenters and Patricia Winn Awardees (for outstanding work of Southern fiction published within the last two years), at the 20th annual Clarksville Writers conference held this June 4th-6th, 2025.
The Renkls were chosen because of their collaboration on two books, Late Migrations and The Comfort of Crows, where Margaret provided the text and Billy, the illustrations. The Renkls were subjects of two sessions at the conference, a plenary session on Thursday afternoon, June 5th, and at the banquet that evening. Both events were moderated by East Tennessee Creative Non-fiction Professor and former APSU faculty member, Amy Wright, and Cynthia Marsh, Professor Emeritus of Art at APSU.
Their Childhood and Parents’ Influence
According to the Renkls, working together is nothing new, as Margaret put it, growing up in the 60’s in southern Alabama, they were “feral“ children with a family rule that “we could do anything we wanted to do as long as we stayed together”. The result of that influence was that the Renkls learned to pay attention to the natural world through “sustained observation,” as Billy pointed out. The sequence that the Renkls follow is that Margaret provides the words while Billy creates the illustrations that complement or correspond to Margaret’s work. As Billy mentioned, “I don’t think anyone does anything of value alone.”
In regard to their success, both Margaret and Billy gave a lot of credit to their parents. Coming from the rural South, their parents grew up poor during the Depression, with hardships early on, and yet they were fully supportive of their daughter going to college to study literature and their son choosing the academics of art. “Practicality be damned” when it came to their parents’ belief in their children’s studies.
Luckily, their parents were the ones to take their artistic work seriously, whereas many artistic students today lack that support structure, stated Billy. They, as children, were at the table with adults, and debate was encouraged on a variety of subjects. Margaret said, “It’s a huge gift to any child to be told that what they’re interested in is to be celebrated.”
The Aging Process
Cynthia Marsh asked about the aging process and its influence on their two books. Margaret and Billy both spoke to the fact that as a person ages, someone they love dies. Their mother, Olivia, died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 80, and Late Migrations evolved as a form of grief therapy. By working on the book, Margaret described the process as observing the cycles of the generations, those of the seasons, and those of life and death as a form of comfort. She added, “This is happening because it must happen, and not because you did something wrong”.
If you observe the natural cycles of life, according to her, you can remove the pain of self-blame and feelings of punishment and suffering, as “grief is the flip side of life”. The siblings discussed how they are keenly aware that life is finite and you need to say “no” to those activities that aren’t important to you to ensure you have time for your loved ones and your art.
Their Artistic Process
Amy Wright mentioned Margaret’s book structure is as a form of patchwork quilting, where many hands piece together their artistic efforts. Margaret added that quilting, although something she grew up with, was something she tended to ignore as domestic work during her embracement of feminism, but now parallels it to her essays and collage, as both are pieced from bits of everyday life brought together in an artful way.
Margaret’s works are personal essays which are shared as creative non-fiction. She feels her work expresses feelings, such as grief or fear, and are not that different than what many others feel. She remembered when a reader reached out and told her that she “gave words to a feeling that I didn’t think anyone ever had had… if there’s a reason for writing, that one’s as good as there is.”
Billy discussed his process of creating the 52 collages representing the 52 essays Margaret had written in The Comfort of Crows. As he began, he misunderstood the scale, but it did allow him to look at the year as an incremental whole – seasons don’t change on a dime, but the world does change from week to week in small bits. The only way to know that, according to him, is to immerse yourself in it. The book gave him “a chance to focus on the beauty of those tiny little incremental changes”. It also reorganized his sense as to how images might develop in relation to the world.
Personal Philosophy
Both Renkls emphasized the importance of paying attention, particularly to the elements of the natural world, in the form of flowers, birds, and insects, as well as humans, and to getting off your phone.
Margaret stated that the “clamor of crowds engaged in the contrariness of this age” is the difficulty of our time, particularly among young people. She emphasized that you must rebuke the crowd if you are an artist, because when you make a statement, everyone will tell you that your work is “wrong, different, or that they have not been embraced or included”. She talked about finding “joyfulness in grimness” and Billy attributed that trait to their father, who, when asked how he was, always answered the same, even during his dying days; “Fantastic”.
When talking about Billy’s work, Marsh asked about the concept of beauty. Billy’s answer was that in art school, when his professors negated or ignored the beauty of images, he was appalled by “that fundamental misunderstanding of the power that beauty is”. Margaret also answered that “Whatever darkness befalls us, we are still always capable of making beauty and we are capable even in our deepest grief, of understanding and feeling joy. That is what it means to be alive.”
Billy best summed up the purpose of their work by saying that “art distills those (life) experiences, tells them back and summarizes them, and suggests meaning for them. And we learn from what we read and look at, to then go back to our own life and recognize its importance.”
