Instructor: Mark Adams & Nick Flynn
Monday - Friday
August 5 - 9
1 - 4 pm
5 sessions

Five days of walking, drawing and writing with Nick Flynn and Mark Adams on the dunes, thickets, and salt-blasted woodlands of Truro from bay to ocean, foraging for words and images.

Scanning the horizon or using close observation, we explore places you’ve probably never been in the hollows and dune fields around Castle Hill with pen, pencil, and sketchbook collecting impressions and generating pages. Starting with a brief set of studio exercises, the sessions to follow will include approaches to drawing and writing in the field, gathering direct observations on guided walks. Sketchbook pages will often combine words and images from particular places and moments. Drawing methods will be suitable for all levels of experience, focusing on each individual’s direct response to the scene and our place in it. 

Most of the class will take place outdoors along trails in Truro, each day in a new location and destination. Walking on sand and uneven surfaces is likely, though the class will not be strenuous. We will proceed in most weather, though steady rain will keep us in the studio.

Mark Adams is a painter, printmaker, cartographer, and traveler based on the outer Cape for more than 20 years. He works making maps for that Cape Cod National Seashore and shows work at the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown. His paintings, maps and sketchbooks were part of a solo retrospective at the Provincetown Art Association in October-November 2017.

Nick Flynn has received fellowships and awards from, among other organizations, The Guggenheim Foundation, PEN, and the Library of Congress. Some of the venues his poems, essays, and non-fiction have appeared in include The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and National Public Radio’s This American Life. He is currently a professor on the creative writing faculty at the University of Houston, where he is in residence each spring. In 2020 he published two books, Stay (Ze Books) and This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (Norton). His work has been translated into fifteen languages. In 2023 he published Low (Graywolf).