June 2005

Greetings from Inkberry!

Before I begin, an announcement: Our first online workshop of the summer — Humor Writing, a.k.a. The Pun Is Mightier Than The Sword — begins tomorrow (June 2), and we have just a few spots left. (Read about it here) If you want to sign up, please opt in now, by purchasing tuition at our store.

May was a delightful month at Inkberry. Early in the month we presented novelists Ron MacLean and Jane Roper at Topia Café in Adams, which was fantastic. Ron and Jane are lovely people and I enjoyed their work. Ron read from his first novel, Blue Winnetka Skies, which is excellent. Jane read from her novel-in-progress, Backward to the Light, and I can’t wait to buy a copy when it comes out — her characters are still alive in my head. And Topia turns out to be a great space for a reading. The ladies painted on the wall smiled at us benevolently (like muses, bearing coffee cups!), and the ladies behind the bar seemed pretty happy to have us there, too. I also loved seeing “INKBERRY NOVELISTS” on the Topia marquee! Thanks to my new digital camera, you too can admire the sign (and our several most recent readers): just go here to browse the growing gallery of Inkberry photos.

We also held two fun events at Papyri Books down the street: a special Mother’s Day WordPlay featuring mother-and-daughter newspaper columnists Lisa and Alexa Hiley, and then a reading of RiverWriting, featuring the winners of the Hoosic Moments writing contest we co-sponsor every year with the Advocate and with the Hoosic River Watershed Association, a.k.a. HooRWA. The RiverWriting reading was especially fun. Eileen from HooRWA had put together a slide show of illustrations and photographs to complement each winner’s essay or poem. We enjoyed the multimedia presentation and then hung around eating cookies and strawberries and browsing Papyri’s excellent stock. (Speaking of which, Papyri Books is for sale. If you’ve ever dreamed of owning an independent smalltown bookstore that’s a staple of the local literary scene, let Karen know at karen@papyribooks.com!)

And now it’s June and summer has finally come to the Berkshires. (Yesterday I broke the Birkenstocks out of storage, which feels great.) We’ll present Joe Manning reading poetry at Papyri Books on June 11th — almost four years to the day since our very first reading, poet Donald Hall (who read at the Main Street Stage on June 14th, 2001). Hard to believe we’ve been at this so long! I still have fond memories of our dinner with Don at 55 Main before the reading; we were terrified that no one would come, and then thrilled when he read to a packed house…Actually, on the very anniversary of Don’s reading, our summer intern comes on board. We might have to welcome her by reading one of his poems aloud.

Aside from those events, and from whatever time we spend reminiscing about the other Junes in Inkberry’s history, this month (as usual) we’ll be working to keep the wheels turning here at Inkberry. Sometimes that means writing press releases and calling newspapers; sometimes, filling out forms for the IRS or drafting grant applications. This month, it probably also means preparing for the first of our big NEA-funded events (a weekend with Verlyn Klinkenborg in late July). But we make our to-do lists and put music on — if you hear the strains of Jonatha Brooke or the Grateful Dead pouring out of a second-story window on Main Street, it’s probably us — and we’re a pretty merry office these days.

In other news, while I was visiting family in Texas last week I had the pleasure of devouring a novel I’ve been waiting to read for a while. I read Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and absolutely adored it. Emily has described it as “the perfect marriage of Harry Potter and George Eliot,” and that seems apt to me; Clarke manages to combine magical esoterica with bitingly-funny social commentary. Perhaps my favorite part of the book is the history of English magic she weaves throughout; she’s created a beautiful mythology, and a whole world of characters who only appear in the footnotes and citations of imaginary works. This is a hefty tome, but it’s worth every minute; when I reached the last page, I almost wanted to cry to think that it was over and I could never read it for the first time again.

And that’s the news from Inkberry! Come and see us sometime soon.

— Rachel