2015 NYS Summer Writers Institute Reading Series

The Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore in Saratoga will run from July 29 through July 24.

All readings are at 8PM in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall, Skidmore College, 815 N. Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866.

For more information:   518-580-5000, info@skidmore.edu

Picture:  Claire Messud

 

JUNE 29: Non-fiction reading by Phillip Lopate and fiction reading by Linda Spalding.

JUNE 30: Fiction reading by Francine Prose and fiction reading by Caryl Phillips.

JULY 1: Fiction reading by Michael Ondaajte and poetry reading by Campbell McGrath.

JULY 2: Poetry reading by Charles Simic and fiction reading by Howard Norman.

JULY 3: Fiction reading by Claire Messud and fiction reading by Elizabeth Benedict.

JULY 6: Poetry reading by Carolyn Forche and fiction reading by Victoria Redel.

JULY 7: Poetry reading by Frank Bidart and fiction reading by Rivka Galchen.

JULY 8: Fiction reading by Mary Gaitskill and non-fiction reading by Honor Moore.

JULY 9: Fiction reading by Joseph O'Neill and fiction reading by Joanna Scott.

JULY 10: Fiction reading by Joyce Carol Oates.

JULY 13: Fiction reading by Amy Hempel and fiction reading by William Kennedy.

JULY 14: Fiction reading by Ann Beattie and poetry reading by Tom Healy.

JULY 15: Fiction reading by Rick Moody and poetry reading by Lloyd Schwartz.

JULY 16: Non-fiction reading by Nick Flynn and fiction reading by Adam Braver.

JULY 17: Poetry reading by Robert Pinsky poetry reading by Peg Boyers.

JULY 20: Fiction reading by Cristina Garcia and poetry reading by Wayne Koestenbaum.

JULY 21:Fiction reading by Russell Banks and poetry reading by Chase Twichell.

JULY 22: Non-fiction reading by Laura Kipnis and non-fiction reading by Jim Miller.

JULY 23: Fiction reading by Jamaica Kincaid and poetry reading by Henri Cole.

JULY 24: Fiction reading by Paul Harding and fiction reading by Binnie Kirshenbaum.

Read More......

Spring Writing Workshops with James Lasdun

NYS Writers Institute Announces Spring 2014 Community Writing Workshops Open to the Public

New York State Writers Institute Fellow and award-winning author James Lasdun will conduct two creative writing workshops for community writers during the spring 2014 semester. Lasdun, a fiction and nonfiction writer, poet, and screenwriter, will offer two eight-week workshops: one on fiction writing, and one on poetry. The workshops are offered for non-credit and will be held at the University at Albany's uptown campus. Admission to both workshops is based on the submission of writing samples. Complete information on the workshops and submission guidelines may be obtained by calling the Institute at 518-442-5620 or by visiting the Institute's website at:

http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/workshop.html

Fiction Writing Workshop

The Fiction Writing Workshop (starting March 6) will focus on detailed discussion of students' work but there will also be readings from published novels, novellas, and short stories. These will range from the classic to the contemporary, and will be selected with a view to broadening the discussion of topics such as character, plot, style and form, as they arise. Participants will be expected to be strongly self-motivated and to submit two works of up to twenty pages each over the course of the semester. These may be short stories or excerpts from longer works.

Poetry Writing Workshop

The Poetry Writing Workshop (starting March 5) is for self-motivated students who already have some writing experience, and is intended to give participants an opportunity to develop and revise poems within a context of constructive peer-group criticism. Course work will concentrate on students' writing, but will also include close reading of selected texts with a view to discussing specific aspects of the art of poetry, such as voice, metaphor, and the relation of style to subject. Participants will be expected to submit up to ten pages of poetry every second week.

Read More......

Anti-sentimental romance fiction, tomorrow

Binnie Kirshenbaum, who reads at Skidmore tomorrow, July 4th, is celebrated for depictions of romantic love relationships in fiction that are never idealized and anything but sentimental.

Here's the Daily Beast on her most recent novel, The Scenic Route (2009):

“.... Binnie Kirshenbaum’s clever, offbeat novel The Scenic Route is an antidote to all that soft-focus sentiment. This is indeed a woman-has-midlife-crisis-and-finds-romance-in-Italy story, but it is so resolutely unsentimental, even antisentimental, that you won’t be dialing Alitalia anytime soon. Instead of escapist fantasy, narrator Sylvia Landsman offers a reality check, sobering truths about family, regret, loss, history—in fact, she provides commentary on all kinds of subjects..... Just about the only thing she doesn’t serve up is a happy ending.”
—The Daily Beast

Kirshenbaum shares the stage with award-winning poet, Frank Bidart.

Full schedule of free summer events:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/sumread.html

Kirshenbaum also chairs the Writing Department at Columbia University School of the Arts: http://arts.columbia.edu/faculty/binnie-kirshenbaum

Read More......

Ann Beattie, Asking Questions Without Answers

Ann Beattie, major novelist who reads to you tomorrow in Saratoga, tells the Paris Review in a 2011 interview:  "It took me years and years to realize a very simple thing, which is that when you write fiction you’re raising questions, and a lot of people think you’re playing a little game with them and that actually you know the answers to the questions. They read your question. They don’t know how to answer correctly. And they think that if they could only meet you personally and look into your eyes, you could give them the answers."

"At readings I’m quite often speechless, actually. I am really very happy that I am striking a nerve. But it’s when they take it a step further and think that I have the salve for the nerve I’ve hit, or that I have personally lived through that myself, and that therefore we have a common bond, ­because they have also lived through that—then I begin to realize that what is ­between me and other people isn’t kinship, but a kind of a gulf."

The New York State Summer Writers Institute presents Ann Beattie tomorrow, Wednesday, July 3rd.

All readings are at 8:00 p.m. in Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, and are free and open to the public.

Full interview:  http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6070/the-art-of-fiction-no-209-ann-beattie

Full schedule of readings:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/sumread.html

Read More......

Summer Writers Institute in Saratoga

 

We invite you to attend the following FREE events:

SUMMER PUBLIC READING LIST 2013
All Readings are at 8:00 p.m. in the Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, Skidmore College, 815 N Broadway, Saratoga Springs
Free and open to the public

For more information, contact the Skidmore Office of the Dean of Special Programs at 518-580-5593 or summerwriters@skidmore.edu.

JULY 1
Poetry and Fiction Reading
Campbell McGrath (poet, American Noise) and Elizabeth Benedict (novelist, Almost) (novelist, The Practice of Deceit; Almost)

JULY 2
Fiction Reading
Paul Auster (author, The Brooklyn Follies) and Siri Hustvedt (novelist, What I Loved)

JULY 3
Fiction and Poetry Reading
Ann Beattie (novelist, Love Always) and Robert Polito (poet, Hollywood and God)

JULY 4
Poetry and Fiction Reading
Frank Bidart (poet, Metaphysical Dog) and Binnie Kirshenbaum (novelist, The Scenic Route)

JULY 5
Poetry Reading
Robert Pinsky (former Poet Laureate)

JULY 8
Fiction Reading
Phillip Lopate (author, Portrait Inside My Head) and Adam Braver (novelist,Misfit)

JULY 9
Poetry and Fiction Reading
Rosanna Warren (poet, Ghost In A Red Hat) and Paul Harding (Pulitzer Prize, novel Tinkers)

JULY 10
Fiction Reading
Bharati Mukherjee (novelist, Miss New India) and Clark Blaise (novelist, The Meagre Tarmac)

JULY 11
Fiction and Poetry Reading
Claire Messud (novelist, The Woman Upstairs) and Jorie Graham (Pulitzer Prize; author, Dream of the Unified Field)

JULY 12
Fiction Reading
Joyce Carol Oates (National Book Award, them; We Were The Mulvaneys)

JULY 15
Amy Hempel (fictionist, The Dog of the Marriage) and Honor Moore (memoirist,TheBishop’s Daughter)

JULY 16
Fiction and Poetry Reading
Russell Banks (novelist, The Darling) and Chase Twichell (poet, Dog Language)

JULY 17
Fiction and Poetry Reading
Rick Moody (fictionist, Demonology) and Tom Healy (poet, What the Left Hand Knows)

JULY 18
Non-Fiction and Poetry Reading
Mark Strand (Pulitzer Prize, Poetry) and Peg Boyers (poet, Honey with Tobacco, Hard Bread)

JULY 19
Fiction Reading
William Kennedy (Pulitzer Prize, Ironweed; Roscoe)

JULY 22
Mary Gaitskill (novelist, Veronica) and Jane Shore (poet, That Said)

JULY 23
Fiction and Poetry Reading
Jamaica Kincaid (novelist, See Now Then) and Henri Cole (poet, Middle Earth)

JULY 24
Poetry and Fiction Reading
Charles Simic (Former Poet-Laureate, Pulitzer Prize, New & Selected Poems) and Linda Spalding (novelist, The Purchase)

JULY 25
Fiction Reading
Michael Ondaatje (Booker Prize, The English Patient) and Howard Norman (novelist-memoirist, I Hate To Leave This Beautiful Place)

JULY 26
Poetry and Non-Fiction Reading
Richard Howard (Pulitzer Prize, Poetry, Talking Cures) and Jim Miller (Democracy is in the Streets)

 

 

 

Read More......

Lydia Davis Will Teach Here Again in the Fall of 2013!

Lydia Davis, winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize, will teach a free Community
Writers Workshop at the NYS Writers Institute in the fall of 2013! The workshop is open to the general public on a competitive basis.

Previous winners of the prize have included Philip Roth, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe and Ismail Kadare.

Here's some video of Lydia from a 2010 talk at the Institute: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7rPWVS8MT0

More on Lydia and her prize:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/davis_lydia13.html

Read More......

Literature as Self-Defense-- James Lasdun

 

James Lasdun, who speaks at a newly added Writers Institute event at UAlbany, Wed. 4/24, in the
Standish Room, Sci Lib, uptown, is interviewed in  The Millions about his new memoir of being stalked by a writing student.

Lasdun, a fellow at the Writers Institute, currently teaches two free, noncredit writing workshops for members of the community-at-large at the Institute.

From The Millions: http://www.themillions.com/2013/02/literature-as-self-defense-an-interview-with-james-lasdun.html

"James Lasdun’s new book, Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked, is a memoir about an experience that is in fact still ongoing. In 2003, he taught a course in creative writing at a college in New York. His most gifted student was an Iranian-born woman in her early 30s, who was writing a novel based on her family’s experiences living in Iran under the shah. In 2005, the woman – whom he calls “Nasreen” – emailed Lasdun to announce that she had finished a draft of her book; although he was too busy to read it at the time, he was confident enough in her talent to recommend her to his agent. They emailed back and forth, and an online friendship began to develop. Nasreen’s correspondence began to intensify, however – to become stranger and more aggressively seductive – and so Lasdun, a happily married man, ceased to respond. The book is an exploration of the effects of this relationship turning sour, as Nasreen continued to hound him online, her emails becoming increasingly hate-filled and anti-Semitic. A major aspect of her psychological guerrilla warfare involved direct attacks on his reputation, accusing him online (in Wikipedia entries, Amazon reviews, in comment sections of his articles) of sexual harassment and plagiarism. Give Me Everything You Have is a harrowing account of what it’s like to have someone expend a great deal of time and energy on the project of damaging your life for no immediately obvious reason. It’s also a beautifully written and digressively essayistic exploration of anti-Semitism, travel, literature, and the mysteriously ramifying effects people have on each other."

Read More......

Jamaica Kincaid and Writers Institute in NYT

The New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore is mentioned in a New York Times profile of Jamaica Kincaid-- though not by name!

"When Ms. Kincaid read from the book last summer at a writers’ institute at Skidmore College, the mostly student audience peppered her with questions about 'whether the novel is a suitable vehicle for working through the personal this or that,' said Robert Boyers, the director of the institute."

Read more in the Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/books/jamaica-kincaid-isnt-writing-about-her-life-she-says.html?src=recg

Read More......

On Men and Violence

Read Mary Gaitskill's short story, "The Other Place," about men and obsessions with violence in last year's Valentine's Day issue of the New Yorker:

"My son, Douglas, loves to play with toy guns. He is thirteen. He loves video games in which people get killed. He loves violence on TV, especially if it’s funny. How did this happen? The way everything does, of course. One thing follows another, naturally."

More.

Gaitskill will share the stage with poet Tom Healy, tonight, Wednesday, July 25th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga. Free.

Click here for more events in the series. All are free and open to the general public.

Read More......

Binnie Kirshenbaum Reads Monday 7/23

"A tremendous talent. Her novels are sexy, intelligent, complex, and provocative; they press against your heart the way old lovers do." — Junot Diaz

"Not many young female novelists can deal with sex, the appetite for it, and the loss of such appetite, with such candor, lack of self-protection, and humor as Binnie Kirshenbaum." — Norman Mailer

"...Kirshenbaum, the prolific writer of novels and stories written with wit and serious moral concern...is a presence to be reckoned with. One of her charms is that vestigial ladylike manner of a young woman who deports herself properly, aims for grace....(A) novelist of enormous cultural reach....the voice of a writer, known, or on the endless journey to knowing herself." — Maureen Howard

Kirshenbaum, who is also Chairperson of the Writing Program at Columbia University School of the Arts, will share the stage with award-winning memoirist and novelist Darrin Strauss, Monday,  July 203rd, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga. Free.

Click here for more events in the series. All are free and open to the general public.

Read More......

Danzy Senna, Author Who Explores Multiracial Experience

Multiracial author Danzy Senna is the daughter of African-American scholar Carl Senna and white author Fanny Howe. Her fiction frequently explores the experience of being biracial, the ambiguity of race, and the absurdity of defining race.

Click here to read an interview last year with the Times Union's Elizabeth Floyd Mair:

"In the liberal white world, what's sometimes hardest for me is the earnestness around race. It doesn't have that quality of irony and humor that I feel when I'm in a group of people who are of color--that ease of humor."

Senna will read today with former U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic, Tuesday, July 17th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga.

 

All events in the series are free and open to the general public.

Read More......

Former US Poet Laureate Charles Simic tomorrow

Charles Simic reads tomorrow at Skidmore with writer Danzy Senna.

His 1999 poem, "Fork," was featured last week in a Slate article on the peculiar history of that utensil.

This strange thing must have crept  

Right out of hell.

It resembles a bird’s foot

Worn around the cannibal’s neck.

As you hold it in your hand,

As you stab with it into a piece of meat,

It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:  

Its head which like your fist

Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.

Tuesday, July 17th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga.

All events in the series are free and open to the general public.

Read More......

The Dark Lady of American Letters, This Friday

Joyce Carol Oates, a towering figure of contemporary fiction, and a favorite to win the Nobel Prize for a quarter century, and a regular visitor to the New York State Summer Writers Institute, will speak on Friday the 13th of July in Saratoga. 8PM, free and open to the public, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs.

All events in the series are free and open to the general public

Her most recent book is The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares: Novellas and Stories of Unspeakable Dread (2011).

Publishers Weekly said, "The seven stories in this stellar collection from the prolific Oates (Give Me Your Heart) may prompt the reader to turn on all the lights or jump at imagined noises.... This volume burnishes Oates’s reputation as a master of psychological dread."

Read More......

Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt tonight in Saratoga

Noted literary couple Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt [pictured here] will share the stage tonight at a reading for the New York State Summer Writers Institute, Skidmore College, 8PM, free and open to the public, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs.

All events in the series are free and open to the general public.

Auster's new memoir, Winter Journal, was just named by Huffington Post Books as one of the 11 Best Summer Books of 2012:

"Paul Auster's second memoir is surprisingly uncomplicated, except for the fact that it jumps around chronologically, and is written in the second person - which gives the book a sense of being spoken out loud, while staring into the mirror. Moments in Auster's life are arranged in interesting ways, such as an annotated list of all the houses he's ever lived in, and it's never less than readable." More.

Hustvedt's new essay collection Living Thinking Looking receives a rave in today's London Independent:

"Seeing is creating, for Hustvedt, and the meditations collected here amount to a lucid, absorbing and vigorous exploration of how we engage with the physical world, with art and with memory."  More.

Read More......

Louise Glück and Caryl Phillips Tonight, July 3rd

Louise Glück, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for Poetry, and Caryl Phillips [pictured here], novelist, A Distant Shore; Dancing in the Dark; In the Falling Snow, will read tonight at Skidmore, 8PM, free and open to the public, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs.

All events in the series are free and open to the general public.

In a review in The New Republic, the critic Helen Vendler wrote: "Louise Glück is a poet of strong and haunting presence. Her poems, published in a series of memorable books over the last twenty years, have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither 'confessional' nor 'intellectual' in the usual senses of those words."

"Caryl Phillips was born in St.Kitts and came to Britain at the age of four months. He grew up in Leeds, and studied English Literature at Oxford University.... He was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1992 and was on the 1993 Granta list of Best of Young British Writers. His literary awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and Britain's oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for Crossing the River which was also shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. A Distant Shore won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize; Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN/Beyond the Margins Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.... A regular contributor to The Guardian and The New Republic, his latest book, Colour Me English - Selected Essays, was published in July 2011."

Read More......

Tonight in Saratoga: Liz Benedict and Phillip Lopate

The Summer Writers Institute reading series at Skidmore begins tonight with a dual reading by Elizabeth Benedict (pictured here) and Phillip Lopate at 8PM in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs. All events in the series are free and open to the general public.

"Phillip Lopate is considered by many to be one of the most important essayists of our time, a writer and editor at the fulcrum of memoir's resurgence who has contributed significantly to discourse on creative nonfiction. The anthology Lopate edited in 1994, The Art of the Personal Essay (Doubleday), helped contextualize the genre as part of a global tradition dating back to the classical period." (Poets & Writers, May 2008).

Benedict's novels have established her reputation as a writer who "specializes in the subterranean currents of modern relationships, the secret motivations and betrayals that underlie everyday interactions." Hallie Ephron in the Boston Globe called her most recent novel, The Practice of Deceit, "a wickedly funny literary suspense novel" that is "wry, at times heartbreaking, always smart and entertaining."Newsday's reviewer said that Benedict's "wit is as sharp as her eye, and twice as fast. She writes the hard, horrifying truth about human nature, and it is addictively entertaining." Fresh Air's Maureen Corrigan chose her previous novel, the bestseller Almost, as one of her top five novels of 2001.

Read More......

Mentors Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives

"A mesmerizing book of essays by famous pens who themselves were once helped -- or hurt -- by established talents as they tried to climb their way up the literary ladder. [Mentors, Muses & Monsters] beautifully captures the experience of being a literary aspirant -- wide-eyed, enchanted by words, and eager for the tutelage of a mentor -- one who's already scaled the temple wall and emerged, shining, in a turret." -- The Christian Science Monitor

The featured text of the Summer Young Writers Institute at Skidmore this year will be Summer Institute faculty member Elizabeth Benedict's Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives, reissued in a new paperback edition by SUNY Press in February 2012.

Read More......

Sneak Preview: 2012 Summer Instititute Reading Schedule

The New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College announces its summer 2012 schedule of free public readings:

All Events begin at 8 PM in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway Saratoga Springs, NY 12866

July 2: Phillip Lopate (non-fiction) & Elizabeth Benedict (fiction)

July 3: Louise Gluck (poetry) & Caryl Phillips (fiction)

July 4: Allan Gurganus (fiction) & Campbell McGrath (poetry)

July 5: Paul Auster (fiction) & Siri Hustvedt (fiction)

July 6: Joanna Scott (fiction) & James Longenbach (poetry)

July 9: Frank Bidart (poetry) & Claire Messud (fiction)

July 10: Jorie Graham (poetry) & Victoria Redel (fiction)

July 11: Rosanna Warren (poetry) & Margot Livesey (fiction)

July 12: Russell Banks (fiction) & Chase Twichell (poetry)

July 13: Joyce Carol Oates (fiction)

July 16: Mark Strand (poetry) & Honor Moore (non-fiction)

July 17: Charles Simic (poetry) & Danzy Senna (fiction)

July 18: William Kennedy (fiction)

July 19: Ann Beattie (fiction) & Peg Boyers (poetry)

July 20: Amy Hempel (fiction) & Richard Howard (poetry)

July 23: Darin Strauss (non-fiction) & Binnie Kirshenbaum (fiction)

July 24: Jamaica Kincaid (fiction) & Henri Cole (poetry)

July 25: Mary Gaitskill (fiction) & Tom Healy (poetry)

July 26: Rick Moody (fiction) & Francine Prose (fiction

July 27: SPECIAL Panel Discussion: Writers On The Presidential Election

       With Katha Pollitt, Jim Miller & Robert Boyers

Read More......

Our Summer Program for Teen Writers

The next session of the New York State Summer Young Writers Institute will be held July 1-7, 2012.

2011 participants in the Summer Young Writers Institute for teenage authors write about their experiences:

"This was my first time away from my parents, so I was kind of nervous, and I wasn't sure I was going to make friends, but I did, despite being somewhat socially awkward. From all different parts of the country, everyone was friendly talented and unique." --Cynthia Gerber

"This past week I have learned to open up to others about my writing whether I was confident about my piece or not.... It's truly amazing how passionate we all are about writing and it's clear how tightly woven by this passion we are." --Erin Carden

"The instructors here, instead of pushing a set curriculum, help to build upon the students' creations, turning ideas into works of art." --Matteo Mobilio

Read More......

Storytellers Gathered Around a Fire

Reflecting in yesterday's Times Union on the highlights of the local arts scene during the

year past, TU Arts & Entertainment Editor Michael Janairo talked about his experiences as a student in a prose workshop offered by the Writers Institute and taught by Writer-in-Residence Jo Page.

"Our gatherings often called to mind what I think of as an archetypal image: ancient storytellers gathered around a roaring fire, leaning forward with their backs to the cold, dark unknown, and sharing tales of their days and the days of yore."

More.

Read More......