4/29 Writers Unbound Literary Festival, Union Grove Distillery, Arkville, NY
6/23 Catskill Interpretive Center Book Festival, Mt. Tremper, NY
7/28 – 29 AMR Open Art Studio Tour, Halcottsville, NY
8/19 Blink Art Gallery, Andes, NY
9/8 Zadock Pratt Museum, Prattsville, NY
Look for our news releases to learn more about upcoming events.
WRITERS IN THE MOUNTAINS (WIM)
PRESENTS
ARTIST – WRITER TALK SERIES
MUTUAL MUSES IN THE CATSKILLS
“THE ARTS CONVERGE”
THE MAURICE D. HINCHEY CATSKILL INTERPRETIVE CENTER
MT. TREMPER, NY
SATURDAY, MAY 27 AT 1pm
Painters Margaret Leveson and Lisbeth Firmin, Printmaker/Ceramicist Peter Yamaoka and Textile Artist Tabitha Gilmore-Barnes in Conversation with Art Writer Simona David
Art writer Simona David will discuss her latest book, How Art Is Made: In the Catskills (2017), and share the stage with several acclaimed artists who live and work in the Catskill Mountains: painters Margaret Leveson and Lisbeth Firmin, ceramicist and printmaker Peter Yamaoka and textile artist Tabitha Gilmore-Barnes. How Art Is Made: In the Catskills pays homage to the place where American art was born through a series of conversations with creatives who live and work in the Catskills. Recent works will also be exhibited.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 12 AT 1pm
Composer Robert Cucinotta in Performance and Conversation with Poet Sharon Israel
Composer Robert Cucinotta and poet and soprano Sharon Israel will discuss their unique roles as each other’s muses. Cucinotta will play electronic works inspired by Israel’s poems, feature the poet’s voice, or both. Israel will read from her new chapbook Voice Lesson, including poems set to music by Cucinotta or inspired by his compositions.
Israel is the host of Planet Poet–Words in Space, an edition of The Writer’s Voice on WIOX 91.3 FM in Roxbury, NY. Her debut chapbook Voice Lesson was published by Post Traumatic Press earlier this year, and her work has appeared in Per Contra, SPANK the CARP, 5:2 Crime Poetry Weekly, Medical Literary Messenger, and Spry Literary Journal. In 2016, Israel appeared as a panelist at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem, MA.
Born in Brooklyn, Cucinotta studied composition and electronic music at the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College with Jacob Druckman, Robert Starer and Charles Dodge. His work MASQUE: the Tempest was premiered at the 2015 Phoenicia International Festival of the Voice by mezzo-soprano Maria Todaro, bass Bradley Smoak and pianist Doug Martin. Recent recordings include Divertimento For Mr. Brooks (2013), Koool Kitchen (2013), Dracula: Harker’s Journal (2014) and Life On The Screen (2016).
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 AT 1pm
Photographer Rudd Hubbell in Conversation with Nature Writer Leslie T. Sharpe
Photographer Rudd Hubbell, who’s been documenting the natural beauty of the Catskills since the 1970s, will be in conversation with nature writer Leslie T. Sharpe.
A descendent of the area’s first settlers, Hubbell has captured thousands of photographs of our spectacular wilderness. He enjoys looking closer than the broad view, and always tries to focus on the things most of us overlook or take for granted. “Every scene is constantly changing and transforming, and I strive to capture that,” Hubbell says.
Sharpe is a writer, editor and educator. A member of PEN American Center, she is the author of Editing Fact and Fiction: A Concise Guide to Book Editing (Cambridge University Press, 1994), which is regarded as a “modern editing classic” and “On Writing Smart: Tips and Tidbits,” featured in The Business of Writing (Allworth, 2012). Her new book, The Quarry Fox and Other Critters of the Wild Catskills (The Overlook Press, 2017), is a lyric narrative look at the wild animals of the Catskill Mountains. Sharpe will read from this work and discuss the genre of nature writing as it relates to the Catskills.
Writers in the Mountains is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization with a mission to provide a nurturing environment for the practice, appreciation and sharing of creative writing. For more information, visit writersinthemountains.org.
The Maurice D. Hinchey Catskill Interpretive Center is a partnership between the Catskill Center and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, with generous financial support by the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and Catskill Watershed Corporation and generous staff and volunteer support from Catskill Mountainkeeper, Catskill Mountain Club, Catskill 3500 Club, and the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference. To learn more, visit catskillinterpretivecenter.org.
The Catskill Center has been promoting the Catskill Mountain Region through regional advocacy, environmental education, arts and culture programming, invasive species management, and land protection for over 45 years. The Center stimulates, conducts, and supports integrated actions to protect vital ecosystems and unique landscapes, to enhance economic opportunities for all the region’s residents, to preserve cultural and historic assets and to further a regional vision and spirit. For more information about the Catskill Center visit catskillcenter.org.
How Art is Made: In the Catskills is a collection of interviews with some of the world’s most accomplished artists who live and work in the Catskill Mountains, New York. Five painters and illustrators, two ceramicists and printmakers, one sculptor, one weaver, and one writer discuss what inspires and moves them, what draws them to their medium of choice, what materials they use, how they approach a new artistic project, how they deal with setbacks, and how they celebrate success. Nine are formally trained at prestigious art schools; one is self-taught. What they all have in common is a rigorous studio practice, discipline, and the desire and curiosity to learn new things, and share them with the world.
Anyone preoccupied with language would find Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations of interest.
In his famous Philosophical Investigations, conducted throughout the 1940s, Wittgenstein explored the concepts of meaning, understanding, proposition, logic, and consciousness, among other things. By analyzing linguistic forms of expression, Wittgenstein set to understand the essence of language, its function, and its structure, and to answer the question “What is language?” Wittgenstein was interested in the logic of language, exactness, regularity and contradictions. Logic presents the order of possibilities, he argued.
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (p. 47).
“The fundamental fact here is that we lay down rules, a technique for a game, and that then when we follow the rules, things do not turn out as we had assumed. That we are therefore as it were entangled in our own rules. This entanglement in our own rules is what we want to understand” (p. 50).
“Language is a labyrinth of paths,” Wittgenstein argued (p. 82).
“If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also in judgments” (p. 88).
Wittgenstein also theorized that it’s human agreement that decides what is true and what is false in any particular language. He also explored more complicated matters like what happens in translation, and how do words refer to sensations? Is our vocabulary inadequate? He then pondered about the extent to which our sensations are private (p. 89). Later in the book Wittgenstein questioned what emotions are outside language, and what experiencing meaning versus experiencing a mental image is.
About lies, he had this to say: “Lying is a language-game that needs to be learned like any other one” (p. 90).
“Is thinking a kind of speaking?” the philosopher asked (p. 107). Is talking to oneself (internal speech) a private language?
“When I think in language, there aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought” (p. 107). Wittgenstein argued that “The thoughts are already there and we merely look for their expression” (p. 108). To think and to mean are different, he explained, because meaning is not a mental activity (p. 172). Later in the book he expounded that “The mind seems able to give a word meaning” (p. 184).
Wittgenstein was intrigued by the mental processes involved in linguistic expression, and questioned whether talking without thinking was possible, and if so, what that entailed. “Speech with and without thought is to be compared with the playing of a piece of music with and without thought” (p. 109).
How do individuals communicate their mental images to others, and what methods of representation are available to communicate and exert influence? Wittgenstein was preoccupied with questions like these.
“Grammar tells what kind of object anything is,” he argued (p. 116).
“The purpose of language is to express thoughts,” he added (p. 139). And “Language is an instrument. Its concepts are instruments.” (p. 151)
“Words are also deeds,” (p. 146) and “To have an opinion is a state” (p. 151).
“A proposition, and hence in another sense a thought, can be the ‘expression’ of a belief, hope, expectation, etc. But believing is not thinking,” he clarified (p. 152).
In psychology he thought that “Here explanation of our thinking demands a feeling” (p. 156).
However, “Talking (whether out loud or silently) and thinking are not concepts of the same kind; even though they are in closest connection,” he concluded (p. 217).
Wittgenstein also stressed just how seeing and interpreting are different from one another, and emphasized the importance of context in understanding human experience. “Do I really see something different each time, or do I only interpret what I see in a different way? I am inclined to say the former.” “To interpret is to think, to do something; seeing is a state,” Wittgenstein argued (p. 212).
Excerpts from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations published in translation by Macmillan in 1953 (250 pages).
At the Union Grove Distillery in Arkville, NY on April 24, 2016
© 2016 Simona David
Writers in the Mountains (WIM) invites you to a literary arts and community event and celebration we call “Meet the Authors,” the third in our series of annual book festivals. This year the event takes place on Sunday, April 24, from 12 noon to 4 p.m. at the Union Grove Distillery in Arkville, NY, an exciting new enterprise in the area. Union Grove is housed in a big old barnlike building featuring comfortable spaces fitted with stainless steel and copper and wood, a roaring fireplace, and the percolation of fine spirits—all making for a perfect environment in which to listen to, talk about, and think about books and writing.
The daylong event welcomes all writers and readers, artists and audience, and community members from every walk to brave the mud and chill of early spring and enjoy a warm gathering of successful and fascinating writers, illustrators, editors, educators, booksellers, and publishers from Syracuse to New York City and points between and beyond. This year’s keynote speaker is Rosie Schaap, author of the celebrated memoir Drinking with Men as well as the “Drink” column for The New York Times magazine.
Come by to shop for books directly from their authors, hear readings and peer-to-peer discussions, join in an enticing raffle (books are the prize, of course), and vote in the Best Book Cover contest.
Participating authors include Sari Botton, Robert Burke Warren, Linda Lowen, Ginnah Howard, John Gregg, Susan Wilbur, Craig Sanders, Jo Salas, Nava Atlas, Mary Lou Harris, and poet Danniel Schoonebeek, among others.
The program is as follows:
12:30—Poetry reading led by poet Sharon Israel. Featured Poet: Danniel Schoonebeek.
Danniel Schoonebeek’s first book of poems, American Barricade, was published by YesYes Books in 2014. It was named one of the year’s ten standout debuts by Poets & Writers and called “a groundbreaking first book that stands to influence its author’s generation” by Boston Review. In 2015, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and his second book of poems, Trébuchet, was selected as a winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series and will be published by University of Georgia Press. Recent work appears in The New Yorker, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. A recipient of awards and honors from Poets House, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Oregon State University, he hosts the Hatchet Job reading series in Brooklyn and edits the PEN Poetry Series. His latest book, a travelogue called C’est la guerre, is forthcoming later this year.
1:30—Group discussion on the latest news and trends in publishing. Leslie T. Sharpe, who taught writing at Columbia University and was an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and now teaches for Writers in the Mountains, will talk about traditional publishing; writer and consultant Simona David will touch on independent publishing; poet, painter and educator Anique Taylor will address getting published in literary journals; and Lillian Browne, editor-in-chief of The Reporter and editor of the Catskill Country Magazine, will share thoughts about her experience with the news media and travel magazine publishing.
2 p.m.—Rosie Schaap, author of the celebrated memoir Drinking with Men as well as the “Drink” column for The New York Times magazine, will deliver the keynote address. Rosie Schaap has been a bartender, a fortuneteller, a librarian at a paranormal society, an English teacher, an editor, a preacher, a community organizer, and a manager of homeless shelters.
2:30—Carrie Bradley Neves, writer, musician, and editor (with a specialization in cookbooks) will talk about new ingredients in the cookbook scene during the “foodie” era. Other illustrated book authors will be in the spotlight.
3:30—The Bounty of Books raffle, with a prize of ten selected book titles, will be awarded (come early, tickets are limited!), and the winner of the Best Cover contest will be announced.
Throughout the day, participating authors will read from their works and share their stories with the audience. Admission is free. For more information, visit writersinthemountains.org, or e-mail writersinthemountains@gmail.com.
Writers in the Mountains is a 501 (c) (3) not-for–profit organization with a mission to provide a nurturing environment for the practice, appreciation, and sharing of creative writing.
Woodstock Writers Festival just concluded its seventh season earlier this month: the festival took place between April 7 – 10 at various locations throughout town, and brought in writers of the highest caliber, as it does every year. This year the festival was co-sponsored by The New School, which also ran a Twitter contest throughout the duration of the festival, and asked participants to tweet their best Six Word Memoir, using the hashtag #6wordmemoir. Winners were offered the opportunity to be published on The New School’s Creative Writing program blog. Luis Jaramillo, the program’s director and author of The Doctor’s Wife, published in 2012, spoke at the festival. Jaramillo, who attended the festival for the first time this year, talked about The New School’s mission to “educate the educated.”
Read full article at Upstater.com.
© 2016 Simona David
Sophie McNeill from Penguin Random House summarized the five key trends in the book market in 2015, which reveal that:
Mark Coker from Smashwords released his predictions for 2016, and these include:
As mentioned in Coker’s article, Amazon did indeed open its first brick-and-mortar bookstore in Seattle back in November. The store, called Amazon Books, is located in University Village. Read article here. Amazon Books plans to use its huge database to stock its shelves; it will look at reviews from millions of readers, but also at staff-favorites, among other sources. Thomas De Monchaux wrote about Amazon Books for the New Yorker.
Amazon is not only the world’s largest bookseller, it’s also an important publisher. Launched in 2009, Amazon Publishing owns 14 imprints, and publishes both fiction and non-fiction books. Through AmazonCrossing, launched in 2010, the company publishes translated books. AmazonCrossing committed $10 million over the next five years to works in translation. Read more about Amazon Publishing here. Read more about AmazonCrossing in this article published by Alex Shephard in the New Republic.
Happy New Year, and Happy Publishing!
Simona David
Writers in the Mountains (WIM) invites you to the Andes Roundtable, Wednesday, October 7, 2015 at 7 pm. The event is held at the Hunting Tavern, on Main Street in Andes, NY. Attendees will learn about WIM’s mission and programs, hear some of the region’s best writers, and have a conversation about the role of arts and letters in the Catskill region.
Writers in the Mountains (WIM) is a literary organization founded twenty-three years ago in Roxbury. Over the past two decades the organization has grown to include more than three hundred writers from all backgrounds, all ages and levels of experience, writing in all genres and styles. WIM offers a variety of creative writing workshops year round throughout the entire Catskill region: fiction, poetry, memoir, playwriting, publishing, business writing, illustration, and more.
In addition to a broad range of workshops and seminars, in 2012 WIM launched an essay contest for middle and high school students in Delaware County. The essay contest encourages young writers to pursue their passion and dare to write – WIM’s motto. This year’s topic is What is your favorite music, and how does it move you?
Additionally, in 2014 WIM ventured into yet another arena: in April 2014 WIM started a book festival for authors, publishers and booksellers in the Catskills and Hudson Valley area. In 2015 the keynote speaker was award-winning author Jenny Milchman, published by Ballantine / Penguin Random House.
Writers in the Mountains hosts The Writer’s Voice, a weekly radio program on WIOX, broadcast Tuesdays at 1 pm, and produced by poet Sharon Israel.
WIM Board of Directors includes professionals with a wide range of skills and expertise: Simona David (consultant), Sharon Israel (poet), Geoff Rogers (writer), Peg DiBenedetto (publisher), Leslie T. Sharpe (professor, author and consultant), Lillian Browne (journalist), Carrie Bradley Neves (editor), Elizabeth Sherr (professor) – all professionals with a strong vision for what the organization is and can be.
Writers in the Mountains is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization with a mission to provide to the general public a nurturing environment for the practice, appreciation, and sharing of creative writing. For more information, visit writersinthemountains.org.
Simona David Consulting 