Double Blog

The Mark Twain House & Museum is constantly working on several projects at once-- you may have noticed our advertising for our Ghost Tours, foodie events, educational programs, and more-- but we're also building up momentum on a project that isn't quite as fancy but vitally important to the author's legacy.

Last Spring we launched a brand-new program that has long been a dream of the staff here: Writing at The Mark Twain House. Our flagship course was taught by Lary Bloom and Suzanne Levine and focused on Memoir. Our students spent eight weeks writing and critiquing their work. Due to their successes, we're delighted to announce that we will continue to offer Writing Workshops at the Mark Twain Museum Center for as long as aspiring and established writers keep on coming back to take them.

We also are committed to displaying our writers' voices, and so we have started a second blog entirely devoted to the product of these workshops: Writing at The Mark Twain House. That blog will display the writing of our students as well as announce upcoming courses and report on the progress we're making in the program. Please follow it!

As if that weren't exciting enough, we're also thrilled to announce that the next round of Nonfiction writing workshops will be taught by the illustrious Susan Campbell, author of Dating Jesus and columnist for the Hartford Courant. Classes will treat all manner of non-fiction work, from opinion writing to autobiography to essay writing to general truth-telling, guided by the spirits of E. B. White, Jessica Mitford, Tracy Kidder and Joan Didion, among others. The six sessions run from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday evenings, beginning Nov. 10 and running to Dec. 22 (no class Nov. 24). There is a fee of $500. Call Steve Courtney at 860-247-0998, Ext. 243, steve.courtney@marktwainhouse.org.

We hope that you are as excited about this set of programs as we are! Let us know in the comments what you think, what kind of writing workshop you'd take, and which writers you'd love to see here at the Twain House.

-- Julia