February 2002

Hello, y’all.

Happy February, slightly in advance! We’re sending out our start-of-February newsletter early to let you know about something cool we’re doing on Feb. 1. Now that we have a “room of our own” on Main Street in North Adams, we’re going to be a part of First Fridays.

First Fridays happen in a lot of cool, hip, artsy towns, and North Adams is joining those ranks. Folks are invited to stroll around downtown on the evening of every month’s first Friday; there’s live music in three or four locations (indoors, at this time of year!), stores stay open late and offer special sales — and, of course, Inkberry will be open to visitors. We’ll be screening videos of poets reading and discussing their work (a grant from the Lannan Foundation) and serving free hot cocoa. So swing by, between 7 and 9 p.m., and pay us a visit! We’ve got everyone from Yehuda Amichai to Richard Wilbur on tape, and the first comers get to pick what we watch…

January was an exciting month for we Inkberries. Not only did we kick off our first-ever essay-writing workshop, but we also inaugurated our new space with a reading by novelist Claire Messud. What a treat! Despite the snowstorm, Claire read to a pretty full house, and many of our audience members stayed afterwards for the wine-and-cheese reception. Our heartfelt thanks to Claire for her reading, and to the audience for braving the elements in pursuit of great literature.

Of course, not everything we touch turns to gold. Witness the hours we spent this month trying to get our crotchety donated computers to talk to the Internet — matched only by the hours we spent downloading “printer driver” software, only to discover that a) the donated printer had come sans power cable, and b) Hewlitt-Packard no longer makes the kind of connector cables that would fit our old Mac! Such are the joys of being on a shoestring budget.

Computer woes aside, we have a lot going on in upcoming weeks. February 6th marks the beginning of Books Make the Best Eating, a combination book discussion group and cooking tutorial. Daniel Wallace, a.k.a. The Wandering Chef, will lead a trio of discussions of food-related books — plus a trio of cooking lessons exploring recipes from the food memoirs the group will have discussed. (The cooking lessons culminate in meals, of course.) February 25th brings the first installment of our two-part Flash Fiction workshop, taught by Alix Ohlin, which will explore the writing of very short stories.

And, on February 22nd Inkberry is pleased to present a reading by Elinor Lipman, the woman a New York Times critic referred to as “an inspired alchemist.” Elinor Lipman is the author of six works of fiction, including Isabel’s Bed, The Ladies’ Man, and The Inn at Lake Devine. I’m a big fan of Lipman’s (The Inn at Lake Devine is one of my favorite novels of recent years) so I’m delighted to be bringing her to town to read her work. The reading will be at 7:30pm at the Inkberry space, and as usual is free, although donations are always gladly accepted.

In addition to all of this, our resource library continues to be open from Wednesdays through Saturdays from 1-5pm. We’ve received donations of books from many of you, and the shelves are starting to fill, which is very exciting.

With such a busy Inkberry schedule it’s a wonder any of us find time to read, but I’ve enjoyed a number of books lately. Winter always seems like a good time for re-reading, so I’ve revisited a few old science fiction/fantasy favorites, notably Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Mmm: good stuff. All three of these writers are skillful world-builders, which makes them fun to read.

I’ve cracked some new books lately, too, though — if not new to the world, at least new to me. One is Jane Smiley’s Greenlanders, a broadly sweeping historical epic set in Greenland during the fourteenth century. I’ve long had a fascination with the far north, and I’m really impressed with Smiley. The scope, set-up, and tone of the book are all appropriate to its subject matter; it reads like Halldor Laxness’ Icelandic classic Independent People, thick with the details of a harsh life in another landscape and another time.

Poetry-wise, I’ve been reading A Point Is That Which Has No Part, by Liz Waldner, winner of the 2000 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. The writing is rich and heady, layered with quotations and allusions. One of Waldner’s primary themes is the malleability of both language and identity — the way that people, and words, may not be what they seem. It’s challenging reading, and I’m finding that I have to pause between poems to digest, but it’s also beautiful stuff.

And that’s the news from Inkberry! Drop in and see us sometime.

— Rachel