MarshSong Cottage, sitting creekside on a tidal marsh, is host to the spring and fall Pat Conroy Literary Center Writer’s Residencies. Mary Ellen Thompson welcomes writers to her guest cottage, located on Saint Helena Island in South Carolina, mid-way between downtown Beaufort and Hunting Island State Park.
MarshSong, so named for the melody the marsh mud plays at low tide, is situated on an historic property, once the first school in the nation for freed Black slaves. But the history goes deeper than that with ancient shell middens hinting at stories of other cultures.
The Cottage is a perfect writer’s sanctuary with views of water and woods; wildlife creatures and birds abound.
Pat Conroy Literary Center’s
Spring 2026 Writer’s Resident
We are welcoming C. Aiden Downey to MarshSong Cottage this spring. Currently living in Decatur, GA, Aiden is actually from my very own neck of the woods on the outskirts of Philadelphia, PA.
Aiden told us: “I have spent most of my life aspiring to write. Now I must write and I am writing as fast as I can. I desperately need to be around other writers, storytellers, people willing to take creative risks with their work and lives. I thrive when I am part of a community, among friends, and am looking for a writing community where I can give and take, teach and learn, laugh and cry. I want to learn to write much like I learn how to cook: at the elbows of writers, absorbing the essence of what they are up to as they go about their craft and lives. I enjoy evenings making food and discussing books, ideas, chapters and lives with friends who share my passion for reading and writing.”
His introduction to Beaufort was, “When I stepped off the bus on Parris Island almost forty years ago the sauna-grade heat, relentless gnats and berserk drill instructors hit me like a ton of bricks. The air was like nothing I had ever experienced, so close and moist and reeking of some sort of salty rot. And it only got worse from there, as the drill instructors made us run and train and roll and shoot in a hell that only got hotter, that drenched us in sweat and dropped us like flies. I could not wait to get off that God-forsaken island and back up north to Pennsylvania. For the life of me I could not imagine how anyone would live there, how anyone could call this part of the country home.
“Twenty-five years later I found myself living in Atlanta and back in the lowcountry, this time to help a good friend research people and places important to the Civil Rights movement. We stopped at a myriad of places--crumbling buildings that had once housed citizen schools, rice plantations, local museums--and made it a point to strike up conversations with people who had lived there all their lives and could not imagine living anywhere else. I gained a whole new appreciation for the lowcountry, for its people, history and natural beauty, and would like to find ways to spend more time there so that the lowcountry might find its way into my writing.”
When we asked, “Who are you?” he replied: “I am the father of two inspiring young women, the spouse of an amazing woman and the son of a woman who lost my father when I was four and raised me and two brothers on her own. I have been a Marine, a pharmacist, a high school teacher and a college professor. I have been writing all my life but still have so many stories that I need to tell. I am realizing that life is short and that these stories are not going to write themselves.”
Please join us in welcoming Aiden to Beaufort and if you can, seek him out and introduce yourselves.