OUR MISSION

To foster the arts and crafts by providing a wide range of instruction for adults and children. Castle Hill holds exhibitions, lectures, forums, concerts and other similar activities in order to promote social interaction among artists, craftsmen, laymen, and the community at large.

Letter from Presidents | Letter from Executive Director

SUMMER 2008 WORKSHOPS - WRITING

TUESDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES AT THE WELLFLEET LIBRARY

$10 admission – Free for Castle Hill Members
8pm on Tuesdays at the Wellfleet Public Library in Wellfleet.

July 8 – Caroline Rand Herron, Former Staff Editor of the New York Times Book Review.

July 15 – Anthony Walton, author of “Mississippi: An American Journey”and historian and scholar of African American history.

July 22 – Daniel Heyman, will discuss his work making portraits of Iraqi torture victims as personal political statements and as part of a long tradition of printmakers who recorded wars in their art.

August 5 – Harry Cooper, curator of the National Gallery.

August 12 - Franco Sacchi, Independant Director/Producer/Editor whose feature length film This is Nollywood, portrays the unknown world of the Nigerian home video industry.

August 19 – Steven Pinker, Harvard linguist and psychologist.

NOT TO BE MISSED LECTURES.....

Summer 2008

Painting

Drawing

Clay

Printmaking/
Book Arts

Performance - Yoga - Music

Teens

Kids

WRITING 2008

Poetry Workshop Martín Espada

June 23 - 27
Mon - Fri
2 - 4pm
5 sessions
$325
Pamet Crossing
For Academic Credit $400

This workshop will stimulate the creation of new poems. Every two-hour session will begin with the distribution and discussion of model poems, followed by writing exercises and sharing of new work (to thunderous applause). We will write poems that celebrate as well as condemn the world around us. We may write poems of unheeded prophecy, speak in the voices of the dead at the cemetery, curse our enemies (real and imagined) or apologize for the things we are secretly glad that we did. The goal is not only to help participants write drafts of five new poems, but to create a sense of community and solidarity in the workshop.

Called "The Latino Poet of his Generation" and "the Pablo Neruda of North American authors," Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published fourteen books in all as a poet, editor and translator. His eighth book of poems, The Republic of Poetry (Norton 2006) received the 2007 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Another collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton, 1996), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other books of poetry include Alabanza: New and Selected Poems (Norton, 2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen (Norton, 2000), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (Norton, 1993), and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands (Curbstone, 1990). He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Robert Creeley Award, the Charity Randall Citation, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Premio Fronterizo, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. His poems have appeared in the The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Harper's and The Nation. He has also published a collection of essays, Zapata's Disciple (South End, 1998); edited two anthologies, Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press (Curbstone, 1994) and El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (University of Massachusetts, 1997); and released an audiobook of poetry called Now the Dead will Dance the Mambo (Leapfrog, 2004). His work has been translated into ten languages. A former tenant lawyer, Espada is now a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches creative writing and the work of Pablo Neruda.

Poetry Workshop: Alan Feldman and Tony Hoagland

July 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, August 6, 13, 20, and a reading on August 28
Wednesdays
$500 for all
sessions, or $65 per session
5 - 7pm
Castle Hill

Register

In the tradition of Alan Dugan's workshop at Castle Hill for more than twenty years, this "drop in" class welcomes serious poets of all ages and levels of experience who would like to participate for one or more sessions. Poets who wish to have their work discussed will need to provide copies to be given out at the start of each session. (One or two poems per session, depending on the time we have; no manuscripts will be critiqued outside of class.) We will focus not only on technical issues-such as diction, or prosody-but also on helping the work to become fully realized: to express its full, intelligent complexity and imaginative potential. Either Alan Feldman or Tony Hoagland (or both) will lead each session, and other experienced guest poets may attend from time to time.

Alan Feldman’s The Happy Genius (1978) was awarded the Elliston Book Award for the best collection of poems published by a small, independent press in the United States. A later collection, A Sail to Great Island (2004), won the Pollak Prize for Poetry from the University of Wisconsin Press. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, and many other magazines, as well as in Best American Poetry 2000 . He is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship, as well as a Massachusetts Artists Fellowship, and for twenty-two years taught the advanced creative writing course at the Radcliffe Seminars.

Tony Hoagland has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment on the Arts, the Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Poetry Society of America. In 2005 he received the Mark Twain Award for humor in American poetry, and the Folger Library's O.B. Hardisson Prize for achievement as a poet and teacher. His most recent book of poems, What Narcissism Means To Me, (2003), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches in the graduate writing program of the University of Houston, and in the Warren Wilson MFA program. A book of prose about poetry, Real Sofistakashun, was published by Graywolf Press in September 2006.

Poetry Reading in collaboration with (ALSC) Association of Literary Scholars and Critics on Wednesday August 27 at 5:00 on the back deck.

Writing at Your Peak: Kathleen Spivack

June 30 -July 4
Mon – Fri
10am – Noon
5 Sessions $325
Pamet Crossing
For academic
credit $400

Register

Work on your ongoing writing projects-and have a great time doing it! All writing genres, (Poetry, Prose, Script) are welcome. This course is designed to support and enhance the writing process for already committed writers. We'll work on technical aspects that will be useful to your work. Focused in -class and (optional!) out of class writing will offer possibilities of taking your writing project further.

Kathleen Spivack is the author of Moments of Past Happiness, (Earthwinds Editions 2007), The Beds We Lie In (Scarecrow 1986), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; The Honeymoon (Graywolf 1986); Swimmer in the Spreading Dawn (Applewood 1981); The Jane Poems (Doubleday 1973); Flying Inland (Doubleday 1971); Robert Lowell, A Personal Memoir; and a novel, Unspeakable Things, the latter two with an agent. Published in numerous magazines and anthologies, some of her work has been translated into French. Other publications include The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Agni, New Letters.

Writing Credible Fiction: David Unger

July 7 - 11
Mon – Fri
10am - noon
5 sessions $325
Pamet Crossing
For academic
credit $400

Register
Our writing reveals the way we see the world. Sometimes what we write parallels or reflects reality; at other times we may distort reality for the sake of portraying a deeper understanding of it. No matter how we choose to write, we still have to create convincing narratives for our readers. To quote García Márquez, "The problem for every writer is credibility. Anybody can write anything so long as it's believed." Setting, imagery, dialogue, character, tone, point-of view and narrative strategies will be explored. Though we will do in-class writing exercises, please bring a 5-10 page piece of writing (double-spaced) for class discussion. Workshop is limited to 12 students.

Guatemalan-born David Unger has just completed a new novel In My Eyes, You Are Beautiful. He is the author of Life in the Damn Tropics (Syracuse University Press, 2002, Wisconsin University Press, 2004, [Vivir en el maldito trópico RandomHouseMondadori, Mexico, 2004; Recorded Books 2005; Locus Publishing, Taiwan, 2007). His work has appeared in Guernica Magazine, Caratula.net, KGBBarLit, Playboy Mexico, Currents from the Dancing River: New Writing By Latinos, Tropical Synagogues: Latin American Jewish Fiction, and in literary journals here and abroad. He has translated thirteen books, among them Teresa Cárdenas's Old Dog (Groundwood, 2007), Rigoberta Menchú's The Honey Jar (Groundwood, 2006) and The Girl from Chimel (Groundwood, 2005), Ana María Machado's Me in the Middle (Groundwood, 2002), Silvia Molina's The Love You Promised Me (Curbstone Press,1999 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize and shortlisted for the 2001 IMPAC Prize); The Popol Vuh (Groundwood, 1999); Elena Garro's First Love (Curbstone Press); Bárbara Jacobs The Dead Leaves (Curbstone Press); and Nicanor Parra's Antipoems: New and Selected (New Directions). He teaches Translation in City College of New York's MFA Program and is the U.S. rep of the Guadalajara International Book Fair.

Poetry: Finding Your Voice Through Art and Craft: Eleanor Lerman

July 7 - 11
Mon – Fri
2 - 4pm
5 Sessions $325
Pamet Crossing
For academic
credit $400

Register

Most poets find their own way to the art more often through their own reading than in literature classes. Similarly, the most important lessons in craft--how do you structure a poem, how do you pace the words in a line, learn the rhythm of language?--often come from studying the work of others whose poetry resonates with them. In this course, through analyzing and discussing the work of two contemporary and continually evolving master poets--Leonard Cohen and James Tate--and by sharing their own work in the context of those discussions, workshop participants will hone their writing skills and deepen their ability to express, in poetry, what cannot be said with equal power in prose.

Eleanor Lerman made her debut in 1973 with the publication of her first book of poetry, Armed Love (Wesleyan University Press) which was nominated for a National Book Award and accused, by The New York Times Book Review, of deserving a rating of "Double X." Eleanor found this surprising, since the only line in the book that could have been considered shocking was that "vampires are happier when they're homosexual," which she still believes is true. Since then, she has settled down considerably and produced a book of short stories, Observers and Other Stories, as well as three more award-winning volumes of poetry. Her most recent, Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds, won the Lenore Marshall Award for the best book of poetry in 2006 from the American Academy of Poets and The Nation magazine. In 2007, she was awarded an NEA fellowship in poetry. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.

Humor Writing with Heart: Susan Seligson

July 14 - 18
Mon – Fri
2 - 4pm
5 Sessions, $325
Pamet Crossing
For academic
credit $400

E.B. White once remarked that like a frog, humor can be dissected, but both things die in the process. Avoiding heavy-handedness and tired formulas, we will work to craft and refine essays with fresh, gentle humor, drawing on examples from the best of the genre. Readings will be provided by the instructor, but students are advised to buy "On Writing Well' by William Zinsser, which is widely available in paperback.

An award-winning humor columnist, Susan Seligson has published reporting and essays in The New York Times Magazine, Salon.com, The Atlantic Monthly, Redbook, Yankee, New England Monthly, The Boston Globe Magazine, Outside, Allure, on public radio, and in many other publications. For many years her column "The Walking Fool" appeared biweekly in the Provincetown Banner, which now features her advice column "Ask Susie." Seligson's travelogue Going with the Grain: A Wandering Bread-lover Takes a Bite Out of Life, was published in the fall of 2002 by Simon & Schuster. A memoir, Stacked: A 32DDD Reports from the Front, was released in 2007 by Bloomsbury USA.

Hooks, Lines and Floaters:
Writing Mysteries that Sell: Jon Loomis

July 21 - 25
Mon – Fri
10am - noon
5 Sessions $325
Pamet Crossing
For academic
credit $375

Register

In this workshop, we'll look at how to write a compelling beginning for a mystery novel and develop some strategies for moving forward. We'll spend much of our time discussing setting and characterization, and try a few tricks aimed at developing a sense for scene. We'll also kick around some ideas for plotting, and talk about the difference between plot and story. Students who've written a few chapters should bring them (a few scenes or even a good synopsis will do; whatever you've got on paper). The workshop will include some reading of published work (a scene here or there), and perhaps a brief assignment or two.

Jon Loomis is the author of the critically acclaimed mystery, High Season (St. Martin's Minotaur, 2007). He has published two books of poems: Vanitas Motel, which won the 1997 FIELD poetry prize and was published by Oberlin College Press in 1998, and The Pleasure Principle, also published by Oberlin College Press in 2001. Twice a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Loomis has also been awarded the Jay C. and Ruth Halls Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Wisconsin, and has been the recipient of grants from the Ohio Arts Council and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. His poems have been published widely in literary journals including Poetry, The New Republic, FIELD, Ploughshares, and The Iowa Review, and have been translated and reprinted in Mexico without his permission. His nonfiction has appeared in The Chattahoochie Review and South American Explorer. Loomis holds an MFA from the University of Virginia, where he was a Hoyns fellow. He has taught writing at UVa, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Florida, and Emory University in Atlanta. He is currently an assistant professor of English/Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire.

Memoir: Allyson Goldin Loomis

July 21 - 25
Mon – Fri
2 - 4pm
5 Sessions $325
Pamet Crossing
For academic
credit $375

Register
Since the art of memoir involves fidelity both to the truth of memory and to the more manipulative craft of storytelling, it inevitably involves its writers in a difficult love triangle. In this workshop we'll practice some skills for managing the often treacherous work of transforming experience into publishable prose. We'll focus particularly on how best to structure students' sometimes vast stores of memories into self-contained essays or chapters, on how to render setting (even when memories of settings are not fully clear) and on how to be sure that characters - those beings who dwell, fully-formed, in the writer's experience-can be transposed onto the page to live vividly for readers encountering those characters for the first time.

Allyson Goldin’s writing has appeared in The Madison Review, The Black Warrior Review, Harper's Magazine and Glimmer Train among other periodicals. She served as a Jay C. & Ruth Halls fellow in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and received an MFA in fiction writing from The University of Montana. She's been teaching creative writing professionally for over ten years. Currently she's an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire.

Poetry Workshop: Peter Campion

July 28 - August 1
Mon – Fri
10 – noon
5 sessions $325
Pamet Crossing
For academic
credit $400

What are our underlying obsessions as poets? What have we not yet explored? How can we connect more fully with our imaginative life, and develop that connection in our poems? In the supportive environment of this class, we'll try and answer those questions. We'll pay close attention to the individual tones and structures of one another's work. We'll divide our time between older poems and new drafts. Our practical goal will be for each student to have, at the end of the week, a sharper and more vivacious portfolio. Poets of all levels are welcome.

Peter Campion has published a book of poems, Other People (University of Chicago Press) and a monograph on the painter Mitchell Johnson (Terrence Rogers Fine Art.) His second collection of poems, The Lions (University of Chicago Press) will be published this fall. His poems and prose have appeared recently in Agenda, ArtNews, The Boston Globe, Modern Painters, The New Republic, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Sculpture, Slate, Tikkun and elsewhere. He has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford. He teaches at Washington College in Maryland. He's the editor of the journal, Literary Imagination.

Poetry: Image/Narrative: Joseph Millar

August 4 - 7
Mon – thurs
9am - noon
4 sessions $325
Pamet Crossing
For academic
credit $400
Register
Here comes another poetic duality. The workshop will focus on these twin engines driving much modern and contemporary poetry. We will briefly consider their development from Ezra Pound and WC Williams through James Wright and the "Deep Imagists", keeping in mind their potential for our own work, and using as models for exercises poems by Adrienne Rich, Louise Gluck, Philip Levine, James Tate and DH Lawrence.

Joseph Millar is the author of Fortune, from Eastern Washington University Press. His first collection, Overtime (2001) was finalist for the Oregon Book Award and the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Millar grew up in Pennsylvania, attended Johns Hopkins University and spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay area, working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines including The Southern Review, TriQuarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, DoubleTake, New Letters, Ploughshares, Manoa, and River Styx. His work has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry, Montalvo Center for the Arts and Oregon Literary Arts. In 1997 he gave up his job as a telephone installation foreman and moved to western Oregon where he now teaches at Pacific University's Low Residency MFA Program and yearly at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa has said, “There's a tenderness at the core of Fortune, where the commonplace becomes atypical and fantastical, and each poem possesses a voice that summons and reveals. Joseph Millar is a poet we can believe.” Winner of 2008 Pushcart Prize.

If you take this workshop & Dorianne Laux's workshop the same week, you will get a $100 discount. Call if you are interested 508-349-7511

This Year’s Presidents Chair

What Makes a Poem Memorable:
Dorianne Laux

August 4 - 7
Mon – Thurs
1 - 4pm
4 sessions $375
Pamet Crossing
For academic
credit $450

Dave Smith says it's a sharp, memorable, confident use of language which releases feeling, and keeps releasing it with repeated readings. Naomi Shihab Nye says for her it is Love and care for elemental details, for chosen words and their simple arrangement on the page... and a way of ending that leaves a new resonance or a lit spark in the reader or listener's mind. This workshop/study group will consist of reading the work of established poets, creating new drafts, and working with already produced poems. I'll be using selections from The 2005 Pushcart Prize, XXIX. If you'd like to find a copy and bring it in, do, though ‘Ill have copies for our use in class. We will take a close look at these prize-winning poems and seek to understand what makes them memorable. We will practice imitation as a striving toward writing our own unforgettable poems with daily in-class free-writes and take home exercises. In addition, I'd like three poems from each poet in advance.

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, DORIANNE LAUX's fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon (W.W. Norton), is the recipient of the 2005 Oregon Book Award. It was also short-listed for the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the most outstanding book of poems published in the United States and chosen by the Kansas City Star as a noteworthy book of 2005. Laux is also author of three collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Awake (1990) introduced by Philip Levine, recently reprinted by Eastern Washington University Press, What We Carry (1994), now in its 7th printing, and Smoke (2000). Red Dragonfly Press will release Superman: The Chapbook, later this year. Co-author of The Poet's Companion, she's the recipient of two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Best American Erotic Poems Prize, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has appeared in the Best of the American Poetry Review, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and she's a frequent contributor to the New York Quarterly, Orion and Ms. Magazine. Laux has waited tables and written poems in San Diego, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Petaluma, California, Eugene, Oregon and Juneau, Alaska. In 2008 she will move to Raleigh, N.C. where she will join the faculty at North Carolina State.

If you take this workshop & Joe Millar's workshop the same week, you will get a $100 discount. Call if you are interested 508-349-7511

Fiction: paul Lisicky

August 18 - 22
Mon - Fri
10am - noon
5 sessions $325
Pamet Crossing
For academic
credit $400

The ideal fiction workshop is a place where we look at one another's work with encouragement and respect, with an eye as to what it might become. It's also a situation where people from various backgrounds and different stages of development can learn from one another. Your own stories will be the primary text, but we'll supplement the workshop format with outside reading, exercises, and relevant discussion. We'll work hard and have fun. Most important, we'll try to give you what you need to stay nourished and inspired, long after the last class lets out.

Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, and the forthcoming Lumina Harbor. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, and the Fine Arts Work Center, where he was twice a winter fellow. He has taught at Cornell, NYU, Sarah Lawrence, Antioch Los Angeles, and at many writers conferences. A former resident of Provincetown, he lives in New York City. See more at www.paullisicky.com or www.myspace.com/paullisicky.

Complicating the Poem: Mark Doty

August 18 - 22
Mon - Fri
2 - 4pm
5 sessions $375
Pamet Crossing
for academic
credit $450

SOLD OUT

This is a course for poets who are interested in stretching their capacities, looking for ways to open up a poem-in-progress and explore its depths and possibilities.

Mark Doty is the author of seven books of poems, among them School of the Arts, Atlantis, and My Alexandria. He has also published three volumes of nonfiction prose and a memoir, Dog Years. He has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, and Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundations and from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is John and Rebecca Moores Professor at the University of Houston.

Autobiography and Memoir: Justin Kaplan

August 25 - 28
Mon - Thurs
10 - 11:30 am
4 sessions $300
Pamet Crossing
For academic
credit $375

Biography and autobiography are literary ways of shaping and understanding real-life experience. This is a workshop course that requires active participation. Please enroll only if you have a specific project in mind or in progress and are willing and prepared to present it for class discussion.

Justin Kaplan author of Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award), Walt Whitman: A Life, Lincoln Steffens: A Biography, and Mark Twain and His World. He is General Editor of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In collaboration with his wife Anne Bernays, he wrote The Language of Names and Back Then: Two Lives in 1950's New York, a joint memoir published by Morrow/HarperCollins. The paperback edition of his latest non-fiction book, When the Astors Owned New York, was published by Plume in 2007.

Elements of Fiction: Anne Bernays

August 25 - 29
Mon - Fri
2 - 4pm
5 sessions $325
Pamet Crossing
For academic
credit $400

Register

The main goal of a fiction writer is to tell a compelling story; to be any good a narrative must keep the reader reading. In this class students will do exercises that enhance their narrative skills through mastery of plot, description, characterization, dialogue and creative tension.

Anne Bernays’ nine novels include Trophy House, Growing Up Rich and Professor Romeo and she has co-authored two books of non-fiction. A long time writing teacher, her book reviews, essays and travel pieces have been widely published. Currently she teaches writing at Harvard's Nieman Foundation and Lesley University's MFA program. Bernays and her husband, Justin Kaplan, are the authors of Back Then: Two Lives in 1950's New York, now in paperback.

© 2008 TRURO CENTER FOR THE ARTS AT CASTLE HILL
10 Meetinghouse Road, P.O. Box 756, Truro, MA 02666
www.castlehill.org | e-mail castlehill@gis.net
tel. 508 349-7511 | fax 508 349-7513