Intern’s Report: Young Writers’ Camp

Ed. note: Our trusty intern Laurel Smith is back, reporting on the events of last week’s camp, run by the supersonic Amanda Rea. Here’s what Laurel had to say.

One of our young writers on the town

For five days young writers sailed the seas of creativity. They wrote their way through brainstorms of poetry and survived the resulting flash fiction. On Friday the Lighthouse guided them to the shores of the Platte River where they disembarked their crazy adventure at the Tattered Cover, reunited with their parents and stood up to tell a packed room of curious onlookers about their voyage. But before they could tell us about the fruits of the Sea of Creativity they had a bit more writing to do.

            Around forty kids went out into the heart of Downtown Denver looking for what inspires them. I was lucky enough to be taken aboard by the fifth and six graders. They watched people walking their dogs, noted the alarming amount of black spots on the sidewalk from chewing gum, and investigated the simmering smell of hotdogs. They turned these observations into poetry and stories, most of which I swear are better than the stuff I’ve read in intro to creative writing classes that I took in college. 

The inspiration for Laurel's nautical metaphors?

            They wrote and read their stories to each other. They even begged for more when a writer stopped short of the end. They would huddle around as she scribbled a few more words on a page, taking note of every waft of the hand and scrunch of the nose, like they were watching a sporting event.

            When their time to speak came, they took the microphone and the room came to a hush as everyone tried to grasp onto every word of their thrilling stories. Parents looked at their children proudly and instructors beamed with satisfaction and I realized the tables had turned. They were the ones teaching us. They showed us the endless possibility of young minds and what it means to be inspired. Shari Caudron, who worked with the high school students, even sent along a message that her students restored her faith in teenagers.

At the end of the event, they beamed with pride holding onto their writing framed and behind glass and left with their parents.

Young writers read at Tattered Cover in front of an audience of over 100

 Do all good things have to come to an end? I asked myself. I saw students clutching onto notebooks packed with blank pages waiting to be filled. Students lined up to hug their instructors and say goodbye. I saw a fifth-grader give cheeky wink followed by a wave. “See you next year,” she said.

End? No, this is only the beginning. I bet in a few years we will even see some of our high students back to sail the seas of creativity and teach young writers just like them what it means to love writing.

 

Cheers,
Laurel Janeen Smith

 

Intern’s Report: Zee party

Ed. note: Once again, our trusty intern Laurel Janeen Smith is on the case, this time chatting up the final Lit Fest party. Next up is the report from the Business weekend, where no one was spotted crying this year. Thanks, Laurel!

What better way to mourn the ending of Lit Fest than a garden party with two open bars? Well I suppose we could have had a garden party with two open bars, a live circus and Mike in a clown suit… Andrea, are you getting this down for next year? Nevertheless, even without circus performers, Saturday night’s party rocked with good food, good conversation and some of the most aggressive mingling I have ever seen.

If there is one thing Lighthouse members have in common (besides being writers, of course) it is that they like to talk. I came to the party not knowing anyone besides a few people I had met in workshops, but I found myself chatting with dozens of people. Every time I found myself standing alone, even if it was just for a moment, someone would swoop in, grab me by the shoulder and ask me a thousand questions like: what am I doing at the Lighthouse, how do I like it, what kind of writing do I do, what do I study at school, what am I passionate about, where did I come from, where am I going and what is my life philosophy? Whew, I never imagined the Lighthouse crowd would be more exhausting than my college friends.

Mike Henry doing the poet's softshoe at Lit Fest farewell.

If there is one thing I learned at the soiree, it’s that as soon as you step inside the Ferril, the Lighthouse will grab you by the right hand (or left if you’re a lefty) and won’t let go until your passions are sparked, your writing is improved and you’ve learned a little bit about the biz. Even after all that you will be lucky to get away. The Lighthouse is a community that looks out for all its members. It supports us, and keeps us going when the writing is hard, and let’s face it, its always hard.  

One great symbol of the Lighthouse community was presented at the Litfest closing party. The Beacon Award represents the great partnership and mutual appreciation between students and faculty, and the skills, support and inspiration that a faculty member graciously shares with his/her students. A committee of board members and Lighthouse members decides the award recipient based on essays written by students. Selections of these essays were read, and they were powerful, showing not only what great writers we have, but also how much they have gained from the Lighthouse faculty. 

The 2008 award was announced first. It was supposed to be awarded in April but we had that freak spring snowstorm so not too many made it to the award ceremony. So in true Lighthouse fashion in front of students, faculty, board members and New York agents and editors, Bill Henderson was re-awarded the Beacon Award.

Following Bill, the Lighthouse board awarded Alexandre Philippe the 2009 Beacon award. As Alexandre took the microphone and accepted the award, his voice caught and Andrea was brought to tears, which spurred Alexandre’s tears. Soon everyone was sniffling. These people are family, and they are so happy to have each other, I thought.   

After the award ceremony it was back to the hanging around the bars, meeting new faces and sharing smiles and stories.

I snuck out just after the sun set and people were dispersing. I waved goodbye to the Lighthouse community happy to be apart of it. Bring it on out world. I’ve got Lighthouse by my side now.

Cheers,
Laurel

 

Intern Report on the Salon: The Niche

Our super talented intern Laurel Janeen Smith is back at it, and getting saucier as she goes. For those of you who missed the final party, she’s got a blog slated for that as well…  Thanks, all, for making this the biggest, best Lit Fest ever.

Carleen Brice, Mario Acevedo, and William Haywood Henderson speak to a narrow room about narrow categories.

Andrea opened up the salon with a very controversial question: Is it niche (nitch) or niche (neesh)? The audience was split which surprised me because we all know its niche (nitch) right? This was not the only unanswered question of the evening. I myself left the Wynkoop brewery wondering if the advantages of having niche outweigh the often pain in the ass expectations it can bring with it. 

We all just want to write, but in this day and age writers are expected to help with the marketing of their own books. Putting a book in a niche helps to market to a very specific audience that is more likely to be interested in the book than if it was marketed to the masses. But as writers we don’t to want to write to fit a formula, we just want to write what compels and obsesses us.

The salon In and Out of the Niche featured three panelists who have all been niched and lived to tell about it.  Author Carleen Brice’s niche has less to do with her writing, and more do to do with the fact that she’s black. She writes fiction, a lot of which, according to her readers, has nothing to do with race. Sill her books are usually found snuggled in the black author section of bookstores.

Mario Acevedo, accomplished vampire writer and president of the local chapter of Mystery Writers of America, almost suffered the same fate as Carleen, only instead of the black shelf, he was destined for the Latino shelf via his imprint, Rayo. Fortunately, after trial and error Mario’s publishers realized Latino readers, even though they are Latino, don’t look for vampire books in the Latino section and Mario ended up being more appropriately categorized as “urban fantasy.”    

Bill Henderson’s self-described niche is gay/straight/western/woman’s/cowboy/historical/landscape, whatever that means. When Bill went on to publish his first book he had the choice of what bookshelf it would end up on. A small press and a gay publishing company were both interested but he went with the gay press because they had more money. The book wasn’t exactly a typical gay novel, it just happened to have one gay character.     

The authors all found creative ways to either get past their niche or embrace it. Carleen embraced it creating the blog White Readers Meet Black Authors which includes a very funny video officially welcoming white folks like me to the black author section of the bookstore. This way Carleen is able to keep her key marketing group and appeal to a wider audience. Mario took a less subtle approach to getting past his niche with his book titles. Anyone browsing titles like The Undead Kama Sutra, Jailbait Zombie and The Nymphos of Rocky Flats knows that they can’t be just your average vampire stories. Mario does admit that his book titles keep him out of high school libraries but who cares; they’re brilliant. Bill’s approach to escaping the niche is probably the simplest: he just keeps writing what he loves to write. His second book had no gay characters in it and is set in the West, but is not a western and publishers had a hard time categorizing it and that’s just the way it should be. Bill sometimes regrets going to the gay press for his first book, but in the end does it matter? Bill is a successful writer, great teacher and writes what he wants. Enough for me.

Whether or not taking on the niche is right for you I don’t know, I think that’s a rather personal question. All our panelists did it and managed to not be too constrained by it. Bill wrote two books after is first “gay” novel, neither of which are “gay.” Mario has considered the young adult genre and Carleen is looking at doing a graphic novel.

Keep up with these guys because I expect we will be seeing a lot them in the future. I highly recommend checking out Mario’s Zombie Lego videos . You can catch Bill’s website here.

Cheers,
Laurel

 

Intern’s report: Obsession Salon

Laurel Smith’s back at it: a report on the incredibly entertaining, funny, smart salon on obsession presented by Alexandre O. Philippe (Lighthouse & Cinema Vertige) and Garrett Ammon (Ballet Nouveau Colorado).

Mike Henry, Garrett Ammon and Alexandre Philippe on obsession.

Last night we packed the studio at 910 Arts sipping our beers and munching on sliced meat. Garrett Ammon and Alexandre Philippe provided the evening’s entertainment, delighting us with stories of their obsessions.

Garrett is the artistic director at Ballet Nouveau Colorado and his obsession is, appropriately, dance. Garrett had a childhood of artistic experimentation, trying out choir, only to have the self-realization that he’s not a singer. He moved on to theatre and suffered from stage fright. When he found dance something clicked.

 ”I found a place where I can be me,” he said.

 I think that’s what leads a lot of us to our obsessions. When I was in high school I became obsessed with Rocky Horror Picture Show for that reason. For those of you who don’t know, RHPS is a cult film about alien transvestites. As an awkward teenager who didn’t fit in at school, I loved putting on my fishnets every Saturday night to shout profanities at a movie screen for 90 minutes with my fellow societal outliers. Thank god I grew out of that obsession.  

Alexandre, on the other hand, never grew out of his childhood obsession. He is the creative director at Cinema Vertige and an award winning film director (and the director of screenwriting at Lighthouse!). His obsession is George Lucas. Now this was a little bit difficult for me to understand. I shamefully must admit, I have never seen a Star Wars movie, and had no idea what Alexandre was talking about most of the night. Despite this, by the end of the night Alexandre had me convinced that I too was obsessed with George Lucas.  Passion must be contagious.

Alexandre uses film to express his passion for George Lucas in the documentary The People vs. George Lucas. In creating the documentary he found others that shared his obsession who used their own art mediums, such as puppets, music, Legos and cartoons, to express what it means to be obsessed with George Lucas.

We use art to express our obsessions. Garrett made the move from dancer to choreographer because he had tons of ideas and didn’t know how to express them. Through choreography Garrett explores these ideas, which too end up becoming obsessions. His most recent obsession is our own Mike Henry. Garrett combined Mike’s poetry with dance and music, and from the short clip we all got see, the results were powerful and moving.

Most of us at the Lighthouse are not choreographers or filmmakers but we all have obsessions that drive our work. Here are some of Alexandre and Garrett’s final thoughts on how our obsessions can guide us:

-Don’t write what you know. Write what obsesses you.
-Creative minds have endless ideas, far too many to follow through with in a lifetime. Pick an idea that evokes something that grabs you powerfully enough that you can take the project to completion.
-Finish what you do!
-Collaborate with other writers.

And finally…
-Don’t do like George Lucas.

If you missed last night or if you just need an extra dose of obsession I recommend you check out the book The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp or Episode 30 from This American Life titled obsession.

 Still haven’t gotten enough obsession?  Blog about it. What obsesses you?

Cheers,
Laurel

 

Intern’s report: Writing in Changing times

Ed note: Lighthouse brings on an intern each summer to keep us current and help them see some of the writing world first-hand. This year Brian Kiteley recommended a remarkable young woman named Laurel Smith, who’s a senior at the University of Denver.  Here’s her first report from Lit Fest:

Let me start by introducing myself. I am a 22-year-old writer getting ready to enter the big scary post college world with nothing but a degree in memoir and ambition in hand. Interning at the Lighthouse is the final bridge I will cross before I get my degree, and my last chance to soak up all the knowledge I can to help me survive in the real world.

Last night I went to Lit Fest’s first salon ready to start filling my real world survival kit. I joined a roomful of other writers at the swanky Baurs restaurant with pen, paper and of course a glass of Melbec in hand. Novelist Laura Hendrie began the discussion of writing in the changing times. She spoke of her own experiences and a time when she could survive simply by writing, and how now she has to be part of the real world to make a living doing what most writers including herself dread; math.

Great, I sighed. For me, these aren’t changing times, but rather the only I’ve known and I am entering it knowing that writers who have been successful their entire careers are doing math to pay the bills.

Literary non-fiction writer Harrison Candelaria Fletcher joined Laura in the discussion. Earlier in his life Harrison had the kind of job young graduates like myself can only dream about: he was a columnist, but he quit that job. Wait…What? He had steady income as a writer and he quit. Being the young unemployed writer that I am, this was hard to understand. Harrison went on to explain that he was tired of getting up at 5:30am to go write in his basement. Okay, now that is something I can understand. “You have to separate writing for money and writing for love,” he said.

Great! I exclaimed. I have never been paid for my writing, and I love it. I must be on the right track to becoming a great writer.

For those of you who missed out on the salon or were too busy sipping your martinis to whip out a pen, here are the final tips given by the Laura and Harrison.

Laura’s Tips:
1. Read to find your own standards.
2. Learn to be alone with yourself.
3. Remember you are in the world (not necessarily of it), and should take in all you can.
4. In times of spasm or transition make a record of what you think and feel.
5. Shape everything important to you into writing.
6. Don’t pretend that you’re free of everything around you.
7. Think for yourself. Know what you think and put it out there.

Harrison’s Tips:
1. Subscribe to literary magazines.
2. Join a writing group. This will sustain you when all else fails.
3. Go to readings and support what you do.
4. Buy literature from small bookstores.
5. Write what you want to read.

If you missed last night’s salon, don’t panic. There’s another salon tonight at 8 at 910 Arts (910 Santa Fe Dr.) Tonight’s topic: obsession. Hope to see you there!

Cheers,
Laurel

 

Learning from the utes: An intern’s take on Young Writers

We asked our wonderful summer intern from Smith College, Sara Aboulafia, to give us her take on the third annual Young Writers’ Camp held in early August.  Here’s what she had to say:

I Don’t Want To Grow Up

Young Writers’ Camp 2008

 

Sara Aboulafia

 

 

In nine months I am going to graduate from college, and while I do fear the onset of debt anxiety and career panic, I have no nostalgic longing to return to childhood, especially adolescence. Catty fights with girlfriends, worrying about your outfit’s cool factor, awkward boys breathing down your neck—no, thank you (though, I’ll admit, some of this still manages to stick around). But, that said, I still love being around kids, especially the sort that came to this year’s Young Writers’ Camp 2008.

While I was backstage for most of the Young Writers’ Camp, drilling away at organizing the kids’ writing for their literary Chapbooks—their tours de force of poems, stories, and ruminations—I still got a little glimmer of the spirit of the week. I remembered, suddenly, that kids, though still developing, are full-fledged personalities—ranging from the shy to the quirky and outspoken.

Much of the difference between the kids was a matter of age, and walking around the house, I saw myself

 

Member dispatch: Report from Grand Lake

Check out Lisa Kenney’s wonderfully thorough take on the Grand Lake retreat.

http://eudaemoniaforall.blogspot.com/2008/07/lighthouse-retreat.html

 

Member Dispatch: Lyric Essay from Grand Lake

For those of you who couldn’t make it to Grand Lake this year:

WRITER’S NOTES ON THE LIGHTHOUSE WRITERS RETREAT
GRAND LAKE, COLORADO–JULY 6-11, 2008
by J Diego Frey

Grand Lake meese, photo by Deb Olson

OK, first off,
when I arrive
I am feeling
like
“Way, way too many sweatshirts!”

I will be glad to report
however, that
as the week wears on
this problem
seems to more or less
disappear.

In fact,
I will have come to see
the sweatshirts
as a kind of unifying texture.
An unwritten syllabus, if you will.

(NB: Of course this is just my thinking and it doesn’t represent the thinking of anyone or anything else.)

____
NOTE: Above item applies as well to underpants.

____
Waffles.
Again, there seems
to be a very intentional
repetition
of a theme here.

Waffles every day.
I begin to question
whether I’m attending
the Lighthouse Retreat
or
the Waffle-House one.

That said
I will allow
as much that
A) each waffle does seem to appear
at exactly the right time
during each day
and B) they are
to my knowledge
the best waffles
eaten by bipeds
since the dawn of the long
and crenelated history of waffles.

(NB: This last point has been fact-checked.)

____
Roger claims I snore
like a bull moose.

(NB: Specious.)

____
Much of the conversation
seems to be dominated
by references to characters
who are not actually here
at the retreat.

I hear references to:
“Carlos”
“Yimpi”
“Gussie”
“The ‘Two Jennifers’”
“Scott the Perfect Husband”
“Mike Henry”
“Moose”
“Yellow Babies”
“That One Guy Last Year Who Insisted on Sunbathing Nude on the Point.”
“Children”
“Mike Henry’s Previous Girlfriends”
“Olivia”
“Michelle’s Previous Boyfriends”

(NB: Often, when I’m appear to be listening to someone I am actually singing the “Meow Mix” theme silently to myself. If you watch closely you can sometimes see my lips move…Thus I may not have heard these names right or whether or not some of them are the same character.  (e.g. Nude Sunbathing Man  quite likely one in the same as Henry character.))

____

 

Bill Henderson
has the cutest little curtsy
I’ve ever been involuntarily exposed to.

____
The dinner music committee
chair Andrea Dupree
cancels the performance contract
for the band Haikuboy Meets Poemboy, citing
“Chris Ransick is no ‘Ted Springstone’”
and
“J Diego sucks wind.”
Also, “They don’t cover Manilow.”

J Diego's artistic rendering (AKA J Diego has too much time)

(NB: Should be noted that a good percentage of harmonica playing involves drawing in air…)

____
NOTE TO SELF: Under no circumstances piss off Teague Bohlen’s relatives.  Ever.

____
Shari Caudron teaches us how to make fish heavier.
Also. she looks  quite sporty
in a dusky-rose henley.

____
NOTE: It seems apparent, in retrospect, that the type of person attracted to this kind of event can be lumped into one of a handful of categories, for instance:
1.not enough sweatshirts
2.enough sweatshirts
3.kinda psychotic but in a “we can play with that” sort of way
4.interested in poetry
5.not just plain scared, but “don’t bring it up on a spooky camping trip because I won’t be able to sleep” scared of poetry
6.crazy about fiction
7.fictionally crazy
8.completely unimpressed by long, rambling, shape-shifting, dumbass, pointless lyric essays

(NB: Quite possible some people can be lumped into more than one of the above categories.)

 

Intern’s Report: Writing Voodoo

Lighthouse is fortunate to have as a summer intern Sara Aboulafia from Smith College–enough to give you hope for the next generations. Here’s her take on last night’s Writing Voodoo Lit Fest Salon.

The Voodoo That They Do:

A Brass-Tacks Conversation with Writers at Forest Room 5

by Sara Aboulafia, Lighthouse Summer Intern 

 

            Earlier this year my school spotted me a few hundred bucks to go to the Nieman Conference of Narrative Journalism, a large get-together of industry hot-shots and hopefuls over a March weekend at The Sheraton Hotel in Boston. After a strange stint writing for a volunteer organization in New Orleans, I thought the conference would give me some idea of what the field was really all about. I would love to say I walked away from the conference with inspiration clicking at my heels as I strode headfirst into a new reporting assignment for my local newspaper. Alas, I instead left with songs of industry-lagging despair ringing in my ears: “This is a miserable field,” one famous, published-in-every-magazine-on-the-block writer told me. But after Lighthouse’s first Lit-Fest salon, “Writing Voodoo” at hip LoHi spot Forest Room 5–where guests settled into a rustic parlor-like back-room with cocktails and beer in hand–I felt a little quickening in my step.

            Rather than scribbling without coming up for a breath as I did at the Nieman Conference, I listened to the panel of writers taking nary a note. The impression that I got from the panel–journalist Shari Caudron and fiction writers William Haywood Henderson and Karen Palmer–was that it was the writers’ attitude and energy that, despite the occupation’s many pitfalls and pratfalls, kept them writing. When a few members of the audience offered questions which verged on the pessimistic and glum (“What do you do when your friend tells you have to write your whole damn book again? Tell me, how do you get one of those agent-things?) all three panelists responded with good-humor, humility, and enough self-deprecation that the gathering felt less like a staged success-story performance and more like the honest, open conversation it was.

            Though the salon was called “Writing Voodoo,” the writers admitted that there were, ultimately, no tried-and-true spells or tricks to writing, and that its satisfactions and tortures tended to trade hands. To demonstrate this truism, writer Shari Caudron jumped up to provide a visual aid which plotted her emotional trajectory every single time she must tackle a new story. Her poster-sized graph depicted a massive reverse-check-mark whose

 

Dateline Boston: Gary’s Report from the Hem-y Awards

Boston, MA, John F Kennedy Presidential Library, Sunday March 30, the 2008 PEN/Hemingway Award 

In the early spring of that year we sat in the auditorium and looked across the bay to the city.  On the shore there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and blue in the shipping channel.  On the podium, Patrick Hemingway stood and read aloud and it was a fine reading, clear and strong, and the sun sparkled off the water, and…..

Sorry, I got a little caught up in the moment.  In truth, being just a bit of a cynic (in a healthy, good natured way) I feared Poppa’s son reading from the opening to A Farewell to Arms might come off as hokum.  But his voice really was clear and strong, and the audience of between 300 and 400 did get caught up in the cadence and rhythm of the piece. 

Sherri and I were in Boston over the weekend of March 30^th to attend the 2008 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for “distinguished first works of fiction,” and for the L.L.Winship/PEN New England Awards (kind of like our Colorado Book Awards).  My book, Migration Patterns, was selected an Honorable Mention, and we had Mileage Plus credits stacked up, and what better excuse to visit a great city?  The ceremony was held at the JFK Presidential Library overlooking the bay and the city skyline.

 

 

The ceremony itself featured short readings not only by Patrick Hemingway but also by Joshua Ferris and the poet Ann Killough, winner of the L.L. Winship poetry award, and a feisty, short (yea!!) keynote by Alice Hoffman.  But the real fun of the weekend was in attending the Saturday night reception at Beacon Press (see pic below) in the heart of the Beacon Hill district, about a block from the state capital, and the