Dear Writers,
I’m so excited to announce that after a four-year hiatus, the Adirondack Retreat is BAAAAACK!!!! Weekend of Jun 23-25! And Summer Writing Camp will be the week of July 10-14 (five days). I’m going to keep this brief and encourage you to scroll down to read more about these two retreats we are offering. In both cases, the magnificent Elaine Apthorp will be on board as both a participant and as a manuscript mentor to work one-on-one with folks who would like to submit work ahead of time.
Finally, next week, being the last week of the month, Morning Seeding & Tending is open to those of you who want to try it.
Love, Nerissa
Adirondack Retreat is BACK!!!
Finally! After a four year hiatus, the beloved weekend retreat in Keene NY is back, June 23-25. Come write with me in the high peaks! Retreat includes delicious home-cooked meals, the best views in the world, and lots of time to write. Eight spots available.
Summer Writing Camp
This year’s Summer Writing Camp will be the week of July 10-14. In-person with remote option. People, we get SO much done and have so much fun during this five-day summer camp for grown-ups (or “grow-up adjacents). This is a fantastic opportunity to delve deeply into an existing project, work on a phD thesis, start a children’s book, edit and revise, or just revel in the community of writers, the beautiful surroundings, the quiet, the on-going discussion of writing and literature. Poets work on chapbooks, novelists see new ways of solving plot problems, and memoirists tackle that difficult section they’ve been wrestling with for years. There are spaces for songwriters to compose in private rooms; there are indoor and outdoor spaces to curl up in and write to your heart’s content. All group discussion will be shared on Zoom. Lunch will be served daily, and it’s yummy.
This year, the amazing Elaine Apthorp will be offering a one-on-one manuscript consultation for those who choose to add that option. For more information, please contact us here. You can come for the entire week, or just a day or two. Pro-rated option is here, and five-day option is here.
Morning Seeding & Tending—Free Next Week!
At the end of every month, Morning Seeding & Tending is open to try it to see if you like it! Come for free the last week in April (April 24-28 ). To receive the Zoom address, write me at Nerissand@gmail.com with “Try MS&T” in the header.
I don’t know where I’d be without my Morning Seeding & Tending group. We are a quiet but steady accountability group where we simply show up and get our work done. Every weekday at 10am sharp, a group of us gather to write for an hour on Zoom. Some days it’s one of us, most days it's four to nine. We blink at each other, mutter some greetings if we’re well-caffeinated enough, and then I read a prompt or a secular prayer (AKA a poem), and while I send it to the group via email, we each set our intentions for the day in the chat. What do we write? Whatever we like! Some days I work on a novel, attempt to get my “first draft” quotient in for the day of 1000 words. Some days I edit, some days I submit to literary journals or work on a query letter, some days I write something to you. I always know I have an hour in the morning to get SOME writing done.
Some folks come almost every day. Some just once a week. The low cost of the group ($20 month via Ko-fi subscription) means that no one feels like they’re not getting their money’s worth. Writing with a group of others is powerful, just like meditating in a group always felt more bolstering to me than meditating on my own. I know there are others out there aligning themselves in the same way I am.
You can sign up here to join the group. Every month, you’ll be charge that $20 fee. When does the month start? Whenever you want it to! How about now? What will you do with your hour a day?
Great Stuff I Recommend:
Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano, a fabulous family saga with notes of Little Women. Pretty much anyone who loves well-written stories will enjoy this novel.
Motherland, the TV series co-created by Sharon Horgan (Bad Sisters). I can’t stop laughing when I watch one of these episodes. Diane Morgan (aka Philomena Cunk) can do no wrong.
Folk Music: a Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs, by Greil Marcus. This is my kind of book. It’s not so much a biography of Bob Dylan as a meditation on his influence and his influences in the folk music world. Even though I am a folk musician and grew up steeped in that world of music, I learned so much from reading this and thinking about the many tangents Marcus leads us along as he continually weaves back to Dylan, Dylan’s unique place in American history, and the time in history that he (and we) were lucky or unlucky enough to inhabit. Here is one of my favorite moments:
“You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience that only he could see, one far off in the future,” Dylan wrote in 2004 of the man who put “Come On In My Kitchen” into the world. [Robert Johnson]. [Dylan] too could be singing to an audience only he could see, one far off in the past. With, sitting in chairs on the front porch of some general store, the likes of Robert Johnson, Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, waiting to see if he had anything to show them. -Greil Marcus, Folk Music
And isn’t this why any of us writes? We’re writing to people in the past, thanking them, carrying on that long conversation; and we’re writing to those the future, too, hoping someone will find our message in the bottle.
Sending love,
Nerissa