Good Times

As the Summer 2014 residency approaches we'll take a look back--a new photo every day until we start reporting in on the residency. Any help with the Who, What, When, etc. of the photos is appreciated. Gives us the 411 in the comments, please.

BTW, the Inkpot is short on pix from the program's early years. If you want to share yours please send them on in to the 'Pot. Address is over to your left.

(Click on photo to enlarge.)

Good Times

As the Summer 2014 residency approaches we'll take a look back--a new photo every day until we start reporting in on the residency. Any help with the Who, What, When, etc. of the photos is appreciated. Gives us the 411 in the comments, please.

BTW, the Inkpot is short on pix from the program's early years. If you want to share yours please send them on in to the 'Pot. Address is over to your left.

(Click on photo to enlarge.)

Good Times

As the Summer 2014 residency approaches we'll take a look back--a new photo every day until we start reporting in on the residency. Any help with the Who, What, When, etc. of the photos is appreciated. Gives us the 411 in the comments, please.

BTW, the Inkpot is short on pix from the program's early years. If you want to share yours please send them on in to the 'Pot. Address is over to your left.

(Click on photo to enlarge.)

Good Times

As the Summer 2014 residency approaches we'll take a look back--a new photo every day until we start reporting in on the residency. Any help with the Who, What, When, etc. of the photos is appreciated. Gives us the 411 in the comments, please.

BTW, the Inkpot is short on pix from the program's early years. If you want to share yours please send them on in to the 'Pot. Address is over to your left.

(Click on photo to enlarge.)

Good Times

As the Summer 2014 residency approaches we'll take a look back--a new photo every day until we start reporting in on the residency. Any help with the Who, What, When, etc. of the photos is appreciated. Gives us the 411 in the comments, please.

BTW, the Inkpot is short on pix from the program's early years. If you want to share yours please send them on in to the 'Pot. Address is over to your left.

(Click on photo to enlarge.)

Good Times

As the Summer 2014 residency approaches we'll take a look back--a new photo every day until we start reporting in on the residency. Any help with the Who, What, When, etc. of the photos is appreciated. Gives us the 411 in the comments, please.

BTW, the Inkpot is short on pix from the program's early years. If you want to share yours please send them on in to the 'Pot. Address is over to your left.

(Click on photo to enlarge.)

Good Times

As the Summer 2014 residency approaches we'll take a look back--a new photo every day until we start reporting in on the residency. Any help with the Who, What, When, etc. of the photos is appreciated. Gives us the 411 in the comments, please.

BTW, the Inkpot is short on pix from the program's early years. If you want to share yours please send them on in to the 'Pot. Address is over to your left.

(Click on photo to enlarge.)

Good Times

As the Summer 2014 residency approaches we'll take a look back--a new photo every day until we start reporting in on the residency. Any help with the Who, What, When, etc. of the photos is appreciated. Gives us the 411 in the comments, please.

BTW, the Inkpot is short on pix from the program's early years. If you want to share yours please send them on in to the 'Pot. Address is over to your left.

(Click on photo to enlarge.)

Good Times

As the Summer 2014 residency approaches we'll take a look back--a new photo every day until we start reporting in on the residency. Any help with the Who, What, When, etc. of the photos is appreciated. Gives us the 411 in the comments, please.

BTW, the Inkpot is short on pix from the program's early years. If you want to share yours please send them on in to the 'Pot. Address is over to your left.

(click on photo to enlarge)

Day Five - Residency Fever

Sorry we have been all so quiet. Residency fever has us all hot and bothered - about theme, about great children's books, about writing process, about being together in a community that I want to bottle up and take home with me.

But I know if I did I'd never sleep. In Jackie Briggs Martin and Liza Ketchum's workshop we mined childhood memories to write powerful sensory scenes that lay buried inside us. These residencies are like overwhelming sensory scenes that wash over us, full of laughter, tears, exhaustion and awe. I think all of us here - faculty and students - know how unique, how privileged we are to spend this time together twice a year. In a way it is like summer camp as Anne blogged about. One leans new skills, whispers into the night, sometimes even tears into one's pillow about not being good enough.

Last night I tried to write a post, but had no words to sum up the stimulating day. A presentation by writer Wendy Orr and illustrator Lauren Stringer about their individual processes that produced the delightful picture The Panther and the Princess, a discussion about girl heroines in Alice's critical thesis presentation, an evening of awe inspiring grad and grad assistant readings, followed by delightful conversation with first year students, laughter with faculty and a decompression conversation with my roommate Anne.

Five days into the residency and it feels like a fever dream that I don't want to end, but that if it doesn't, I may burn up from the stimulation of lectures, workshops, readings and fellowship with beloved faculty friends and old and new students.

As I try to look back, what stands out for me is the deep sharing on process this week. So appropos because our focus is theme. Betsy Partridge in her talk on "Kickass Nonfiction" talked about kotodomo (spelling ?) the idea that every word has a spirit, a soul. But we can only find those soul words, the themes in our writing by sitting down every day to write them. Betsy shared how she takes her primary research and weaves the details into her story, word by word. She talked about how when dealing with controversial or complex information she lets actual quotes do the heavy lifting.

This morning we return to our workshops after a morning off yesterday to cool down and recharge for the second half of the residency. Each workshop with fellow faculty Kelly Easton has offered deep and respectful discussions with student writers about each piece, focused on craft and also evolving into the process behind it.

Anne just came out to ask about her outfit for the day. She gave me a new word. Ineffable. Much of what goes on here is unspeakable, like our writing. But we try to speak, to share, so we have the hot spirit to return home to our work.

I must stop. My temperature is up. More from the front later. More for me to savor all semester long. CRM

Hooks

I'm surprised by all the new posts. I thought you guys would be lying down and drinking through a straw!

I don't have the residency to reflect on, so I'll write about what's on the writer's part of my mind. I like to read short things, so I picked up THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING. I like that Best American series, anyway, and wasn't disappointed.

Here are a few opening sentences from the essays: "'I can smell the sea from here,' said the prisoner." Or, "Chunking Mansion is the only place I have ever been where it is possible to buy a sexual aid, a bootleg Jay Chou CD, and a new, leather-bound Koran . . ." Or, "The throbbing music emanating from Le Carnivore Restaurant behind our hotel grows tinnier with each throbbing beat."

Hooks, right? Get your reader's attention right out of the gate. We've all done it. As teachers we've all told students to do it.

So I'm at the local library standing in front of the narrow YA shelf and hoping something will, cobra-like, dart out and stun me. Instead, I read first page after first page and my blood sugar drops. Instead of a voice I want to hear for two hundred pages, I hear the lieder of the craft book.

I think what bothers me is the calculating tone of the hook and - behind it - that calculating tone of the advice. It reminds me too much of those old books-on-dating that included pick-up lines.

God knows I'm easy, but I'm not that easy.

RK

Being Awesome

One of our students, Dave Revere, gave his lecture on the willing hero. He called it "Being Awesome." That phrase seems to have defined the last couple of days of residency, where all we can do is bask in the awesomeness of our experience and our colleagues. We're way past exhaustion now, but what comes in this place is something oddly close to clarity.

I love it here. I love coming back every six months to this spiritual home. Our theme this residency was setting, and now I'm thinking about this great place, and how it is created by the people in it and the energy around it. Bad food and bad weather just add to the place-y-ness of it--for they just add the depth that make it whole. Besides, without some foibles, this place wouldn't be real, and then where would we be?

It turns out that some of our faculty have talents beyond writing, and while I think this is desperately unfair, it sure makes for a good closing night banquet. They gave us a rousing musical review and our amazing graduation speaker, Jane Yolen, joined in. I'm not sure I'll ever forget the sight of her sprawled on the grand piano, torch-singer style, serenading our graduates.

I leave for home--where apparently I have a husband and child-- feeling energized and inspired by my awesome colleagues--faculty, students, and staff alike. It's such a great privilege to call these people my friends.

HOME

Greetings. I am one of the 'new' bloggers on TheStoryTellersInkspot, though I've been on the Hamline faculty since July '08.

Today has been yet another jampacked residency day of scintillating lectures and panels from faculty and students alike. My mind is brimming over with it all. We have one more day to go, and home is on all of our minds.

For this reason, Daniel's lecture, "The Search for Home In Children's Literature," has struck a chord. One tends to think of home as a physical dwelling, and of course we are all longing to return to our own familiar dwellings, full of comfortable personal possessions and hugs from those who have missed us. But, as Daniel pointed out, home is also (and frequently for children) made of friends, community, support, and acceptance, and that the ideal protagonist will leave home and then return changed. Isn't that what we have created here in this snowy, chilly landscape, on the Hamline campus, and even in the Radisson hotel in its barren industrial setting? As I begin to get the glimmer of seeing my dogs again, of being with my loved one, as I experience the thrill of shoving my dirty laundry into my suitcase and figuring out which shuttle to take to the airport Monday morning, I realize I may be going home, but I am also leaving home. The folks here are friends and colleagues with whom I belong. We all belong here--our common interests, struggles and epiphanies bond us and make a home.

And don't worry we still have one more reading, two lectures, a faculty meeting, a master's class (for those graduating), a graduation ceremony, and a final dinner to go, before we leave this home and return, forever changed, to the home from where we came.

Irony?

I've spent the last week immersed in conversation about writing and books. The result: I can't read. I return to my hotel room at night, look at the stack of books I brought along and don't even bother.

This has happened in other years when I've come to residency, and I anticipated it would again so this time I only brought short stories--a mix of old favorites and some I hadn't read (Alice Munro, Ward Just, Elizabeth McCracken).

I could use a stack of People magazines. Entertainment Weekly and Cosmo sound good too. I suspect, however, that Vanity Fair would be too taxing.

There's still a lot of wonderful stuff on the residency schedule for these last few days (including a reading by Jane Yolen on Saturday night--come one, come all*) but I confess I'm already looking beyond the graduation on Sunday to when I head home. The new Anne Tyler is waiting for me there (Please--no reviews in the comment section, okay?) and Catching Fire, the sequel to The Hunger Games, is waiting for me at the Eau Claire library. (Ditto.)

I live about ninety minutes east of St. Paul. I have no idea if the drive home will provide enough time to retool and regain my reading skills. Here's hoping.

MQ

Jane Yolen reads Saturday, January 16
7:00-8:00 p.m. Hamline U
Giddens Learning Center, Room 100E, 1556 Hewitt Avenue, Saint Paul

Unwrapped

A couple of our inaugural Inkpotters have ended their terms, and we have two fabulous new bloggers starting soon, but it seems to be down to Marsha Q and me in terms of holding down the fort right now. This may be when things start getting weird. We've finished Day 3 of residency--or else it's Day 37--and there's some possibility that we've never left at all. Marsha's going to be doing a lecture on time in a couple of days and I hope she can make some sense of all of this.

We trudge around the snowy campus, wrapped up like puffy literary beetles. There's something convivial about it all, though, and something ritualistic as we take on and shed layers through the day. Our visiting editor, Wendy Lamb, said that she thinks magic is closer to the surface in the cold. There's certainly something in the air--I always spend residency marveling at my colleagues, but the lectures this time seem particularly marvel-worthy. The topic of setting has inspired some very personal reflections, from Liza Ketchum's discussion of memory and place to Jackie Briggs-Martin's exultation of the imagination to the inspiration Lisa Jahn-Clough found in the stray dogs of Puerto Rico. Claire Rudolph Murphy spoke eloquently of finding personal narrative in conjunction with our story's narrative and inspiration in our struggles. "Every challenge in my life," she said, "is about world-building."

We had our first two grad readings tonight--Andrew Cochran and Christine Hepperman. They were both outstanding, and I was so proud of the program tonight. Though I guess the students should get some credit, too.

Chillin'

Just finished the first full day of the residency. Great lectures by Mary Logue and Jackie Briggs Martin. One sits and listens to all the good points made and what comes to mind are the flaws in one's own work. Well, this one goes through that, alas.

Tonight I took turns at the podium with Kelly Easton Rubin and Claire Rudolf Murphy for the first night of faculty readings. After I read from a rather dark manuscript that's headed to a drawer for a little R & R, Kelly got us laughing and then Claire got us singing. As the kidz say, or used to say, Sweet.

Tomorrow we start workshopping. Daily workshops are like the home room for the residency--a great place to get to know people and their writing.

As Anne said, except for Ron, who is staying warm in California, the Inkpot bloggers might be a little slow, a little dazed, a little confused over the next few days.

One last thought: The hotel we return to at the end of the long day is very nice, the kind of place the George Clooney character in Up in the Air would have liked. I 'm going to crash soon, but first I need check out the mattress and find out what my my sleep number is.

MQ

Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends, Once More

We're about to enter our residency, some of us more well-coiffed than others. Twice a year, the Hamline students and faculty gather on campus for ten days of workshops, lectures, and lots of great companionship. My husband tells me there's a famously untranslatable German word--gemütlichkeit--the feeling of warm-heartedness and companionship that one feels for one's fellows, friends and strangers alike, while drinking gigantic steins of beer in the beer hall. Change "gigantic steins of beer" for "epically bad food" and there you have Hamline. It's a magnificent thing to be amongst other writers.

Residency is something like the first few days after you've been turned into a vampire--it's hard to focus on anything else. So the Inkpot might get quiet for the next week, or very weird, or filled with postings from Ron about how nice the weather is in California. I will try to file some reports, and I'll just apologize in advance for everything I say. Meanwhile, I'm getting my stuff together to go work in the Hamline library--I've got a lecture to write--and I raise a cafeteria-style, institutional-Diet Coke-filled glass to my fellows. See you soon.