OUR MISSION

To foster the arts and crafts by providing a wide range of instruction for adults and children. Castle Hill holds exhibitions, lectures, forums, concerts and other similar activities in order to promote social interaction among artists, craftsmen, laymen, and the community at large.

Letter from President | Letter from Executive Director

SUMMER 2010 WORKSHOPS - WRITING

Mark Bittman: This year's Woody
English Distinguished Artist & Writers Chair
[Wednesday, July 21 at the Wellfleet Congregational Church]

TUESDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES AT THE WELLFLEET LIBRARY

$10 admission – Free for Castle Hill Members
8pm on Tuesdays at the Wellfleet Public Library in Wellfleet.

July 20 – Alison Saar:

She studied art and art history at Scripps College and received an MFA from the Otis Art Institute. She has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and two National Endowment Fellowships.

July 27 – Brooke Newman:

A writer whose fable for adults, The Little Tern sold over a million copies. Brooke's memoir, Jenniemae & James: A Memoir in Black and White, to be published this Spring, is set in the 1940's and 50's and recollects the unlikely relationship between her father, an aloof, white mathematical genius, and their maid, an illiterate, uneducated African American who had a knack with numbers.

Aug 3 – Dorianne Laux & Joe Millar:

Poetry Reading - Dorianne Laux’s fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon (W.W. Norton), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and received the 2005 Oregon Book Award. Joseph Millar is the author of Fortune (Eastern Washington University Press). His first collection, Overtime (2001) was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Aug 10 – Dan Okrent:

author of the forthcoming Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, to be published by Scribner in May. He began working on Last Call shortly before he concluded his term as the first Public Editor of the New York Times in 2005.

Aug 17 – Harriet Reisen:

a former fellow in screenwriting at the American Film Institute, has written dramatic and historical documentary scripts for PBS and HBO, and has delivered commentaries
for Morning Edition and Marketplace.

Sept 10 – Maxine Kumin: Poetry Reading

September 11 - Maxine Kumin - Poet Laureate: Poetry Reading

Summer 2010

Painting

Drawing

Clay

Printmaking/
Book Arts

WRITING 2010

Fiction Anne Leclaire

June 28 – July 2
Mon – Fri
10am - noon
5 Sessions $360
Pamet Crossing

Register

This intensive writing workshop focuses on drawing from the twin wells of imagination and memory to craft fiction. Crucial aspects of structure, character development and plot will be addressed as well as the specific problems that arise while completing a narrative and the critical decisions authors must make while creating a story.

Anne Leclaire A journalist and the best-selling author of eight critically acclaimed novels, Anne LeClaire has received international recognition for her work and is published in twenty-four countries. She has taught in France, Ireland, Jamaica, and at the Maui Writers Conference and lectures widely on writing and the creative process. She is a Distinguished Fellow of the Ragdale Foundation and is a member of the Fellows Council of the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts.

Speaking Up. Talking Back: Writing for Non-Writers Judith Huge

July 5 - 9
Mon – Fri
10am - noon
5 Sessions $360
pamet
Crossing

Register
Voicing our stories can be an act of excavation; they hide. In the back of a closet, in the cracks on a coffee mug, in the creases of a catcher’s mitt, they wait to be re-discovered and brought back to life on the page. This workshop is for those who may intend to write but have yet to discover the way in or clear the time to follow where it leads. Working with material from your own life, we will explore a wide variety of ways to start and structure your stories, using the tools of narration and reflection to bring memory back into the light of day.

Judith Huge has spent more than 30 years as a college teacher, writer, corporate consultant, and workshop director. She is founder of a graduate program in the teaching of writing at Goucher College, president of her own national consulting firm, and has trained more than 5,000 people to use communication in managing their work and lives. She has conducted a wide variety of workshops for those in transition including The New PMS (Post-Move Syndrome), Finding the Me in Memoir, Re-Minding the Body, and Your Write to Heal, to name a few. Currently teaching courses in advanced writing and Therapeutic Journaling at Lakeland College, she has written a regular business column and contributes frequent travel narratives for the Gannett newspaper and magazine chain. In addition, she is the author of "A Middle Aged Woman and the Sea," a tale of memoir and transition published in Women in the Wild.

Writing Credible Fiction David Unger

July 12 - 16
Mon – Fri
10am – noon
5 Sessions $360
Pamet Crossing

Register

Our writing reveals the way we see the world. Sometimes what we write parallels or reflects reality; at other times we may distort reality for the sake of portraying a deeper understanding of it. No matter how we choose to write, we still have to create convincing narratives for our readers. In this class setting, imagery, dialogue, character, tone, point-of view, and narrative strategies will be explored. Though there will be do in-class writing exercises, students should also bring a 5-10 page piece of writing (double-spaced) for class discussion.

Guatemalan-born David Unger has just completed a new novel: In My Eyes, You Are Beautiful. He is the author of Life in the Damn Tropics. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals here and abroad. He has translated thirteen books, among them Teresa Cárdenas's Old Dog and Letters to My Mother, Rigoberta Menchú's The Honey Jar (Groundwood, 2006) and The Girl from Chimel, Ana María Machado's Me in the Middle, Silvia Molina's The Love You Promised Me, The Popol Vuh, Elena Garro's First Love, Bárbara Jacobs The Dead Leaves, and Nicanor Parra's Antipoems: New and Selected. He teaches translation in the City College of New York's MFA program and is the US representative at the Guadalajara International Book Fair. Ni chicha ni limonada, a collection of 12 stories and an essay, will be published in October by Fy G Editores in Guatemala. Ni chicha, ni limonada (Guatemala: F y G Editores, 2009; New York: Recorded Books, 2010)

JUST SIGNED A CONTRACT FOR THESE TWO NEW BOOKS: The Price of Escape (New York: Akashic Books, May 2011)

Para mi eres divina / In My Eyes You Are Beautiful (Mexico: Random House Mondadori, May 2011

Poetry Keith Althaus

July 19 – 23
Mon - Fri
10am - noon
5 Sessions $360
Pamet
Crossing

Register

This workshop aims at expanding our own definition of what is possible while remaining true to ourselves. We all seek approval for our work but in the long run admitting new critical insights will prove more useful and fulfilling. I strongly believe in being supportive of the poet's voice and manner. What good does it do us to "workshop" a poem into a kind of perfection until it no longer represents the poet's thought or feeling. I see no reason why we can't learn craft, pick up hints and new viewpoints, without altering our essential approach. I often find the most "hopeless" poems can elicit the greatest general insights, and the most "perfect" poems seem only to have built a wall impervious to criticism around themselves. That same wall often doesn't allow much flow of light or wisdom. This workshop is open to those at all levels of development.

Keith Althaus has published two books of poetry: Ladder of Hours and Rival Heavens. He has been a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, and has received grants from the NEA and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Arts. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, Grand Street, and other magazines.

Biography and Memoir Justin Kaplan

July 19 – 22
Monday – Thursday
2 - 4 pm
4 Sessions
$350
Pamet Crossing

Autobiography and memoir are literary ways of shaping real-life experience and turning it into narrative. This is a workshop course that welcomes each student’s active participation. Please enroll only if you have a writing project in mind or in progress and are willing to present it for class discussion.

Justin Kaplan is the author of Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award), Walt Whitman: A Life, Lincoln Steffens: A Biography, and Mark Twain and His World. He is General Editor of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In collaboration with his wife Anne Bernays, he wrote The Language of Names and Back Then: Two Lives in 1950's New York, a joint memoir published by Morrow/HarperCollins. The paperback edition of his latest non-fiction book, When the Astors Owned New York, was published by Plume in 2007.

Fact as a Formal Element: A Poetry Workshop Elizabeth Bradfield

July 26 – 30
Monday – Friday
2 – 4 pm
$360

In writing a sonnet, rhythm and sound force each line's content. Fact can be considered similarly. What happens when we bring unalterable fact into conversation with feeling and interpretation? Whether it's history, biology, architecture, or art, we will work toward bringing the specifics of the outer world into the inner life of our poems. The class will read work by poets who have used various techniques, from the flamboyantly experimental to the subtly lyrical. Exercises will encourage us all to play with the placement, style, and prominence of fact in our work. The group will share experiments in a supportive workshop environment—listening carefully to each other and offering feedback that will open our poems to their full potential.

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of two collections of poetry, Approaching Ice (2010) and Interpretive Work (2008), which won the Audre Lorde Award. She is a recipient of a Stegner Fellowship and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and her poems have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Orion, and in numerous anthologies. In 2005 she founded Broadsided Press, which takes inspiration from street art and publishes monthly artistic/literary collaborations that are posted around the world by Vectors. She lives in Truro and works as a web designer and a naturalist.

Poetry: Image/Narrative Joe Millar

August 2 – 5
Monday – Thursday, 10 am – noon
4 sessions
At Pamet Crossing
$360

This workshop will focus on the poetic duality of image and narrative, twin engines driving much modern and contemporary poetry. The course will briefly consider their development from Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams through James Wright and the “Deep Imagists”, keeping in mind their potential for our own work, and using as models for exercises poems by Adrienne Rich, Louise Gluck, Philip Levine, James Tate, and D.H. Lawrence.

Joseph Millar is the author of Fortune (Eastern Washington University Press). His first collection, Overtime (2001) was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Millar grew up in Pennsylvania, attended Johns Hopkins University, and spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay area, working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines, and his work has won fellowships from the NEA in Poetry, Montalvo Center for the Arts, and Oregon Literary Arts. In 1997 he gave up his job as a telephone installation foreman and moved to western Oregon where he now teaches at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program and yearly at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur.

What Makes a Poem Memorable Dorianne Laux

August 2 – 5
Monday – Thursday
1 – 4 pm
4 sessions

Pamet Crossing
$450

This workshop/study group will consist of reading the work of established poets, creating new drafts, and working with already produced poems. The class will be using selections from The 2005 Pushcart Prize, XXIX, copies of which will be available for use for those who do not have their own. The group will take a close look at these prize-winning poems and seek to understand what makes them memorable. Students will practice imitation as a striving toward writing their own unforgettable poems with daily in-class free-writes and take home exercises. In addition, three poems from each poet should be submitted in advance of the first class.

Dorianne Laux’s fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon (W.W. Norton), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and received the 2005 Oregon Book Award. It was also short-listed for the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the most outstanding book of poems published in the United States and chosen by the Kansas City Star as a noteworthy book of 2005. Laux is also author of three collections of poetry: Awake (1990) introduced by Philip Levine, What We Carry (1994), and Smoke (2000). Red Dragonfly Press will release Superman: The Chapbook, later this year. She is the recipient of two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Best American Erotic Poems Prize, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from the NEA, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines. She has waited tables and written poems in San Diego, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Petaluma, CA, Eugene, OR and Juneau, AK. In 2008 she will move to Raleigh, NC where she joined the faculty at North Carolina State.

Elements of Fiction Anne Bernays
August 9 – 13
Monday – Friday, 2 – 4 pm
Pamet Crossing
5 sessions
$360

The main goal of a fiction writer is to tell a compelling story; to be any good a narrative must keep the reader reading. In this class students will do exercises that enhance their narrative skills through mastery of plot, description, characterization, dialogue, and creative tension.

Anne Bernays is the author of nine novels, including Trophy House, Growing Up Rich, and Professor Romeo; and she has co-authored two books of non-fiction. A long-time writing teacher, her book reviews, essays, and travel pieces have been widely published. Currently she teaches writing at Harvard's Nieman Foundation and Lesley University's MFA program. Bernays and her husband, Justin Kaplan, are the authors of Back Then: Two Lives in 1950's New York, now in paperback.

Personal and Professional Blogging J.C. Bouvier
Aug 9, 10, 11
Mon – Wed
3 Sessions
9 – 12
$225

In this 3 day course, professional blogger, social media maven and consulting marketer will share with the class his hard-won nuanced lessons and current daily disciplines needed to successfully create, manage and promote a weblog, Facebook page and/or any other personal Internet destination. Students will learn all aspects of Blogging in this workshop and all questions will be answered.

J.C. Bouvier first started blogging using AOL 2.5 from the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, where he was a member of the administrative team and has maintained a personal web presence ever since…he is currently the Social Media Marketing Lead for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) where he manages the strategy and tactics that promote IFAW in the blogosphere and social media arenas. He has written for Filmthreat.com, AppleMatters.com, CreativeCow.net, and of course his own blog, jcbouvier.com.

2010 President's Chair

The Sounds of Poetry Robert Pinsky
August 14 & 15
Sat & Sun
10 – 2 pm
2 sessions
Pamet Crossing
$300

This workshop will deal with student work from the viewpoint based on attention to sound, and to the relation between reading and writing. Please read the anthology Essential Pleasures by Pinksy & ABC of Reading by Ezra Pound.

Pinsky was born and raised on the New Jersey shore, in the historic town of Long Branch. His most recent book of poetry is Gulf Music (FSG, 2008) and his new anthology is Essential Pleasures (Norton, 2009). His translation The Inferno of Dante (1994) was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor's Choice, and received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. He teaches in the MFA program at Boston University and is poetry editor of Slate. His prose works include The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide (FSG, 1998), an amusing, and jargon-free book used in many classrooms. While serving as United States Poet Laureate, he founded the Favorite Poem Project.

He will be giving a free reading on Tuesday, August 17 at the Truro Public Library

Playwriting Workshop:

Wendy Kesselman

Aug 16 & 17
Mon & Tues
9:30 - 1:30
Pamet Crossing
$275

A two day workshop for novice or experienced playwrights to hear and revise their plays in a professional setting. E-mail Castle Hill a short scene from either a full-length or one-act play by August 1st.

Wendy Kesselman’s new adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank received a Tony Award Nomination and was produced on Broadway. Her plays include My Sister in this House; The Black Monk (book, music, lyrics); The Notebook; The Executioner’s Daughter; The Foggy Foggy Dew; The Last Bridge; I Love You, I Love You Not; The Juniper Tree; A Tragic Household Tale (Book, Music, Lyrics); Maggie Magalita; The Shell Collection; Merry-Go-Round; Becca (Book, Music, Lyrics); and A Tale of Two Cities (Book, Music, Lyrics). A member of the Dramatists Guild, she is the recipient of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the AT&T Onstage Award, the New England Theatre Major Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement, the first annual Playbill Award, the Roger L. Stevens Award, the Lecomte du Noüy Annual Award, and Guggenheim, McKnight and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Her screenplays include Sister My Sister; I Love You, I Love You Not; and Mad Or In Love. She won a Writers Guild of America award for her screen adaptation of A Separate Peace.

Fiction: Keeping an Eye on The Story Retha Powers

Aug 23 - 27
Mon – Fri
10am - noon
5 Sessions
$360

Register

Some of the greatest art has emerged from challenging times. The current political, social and economic landscapes provide writers with rich material as do many eras of the past. However, the most moving and powerful works that explore subjects such as race, class, gender, and sexuality are at center compelling stories. How can writers create complex and layered fiction that encompasses the setting and circumstances of their characters without overburdening the narrative? Through readings of successful examples, in-class writing exercises and discussion of student work we will explore ways to create tales rich with issues while keeping an eye on the story. Please bring 5-10 pages of a work in progress for class discussion.

Retha Powers is editor of the anthology Black Silk and co-editor of This is My Best: Great Authors Share Their Favorite Work. Powers is also General Editor of the first edition of Bartlett's Familiar Black Quotations to be published by Little, Brown. Her essays and articles have appeared in Essence, Glamour, Ms., and The New York Times Magazine. As Executive Editor of Quality Paperback Book Club she oversaw the book club's New Voices Award for outstanding fiction by new writers and was a founding co-editor of InsightOut Books, which received the Lambda Literary Foundation's Pioneer Award. She is now assistant director of the Publishing Certificate Program at City College of New York where she also teaches.

Poetry Master Class Maxine Kumin

Sept 10, 11 & 12
Friday, Sat & Sun
10am - 2pm
pamet crossing
3 sessions $370

Register
Participants will be asked to read other's poems, as well as their own work, aloud. This will give each poet the opportunity to "hear" the poem without prejudice, and provides others the chance to interpret what the poet intended. Discussions will then focus on the content, diction, and intent of the poem.

Maxine Kumin sixteenth poetry collection, Still to Mow, appeared in 2007 in her 82nd year, following Jack and Other New Poems, The Long Marriage, and Selected Poems 19860-1990. She is also the author of Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry, and a memoir, Inside the Halo and Beyond: Anatomy of a Recovery. Her awards include the Ruth E. Lilly Poetry Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the Harvard Arts and the Robert Frost Medals. She served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (now titled Poet Laureate) in 1980-81. She and her husband live with their dogs and horses on a farm in New Hampshire, where for many years they bred and raised Arabians and competed in distance rides and drives.

Maxine will be giving a reading on Friday September 10 at 7pm at the Wellfleet Public Library.

© 2010 TRURO CENTER FOR THE ARTS AT CASTLE HILL
10 Meetinghouse Road, P.O. Box 756, Truro, MA 02666
www.castlehill.org | e-mail info@castlehill.org
tel. 508 349-7511 | fax 508 349-7513