Thursday, March 21, 2013

A place for you in the circle

DEAR FRIENDS
It's officially spring, and summer will be upon us soon enough. What are you going to do with your beautiful summer? Or, as Mary Oliver asks, your wild and wonderful life? There is a chair especially for you in my class during Creative Arts Week at Ghost Ranch, July 29 - August 4. 

I usually try to lure you out with a landscape photo, the valley of shining stone being a on-going siren song. The picture I offer you today is of Ghost House. This has been my classroom for many years because it's small and perfect for six or seven writers. It is an intimate space but outside those windows is the famous mesa, Pedernal, sometimes called Spider Woman or Changing Woman, and later seen widely in the paintings of Georgia O'Keefe. "God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it"  she said. Whatever bargain they made, fortunately for us, the living can still enjoy it -- that and many of the other natural gifts of Ghost Ranch. A room with an inward perspective and calling to look outward nurtures the creative spirit.

Consider coming this year. My classes offer a circle of shared insight and also provides new vistas, challenges for fresh and unexpected writing.


Back by popular demand this summer is Where Truth Is Told: the Art of Letter Writing, a class I offered a few years ago during the Fall Writing Festival.  The link to the Ghost Ranch catalog will give you all the particulars of living on the Ranch for a week. Here is the course description but I would like to add that we will study and experiment with the letter as a contemporary art form not simply a mode of communication.  

Where Truth is Told: the Art of Letter Writing

Workshop ID: G13W753
Dates: July 29, 2013 - August 4, 2013 Price: $350.00
Reading the letters of both famous (Ansel Adams, Flannery O’Connor, Emily Dickinson, Woody Guthrie perhaps) and ordinary people (maybe your mother or grandfather) we will discover the way letters rise to the level of art and enrich the lives of both sender and receiver.  Through letters, daily routines and deepest desires intermingle.  The art of letter writing is not entirely lost to us yet.  Come prepared to compose letters worth keeping, the ones you have been meaning to write. While we still have a mail carrier, let’s write some beautiful letters.