Brattleboro Literary Festival / Marlboro College Writing Workshops

The Brattleboro Literary Festival, in conjunction with Marlboro College, is pleased to announce it is offering workshops for poets and fiction writers for the first time in 2011. 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, October 14, from 1-4:00 pm at the Marlboro Graduate Center in downtown Brattleboro. Workshop students are invited to a private author reception on Friday night.

 Jeanne Marie Beaumont Advanced Poetry Workshop

This three hour workshop will explore poetry as an art of communication, imagination, and transformation. Among craft issues we will consider are the tensions created between such strategies as brevity vs. prolongation, simplicity vs. elaboration, and clarity vs. complexity. We will also examine aspects of influence, sound play, voicing, and shaping. In serving as care-taking and curious readers of each other’s work, our goal will be to discover approaches to revision that will help each poem reach its fullest embodiment of meaning.

Submit two poems in process of up to 40 lines that you are dissatisfied with in some way. Depending on the size of the group, we will get to one or two poems by each participant.

Jeanne Marie Beaumont is the author of Burning of the Three Fires (BOA Editions, 2010), Curious Conduct (BOA, 2004), and Placebo Effects, winner of the National Poetry Series (Norton, 1997). Her poems have appeared in numerous publications including Good Poems for Hard Times, The Manhattan Review, The Nation, Poetry Daily, The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror 2007, and World Literature Today. She won the 2009 Dana Award for Poetry. She lives in Manhattan and teaches at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92^nd St. Y and in the Stonecoast MFA program. www.jeannemariebeaumont.com

Nicholas Delbanco Advanced Fiction Workshop

In this three hour workshop, we 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. Our session will focus on those strategies of prose—first or third person, present or past tense, mandarin or colloquial rhetoric, etc.—that announce the tale to come. Submit a story or the beginning of a novel; work by all students will be discussed.

Nicholas 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 twenty years he taught at Bennington College, where he co-founded (with the late John Gardner) the Bennington Writing Workshops. He is the author of twenty-five books; his most recent work of non-fiction 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 1970’s. www.nicholasdelbanco.com

Registration: The fee for each workshop is $75. Space will be limited to 12 students in each class to ensure a quality experience. A $25 deposit is necessary to hold your place in either class. Please mail a check, payable to Marlboro College, to Marlboro College, PO Box A, Attn: Director of Non Degree Programs, Marlboro, VT 05344, by September 12. For more information, or to submit your work, email workshop director Wyn Cooper at wyncooper@gmail.com.

Note: The 2011 workshops are full!! Thank you to all who registered and we look forward to seeing you at the festival.