BRATTLEBORO — This year, for the first time, the Brattleboro Literary Festival, in conjunction with Marlboro College, will offer workshops for poets and fiction writers.
New York poet Jeanne Marie Beaumont will run the poetry workshop, while the fiction workshop will be led by Nicholas Delbanco from the University of Michigan. Both sessions take place on Friday, Oct. 14, from 1-4 p.m., at the Marlboro Graduate Center in downtown Brattleboro.
Beaumont's advanced poetry workshop will explore poetry as an art of communication, imagination, and transformation. Among craft issues the participants will consider are the tensions created between such strategies as brevity versus prolongation, simplicity versus elaboration, and clarity versus complexity.
Aspects of influence, sound play, voicing, and shaping will also be examined. As participants become caretaking and curious readers of one another's work, the goal will be to discover approaches to revision that will help each poem reach its fullest embodiment of meaning.
Participants are asked to submit two poems in process of up to 40 lines that they are dissatisfied with in some way. Depending on the size of the group, the hope is to get to one or two poems by each participant.
Beaumont is the author of Burning of the Three Fires (BOA Editions, 2010), Curious Conduct (BOA, 2004), and Placebo Effects (Norton, 1997), winner of the National Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, and in 2009, she won the Dana Award for Poetry. She lives in Manhattan and teaches at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd St. Y, and in the Stonecoast MFA program..
Delbanco's advanced fiction workshop will pay close attention to the “beginnings” of things. Eudora Welty called it “one writer's beginnings,” but all authors start their work with a sense of what will follow the first line. The session will focus on those strategies of prose - first or third person, present or past tense, mandarin or colloquial rhetoric, and so on - that announce the tale to come. Submit a story or the beginning of a novel; work by all students will be discussed.
Delbanco is the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Michigan, where he also directs the prestigious Hopwood Awards Program. For 20 years, he taught at Bennington College, where he co-founded (with the late John Gardner) the Bennington Writing Workshops.
He is the author of 25 books; his most recent work of nonfiction is Lastingness: The Art of Old Age, and his most recent work of fiction is Sherbrookes, a reconceived version of his Vermont trilogy (Possession, Sherbrookes, and Stillness), which appeared in the late 1970s.
Each three-hour workshop costs $75; a $25 deposit is necessary to hold your place in either class. To ensure a quality experience, space will be limited to 12 students in each class.
Mail a check, payable to Marlboro College, to Marlboro College, P.O. Box A, Attn: Public Relations Office, Marlboro, VT 05344, by Sept. 1.
For more information, or to submit your work, e-mail workshop director Wyn Cooper at wyncooper@gmail.com.