January 2005

Greetings from Inkberry, and happy new year.

We’re kicking 2005 off with a bang: we’re moving, and we’ve been awarded a Challenge America Fast Track Grant by the National Endowment for the Arts!

First things first: here’s the news about our move. After three years at 63 Main Street, we’re picking up stakes and moving…to 61 Main Street. Yep: we’re moving next door, and up the stairs to suite #223. We’ll be a little bit sad to say goodbye to the long blue boxcar space at 63 Main; it’s seen workshops taught by Alicia Ostriker, readings by Bob Hicok and Mark Doty, the celebration of Inklings (complete with a birthday cake for Inkberry), and countless ordinary moments in the writing life of northern Berkshire. But our new space has much to recommend it; we’ll be occupying a corner suite with huge windows that look out over downtown North Adams and the beautiful mountains that surround us, and we’re excited about that.

In conjunction with that move, we’re turning our reading series into a kind of “moveable feast”—now we bring literature to you! This spring we’ll be holding readings in various venues around town (a coffee shop, a nightspot, and a yoga studio among them), and in future seasons we plan to take the reading series on the road to venues around the county.

Anyway, the big moving day is January 15th; if you’re in the area and want to lend a hand, please come by Inkberry that Saturday! We’re organizing a bucket brigade of volunteers to help move our office, library, and classroom upstairs. We’ll feed our volunteers lunch, plus they’ll have our unending gratitude. So please come help Inkberry relocate, and bring your friends!

On account of the move, our spring calendar this season will cover February through April: we’re not offering much in January. All of our spring offerings are now online on our website, though, so check them out. Highlights include “Alaska’s Fiddling Poet,” Ken Waldman, who’s teaching a workshop and giving a performance (which we’re presenting in conjunction with the Railway Café), and a weekend writing-about-art workshop designed especially for out-of-towners. Give the website a whirl, and sign up early for the workshops that appeal to you. I know the online store doesn’t currently list the spring workshops; that’s because the store guy is away for the holidays. But rest assured that soon you’ll be able to purchase tuition for our spring workshops via the online store!

Okay, enough about the move; here’s the scoop on our other exciting news. Inkberry has been awarded $10,000 by the National Endowment for the Arts for a project focusing on community transitions and rural sense of place.

The NEA announced on December 15th that it will award $1.7 million through 171 grants in its Challenge America Fast-Track Review Grants category. These awards support projects that provide opportunities for people to experience and participate in a wide range of art forms and activities, enable arts organizations to expand and diversify their audiences, and emphasize the potential of the arts to help strengthen communities.

Inkberry is one of only four institutions in the state of Massachusetts selected by the NEA for a Challenge America Fast-Track grant. We’re going to collaborate with the Williamstown Rural Lands Foundation, the Words are Wonderful program, and the Williams College Chaplain’s Office to bring here three terrific writers whose work relates to community transitions and rural sense of place. We’ll schedule a variety of activities with each writer, including readings, workshops, and walks.

The project aims to examine and creatively respond to the challenges — economic, environmental, cultural, and spiritual — facing northern Berkshire communities. By confronting and giving voice to these challenges, Inkberry and its collaborators aim to build community through public art. Pretty neat, eh?

We’re working now on getting these three sets of events planned; it looks likely that the first will be during the summer and that the other two will happen over the course of next fall. We couldn’t be more excited about this: getting a grant from the NEA is a fantastic vote of confidence in who we are and what we do, and we’re dancing for joy at the prospect of being able to make these programs we dreamed up into a reality! Stay tuned for further updates; as the project takes shape, you’ll hear about it here.

And that’s the news from Inkberry! 2005 is shaping up to be an amazing year: a new home, a major grant, all kinds of new programs and partnerships. We couldn’t do it without you, our audience and community — so thanks for being a part of Inkberry. Fasten your seatbelts; 2005 is going to be a fantastic ride.

— Rachel