Taking part in Kentucky State Parks 100th anniversary celebration.

Kentucky Poet laureate and New York Times bestselling author Silas House, who is hosting writing workshops at State Parks.

One of the workshops held earlier this year was at Cumberland Falls State Resort Park.

House grew up near Cumberland Falls, and as we found out when we met up with him there.

It's a place that holds real special meaning for him.

I never sit down to write without going for a walk and I mean, some of that has to do with that's just the way I was raised.

You know, you got to also and use your imagination.

So I can I can't disconnect imagination from the natural world.

I still really need it as an impetus for morale.

And when you grow up in a more rural place, there's not a there's not a whole lot of places that you go, you know, in town, you go out into the natural world.

And so we would go to the state parks.

I grew up directly between two state parks, Trumbull and Falls and Levi Jackson State Park, which is no longer a state park, but it used to be.

And so any kind of family reunion, you know, or picnic or outing on a Sunday, we would usually go to one of those state parks.

Just take a look at a fried chicken, you know, and find a picnic table in the shade, a menu wander around the park.

Cumberland Falls State Park, especially, had so many different things you could not only see the falls, but go hiking.

Has a great swimming pool.

It has a lodge.

There.

Lots of times people would meet there, you know, for your prom date.

You know, you might get to come from falls to lodge, things like that.

So it was definitely centered around family for me, especially as a child.

And then when I had children myself, you know, I wanted to take them.

I wanted them to have that same experience in the state parks.

But Cumberland Falls was somewhere I would bring my children very often on a Sunday.

I love that tradition.

And it's just something that sort of I don't know when I think of home in my mind's eye.

One of the things I think of is Cumberland Falls.

When I when people ask me where I'm from, they usually don't.

A lot of people don't know Corbin.

But if I say it's near Cumberland Falls, a lot of times they'll be able to place it.

You know?

I think the interesting thing about Cumberland Falls to me is that I must have seen the falls, you know, hundreds and hundreds of times.

But I'm always mesmerized by.

And the other thing is it's always different.

You know, one time it might be like this incredible green.

And at the time it's muddy because it's been raining a lot and the water's always a different level.

So it's it's never the same thing twice.

And I think that's one thing about the state parks is, you know, they're of the natural world, which is always changing.

And it's different in every season and it always has something new to offer.

So, I mean, I guess that's one reason we keep going back.

As soon as I became poet laureate, I started working pretty closely with tourism because I really wanted to make our literary heritage more a part of our tourism.

People know a lot about the musicians of Kentucky.

We have a highway named the Country Music Highway in Kentucky, and I wanted to do that with with our literary heritage as well.

And so the tourism department's been really great about working with me on all that.

And when they told me it was the hundredth anniversary, the state Parks, they suggested that may be able to do a one workshop.

And it was just so successful that we decided to do a whole series of them.

And we found it's a great way to bring people into the state parks, especially the off season, because most of the time people use the parks mostly in the spring and summer.

And so we were trying to get them there in the wintertime.

But because, you know, it has something for them to the lot of the people who came to the writing workshops said, I've never been here before.

I'm so sad.

This is my first time knowing about this.

And, you know, a lot of them said that they would be coming back.

And so, yeah, I think it really expanded their experience and that's something about when you come to the state parks, you're seeing the best of Kentucky, you know, and you're seeing places that have been preserved and to a large degree, see in places, you know, mostly in their natural state.

And one thing the state parks system does so well is is I mean, the state parks system was eco tourism before people even thought about tourism that way.

You know, it was part of the environmental movement before there was an environmental movement in the way it preserves and not only preserves nature, but history and all those things.

You know, it's it's right here and not enough of us take advantage of having it.

So I think a lot of us think we can only, you know, if we're going to have a tourist destination, it has to be way, way away.

And that's one thing I love about the state parks is their free and open to everybody.

Beauty in our backyards.

Indeed.