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Walloon Writers Retreat— Sept. 28 - Oct. 1, 2006
2006 Guest Authors
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Jane Hamilton burrows into the souls of fictional Midwesterners whose own ordinary lives get upended: a young wife battling her abusive mother ("The Book of Ruth"), a schoolteacher whose friend's daughter drowns while in her care ("A Map of the World") and a gay dancer whose personal crises are overshadowed by his brother's cancer ("The Short History of a Prince"), in "Disobedience," a 17-year-old boy secretly looks at his mother's e-mail and discovers she is having an extramarital affair. Her new book, When Madeline Was Young, arriving September of 2006, is a richly textured novel about a tragic accident and its effects on two generations of a family.When Aaron Maciver’s beautiful young wife, Madeline, suffers brain damage in a bike accident, she is left with the intellectual powers of a six-year-old. In the years that follow, Aaron and his second wife care for Madeline with deep tenderness and devotion as they raise two children of their own. Jane Hamilton, with her usual humor and keen observations of human relationships, deftly explores unusual situations and examines notions of childhood. Her first novel, "The Book of Ruth," was published in 1989 to laudatory reviews, and it won the PEN/Hemingway Prize for best first novel, but it was hardly a bestseller. With "A Map of the World" five years later, Hamilton again impressed the critics and fared much better commercially. Oprah Winfrey made Hamilton's a name of note even at airport newsstands when she picked "Ruth" for her fledgling book club in 1996. Three years later, the Oprah Book Club featured "A Map of the World," shortly before the release of the movie version, which earned Sigourney Weaver an Oscar nomination.She is one of only three authors chosen twice by the club, along with Toni Morrison and Wally Lamb. She never believed in "women's fiction" until she started reading new fiction full-time for the PEN awards. "I always felt that's baloney, there isn't even such a genre, but there is, you can see it." One of its hallmarks, besides heroines who undergo epiphanies, is "a quality to the prose, a kind of intimacy" that puts the reader "right there in the kitchen," said Hamilton.
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Jacquelyn Mitchard is the author of the number one New York Times bestselling novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, from Viking Press — chosen as the first book for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, and four other bestselling novels, The Most Wanted, (1998), A Theory of Relativity, (2001), an essay collection, The Rest of Us: Dispatches From the Mothership (1997), Twelve Times Blessed (2003). Her first childrens book, Starring Prima! The Mouse of the Ballet Jolie came out in May 2004 as well as Baby Bat’s Lullaby out in September 2004. The film version of The Deep End of the Ocean, starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Whoopi Goldberg, was released in March 1999. A Theory of Relativity, from HarperCollins, now is in development by Paramount Pictures. In her book The Breakdown Lane (Harper Collins), "... Jacquelyn Mitchard offers an honest, moving, passionate portrait of what happens when we fall off the track of a comfortable life — and more importantly, how we might learn to rise again, and soar. Reading just doesn't get any better than this." -Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper and Vanishing Acts. In her new novel Cage of Stars, a narrative about a teenage girl's struggle with some of life's most difficult decisions concerning faith, trust and forgiveness, Mitchard “…struggles with questions of divinity and retribution by asking if it is really anyone's place to sit in judgment of others. It is a story that is at times eloquent, yet always painful to read. Readers are invited to get to know the Swans; they will be left all the more complete because of the experience. This is Mitchard's best novel to date and is an essential purchase for all public libraries." Library Journal(Starred Review) A Ragdale Foundation Distinguished Fellow, she has also written two non-fiction books, Mother Less Child: The Love Story of a Family (W.W. Norton) and Jane Addams of Hull House (Gareth Stevens Press). Her essays on parenthood and social issues have been widely anthologized; and she has received the Maggie Award for Public Service Magazine Journalism, a nomination for Britain’s Orange Prize for fiction; and served on the 2002 jury for the National Book Awards for fiction.
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Mary Jo Salter is the author of five collections of poems, all published by Knopf: Henry Purcell in Japan (1985); Unfinished Painting, the 1989 Lamont Selection for the year's most distinguished second volume of poetry; Sunday Skaters, nominated in 1994 for the National Book Critics Circle Award; A Kiss in Space (1999), and Open Shutters, (2003), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She also has a children's book to her credit, The Moon Comes Home (1989). She is a coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry and has contributed the foreword to The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt (1997). Her first full-length play, Falling Bodies, was produced in 2004. Mary Jo Salter was born in 1954 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She grew up in Detroit and Baltimore, and received her B.A. from Harvard, where she studied with Elizabeth Bishop. After receiving an M.A. in English from Cambridge University, she worked as a staff editor at the Atlantic Monthly and as poetry editor of the New Republic. Salter’s essays and reviews appear in The New York Times Book Review and The Yale Review, among other publications. She has received numerous awards, including NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. She is on the board of the Amy Clampitt Fund, the Bogliasco Foundation, and The Kenyon Review, and has been Vice President of the Poetry Society of America since 1995. Salter has been a member of the English faculty at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, since 1984. Les Murray calls Salter's poems, "moving and adventurous" and poet Carolyn Kizer has written of Salter's work, "These are poems of breathtaking elegance: in formal control, in intellectual subtlety, in learning lightly displayed." In Open Shutters, released in paperback in 2005, darkness and light interact throughout the book—in poems about September 11; about a dog named Shadow; about a blind centenarian who still pretends to read the paper; about a woman shaken by the death of her therapist. "Salter . . . performs with deep pleasure and arresting artistry the paired arts of avid observation and the transformation of hectic experience into crystalline images, golden threads of narrative, and startling extrapolations . .."—Donna Seaman, Booklist Specialization: The writing of poetry; poetry criticism;
prosody; Emily Dickinson; W. H. Auden; Tom Stoppard. |
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Brad Leithauser was
born in Detroit and graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School.
He is the author of five previous novels—Equal Distance, Hence,
Seaward, The Friends of Freeland, and A Few Corrections; four volumes
of poetry—The Odd Last Thing She Did, Mail from Anywhere, Cats of
the Temple, and Hundreds of Fireflies; and a book of essays. His independent careers as novelist and poet come together brilliantly here, producing something rare and wonderful in the landscape of contemporary American writing: a book that bends borders, a happy marriage of poetry and fiction. The hero of this one-of-a-kind novel is Russel Darlington, a born naturalist and an unlikely romantic hero. We meet him in the year 1895—a seven-year-old boy first glimpsed chasing a frog through an Indiana swamp. And we follow this idealistic, man for nearly forty years: into college and over the Rockies in pursuit of a new species of butterfly; through a clumsy courtship and into a struggling marriage; across the Pacific, where he suffers a nightmarish accident; through the deaths of friends and family and into a seemingly hopeless passion for an unapproachable young woman. Darlington’s Fall is ultimately a love story. It is written in verse that—vivid, accessible, and lush—imparts an intensity to the story and its luminous gallery of characters. An Emily Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College, he lives with his wife and their two daughters, Emily and Hilary, in Amherst, Massachusetts. "An amazing merger of art and science, verse
and narrative. Leithauser has invented a stanza as accommodating
and mobile as prose, which yet rewards us, if we listen, with the music
of rhyme. Prose could not have provided a narrative so richly embroidered,
so darting and animated in its impulses and inspirations, so glitteringly
exact in its evocations of nature. Not since Nabokov has the miracle
of consciousness been celebrated with such erudite passion, such lofty
wit." —John Updike |
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Doug Stanton
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Doug Stanton is the author of In Harm’s Way, which spent 9 months on the New York Times best-seller list, with 750,000 copies in print. Also an international bestseller (The Sunday Times, London), the book has been translated into German, Japanese, Danish and Italian, and is in development as a movie at Warner Brothers, with Akiva Goldsman producing. It was also chosen as a New York Review of Book “Best Books In Print, 2001,” a Publisher’s Weekly “Notable Book of 2001," and a Michigan Notable Book of the Year. Stanton's new book, The Horse Soldiers, is the dramatic account of 12 secret U.S. soldiers who entered Afghanistan immediately following 9/11, and, riding to war on horses, defeated the Taliban. Horse Soldiers is the story of ordinary men doing extraordinary things in a shadow world of grays, where often the power of the mind is more important than the speed of the bullet. Little, Brown & Co will publish The Horse Soldiers as a lead, literary non-fiction title in 2006. Doug Stanton lives in his hometown of Traverse City, Michigan, with his wife, writer Anne Stanton, and their three children. He has worked as a high school and college teacher, a commercial fisherman, bookseller, and caretaker of Robert Frost's house in Vermont. "In Harm's Way is a stunning book. The story of the USS Indianapolis is one of the most harrowing tales of World War II -- and Doug Stanton takes you through every terrifying moment in a vivid and utterly memorable account." —Tom Brokaw, author of The Greatest Generation
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Craig Holden - like many writers, held a variety of jobs before becoming a full time writer, including high school teacher, college instructor, factory worker, literary agent and night-shift technician at a medical center lab. His hospital experiences inspired his acclaimed first novel, The River Sorrow, the story of an emergency room doctor who becomes involved in a murder investigation. Published by Delacorte in 1994, the New York Time Book Review called it an auspicious beginning for Holden. His second novel, The Last Sanctuary (Delacorte, 1996), which has been optioned for film, is the story of a war veteran drawn into a world of underground militias and terrorist cults after being falsely accused of murder. This literary thriller earned further praise from Robert B. Parker, Tony Hillerman and James Ellroy, among others. Craig’s novel, Four Corners of Night (Island paperback, 1999), was awarded The Great Lakes Booksellers 1999 Book Award in Fiction. Craig’s book The Jazz Bird was published by Simon & Schuster in January of 2002 and recently released in paperback. His new book, The Narcissist's Daughter (Simon & Schuster), was published early in 2005. "Combine Holden's skill for writing elegant, flowing, and poetic prose with plot twists that keep you up at night and an ending that surprises, shocks, and yet seems inevitable, and you have the quintessential literary thriller. The Narcissist's Daughter is, by far, Holden's best effort to date." —Charles Brice, The Circle
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Chuck Pfarrer is a screenwriter, novelist and former US Navy SEAL. Pfarrer’s Hollywood credits include screenwriting and production work in Navy SEALs, Darkman, The Jackal, Virus, Red Planet, and Hard Target. Pfarrer’s best-selling autobiography, Warrior Soul, The Memoir of a Navy SEAL, was published by Random House in 2004. His debut novel, Killing Ché, will be published by Random House in April, 2007. He is the author of six graphic novels for Dark Horse Publications, and has written and produced two interactive full motion videos, Flash Traffic and Silent Steel, both for Tsunami Media. A counter-terrorism consultant to the US and foreign governments, Chuck has written Op Ed for the New York Times, appeared as an author and counter-terrorism expert on CSPAN2, NPR, Voice of America, Fox-TV and America Tonight. He has written about weapons of mass destruction and counter-insurgency for the Bulletin of the Navy SEAL Museum, as well as the Knight-Ridder syndicate. Pfarrer lives in Michigan.
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Gary Metras is
the author of the poetry books: The Night Watches, Destiny’s Calendar, He is the editor, publisher, and printer of
Adastra Press, which specializes in
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M.L. Liebler - has authored 11 books of poetry and fiction including the recently released The Moon a Box. Also in print, “Brooding the Heartlands: Poets of the Midwest” (1998), “Breaking the Voodoo” (1990), “Deliver Me” (1990), and the 1995 Viet Nam Generation Press release, “Stripping the Adult Century Bare.” Much of his work has been published in Exquisite Corpse, Rolling Stock, Cottonwood Review, River Styx, Gargoyle, and anthologies from Michigan State University, Kent State University, and Viking-Penguin. He is the director of Springfed Arts Metro Detroit Writers and has been on full-time faculty in literature, creative writing, American Studies and Labor Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit since 1980. In April of 2005, M.L. was named the Poet Laureate of St. Clair Shores, Michigan. He has just released Greatest Hits: 1984 – 2004 (Pudding House Press). "M. L. Liebler is a piece of the reality poetry that needs to stay alive... He is a beacon shining for the republic (of poetry and love) for which he stands." —Alicia Ostriker
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John D. Lamb is the Director of Springfed Arts, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to educate and inspire folks in the craft of writing, be it prose or song, the performance of works, spoken or sung.
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