David Gessner returns to Doe Branch Ink, teaming up with his longtime friend and collaborator Bill Roorbach to offer a master class in prose—nonfiction and fiction—inspired by our beautiful setting. They’ll give talks, lead walks, offer exercises and readings to help each participant develop fresh ideas and make new starts to carry forward into the months and years to come. You’ll explore the spectacular surroundings, but also consider your craft, find your own unique voice. Where do book ideas come from, and how are they developed? What are the ten skills every writer must hone? How do we best use nature as both foreground and background in our paragraphs and pages, our essays and stories and books? We’ll leave plenty of time for writing, and take time in both large and small groups to hear and discuss your new ideas and work-in-progress, and to nurture the images and metaphors that can only arrive in a place like this. And of course we’ll meet at cocktail hour for wide-ranging talk and humor, and, above all, warm and lasting fellowship. This is an outstanding opportunity to spend a week immersed in both the writing life and the natural world. Bill and Dave offer a popular blog on writing and life and just about everything else: Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour, worth a visit at http://billanddavescocktailhour.com/
DAVID GESSNER leads the highly regarded non-fiction writing program at UNC Wilmington He is the author of eight books, including Tarball Chronicles, My Green Manifesto, Sick of Nature, The Prophet of Dry Hill, and Return of the Osprey, which was chosen by The Boston Globe as one of the top ten nonfiction books of the year and by the Book-of-the-Month club as one of its top books of the year. The Globe called it a “classic of American Nature Writing.” In 2006 he won a Pushcart Prize; in 2007 he won the John Burroughs Award for Best Natural History Essay; and in 2008 his essay, “The Dreamer Does Not Exist,” was chosen for The Best American Nonrequired Reading. His work has appeared in many magazines and journals including The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, Outside, The Georgia Review, The Harvard Review, and Orion. Learn more at www.davidgessner.com
Praise for David Gessner’s Writing:
“Anyone who wanted a first-hand look at the Gulf after the news cycle ended will find it here . . . a brilliant and thoughtful book.” —Publishers Weekly (STARRED review)
“A wonderfully readable book. Gessner’s attempts to define the role of the new environmental warrior, both in terms of idealism and political practicality, are heartfelt and informed. [My Green Manifesto] is brave enough and intelligent enough to embrace technology as well as art, pure ideology as well as compromise, hope as well as despair, depression and paralysis as well as valor and joy.” —Boston Globe
“Raw and honest . . . there’s a lilt in his jig that many will find invigorating.”—Los Angeles Times
“For nature-writing enthusiasts, Gessner needs no introduction. His books and essays have in many ways redefined what it means to write about the natural world, coaxing the genre from a staid, sometimes wonky practice to one that is lively and often raucous.”—Washington Post
“Soaring with Fidel is a grand and cheering journey on the wings of one of nature’s most sociable predators. It’s impossible to watch an osprey hovering above a crystal calm bay and not envy the great bird’s freedom. Now, thanks to David Gessner, we are invited to follow.” — Carl Hiaasen
Return of the Osprey can . . . claim a place among the classics of American nature writing.”
–The Boston Globe
BILL ROORBACH is the author of the Flannery O’Connor Prize and O. Henry Prize winning story collection Big Bend, as well as the internationally acclaimed novel The Smallest Color. Life Among Giants, his new novel, is due from Algonquin in August, 2012. Three nonfiction books form a trilogy of Bill’s life in nature: Summers with Juliet, Into Woods, and, of course, Temple Stream. The 10th anniversary edition of his craft book, Writing Life Stories, is used along with his Oxford anthology Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Truth, in writing programs around the world. Recently, Bill was a judge on Food Network All Star Challenge, evaluating incredible life stories cakes made under the gun, so to speak (Bill knows nothing about cake, but he knows a lot about life stories!) His short work has been published in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Playboy, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, New York Magazine, and dozens of other magazines and journals. His story “Big Bend” was featured on NPR’s “Selected Shorts,” read by actor James Cromwell at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. He’s an NEA fellow, a MacDowell fellow, and a fellow of the Kaplan Foundation (for Temple Stream). Bill has taught at the University of Maine at Farmington, Colby College, and in the MFA program at Ohio State. His last academic position was the Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts. He has now left academia entirely in order to write full time, and lives in western Maine with his wife, the painter Juliet Karelsen, and daughter Elysia, who is 11 and quite a writer herself. Learn more at: http://www.billroorbach.com/
Praise for Bill Roorbach’s Writing:
“Bill Roorbach is a brilliant guide to the natural world. Gracefully combining deep knowledge, lyrical description and wry humor, his writing draws you out of your chair and into a world of streams and meadows and trees and bugs and beavers. And it makes you want to stay there. Roorbach is a master of capturing and expressing joy.” –The Hartford Courant.
“There is poetry in Bill Roorbach’s prose … his lyricism is touched lightly with irony.” –The Boston Globe
“While genuine in his appreciation of nature, Roorbach is the antithesis of the smug and self-absorbed naturalist.” –The Believer
“I’ve admired Bill Roorbach’s voice for a long time. He’s a writer who is full of compassion and warmth for his subjects, and he’s funny as hell, too.” –Rick Moody
“Bill Roorbach’s writing is notable for its warmth, its sensitivity to women, and its irresistable bad boy charm.” –Joyce Johnson
“Temple Stream is nature writing at its best. Roorbach is not some latter-day Thoreau forever bemoaning man’s defilement of the once-pristine land. He accepts the stream and nature as he finds them, battered by civilization but stubbornly surviving. He writes about the rusted-out cars and graffiti-covered bridges he finds as respectfully as he does dewberry patches and hemlock glades.” –Cleveland Plain Dealer
