Workshop Retreats and Weekend Workshops
The Millay Colony for the Arts offers four-day Workshop Retreats in writing, art and music on Colony's sylvan campus. Each Retreat includes twelve hours of workshop time, all meals, and ample time to work, ruminate and explore our lush natural surroundings. Private bedrooms and spacious private studios are available for all participants. Participants delve into their work, explore new ideas, meet extraordinary teaching artists and collaborate with others while spending intense work-time on our gorgeous campus. Fragrant with blueberries, thyme, and wildflowers, the quiet loveliness of our campus provides uninterrupted calm and inspiration—the perfect retreat for creativity and relaxation.
We also offer a program of Weekend Workshops at the lovely Trisha Brown Studio in Tribecca, Manhattan. These two-day/eight-hour workshops offer intensive sessions with some of the most exciting teaching artists around. Lunch and coffee included both days.
2013 Workshop Retreats with Carole Maso and Melissa Febos; Weekend Workshops with Kara Lee Corthron, Catherine Wagner, Julia Dault & Selena Kimball, Anselm Berrigan, Rebecca Wolff, R. Erica Doyle & more
NEW YORK CITY WEEKEND WORKSHOPS AT TRISHA BROWN STUDIO IN TRIBECCA: SPRING
Editing as Generative Adventure
with Rebecca Wolff
April 13 - 14, 2013
NYC
Editorial work can take practitioners beyond the mechanics and social politics of bringing writing into the world and into a transpersonal space of mind-opening empathy. In this workshop, we will discuss editorial practices with some particularity and then examine our own editing skills and habits and obstacles thereof. Participants can come with projects in mind or develop ideas during the class.
Rebecca Wolff is an award-winning author of three books of poetry, including The King (W.W. Norton), and a novel, The Beginners (Riverhead). Her work has appeared in anthologies and magazines including The Nation, The Paris Review and A Public Space. She is the founding editor of Fence Magazine and Fence Books and the Constant Critic, a site for poetry criticism. She is a Program Fellow at the New York State Writers Institute at SUNY Albany. Wolff lives in Hudson, New York.
Goodbye, Writer's Block!
with Kara Lee Corthron
May 11 - 12
NYC
In this two-day intensive, writers of all genres are invited to come and try some wild writing exercises, get tips for when the inspiration well runs dry, and most of all to write, write, and WRITE some more. Have a project that you haven't been able to finish? Overwhelmed by deadlines? Or just plain stuck? Join us for two days of sucker-punching anything that blocks your muse in the gut!
Kara Lee Corthron's full-length plays include Julius by Design (Fulcrum), Etched in Skin on a Sunlit Night (InterAct Theatre in Philadelphia), Alice Grace Anon (New Georges), and Wild Black-Eyed Susans. Awards include The Vineyard Theatre's 3rd Annual Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, the Princess Grace Award, two NEA grants, the Helen Merrill Award, Lincoln Center's Lecomte du Nouy Prize (three-time recipient), the Theodore Ward Prize, and the New Professional Theatre Writers Award. Commissions include: South Coast Rep, New Georges, InterAct, E.S.T./Sloan, and Naked Angels. Kara is a 2012-2014 Women's Project Lab Time Warner Foundation Fellow. Her plays have been produced and/or developed at the African Continuum Theatre (DC), Ars Nova, CenterStage (Baltimore), Electric Pear, E.S.T., Horizon Theatre (Atlanta), the Kennedy Center, Naked Angels, New Dramatists, New Georges, New York Theatre Workshop, The Orchard Project, Page 73, Penumbra, PlayPenn Conference (2010), The Shalimar, South Coast Rep, TheatreWorks (Palo Alto), the Vineyard Theatre, and Voice & Vision. Kara is a Juilliard alumna, instructor at Primary Stages' Einhorn School of Performing Arts, a New Georges Affiliated Artist, and member of Interstate 73 (2007-2008), the Ars Nova Play Group (2010-2011), 'Wright On! Playwrights Group (co-founder), Blue Roses Productions, the Dramatists Guild and the Writers Guild of America.
What Can Writing Really Do?: A two-day workshop for visual artists
with Julia Dault & Selena Kimball
June 8-9
NYC
What can writing really do? How can it be harnessed to truly translate a visual practice or refine an artistic idea? This two-day workshop will act as a laboratory for the development, revision, and refinement of participants' writing for the visual arts. The strategies explored will provide tools for a variety of contexts, from composing artist statements to overcoming creative blocks to completing grant applications. Through a series of individual writing exercises, group sessions, and collaborative activities, participants will hone their voices and discover a vocabulary that truly defines their practices. The approach will be experimental and will require the full engagement of all attendees.
Julia Dault is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. This year she will present solo exhibitions at Jessica Bradley, Toronto; Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Zurich; and Harris Lieberman, New York. In 2012, she presented a solo exhibition as part of the series "Inside the White Cube" at White Cube Bermondsey, London, and participated in "Roundtable," the Ninth Gwangju Biennale, and "The Ungovernables," the second New Museum Triennial. Her work has been exhibited at the Marrakech Biennale, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, and other international venues, and is part of the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. She is on the faculty of the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons, the New School for Design.
A native of Maine, Selena Kimball earned her BFA in sculpture from The Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from Hunter College. Recently her large-scale wall installations have been exhibited at the Portland Museum of Art (2011) and the University of North Texas (2010). She will be in a two-person show this summer at Wolfstaedter Gallery, Frankfurt, Germany. Kimball has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell colony, Blue Mountain Center, and Millay Colony for the Arts. Her published work can be seen in the collage novel The Sleeping Life of Leonora De La Cruz, which she produced together with Agnieszka Taborska (Gdansk 2004, slowo/obraz teryrtoria; New York 2007, Midmarch Arts Press; Paris 2007, Édition Interférences). Kimball is adjunct faculty at Parsons, The New School and Hunter College, CUNY. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
WORKSHOP RETREATS AT THE MILLAY COLONY IN AUSTERLITZ, NY
Personal Matters: Pushing the Boundaries of First-Person Nonfiction
with Melissa Febos
May 28 - June 1
Millay
Memoir is not a dirty word. Confessions often make compelling stories. Nonetheless, as personal writers we must seek to bring thoughtfulness, honesty, and real craft into this bloated landscape of bloggers and tabloids; we must be artful, intellectual, innovative, and accessible. A writer can plumb experiences of sex, madness, addiction, violence, love, and grief while avoiding pitfalls of navel gazing and sensationalism. We must begin with questions, rather than answers, and face our unprettiest selves without flinching. We must attend to the universal vis-a-vis the specific. In this class we will examine the way experience, emotion, research, and intellection are integrated into creative nonfiction through traditional and innovation craft techniques, and then we will generate work by applying these techniques to our own stories.
Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin's Press, 2010). Her work has been widely anthologized and appeared in publications including Glamour, Salon, Dissent, The Southeast Review, New York Times, Bitch Magazine, The Rumpus, Drunken Boat, Hunger Mountain, and The Chronicle of Higher Education Review. She has been featured on NPR's Fresh Air, CNN's Dr. Drew, Anderson Cooper Live, and elsewhere. The recipient of MacDowell Colony fellowships in 2010 and 2011, and a 2012 Bread Loaf nonfiction fellowship, Melissa co-curates the Mixer Reading and Music Series in Manhattan, teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and lives in Brooklyn.
What Matters Most
with Carole Maso
August 28 - September 1
Millay
What are the resonant and perhaps buried objects and images that haunt and inform your life? How might these be used to create vital and vibrant works of art?
Through a series of rigorous exercises we will retrieve these shapes to create works of longing, beauty and urgency
Carole Maso is the author of ten books including the novels The Art Lover, AVA, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat and Defiance; prose poems, Aureole and Beauty is Convulsive; a book of essays, Break Every Rule; and a memoir, The Room Lit By Roses. She is Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University and she lives in the Hudson River Valley. She says of her work, "I believe my books, darkly imagined, deeply emotional, are no less accessible than others, and require only a certain faith and willingness to surrender in order to be entered. My desire is to create spacious fields of narration in which the reader might feel alive and vibrant and possible and free."
NEW YORK CITY WEEKEND WORKSHOPS AT TRISHA BROWN STUDIO IN TRIBECCA: FALL
B[e]aring the Line, Free[k]ing Your Mind
with R. Erica Doyle
September 21 - 22
NYC
How can we find language for the unspeakable ecstatic, the disastrous? How can we counter exposition with composition? How can we distill spillage, leakage and carnage with an eye towards not only our own liberation, but the planet's? In this workshop, through exercises and readings, we will trouble and excite the writer inside and see what new moves we can make.
R. Erica Doyle was born in Brooklyn to Trinidadian immigrant parents, and has lived in Washington, DC, Farmington, Connecticut and La Marsa, Tunisia. Her book proxy is new from Belladonna* and her poetry and fiction have appeared in Best American Poetry, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, Callaloo, Best Black Women's Erotica, Bum Rush the Page, Bloom, and From the Fishouse, among others. She has received grants and awards from the Hurston/Wright Foundation and the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, and she was a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow. Erica is also a fellow of Cave Canem: A Workshop and Retreat for Black Writers. She received her MFA in Poetry from the New School, and lives in New York City, where teaches in the NYC public schools and facilitates Tongues Afire: A Creative Writing Workshop for queer women and trans and gender non-conforming people of color.
Content is a Glimpse: Rebuilding a Practice from the Ground Up
with Anselm Berrigan
October 19 - 20
NYC
In this course we will collect and practice a range of techniques based on splicing, expanding, upending, reconfiguring and re-sounding previously generated material of our own, as well as material produced on the spot. "Our own" being subject to broad interpretation. The idea is to A) get a closer look at what poems do by veering away from our internalized notions of standard practice, whatever they may be; B) build a bigger bag of tricks; and C) address our own relationships with language in order to recognize the loops and hurdles our decision-making processes create for us when we write.
The title is taken from a statement in an interview made by the painter Willem De Kooning: "Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It's very tiny...." The possibility of writing towards such flashes, and the accumulation of them as a record of consciousness put to tremulous, if sturdy, form is one avenue we'll explore, along with unautomatic fast writing, moving laterally off pre-selected titles, collaging from one's own shards of materials, spinning the notebook, replacement of self with voice and vice-versa, and other curiosities.
Anselm Berrigan's most recent books of poetry include Notes from Irrelevence, a book-length poem published in 2011 by Wave Books, and Skasers (2012), jointly written with poet John Coletti. His other collections of poetry include Integrity & Dramatic Life (1999), Zero Star Hotel (2002), Some Notes on My Programming (2006), and Free Cell (2009). He is the current poetry editor of The Brooklyn Rail (brooklynrail.org) and co-edited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (2005) with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan. He was the recipient of a 2007 poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Berrigan directed the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church from 2003 to 2007 and is co-chair of the graduate writing program at Bard College.
Revisionary Trance
with Catherine Wagner
November 16 - 17
NYC
On the the first day of this workshop, we'll get down in our heads, our stressed-out infested heads, and learn how to enter trance states through self-hypnosis and soundwork. We won't abandon the stressed-out infestation. We will write poems during and after trance that rely exactly on the language that stresses and infests our heads. The idea is to become Klein bottles that pour language.
The second day will be revisionary. We'll play with the language we generated, separately and collaboratively artificing the free-pour, making chop charts and pop covers till we don't know what the original was, and then we'll see what we have, and we'll have an infestival.
Catherine Wagner is a poet. Her collections include Nervous Device (City Lights, 2012) and three books from Fence: My New Job (2009), Macular Hole (2004), and Miss America (2001). She is currently writing a column on poetry for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and her work has been anthologized in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK, Gurlesque, Poets on Teaching, Best American Erotic Poems and elsewhere. She is professor of English at Miami University and lives in Oxford, Ohio with her son Ambrose.
Workshop Retreat & Weekend Workshop Details
Workshop Retreat Schedule: Each day begins with a fresh breakfast followed by a three- hour workshop at 10:00 AM. Total workshop time for the retreat will be twelve hours. The afternoon can be spent working in the studio, visiting local sites, swimming in a nearby lake or walking the mountain trails. Dinner is served overlooking our gorgeous meadows. Evening hours are devoted to worktime.
Retreat Fees: $600 includes tuition, private room, private studio and all meals. $375 includes tuition and meals only.
$1,100 for both Workshop Retreats.
Participants may purchase a thirty-minute Private Consultation with their instructor for $150. Manuscripts (15 pages maximum) must be sent in advance; portfolios can be but this is not required.
Limited Scholarships, based on need, are available.
Millay Colony Alumni receive a 30% discount.
Weekend Workshop Schedule: We will begin each four-hour class at 10:00 with coffee, tea and a lot of ideas about a lively, focused, smart writing and art practice. Total workhop time is eight hours. Lunch is served at each class and the day ends at 3:00 PM.
Weekend Fees: $250 for a weekend class, $450 for two Weekend Workshops, $650 for three Weekend Workshops.
Limited Scholarships, based on need, are available.
Millay Colony Alumni receive a 30% discount.
To Apply: Send a letter of introduction indicating your choice of workshop and including a brief biography with a $100 deposit for Retreats and $50 for Weekends. Also include a work sample (10 pages of writing, 10 images on CD or a brief video clip -- links to online work are also fine). Applicants will be accepted on a first-come first-serve basis. Please indicate if you require lodging and studio space for the Retreats.
Apply to: The Millay Colony for the Arts, 454 East Hill Road, Austerlitz, NY. Attention: Summer Retreats. Make Checks payable to The Millay Colony for the Arts.
For more information please get in touch with Caroline Crumpacker at 518-392-4144 or
.