January 2006

Greetings from Inkberry!

A happy 2006 to all of you: we hope your coming year is filled with wondrous things. We’re pretty sure ours will be, given the amount of excitement that’s already going on here!

Our spring calendar is going out in the mail later this week. You may notice a new format: instead of the tabloid-sized foldout that we’ve been using over the last five years, we’ve switched to a beautiful glossy oversized postcard which contains teasers for all of our workshops and events. (To read the full descriptions of each class and reading, as well as teacher bios and the like, you’ll need to visit our website, www.inkberry.org.) I think Daniel, our gracious graphic designer, was a little bit floored when we told him he actually got to work in color this time! Anyway, we’re psyched about the new look — not least because it does such a nice job of showcasing our spring season.

We’re offering three workshops this season. First comes “Revising Your Work,” a fiction workshop taught by Terri Mathes. Here’s how Terri describes the class: “You’ve written a story and you like it, but is it ready to send out? Learn to analyze your own writing, identify what works, what doesn’t, and why.” That workshop is offered online, lasts for eight weeks, and begins on February 1. Our other online offering is “The Best of Times, The Worst of Times,” a course designed to help writers take advantage of the myriad career opportunities open to us, taught by Linda McCauley Freeman. That class lasts for seven weeks, and begins on February 27. You can sign up for either one in our online store, http://www.inkberry.org/store/

Our third workshop is an in-person one, offered at Inkberry on the first and third Thursday of every month. That’s our free “Thursday Night Crit” class, a drop-in workshop that’s part of our Thursday night Salon Series, led by Inkberry staff member Jill Gilbreth. No advance sign-up is required; come anytime!

On the second and fourth Thursdays of the month, our Salon Series will be morphing into a teen coffeehouse, created in conjunction with the kids of UNITY (United Neighboring Interdependent and Trusted Youth). We’re hoping a few of the young writers associated with that project will be willing to write about it, so keep an eye on inkblog in the coming weeks!

This spring we’re also offering a series of fantastic events, among them a two-part visit from John Dicker, author of The United States of Wal-Mart (we’re presenting him at Williams College and at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in late February), a one-man storytelling performance of the Gospel of Mark (which the Reverend Burt Marshall tells from memory), and a reading by novelist Andrea Barrett at the Eclipse Mill in March. Plus we’ll continue presenting WordPlay at Papyri Books, featuring local mystery novelists, folks from Pittsfield-based literary magazine upstreet, and a series of regional poets in April who will knock your socks off.

And as if that weren’t enough, we’ll also be spending this month beginning to prepare for our Fifth Anniversary Inkstravaganza! This April will mark the fifth anniversary of our very first workshop; in June, we’ll celebrate the fifth anniversary of our reading series, which began with poet Donald Hall lo those many years ago. Stay tuned for more information about that.

We’re also planning to spend January getting to know our two Winter Study interns, Anne-Louise from Williams College and Elizabeth from Mount Holyoke College. Both will be with us for one month, and both are excited about being a part of the inkberry team. With any luck, they’ll be guest-bloggers at inkblog, too — all the more reason to subscribe to our RSS feed!

Over the last few days I’ve had the chance to begin a book I’d been wanting to read for a long time, and so far I’m loving it. The book is Harvey Cox’s Common Prayers. Cox is a Christian theologian and scholar of religion; he’s married to a Jewish woman, and this book is his exploration of the Jewish liturgical and festival year, seen through his outsider/insider eyes. It’s a fantastic read for anyone interested, as I am, in Judaism and in interfaith dialogue; I recommend it highly.

Anyway, we’re amazingly excited about the year to come, and we hope you are too. Please join we inkberries in celebrating 2006 and the joys we hope it will hold!

— Rachel