Our Writers' Weekend
APRIL 20-21: A Writers' Weekend at the Mark Twain House will offer talks, workshops and other events devoted to the craft of writing and its practitioners.
Novelists, authors of non-fiction, poets, memoirists and playwrights will be supplying a rich array of events. Participants include Lewis Lapham, Jon Clinch, Alfred Uhry, Bessy Reyna, Lary Bloom and A.R. Gurney.
The Friday-Saturday event begins with an April 20 early-evening reception followed by a keynote speech by legendary editor Lewis Lapham of Harper's and Lapham's Quarterly.
On Saturday, there's a kickoff talk by novelist Jon Clinch (Finn, Kings of the Earth), a panel including playwrights Gurney (The Dining Room) and Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy), and nearly a score of workshops, talks and other sessions.
The event will run from 8:00 am to about 6:00 p.m.on Saturday. A box lunch will be provided, and the event winds up Saturday evening with a closing reception.
The cost of the Writers' Weekend for participants is $100. This includes the Friday night reception and lecture, all Saturday sessions, a box lunch and the Saturday night closing reception. Participants will also receive a voucher good for a tour of the Mark Twain House at any time. Space is limited, and advance registration and payment is a must: Call 860-280-3130 to register.
Eighteen panels, talks and workshop sessions will take place Saturday. No fewer than two winners of the Connecticut Book Award Lifetime Achievement Award holders will be participating in sessions at the Weekend: Lary Bloom, longtime editor of Northeastmagazine, columnist, author of many books, and sage teacher of writing at the Mark Twain House and many other places; and Bessy Reyna (Memoirs of the Unfaithful Lover), the beloved Cuban-born poet who has been called "a clear-eyed guide to the world we see but don’t see" by Martin Espada.
Among the authors slated to lead 50-minute sessions on Saturday are Susan Campbell(Dating Jesus), Susan Schoenberger (A Watershed Year) Suzanne Levine (The Haberdasher's Daughter), Denis Horgan (Ninety-Eight Point Six) Cindy Brown Austin (By the Waters of Babylon) and Wendy Clinch (The Ski Diva).
There will be sessions on blogging, the business of getting published, and new forms of storytelling unleashed by the existence of the Internet.
The Writers’ Weekend builds on the success of Writing at the Mark Twain House, the writing program that bears out The Mark Twain House & Museum's explicitly stated mission, promulgated in 1955, to develop a literary center. The program has offered fall and spring evening courses in memoir, non-fiction, and fiction over the past few years.
During the Writers' Weekend, a panel of faculty and students in the Writing at the Mark Twain House program will be discussing the ins and outs of teaching and learning writing.
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