July 2001

Hello, and welcome to Inkberry’s end-of-July newsletter. In this month’s update: news of the month in review, an article in the Transcript, poetry readings past and fiction readings upcoming, and what we’ve learned from our summer enrollment.

Despite our successes thus far, we’re still a fledgling organization, and we learned an important lesson from the dip in enrollment we experienced at the start of our summer term: summer in the Berkshires is not like the other three seasons. (“Of course it isn’t,” you may be saying to yourself now; “summer means there’s no snow.” But bear with me, because there’s more to it than that.)

Last fall and winter, when we were planning our programming, our top priority was to be a year-round arts organization. Cultural life in the Berkshires runs on two schedules — there’s the summer, when most of the area arts organizations provide programming, and then there’s the rest of the year, when the pickings are considerably slimmer. We live here year-round; we want workshops and readings year-round; thus, we vowed, we would keep our workshops and readings and book groups going all year!

But in the throes of winter, we didn’t quite remember what summer here was like. We remembered the green foliage and the abundance of zucchini, peaches and sweet corn; we somehow forgot that on any given summer night there are at least a dozen different things to do. Any night in July and August, one could be at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, or at Shakespeare and Company; at Tanglewood, or at Jacob’s Pillow; hiking, or at a Pittsfield Astros baseball game. Plus people take vacations.

Summers here are busy. Which means they’re a tough time for people to take ongoing classes and book groups. It’s hard for a ten-week writing workshop, or an indoor poetry reading, to compete with a sunny Berkshire day.

Everyone we spoke to agreed that our book groups sounded fascinating — but very few people were actually able to sign up for them, thanks to the vagaries of summer scheduling. So we postponed both book groups; we’re now planning to offer them in the winter session instead. And next time around we plan to offer a lot of short workshops, instead of sustained long ones; stay tuned to this channel for news of the many one- and two-afternoon workshops and discussion groups we’ll offer next summer.

On the bright side, although our summer workshop is small, we got just enough diehard writer-types to keep the class open. And although our recent Karen Pepper/Michelle Gillett reading wasn’t quite as crowded as the Donald Hall one was, those who attended seemed to have a roundly good time, and the poetry was divine.

This month also brought our first press coverage in The North Adams Transcript, North Adams’ daily newspaper. (You can read that, along with the other articles about us, on the press clippings page of our website.)

If you’re around on the afternoon of August 4, there’s still some space in our free one-shot workshop on Ekphrastic Writing (writing about, or inspired by, visual art). We’ll meet at the Contemporary Artists Center at 1pm, tour the galleries, look at some examples of ekphrastic writing and then create our own, closing with some time to critique and discuss each others’ work. Participants in that workshop will have the chance to share their works with the public at an August 19 reading, also at the CAC. The workshop is free, but admission is contingent on sending us a writing sample in advance; you’re welcome to send one via post to us at 228 Main St. #434, Williamstown MA 01267, or you can email it to us at ekphrastic@inkberry.org . Act fast, though; we need those by July 30 in order to get everything in order before the event.

Speaking of events, we’ve got something fantastic planned for August. Best-selling writer Pam Houston (author of Cowboys Are My Weakness and A Little More About Me, among others) and folksinger Nerissa Nields (of alternative folk/pop band The Nields fame) are coming to town for a special evening of story and song. The two women are longtime friends, but this is their first collaboration; they performed together all over the West Coast, and this is their only East Coast show. We’re co-presenting that show with MASS MoCA (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) and tickets are $10. You can buy them in advance from the MoCA box office — visit their website, www.massmoca.org, or call 413-662-2111.

With everything that’s going on for Inkberry, it’s a wonder I’ve had time to read, but I’ve enjoyed some good books lately — among them Ted Conover’s Newjack and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.

Conover’s a cross between an anthropologist, an essayist and a gonzo journalist; he’s written several great books about groups of people most of us don’t personally know (illegal Mexican immigrants, for instance), and for each book he spends a year or more living with the people he’s writing about. Newjack is the story of the year he spent becoming a New York State Corrections Officer, and then working as a newbie — a “newjack,” in prison parlance — at Sing Sing prison. It’s a hell of a story.

White Teeth is a hell of a story, too. It interweaves the stories of three English families, including Jewish intellectuals, Pakistani immigrants, and Jamaican Jehovah’s Witnesses. The storytelling is superb, the characters are believable and engrossing, and the writing is both spare and lush in all the right places. I’ve been reading a lot of literature of the Indian subcontinent lately — Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy — and Zadie Smith’s book is an easy equal to those two masters. I’m working on fighting off a small attack of jealousy, though: this bestseller is Smith’s first book, and she was born in 1975, just like me.

That’s this month’s news from Inkberry! We hope to see you at the Ekphrastic Writing workshop and at the Nields/Houston reading; as always, feel free to drop us a line.

— Rachel