In a talk that touches on issues of craft, narrative, and inspiration, the biographer Megan Marshall (’77, RI ’07) will discuss her work on past and current subjects, including Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Hawthorne, and Elizabeth Peabody. She is the recipient of many awards, such as the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, and a Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

The lecture will be held at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University in the Sheerr Room of Fay House (10 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138).

This event is free and open to the public.

For more information, visit http://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/event/2015-megan-marshall-lecture.

The Brooklyn Book Festival in collaboration with the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop is proud to announce New York’s Exciting New Voices, a Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Reading at Muchmore’s (located at 2 Havemeyer Street, Brooklyn, NY) on Sunday September 20 from 7 – 9 pm.

The event will be moderated by Diana Norma Szokolyai and features writers Rita Banerjee, Jonah Kruvant, Brandon Lewis, Elizabeth Devlin, Lisa Marie Basile, Jessica Reidy, Gregory Crosby, Matty Marks, and Emily Smith.  Enjoy a drink and a bite to eat in the heart of Williamsburg as you hear from some of New York’s most exciting, new voices, many of whom are faculty members for the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop.  The Brooklyn Book Festival is the largest free book event in New York City and presents established as well as emerging writers each year.  The Bookend Events kick off the week’s festivities each year with literary themed events at clubs, bookstores, parks, etc.

Featured Readers:

Diana Norma Szokolyai is a writer/interdisciplinary artist/educator and Executive Artistic Director of Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. She frequently records her poetry with musicians and has collaborated with several composers, such as Jason Haye (UK), Sebastian Wesman (Argentina), Peter James (UK), Julie Case (US), Jeremie Jones (Canada), Claudio Gabriele (Italy) and David Krebs (US). Her poetry-music collaboration with Flux Without Pause led to their collaboration “Space Mothlight” hitting the Creative Commons Hot 100 list in 2015, and can be found in the curated WFMU Free Music Archive. Her writing on literary communities was the subject of a monthly feature on HER KIND by VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts and an interview on the same topic was featured in Quail Bell Magazine in May 2014. Author of the poetry collections Parallel Sparrows (honorable mention for Best Poetry Book in the 2014 Paris Book Festival) and Roses in the Snow (first runner-­‐‑up Best Poetry Book at the 2009 DIY Book Festival), she has also been published in Quail Bell, International Who’s Who in Poetry 2012, Lyre Lyre, The Boston Globe, Dr. Hurley’s Snake Oil Cure, Polarity, The Fiction Project, Up the Staircase Quarterly and elsewhere. Her writing has been anthologized in Always Wondering, The Highwaymen NYC #2, Other Countries: Contemporary Poets Rewiring History, The Cambridge Community Poem, and Teachers as Writers. She co-­curates a poetry-music series, performs in CHAGALL PAC, and is an interdisciplinary performance artist with the Brooklyn Soundpainting Ensemble. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and holds an Ed.M degree in Arts in Education from Harvard, as well as an M.A. in French literature from UConn.

Rita Banerjee is a writer, and received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. She holds an MFA in Poetry and her writing has been published in Poets for Living Waters, The New Renaissance, The Fiction Project, Jaggery, The Crab Creek Review, The Dudley Review, Objet d’Art, Vox Populi, Dr. Hurley’s Snake-Oil Cure, and Chrysanthemum among other journals. Her first collection of poems,Cracklers at Night, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2010 and received First Honorable Mention for Best Poetry Book at the 2011-2012 Los Angeles Book Festival. Her novella, A Night with Kali, was digitized by the Brooklyn Art-house Co-op in 2011. She is a co-director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, and her writing has been recently featured on HER KIND by VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and on KBOO Radio’s APA Compass in Portland, Oregon.

Jonah Kruvant is one of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop’s  NYC area program organizers and is also a teacher, performer, writer, and student of the world.  He used to live in Costa Rica, where he wrote a popular blog, “From Gaijin to Gringo: Living Abroad in Costa Rica.”  His writing has been published in Digital Americana, and you can read about his adventures in Latin America here: http://costaricagringo.blogspot.com/

Lisa Marie Basile is the author of APOCRYPHAL, along with two chapbooks, Andalucia (Poetry Society of NY) and War/lock (Hyacinth Girl Press, February, 2015). She is the editor-in-chief of Luna Luna Magazine and her poetry and other work can be seen in PANK, the Tin House blog, Coldfront, The Nervous Breakdown, The Huffington Post, Best American Poetry, PEN American Center, Dusie, and the Ampersand Review, among others. She’s been profiled in The New York Daily News, Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls, Poets & Artists Magazine, Relapse Magazine and others. Lisa Marie Basile was the visiting poet at Westfield High School and New York University, and she was a visiting writer at Boston’s Emerson College. Her work was selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler for inclusion in the Best Small Fiction 2015 anthology and was nominated for inclusion in the Best American Experimental Writing 2015 anthology. She holds an MFA from The New School and works as an editor and writer.

Brandon Lewis lives and teaches in NYC. He received an MFA in poetry at George Mason, and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as The Missouri Review, The Massachusetts Review, Salamander, Drunken Boat, American Poetry Review, and Spork. This year he won the Sundog Lit Poetry Contest and was recently a finalist for The Brittingham Prize and the Crab Orchard Review Series.

Elizabeth Devlin is a modern day renaissance woman.  If she is not composing music for the solo, autoharp wielding, singer-songwriter act, ELIZABETH DEVLIN, she can be found crafting Illustrations/Graphics at DEVLIN DESIGN AND ILLUSTRATION, playing electric bass and singing as front woman for Brooklyn based rock band, VALVED VOICE, or curating a fresh new line-up for the THE HIGHWAYMEN NYC, a Brooklyn based, monthly, poetry reading series that meets on the full moon.

Jessica Reidy earned her MFA in Fiction at Florida State University and a B.A. from Hollins University. Her work is Pushcart-nominated and has appeared in Narrative Magazine as Short Story of the Week, The Los Angeles Review, Arsenic Lobster, and other journals. She’s a staff-writer and the Outreach Editor for Quail Bell Magazine, Managing Editor for VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, Art Editor for The Southeast Review, and Visiting Professor for the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop retreats. She teaches creative writing and is a certified yoga instructor and Reiki Master. Jessica also works her Romani (Gypsy) family trades, fortune telling, energy healing, and dancing. Jessica is currently writing her first novel set in post-WWII Paris about Coco Charbonneau, the half-Romani burlesque dancer and fortune teller of Zenith Circus, who becomes a Nazi hunter. You can learn more at www.jessicareidy.com.

Gregory Crosby‘s poems have appeared in Court Green, Epiphany, Copper Nickel, Leveler, Ping Pong & Rattle, among others. He is co-curator of the long- running EARSHOT reading series and is co-editor, with Jillian Brall, of the online poetry journal Lyre Lyre.  He has served as a host and panelist for several Cambridge Writers’ Workshop events, including 2012 & 2013 Brooklyn Lit Crawl, the 2012 Mass Poetry Festival, and  our live radio shows.

Matty Marks is a 30 yr old musician, writer and sports enthusiast.  Creating art has been a lifelong endeavor that is a constant source of fun and pride.  Dunks is his first and only novel.  It combines many elements of his own life to create a rated R young adult novel that today’s teenagers can relay relate to.  However, it’s also a fun book for anyone of any age who can relate to the wild side of life, resulting from pushing boundaries to find yourself.

Emily Smith is an Editing and Communications Intern for the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. Originally from Sarasota, Florida, she currently attends school at the New Hampshire Institute of Art where she studies Creative Writing and Art History. She writes for Opposing Views, Highbrow Magazine and a number of health websites run by Deep Dive Media. Her poetry has been published in Walleyed Press, Essence Poetry, and Ayris.

Join the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop for a Brooklyn Bookend Reading at Muchmore’s (located at 2 Havemeyer Street) on September 20 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. The event will be moderated by Diana Norma Szokolyai and includes writers Rita Banerjee, Jonah Kruvant, Brandon Lewis, Elizabeth Devlin, Lisa Marie Basile, Gabriella Rieger Lapkoff, Jessica Reidy, Gregory Crosby, Matty Marks, and Emily Smith. Some of the writers are emerging on the literary scene with a bang, and many other writers have recently published their first or second books, and have received prestigious awards. Enjoy a drink and a bite to eat in the heart of Williamsburg as you hear from some of New York’s most exciting, new voices, many of whom are faculty members for the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop.

The Brooklyn Book Festival is the largest free book event in New York City and presents established as well as emerging writers each year. The Bookend Events kick off the week’s festivities each year with literary themed events at clubs, bookstores, parks, etc.

Featured Readers:

Diana Norma Szokolyai is a writer/interdisciplinary artist/educator and Executive Artistic Director of Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. She frequently records her poetry with musicians and has collaborated with several composers, such as Jason Haye (UK), Sebastian Wesman (Argentina), Peter James (UK), Julie Case (US), Jeremie Jones (Canada), Claudio Gabriele (Italy) and David Krebs (US). Her poetry-music collaboration with Flux Without Pause led to their collaboration “Space Mothlight” hitting the Creative Commons Hot 100 list in 2015, and can be found in the curated WFMU Free Music Archive. Her writing on literary communities was the subject of a monthly feature on HER KIND by VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts and an interview on the same topic was featured in Quail Bell Magazine in May 2014. Author of the poetry collections Parallel Sparrows (honorable mention for Best Poetry Book in the 2014 Paris Book Festival) and Roses in the Snow (first runner-­‐‑up Best Poetry Book at the 2009 DIY Book Festival), she has also been published in Quail Bell, International Who’s Who in Poetry 2012, Lyre Lyre, The Boston Globe, Dr. Hurley’s Snake Oil Cure, Polarity, The Fiction Project, Up the Staircase Quarterly and elsewhere. Her writing has been anthologized in Always Wondering, The Highwaymen NYC #2, Other Countries: Contemporary Poets Rewiring History, The Cambridge Community Poem, and Teachers as Writers. She co-­curates a poetry-music series, performs in CHAGALL PAC, and is an interdisciplinary performance artist with the Brooklyn Soundpainting Ensemble. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and holds an Ed.M degree in Arts in Education from Harvard, as well as an M.A. in French literature from UConn.

Rita Banerjee is a writer, and received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. She holds an MFA in Poetry and her writing has been published in Poets for Living Waters, The New Renaissance, The Fiction Project, Jaggery, The Crab Creek Review, The Dudley Review, Objet d’Art, Vox Populi, Dr. Hurley’s Snake-Oil Cure, and Chrysanthemum among other journals. Her first collection of poems,Cracklers at Night, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2010 and received First Honorable Mention for Best Poetry Book at the 2011-2012 Los Angeles Book Festival. Her novella, A Night with Kali, was digitized by the Brooklyn Art-house Co-op in 2011. She is a co-director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, and her writing has been recently featured on HER KIND by VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and on KBOO Radio’s APA Compass in Portland, Oregon.

Jonah Kruvant is one of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop’s  NYC area program organizers and is also a teacher, performer, writer, and student of the world.  He used to live in Costa Rica, where he wrote a popular blog, “From Gaijin to Gringo: Living Abroad in Costa Rica.”  His writing has been published in Digital Americana, and you can read about his adventures in Latin America here: http://costaricagringo.blogspot.com/

Lisa Marie Basile is the author of APOCRYPHAL, along with two chapbooks, Andalucia (Poetry Society of NY) and War/lock (Hyacinth Girl Press, February, 2015). She is the editor-in-chief of Luna Luna Magazine and her poetry and other work can be seen in PANK, the Tin House blog, Coldfront, The Nervous Breakdown, The Huffington Post, Best American Poetry, PEN American Center, Dusie, and the Ampersand Review, among others. She’s been profiled in The New York Daily News, Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls, Poets & Artists Magazine, Relapse Magazine and others. Lisa Marie Basile was the visiting poet at Westfield High School and New York University, and she was a visiting writer at Boston’s Emerson College. Her work was selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler for inclusion in the Best Small Fiction 2015 anthology and was nominated for inclusion in the Best American Experimental Writing 2015 anthology. She holds an MFA from The New School and works as an editor and writer.

Brandon Lewis lives and teaches in NYC. He received an MFA in poetry at George Mason, and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as The Missouri Review, The Massachusetts Review, Salamander, Drunken Boat, American Poetry Review, and Spork. This year he won the Sundog Lit Poetry Contest and was recently a finalist for The Brittingham Prize and the Crab Orchard Review Series.

Elizabeth Devlin is a modern day renaissance woman.  If she is not composing music for the solo, autoharp wielding, singer-songwriter act, ELIZABETH DEVLIN, she can be found crafting Illustrations/Graphics at DEVLIN DESIGN AND ILLUSTRATION, playing electric bass and singing as front woman for Brooklyn based rock band, VALVED VOICE, or curating a fresh new line-up for the THE HIGHWAYMEN NYC, a Brooklyn based, monthly, poetry reading series that meets on the full moon.

Jessica Reidy earned her MFA in Fiction at Florida State University and a B.A. from Hollins University. Her work is Pushcart-nominated and has appeared in Narrative Magazine as Short Story of the Week, The Los Angeles Review, Arsenic Lobster, and other journals. She’s a staff-writer and the Outreach Editor for Quail Bell Magazine, Managing Editor for VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, Art Editor for The Southeast Review, and Visiting Professor for the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop retreats. She teaches creative writing and is a certified yoga instructor and Reiki Master. Jessica also works her Romani (Gypsy) family trades, fortune telling, energy healing, and dancing. Jessica is currently writing her first novel set in post-WWII Paris about Coco Charbonneau, the half-Romani burlesque dancer and fortune teller of Zenith Circus, who becomes a Nazi hunter. You can learn more at www.jessicareidy.com.

Gregory Crosby‘s poems have appeared in Court Green, Epiphany, Copper Nickel, Leveler, Ping Pong & Rattle, among others. He is co-curator of the long- running EARSHOT reading series and is co-editor, with Jillian Brall, of the online poetry journal Lyre Lyre.  He has served as a host and panelist for several Cambridge Writers’ Workshop events, including 2012 & 2013 Brooklyn Lit Crawl, the 2012 Mass Poetry Festival, and  our live radio shows.

Matty Marks is a 30 yr old musician, writer and sports enthusiast.  Creating art has been a lifelong endeavor that is a constant source of fun and pride.  Dunks is his first and only novel.  It combines many elements of his own life to create a rated R young adult novel that today’s teenagers can relay relate to.  However, it’s also a fun book for anyone of any age who can relate to the wild side of life, resulting from pushing boundaries to find yourself.

Emily Smith is an Editing and Communications Intern for the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. Originally from Sarasota, Florida, she currently attends school at the New Hampshire Institute of Art where she studies Creative Writing and Art History. She writes for Opposing Views, Highbrow Magazine and a number of health websites run by Deep Dive Media. Her poetry has been published in Walleyed Press, Essence Poetry, and Ayris.

[ Originally published as an Op-Ed on VIDA Women in the Literary Arts: Report from the Field ]

There are so many very important articles on the victimization of women in society.  And this is not one of them. Nope. This is an altogether different take—this is about when the male writer feels threatened by the empowered female writer.  Is it because he does not understand her?  Is it because she does not fit his mold of the iconic “writer” model, complete with a tweed jacket and dark-rimmed glasses, and —of course—a penchant for craft beer?  It could be one of many reasons, including the simultaneous exoticizing and diminution of women who write.

Being a female and a writer has its interesting twists (I purposely am not saying “woman writer” or “female writer” because we rarely make the distinction “man writer” or “male writer”).  Women need to have their voices heard, but they don’t need their voices to be ghettoized into a special bookstore category of “women’s writing.”  This suggests that men’s writing is the default and that women’s writing is some sort of sub-category, or—worse—something that happens far off on the exotic island where women write, certainly not on the main continent of male writing.

I am one of the founders and Executive Artistic Director of a literary organization, the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop.  We have been leading writing workshops and retreats since 2008, and coincidentally, the founding co-Director and Executive Creative Director, Rita Banerjee, also happens to be female.  We are always surprised when, occasionally, people assume that we are a women’s-only organization simply because the directors are women.  Something tells me the same would not apply if the directors were male.  In fact, we have a balanced ratio of men and women on our executive board and our summer writing retreat in Paris this summer, for instance.  Also, there are men as well as women who serve as our faculty members on our retreats. The anthology that several members of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop are editing, CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, also has a balanced representation of genders.

When we share about our programs, we mostly get positive responses.  However, sometimes we get some strange responses (mainly from male writers) that show a distinctly defensive tone. Could it be that they somehow feel threatened?  Their responses never cease to amuse the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop team.  Recently, we shared about our writing retreats in Paris and Granada on a community forum.  One of the responses was to our Granada Writing Retreat Poster (which prominently features a painting of a female flamenco dancer) from the group moderator (a middle-aged male writer who shall remain un-named). He wrote,

 “Yeah, we do Flamenco dancing here all the time. You don’t need to go to Spain.” Later, there was a sardonic joke about how his “more serious” writers’ group would vote on “whether to have a Flamenco dance-off or to drink beer…I believe the beer vote carried the day.”

There are several problems I have with ridiculing a female Flamenco dancer image.  Is it the figure of a powerful female dancer, or the Romani (Gypsy) heritage that is being mocked?  The commenter assumes that this image cannot be associated with serious writing. What of Lorca and countless other writers who have been inspired by Flamenco and Andalucia?  The thing that strikes me is that this same commenter had nothing to say of the iconography of a lighthouse on our Newport retreat poster or the Eiffel Tower on our Paris retreat poster, which was also posted to the forum.  But the female Romani Flamenco dancer on our Granada poster…for him, this seemed an easy target!  I am going to make a suggestion—one that, I admit, makes an assumption.  I am going to assume that he simply could not process the power of this image, and perhaps it even threatened his limited world view. Yes, the body of a beautiful woman of color dancing can exist in a non-sexualized context—in the context of a serious writing workshop, with serious faculty committed to the writing process.

This same commenter completely wrote-off the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop program, citing a desperate comparison that his writing group was not for the likes of us, not “for aspiring writers” but rather “a real-world writer’s workshop now in its tenth consecutive year, moderated by two professional, multi-credentialed, traditionally published authors. I’m one of the moderators…the other is best-selling author, XX. We meet every Monday evening at 7 PM from 10 PM in XX.”  I immediately saw that this man, this apparently well-established writer (of low-brow thrillers and graphic novels) was feeling defensive!  I thought that perhaps he saw the CWW as a competitor, so I immediately took the higher road and apologized for infringing on his territory, writing “We apologize for the postings. We misunderstood and thought your group was an open platform for the community of writers to post. Just FYI, we are also a professional writers’ workshop that has been meeting regularly for the past eight years and hosting retreats for the past four years, with best-selling faculty members such as David Shields, Kathleen Spivack, and Peter Orner, etc. Please accept our apologies. Now that we understand the nature of your group, we see why posting other opportunities (that may be competition to your model) poses a problem. It won’t happen again! Best regards, Diana Norma and the CWW Team.”

Publically, on the forum, he accepted my apology, but in a private message to me he wrote: “Well…since our workshops focuses on actually producing work rather than retreats, there’s really not that much competition.”  More defensiveness covered in seeming nonchalance. Poor man, I thought. Did he not know what a retreat could do for a writer?  So many of us writers are holders of day jobs, with family responsibilities.  A retreat, as any serious writer would know, can afford the necessary space and time to complete a project and move our writing goals forward.  Many of our writers have finished novels, poetry manuscripts, screenplays, and more on our retreats.

Another male writer ridiculed the yoga component to our retreats, asking, “Why yoga? What does it have to do with writing?” He questioned the seriousness of the workshop, but later expressed that he really wasn’t that flexible.

That being said, I want to be clear that I’m not generalizing about the attitude of all male writers.  Many are sane and perfectly normal human beings, of course.  Some are on our faculty (such as David Shields, Peter Orner, and Steve Aubrey).  We recently had one commenter from another writing group out in Portland who said that they wished their writing group had yoga, like ours, saying “That would probably help us a lot.”

If you’re reading this and thinking…hmm…I need a writing retreat myself, we are offering scholarships to serious writers in three categories (Diversity, Student, and Parent) for our Paris (July 22-30) and Granada Writing Retreats (August 3-10).  Apply at cww.submittable.com

Summer in Paris Writing Retreat

Summer in Granada Writing Retreat

It’s finally here: the deadline for our summer writing retreats.

During the Summer in Paris Writing Retreat, participants will have the opportunity to learn alongside award-winning writers like David Shields (nonfiction, book-length essay), Diana Norma Szokoloyai(poetry, nonfiction), Rita Banerjee (poetry, fiction), and Jessica Reidy(fiction, poetry). Yoga will be led by Elissa Lewis (yoga, meditation).

Classes include:

• Brevity, Collage and Collaboration (3 classes)
• Workshop on the Evocative Object
• Literary Taboo: Playing With the Five Senses
• Anaïs Nin & the Art of Journaling

As part of the Paris retreat, David Shields will also be reading at Shakespeare & Company in Paris on July 23. The retreat is not one to be missed!

***

During the Summer in Granada Writing Retreat, participants will learn from award-winning writers like Peter Orner (fiction, nonfiction), Rita Banerjee (poetry, fiction), Diana Norma Szkoloyai(poetry, nonfiction), and Jessica Reidy (fiction, poetry). Yoga will be led by Elissa Lewis.

The retreat will take place from August 3-10, 2015 at the Hotel Guadalupe. The cost of the retreat is $2950, which includes lodging, craft of writing seminars and writing workshops, yoga classes, room cleaning, and breakfast. Optional add-ons include reiki healing and aromatherapy sessions.

Classes include:

• Storytelling Techniques in Short Fiction & Novels
• A Tiny Survey of Spanish Prose in Translation: From Cervantes to Lorca to Ana Maria Matute to Javiar Cercas…
• Workshop on the Evocative Object
• Literary Taboo: Playing With the Five Senses
• Your Voice
• Flamenco: Rhythm as Meaning in Poetry & Prose
• Lorca’s Gypsies: Blood of the Archetype

Apply by midnight tonight at cww.submittable.com.