April 2001

Welcome to another installment of Inkmail, the monthly update on the ins and outs of Inkberry.

“April is the cruelest month,” Eliot wrote, but it’s been a particularly kind month for us; it held both a new beginning and an anniversary. We first started brainstorming about Inkberry around this time last year, in April of 2000; April was when we started talking (via e-mail, since Emily was still in Chicago then) about the dream we were calling, for lack of a better term, “Our Thing.” It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since we first started contemplating the creation of a literary center for the Berkshire region.

This month, in apt celebration of that anniversary, that dream became reality in a whole new way: April marked the first meetings of our two book groups and our first introductory mixed-genre creative writing workshop. We’ve discovered a few kinks in our system that need to be worked out; for instance, our workshop is currently located in the downstairs “green room” of the Main Street Stage, and they’re rehearsing Chekhov above us. Fortunately, we seem to be holding our writers’ attention despite the shouts and cackles from upstairs, and we’re thinking of organizing a mass field trip to see the Chekhov plays when they premiere.

Despite the inadvertent exposure to Russian drama, though, our book groups and workshops have gotten off to a great start, and after the three of us team-taught the first Inkberry workshop session we went next door to Fifty-Five Main to split a bottle of champagne.

If you missed this term, you haven’t missed your chance; we’ll be offering another introductory mixed-genre creative writing workshop in our summer session, plus two different book groups. Stay tuned for more information on that front.

The Inkberry media kit grew this month, thanks to a profile one week in Streetmail (in their weekly e-newsletter for the Berkshire region, www.streetmail.com). Plus, we got our second radio interview, this time on WAMC’s morning show The RoundTable (hearty thanks to Susan Arbetter and Joe Donahue).

April was also a good month for looking ahead. This month we finalized plans for our August event, a performance by author Pam Houston (Cowboys Are My Weakness) and folksinger Nerissa Nields (of folk-pop band The Nields) at MASS MoCA on August 12. Pam is one of the few short story writers who has the distinction of being a “best-seller” according to the New York Times; Nerissa is responsible for many of the Nields’ poignant and funny lyrics. Seeing them together should be a treat, and we’re thrilled to be partnering with MoCA for this event.

In other news, we’re hip-deep in grant applications. If you know of any grants for literary, artistic or educational nonprofits, please let us know! We’ve got funding for our first year, but we’ll need grants in order to expand our programming.

I’ve been lucky enough to read a bunch of fabulous things this month, most notably Clara Park’s Exiting Nirvana and Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent. Park is a professor emeritus of English at Williams College; Exiting Nirvana is a sequel of sorts to her earlier book The Siege, which chronicled the first several years of her autistic daughter Jessy’s development. I spent a happy Saturday morning eating toast spread with Nutella and savoring Park’s prose. I think I liked her book better than the she writes with stunning clarity and surprising perspective about Jessy’s long, hard trek away from the self-absorbed “Nirvana” of autism and into an interactive life.

The Red Tent is a novel which retells the story of Dinah, daughter of Joseph and Leah (see Genesis). In the Torah, Dinah gets only a brief narrative; in The Red Tent, we learn the stories of her four mothers and the tale of Dinah’s long and fascinating life. I’m awed by Diamant’s ability to spin a novel-length midrash from such short source material, and I’m enchanted by the vivid picture she’s painted of women’s lives in Biblical times. The religion major in me, and the writer in me, both loved this book.

On the lighter side, I’ve been reading the first several Dykes to Watch Out For collections, written and drawn by Allison Bechdel. I was familiar with the recent strips but not with the cartoon’s origin; it’s been fun to see where the strip began, and to watch it grow from a generic lesbian-life cartoon to one featuring an interesting and complicated cast of recurring characters.

And that’s the news from Inkberry, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above-average,” in the immortal words of Garrison Keillor. Hope to see y’all in our classes, book groups and readings sometime soon!

— Rachel