Lit Fest at Stone Valley Arts Celebrates the Written Word!

August 10,11 at 145 East Main Street, Poultney VT (Old Stone Church) across from Poultney High School). RSVP online at https://tinyurl.com/SVALitFest3

If you write, or have ever had the desire to write, now is the time to explore the possibility!

We all have thoughts, feelings, experiences, and stories worth preserving and sharing with family, friends, or a public audience. Whether a poem, story, or any other genre, writing is a way to honor the special people and the important moments and memories of our lives. SVA Lit Fest workshops (Poetry Saturday, Memoir Sunday) are carefully crafted by professional facilitators to benefit writers in all genres and with all levels of experience. Writers are encouraged to cross genres and participate in all four workshops. Expand your creativity!

Saturday 10:00 AM to Noon Writing as Meditation – James Crews
Learn how to treat the practice of writing as a kind of in-the-moment meditation, opening your senses to whatever you find around you, and welcoming whatever arises both on the page and inside yourself. Poetry especially brings us more deeply into the present, and we'll write together from several prompts, exploring how we can approach each new session with a "beginner's mind," staying open to the surprise and wonder that often arrive on their own when we move beyond self-criticism and doubt.

Saturday 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM Funhouse: Poetry at Play – Bianca Amira Zanella
Funhouse mirrors can make you appear distorted when you gaze upon your reflection.
Reality can easily be misshaped, time can warp, illusions reigning, second-guessing. What if your poem walked through a Funhouse? What would come out at the end of the journey?
Using play therapy and poetry therapy tools, we will practice walking a poem through many versions of itself, leaning into experimental curiosity. Dive into the unknown and leave with an expanded sense of what grounds you back to reality and where your poems can go when you rewild your garden.

Sunday 10:00 AM to Noon Fictionalizing Your Own Life – Herb Childress
Our homes, our cars, our clothes are all intended to do two things at once: to accommodate the way we live, and to send a message to others about who we are. They aren't lies; they're well-framed, partial truths, intended to tell a story. A memoir is exactly this: a well-framed, partial truth, intended to tell a story. And just as is true of fiction, a good memoir should surprise us with the stories we have to tell about ourselves. This session will have two aims: to help us leave aside the clutter of a diverse life in favor of a story well-framed, and to begin the work of surprising ourselves with a life we already thought we knew.

Sunday 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM Reimagining Memoir – David Mook
Let's reimagine memoir as a collage of images, a mosaic of moments, a multi-genre collection of stories (including Moth-style oral storytelling), poems, personal essays, letters, literary fragments, song lyrics, plays, comedy sketches, and any other ideas we discover collaboratively. We'll look at a few examples from the list above and then write to prompts designed to evoke memorable moments and/or themes that could find their way into your memoir. The main idea is to avoid mumoir, the memoir that never finds its voice.

Pre-register online and receive a discount at https://tinyurl.com/SVALitFest3

Pre-Registration is recommended so that presenters have a rough count for materials. Online preregistration is $40 per day, $70.00 for both days, $18.00 for students 12-18 years of age per day and $36.00 for students for two days.

Preregister by clicking this link: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=TCXXBU9GKUSSY

Registration after Aug 9 is : $45 for either Saturday or Sunday, and $80 for both days – all four workshops! Students age 12 -18, $20 per day. Scholarships available – email davidmook@aol.com
Register by clicking this link: https://tinyurl.com/SVALitFest3

Or RSVP by mail to Stone Valley Arts, P.O. Box 47, Poultney, VT 05764

Scholarships available – email davidmook@aol.com for details.

Event Info

Sep 9, 2024, 6 to 8 PM

Sep 10, 2024, 5:30 to 7:30 PM

Sep 15, 2024, 3 to 5 PM