May 2005

Greetings from Inkberry!

April was a great month here. When last I wrote (April 1st), we had just kicked off our second annual Celebration of Poetry with a poetry slam on March 31st. That very night, we held event number two: Diane Wald and Patricia Lee Lewis read their wonderful work at the Appalachian Bean Cafe, persevering despite the periodic humming sounds of the refrigeration equipment. The Bean has since closed, and I think that was their last event! And the next night we welcomed April Bernard and Mark Wunderlich, who gave a truly splendid reading at Frog Lotus Yoga, in front of the gorgeous frog/lotus mural. They braved nasty weather and were good sports about reading in their stocking feet (to preserve the yoga floor), and it was an excellent celebration of poetry all ‘round. Many thanks to the poets who shared their words, and to the listeners who drank the poetry in, shared their enthusiasm, and generally made the celebration happen.

Once the poetry festival was out of the way, we spent the rest of April preparing for our summer season, which begins in May. Our summer calendars went out in the mail last week (if you’d like to receive one and haven’t, let us know) and we’re incredibly excited about the coming months. Our summer kicks off with our first-ever reading in the town of Adams, Massachusetts: we’re presenting novelists Jane Roper and Ron MacLean at Topia Cafe at 7:30pm on Saturday, May 7.

Jane Roper holds an MFA from the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop; she was a colleague of mine at Williams College back in the day. She’s written for all sorts of magazines, and is currently at work on finishing her first novel, tentatively titled Backward to the Light. And Ron MacLean is the executive director of Grub Street, a writers’ organization not unlike Inkberry (but located on the eastern end of our fine state). He’s been published in all sorts of magazines, too; he holds a doctorate from SUNY Albany, and his first novel Blue Winnetka Skies was published recently. We’re really looking forward to having them here.

We’re also looking forward to presenting our first event at Topia in Adams. Topia Cafe (located at 27 Park Street, a.k.a. route eight in downtown Adams) is a great place for coffee, wine, or a tasty snack; it’s run by two really lovely women, Karen and Nana, who settled here specifically to help the arts flourish. Karen used to dance with the Paul Taylor company and founded her own dance company, and Nana is an instrumentalist (she plays, among other things, the sitar) who makes a mean Greek coffee. It’s a really fun space (you can recognize them by the spiraling purple fabric shell affixed above and around their door) that’s fast becoming a local hangout, and we’re thrilled about presenting an event there. Suggested donation for admission is $5, so come on down!

Our first summer workshop will be an installment of Wednesday Night Writers, the workshop designed to help you carve out a space in your week for writing. (Read about it at http://www.inkberry.org/atinkberry.html#Wednesday; sign up at http://www.inkberry.org/inkonline/store.cgi) The season will also include a couple of great online workshops (including our first-ever workshop on writing humor, taught by Seth Brown of http://www.RisingPun.com) and a fantastic weekend with Verlyn Klinkenborg (co-presented with the Williamstown Rural Lands Foundation, thanks to our grant from the NEA). We hope you’ll join us for one or all of these.

The other big news at Inkberry this month is that we made a hire! Since its inception in 2000, Inkberry has been a volunteer-run organization; we have often paid our workshop instructors a cut of tuition income, but everyone else here donates their time. This month, that trend finally changed. I’m delighted to present Jill Gilbreth, administrator extraordinare, who has been volunteering for us since she and her partner Diana moved here last summer and who is now the first person in Inkberry history to receive a regular paycheck from us.

Jill’s here three days a week, doing all kinds of different tasks, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to have her on board. Naturally it’s lovely to share the workload; it’s also lovely to have someone with whom I can drink tea, natter about writing, and generally share the day-to-day experience of running this strange and wonderful little ship. I’ll let her close this edition of Inkmail by introducing herself; look forward to hearing more from Jill as time goes on.

Thanks for being a part of Inkberry! Come and see us sometime soon.

— Rachel

Dear Inkberrians,

Hello to you all out there. This is my very first Inkmail message and so we’ve probably not met. My name is Jill and I am Inkberry’s new administrator. I’m also new to the area; I moved to North Adams in August of last year after I became smitten with your Berkshires and decided once and for all that I am not much of a city girl. I should probably tell you that I became smitten with the area while I was living in Boston (said city) and that before I lived in Boston (the lovely place in which I lived for four years before during and after I was a graduate student at Emerson College) I lived in Colorado for ten years and that before I lived in Colorado (where the sky is very blue and the mountains are gynormous) I lived in Phoenix, Arizona, where I was born and reared (and where it is too hot for many humans most of the time). More importantly, I moved to North Adams in August and I love it here. Needless to say I am thrilled to be working for Inkberry and I can’t wait to meet all of you. In the coming weeks, I will be learning the ropes from Rachel and working with her to make sure that Inkberry will continue to “put down roots and bear fruit”.

Cheers!

— Jill