September 2004

Greetings from Inkberry!

August was a pleasantly quiet month here, which is par for the course. Our August online workshop got underway, thanks to an ensemble of students from around the world (we welcomed our first Swedish student this month!); they’re working now with instructor C.J. Sage to explore the lyrical possibilities of various poetic forms. That’s our last workshop of the summer; now we’re moving full steam ahead towards fall.

Our first fall workshop is an online Introduction to Fantasy and Horror, taught by Nick Mamatas. I’m incredibly excited about this one; we’ve wanted to offer a fantasy/horror workshop for a long time, and Nick’s just the guy to teach it.

Fantastic fiction, Nick says, is characterized by a use of the fantastic to highlight the real. Horror (he tells us) is the art of the abject: the reader must keep reading despite feeling dread, anxiety, and fear. Students in this workshop will discuss what editors and readers want, critique story ideas, look at forms and formulas, and explore how to structure a good horror/fantasy story or novel. They’ll also look at writing fantasy and horror for literary, romance, mystery, and other audiences. Like tabasco sauce, horror and fantasy go on anything! Students will complete a new story, or two chapters and synopsis of a novel, by the end of the course.

Nick is the Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of the short novel Northern Gothic, among others, and has written for tons of magazines, among them The Village Voice, Razor, and Strange Horizons. If you want to opt in, the time is now! The workshop runs for eight weeks, and tuition is $125. Learn more at www.inkberry.org/workshops/online//#fantasy; sign up at http://www.inkberry.org/store/, or by downloading a registration form and mailing it to 63 Main Street, North Adams MA 01247. Act fast; the workshop starts on September 6!

Also in the coming month, we’ll kick-start our reading series (we’ve been on summer hiatus since the June Inklings reading: there’s just too much else going on in the Berkshires in the summertime). We’re featuring novelists Jim and Karen Shepard in a rare joint appearance. Jim has been on our advisory board since the very beginning, and both are terrific writers (I’m personally fondest of Karen’s An Empire of Women and of Jim’s short-story collection Batting Against Castro). They’re reading on the 18th; come cheer them on!

In other exciting news, we’re about to play host to a team of first-year Williams College students. They’re participating in “Where Am I,” a program designed to give incoming frosh a sense of place beyond the purple bubble (a.k.a. campus). On Sunday afternoon we’ll welcome them here; tell them a little bit about Inkberry; do some writing together; and then work together to give Inkberry’s classroom a facelift! If you live in the area and have paint or painting materials to donate, please do drop by; we’re open Thursday and Friday afternoon. I was in Ghana when we rallied our friends and students to help us paint the bulk of our space, so I’m especially excited about being a part of the classroom-repainting endeavor…

Behind the scenes, I’ve been building our Inkbuddy roster. We now have dedicated Inkbuddies in Billings, Montana; Princeton, New Jersey; Windsor, Vermont; and Kent, England, among others! If you live somewhere I haven’t named, and you’d like to distribute Inkberry flyers three times a year in return for free Inkberry stuff, let me know. We’re always looking for Inkberry ambassadors to help us get out the word.

Meanwhile, I’ve read some fun stuff this summer. Top of my list: the first three books in the Ladies’ No. 1 Detective Agency series, by Alexander McCall Smith. I’m not usually a big reader of mystery stories, but these won me over immediately; they paint an incredibly vivid portrait of life in Botswana, the characters leap to life off the page, and although there are mysteries woven in, I think these books transcend their genre. The runner-up in the fluff category (can you tell I’ve been watching the Olympics?) is Christopher Moore’s Fluke, a wild romp centering around a bunch of wacky cetaceologists (that’s whale scientists, in plain English) in Hawai’i. It’s not quite as good as Lamb, his irreverent look at the life of Jesus as told by his best buddy Biff, but it’s still an entertaining read.

And that’s all the news that’s fit to print! Check out our fall lineup, sign up for an online workshop, drop by the discussion forums or our Main Street storefront: come and see us sometime.

— Rachel