Founder’s Focus

Carrie Moyer	Sheila Pepe
Dean Snyder	Lorna Ritz

December Visiting Writers:

Excerpt from “The Bowmaker’s Cats”
by Gregory Spatz

We’d been to the bowmaker’s house before, but not recently, and never all of us together. We’d toured his workshop and house, seen his shelves of stacked bow blanks, his grove of aged Pernambuco logs lain horizontally in the basement, his ebony stumps for frogs and store of mastodon tusks for tips, his drawers of abalone shell, whale baleen, bits of lizard skin, and hanks of Mongolian stallion tail hair. His knives and planes and gouges and buffing pads and leathers. We’d watched him at work pedaling his antique jeweler’s lathe, shorn gold filings piled on the floor around him. Watched him heat a straight length of faceted pernambuco in the alcohol lamp and gently pry it back to the exact leg-bone curve in which it would serve the rest of its life. Lined up and hairless in his downstairs window rack to sun-cure, those bows were candy in the brain: sounds to imagine and not yet hear. Perfect, therefore, and better (maybe; almost) to look at than to play. Perfect, too, in the way we could imagine them responding in our hands – exactly mated to the finger’s asymmetry, perfectly weighted and balanced, pressure of thumb on the thumb grip, forefinger cocked against the silk and gold winding. Zing! To see one was to ache to hear and play it. Pull, press, draw it down and back and down again across the strings. Listen. Glide the sound out. Polished as gems, shapelier than roots or bones or antlers, but somehow calling these things to mind (also: lager, absinthe, amber single malt in a glass, the outer wrappings of a cigar, sun on a summer wheat field).
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Excerpt from the “Bowmaker’s Cat,” (Kenyon Review),© Gregory Spatz. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
To learn more about Gregory Spatz, click here.

See below to learn more about Tayari Jones, and click here to visit her site.

Tayari Jones was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia where she spent most of her childhood with the exception of the one year she and her family spent in Nigeria, West Africa. Her first novel, Leaving Atlanta, is a coming of age story set during the city’s infamous child murders of 1979-81. Leaving Atlanta received many awards and accolades including the Hurston/Wright Award for Debut Fiction. She has received fellowships from organizations including Illinois Arts Council, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, The Corporation of Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, Arizona Commission on the Arts and Le Chateau de Lavigny (Switzerland.) Her second novel, The Untelling, published in 2005, is the story of a family struggling to overcome the aftermath of a fatal car accident. In 2005, The Southern Regional council and the University of Georgia Libraries awarded The Untelling with the Lillian C. Smith Award for New Voices. Her work has appeared in The Believer, McSweeny’s, Callaloo, and The New York Times.  Tayari Jones is an Assistant Professor in the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark University.

January Visiting Artists and Writers:

Amy Bloom

Susan Walp

Brenda Garand

Peter Schumann

Jill Moser

Howard Norman

This fall, local students and teachers of Hyde Park Elementary School (HPE), Lamoille Union Middle School (LUMS), Green Mountain Technical and Career Center (GMTCC) and Johnson Elementary School (JES) have made numerous visits to the studios and Red Mill Gallery shows of VSC’s resident artists and sculptors Ki-Jin Park (Korea), Sookoon Ang (Singapore), Oreen Cohen, Harlan Mack, Jessica Pezalla, and David Purcell; painters Alexis Avlamis (Greece), Dave Kearns, Joelen Mulvaney, Arista Alanis, G. Todd Haun, Jason Farson, Ekua Holmes, Sofia Maldonado (Puerto Rico/Cuba); and printmaker Leonardo Aquinaldo (the Philippines).

In addition to studio visits, students had several hands-on workshops at VSC including:  two workshops on differing approaches to collaborative mural-making with Joelen Mulvaney and Sofia Maldonado; and a workshop on Ekphrastic poetry with Ki-Jin’s work as its subject led by VSC Visiting Writer, Sebastian Matthews.  2009 is the third year of VSC’s Learning in Art in Culture Teacher Fellowship Program, which now offers creative revitalization residencies to Vermont English and Visual Art teachers and support to expose their students to the richness of VSC’s international creative community.  The 2009 LACP Fellows are Matt Neckers (HPE), Tamra Higgins (LUMS) and Barbara Flack (GMTCC).  Below are  more pictures: