Last year we held the retreat at the Hotel Northampton in Northampton, Massachusetts. It’s a great hotel, and I love the town. There are art galleries, coffee houses, bars and restaurants, book stores, a hot tub place. It’s just a cool town. So we had our workshops and our dinner, and then night time arrived and … nothing. I tried to drum up interest among the teachers in a night on the town, checking out the galleries, finding some live music, doing a little kafe hopping. But no. I got a few folks to sit with me in the lobby and have a drink before bed. I thought, OK, this is not Whispering Pines, and I am not turning in early and going for a run in the morning. So I went out alone, checked out the art gallery, got a cup of coffee, people watched, found a nice kafe to have a drink, got to bed around midnight and slept in a little.
So this year when we hosted the retreat at UConn, I was determined to arrange something social for the evening, if for no other reason than to have something to do myself. Now Storrs is not Whispering Pines but it is also not Northampton. For night life there’s Starbucks and then there’s Starbucks. Therefore, I approached the Graduate Assistant Director of the Creative Writing Program, Sean Forbes, who will be the CWP’s Graduate Assistant Director next year, and asked him to arrange an Open Mic event for Friday night.
Sean did a great job, as did Denise Abercrombie from E.O. Smith. We held the event in the Stern Lounge of the CLAS Building, just upstairs from our office. The room was filled almost to capacity, with people sitting in the doorways to find room to stretch their legs. The readings began at 8:30 and went almost to 11 PM. The evening began with about a half dozen of Denise’s high school students from her creative writing classes, and also included both her teenaged son and her nine year old son, who read a very playful poem and showed no reservations at the mic. Denise also read, as did her husband Jon, who teaches at Quinnebaug Valley Community College. From there Sean took over and introduced another seven or eight undergraduate students from his creative writing classes and from the undergraduate staff of the Long River Review. Two girls from the drama department even read a one-act play written by another student playwright.
From there we opened up the night to the teachers from the various New England writing project sites, and perhaps a dozen came to the mic to read their work. In all we had perhaps thirty readers—a third grader, more than a dozen high school students and undergraduate students, a couple of graduate students, another dozen or more K-12 teachers, and a couple of college or university faculty members. And the poetry (and some prose) was terrific. One undergraduate student even wrote an impromptu paean to Denise and Jon’s nine year old son and read it as our closing piece for the night.
On Friday prior to the open mic, Jane Cook and I presented a workshop on our efforts to build a web presence for the CWP, and to increase our efforts at offering professional development in technology. But the highlight of the workshops was Saturday’s presentation by the NWP’s Paul Oh on Pedagogy of the Socially Networked. Paul actually co-presented with Andrea Zellner of the Red Cedar Writing Project in Michigan, but Andrea remained in Michigan. We video-conferenced with Andrea via skype, a laptop, an lcd projector, and a microphone. Paul put Andrea’s image on the right hand side of the screen, and on the left hand side he projected the google document he and Andrea created, so that all of us could see the document that Andrea and Paul were referencing live, and for those of us with laptops, since the Nathan Hale Inn has wireless internet access, we, too, could type in the URL and link up to the googledoc, launching its embedded links and files and even participating in a sidebar chat with other TCs from across the conference room. It was pretty cool, and I think much of it was new to many of the participating teachers. People left a little blown away but filled with ideas, particularly from the planning and sharing sessions that followed each workshop presentation.
But as always, there is no rest for the weary. The following Monday through Wednesday, Kelly Andrews-Babcock and I resumed and completed interviews of candidates for the Summer Institute. Today I sent out acceptance emails to sixteen teachers to become our newest cohort of Teacher Consultants. This will be our twenty-eighth Summer Institute since 1982, and these sixteen teachers will bring our total to 438. It’s exciting to think that in two years we will celebrate our thirtieth anniversary, and soon thereafter see our numbers reach 500.
One last piece of good news. This past Tuesday was the deadline for the Senate Dear Colleague letter to support continued direct funding for the NWP. At four o’clock I got word from Lieberman’s education aide that he had signed the letter, and at six o’clock I heard from Dodd’s aide that he, too, had signed. Things are looking good for that thirtieth reunion.
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