Dear <<First Name>>,

Special Bard Big Read Writing Workshop for LLI Members

We are delighted to invite you to register for a special writing workshop being offered to LLI members by Bard College, as part of its Big Read Hudson Valley: Spanning the Hudson River with Words. The workshop will take place on Wednesday, April 20, from 1:00-3:00 pm in the Anne Cox Chambers Alumni Center on Route 9G, across from the main entrance to the College. The workshop will be limited to 15 participants on a first-come, first-served basis.

The title of the workshop will be: Writing Your Hudson Valley: Getting Started with Fiction

Want to write your own fiction but don’t know where to begin? Building off Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, this generative fiction workshop will provide ways to get started—one page at a time. With Cisneros’s work as a jumping-off point, we will explore and experiment with methods to get started on your own short story, novella, or novel. Together, we’ll discuss the practice of “translating” your life into fiction via prompts and experimentation. For those who wish to share their work, space will be provided to read aloud from what you’ve written, with a supportive and constructive framework to guide us, focusing on what we, as a workshop, are most excited to hear about next. No prior experience with fiction writing is required.

The presenter of this workshop will be Grayson Morley, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Bard College. A winner of the PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, his work has appeared in Catapult, The Iowa Review, The Masters Review, and elsewhere. He lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife and dog, where he is a digital content editor at Bard College. He is at work on his first novel.

This workshop is open to current members of LLI. To attend, you must have had your Covid vaccinations and boosters all verified by LLI, and you will need to show your name tag with both verification stickers. 

To register for this workshop, please email Sarah Donnatien, sdonnatien@bard.edu, and cc president@lli.bard.edu. For the subject of your email, please put: “Registration for Writing Your Hudson Valley Workshop.”  The first 15 members to sign up will be admitted to the workshop. 

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), in partnership with Arts Midwest, has awarded Bard College a $19,985 NEA Big Read grant to support the Big Read Hudson Valley: Spanning the Hudson River with Words, a dynamic community-wide reading program offering reading groups, performances, workshops, and events in Red Hook, Rhinebeck, and Kingston. Focused on the Big Read selection, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, Big Read Hudson Valley, which takes place in March-April, 2022, is a collaboration among Bard College and its Master of Arts in Teaching Program and La Voz magazine, with support from Bard’s Written Arts Program, the Bard Conservatory, and Conjunctions literary journal, along with partner libraries and community organizations including LLI, Radio Kingston, the Kingston Library, the Red Hook Library, Tivoli Library, Starr Library, the Reher Center for Immigrant Culture and History, Ramapo for Children, Oblong Books, and Rough Draft Bar & Books. 

For more information about the many excellent programs being offered throughout the next month by Big Read Hudson Valley: Spanning the Hudson River with Words, please look at the website here: www.bard.edu/big-read.