Day 4 in Photos

Our Breakfast


Our Painters and Writers



Our Shoppers


Our Flora and Fauna

Day 3: Gayle Marano-Brown's "Sunset Haven"

As the brilliant warm day gives way to dusk, we watch with rapt wonder the soulful Jamaican sunsets -- each glorious, all encompassing, and beyond awe. The azure Caribbean Sea is lit with gold, orange, yellow, and pink, while cloud formations appear to paint the sky. Doesn't this beauty abound all over the globe, you might ask.

Yah, mon, but Jamaica's got the edge on Soul. Especially at the Calabash House.

by Gayle Marano-Brown

Day 2: Up the Black River

Flora




This is such a wonderful experience! Challenging writing workshops in the mornings and wonderful adventures in the afternoons. Our group is so energizing because everyone brings such rich personal histories with them and as we share with each other, I find myself inspired to dig deeper and to write better. Then, the fun and laughter of our excursions --- walking down the road to the little shop for sodas, boating across the seas to the Black River with crocodiles and egrets to admire along the way --- dinners around the long table on the back veranda with the sound of the waves washing the shores behind us --- my senses are full and I feel myself letting go of all the tensions of work and responsibility. Watching Flora, our companion dog this afternoon in the launch as we cruised the Black River, her nose high and ears forward, eagerly searching the banks for crocodiles, made me realize how much I need to live more in the moment, how we all must relish every second that we have on this earth. And it's only Tuesday! I can't wait to see what Wednesday brings! Thank you Tracy, Liz, and Sara. You said it would be great and it really, truly, is.

--Nancy Shumaker

From the Grandiosa Hotel

After a relaxing night in Montego Bay, today we head to Calabash House for a wonderful week of Writing, Writing, Writing.

It's All Good

July ATB Reading at Wonderments Wine Shop, Findley Lake, NY.


I'm on Jekyll Island at the moment, and it is a mess. Heavy equipment zips across Beachview Drive to complete The Great Dunes Park in a timely manner. There is planting of palms and pines galore, and our very small shopping district is being torn down to make way for a newer, classier one. The entry onto the island is being re-routed in a semi-circular fashion, and the shops, businesses, and our local P.O. are being stuffed into mobile, metal housing for the duration of our progress. At least they face the ocean.

For as much grumbling as we may do, we all trust that every bit of improvement will be well worth the wait. It will live up to the new slogan for Jekyll's siege of construction: It's All Good.

Right now I'm feeling much the same way about Around the Block. The dust is flying around us, too, at the moment. Except for that brief wondrous week or weekend when we come together and meet up with real live students, Liz, Tracy, and I are always in three different places, doing three different things in three different ways. This fall Tracy has taken on a very special teaching assignment in California, and Liz and I will be doing our stints of Around the Block without her. Which requires a little shifting around, a little moving, a few more orange construction cones.

Here's the plan: Liz will have the month of September to work with you all, and I will have November. In October, Liz will spend the first two weeks with what she calls her Digging Deeper Project -- encouraging you to look at your work in a new way. In the last two weeks, I will encourage you to loosen up, to write in short, fast, bursts before we move onto to longer pieces of work. We think it will be fun.

We look forward to having Tracy back with ATB in the Spring, and --before then-- to spending a fabulous week in Jamaica with you, our real live students. Just take a look at these happy faces from our July Reading in Findley Lake and tell us it's not ALL good. We dare you.

A Week in July

Here's our daily schedule for Around the Block in Findley Lake:

Please note: The following classes meet at Hazen Manor from 1 to 3 p.m.

Monday, July 19th with Tracy Robert
Confession: Creating Drama in Your Narrative

We’ve all committed crimes of a greater or lesser nature. (Oh, come on. You know you’ve at least contemplated them.) Learn how confession makes for compelling characters and narrative tension, and don’t worry. What happens at Hazen Manor stays at Hazen Manor.

Tuesday, July 20th with Sara Kay Rupnik
The Natural Approach: Using Nature in Memoir and Fiction

As readers, we expect memoir and fiction to include a visual world of trees and flowers and maybe a birdsong or two, but as writers we struggle to decide when the description of nature is too much or simply not enough. What bearing might an old elm tree, for example, have on the story you are sharing with your reader? Today we will discuss nature writing before slipping touches of nature into your own narratives.


Wednesday, July 21st with Liz Abrams-Morley
Honing the Image: The Process of Discovery

Many terrific poems and stories begin with a moment or picture that haunts us as writers and as human beings. We learn what we are thinking and feeling about that picture when we write it down, write from it, and see where it leads us. We'll work today from image to awareness, practicing a process which will help us to stay loose, to let the work unfold and to subvert the tendency we all have to cut off possibilities by over-controlling the movement of a poem or story.

Thursday, July 22nd with Tracy, Sara, Liz
Wooing the Muse, Part I

Do you have trouble getting started or being inspired?
Learn how Ad Copy, Words of Wonderment, and Writing What You Don’t Know can lead you into the composing mode. You may attend one or both of the “muse” classes (see below).

Friday, July 23 with Tracy, Sara, Liz
Wooing the Muse, Part II

Inspiration is tough; you need all the tools at your disposal.
Tools like Books of Questions, Epigraphs, and Greeting Cards are surprisingly complementary to the writing process. You may attend this class in addition
to Part I (see above) or exclusive of it.

In Defense of Keepsakes

Watching A&E’s reality show, “Hoarders,” is precisely like watching the proverbial train wreck. It is gruesome and gory and filled with pathos, but I cannot turn it off. The premise is always the same: we hear the traumatic history of the homeowner as we tour the house, every room crammed to the ceiling with incidental, useless articles of furniture, clothing, printed materials, outdated food, odd bits of machinery, and an occasional dead animal. Often there are collections such as imported beer cans or Peanuts comic strips, and, in some of the more unsavory habitats, garbage is strewn everywhere. With no passageways through the mess, the hoarders climb like mountain goats to venture from kitchen to bedroom. The one cleared seat is invariably in front of the television, and the bathrooms are universally appalling. Then the therapists and the clean-up crews arrive, and the real drama begins.

What turns the tale and rivets me to this program is the revelation that hoarders are generally well-educated professionals, men and women who are successful and intelligent and yet have the compulsion to save every iota from their lives. To save what they have and also buy more to add to their stash. I myself am a saver, the keeper of my family’s past, and I relate totally to those tearful individuals who cannot part with a greeting card or a teddy bear or an article of clothing because it is associated with a particular memory. “But you have the memory,” the therapist always says to the hoarder clinging to her grandmother’s quilt or her daughter’s first baby shoes. “You don’t need to keep this.”

I’m not so sure. What has become of the notion of preserving memories through items passed on to us from our ancestors: the lock of hair or the pressed flower or the letters of a loved one? As a writer, I worry that we are becoming too easily dismissive of the very things that spark our senses, our imagination, our wonder about people who lived in different times and different places. And what of the next generation of writers, bereft of tactile prompts like hand woven fabrics or handwritten letters or even so much as an email to hold in their hands? What will they have to say about us?

I admit that “Hoarders” has made me a more cautious saver, and while I feel virtuous with every bag of old things I haul off to Goodwill, I have also begun to consider the merit of labeling what I keep. By recording the name of the quilter and the year of her creation or the significance of the people and the place in the 1942 photo, I will be saving an artifact rather than a mere piece of trash. I will be leaving a legacy for tomorrow’s storytellers.