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Registration is now open for the 12th annual Chautauqua Writers’ Festival, taking place June 18 to 21 on the grounds before the season.
Live and write with award-winning poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers who share their insights in intensive workshops, readings, panel discussions, and individual conferences designed to ensure personalized attention. This year’s faculty includes fiction writers Jane McCafferty and Aimee Parkison, nonfiction writers Lia Purpura and Steve Almond, and poets Tim Seibles and Tony Hoagland.
For the first time ever, the festival will include a songwriting workshop, led by singer-songwriter and creative writing professor Scott Minar, for participants who want to learn to set their writing to music or to create words for their songs.
For more information on the 2015 Writers’ Festival, including the registration form, visit ciweb.org/literary-arts/writersfestival. Early-bird registrants receive 15 percent off through March 1.
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Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free
Héctor Tobar
3:30 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 6, 2015 — Hall of Philosophy
 When the San José mine collapsed outside of Copiapó, Chile, in August 2010, it trapped 33 miners beneath thousands of feet of rock for a record-breaking 69 days. The entire world watched what transpired above-ground during the grueling and protracted rescue, but Héctor Tobar’s work marks the first time that the saga of the miners' experiences below the Earth's surface — and the lives that led them there — has ever been told.
For Deep Down Dark, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tobar received exclusive access to the miners and their tales. These men came to think of the mine, a cavern inflicting constant and thundering aural torment, as a kind of coffin, and as a church where they sought redemption through prayer. Even while still buried, they all agreed that if by some miracle any of them escaped alive, they would share their story only collectively. Héctor Tobar was the person they chose to hear and tell that story.
The result is a masterwork of narrative journalism — a riveting, at times shocking, emotionally textured account of a singular human event. Deep Down Dark brings to haunting, tactile life the experience of being imprisoned inside a mountain of stone, the horror of being slowly consumed by hunger, and the spiritual and mystical elements that surrounded working in such a dangerous place. In its stirring final chapters, it captures the profound way in which the lives of everyone involved in the disaster were forever changed.
Tobar is the author of four books, including The Tattooed Soldier, Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States, and The Barbarian Nurseries. A journalist whose work largely examines the relationship between Latin America and the U.S., he was most recently a reporter with the Los Angeles Times. He is currently an assistant professor in the school of journalism and communication at the University of Oregon.
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Earth, Grass, Trees and Stone, a new poetry collection by Mary Anne Morefield, will be published by Coffeetown Press April 15, 2015.
Morefield is past president of the Chautauqua Literary Arts Friends and frequent participant in Writers’ Center workshops.
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Two Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Selections — one previous and one current — have been named finalists for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Awards.
On Such a Full Sea, by Chang-rae Lee (CLSC ’14), is a finalist in fiction, and Deep Down Dark, by Hector Tobar (CLSC ’15), is a finalist in general nonfiction. Winners will be announced in March.
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