Tuscan Retreat

We just found out about this retreat in Tuscany hosted by Stephen Lloyd Webber, a teacher of poetry and composition at New Mexico State University and also a certified personal trainer and activist for Population Connection. 2010 will be his fourth summer at Spannocchia hosting a retreat.

Spannocchia is a 1,100 acre estate in the wooded hills of Tuscany with a large farmhouse and villa, numerous cottages, and a 800 year-old towered house. Run by the Spannocchia Foundation, its main emphasis has been to heighten the traditions of sustainable organic agriculture as well as Tuscan culture.

Paragraph - New York

All you New Yorkers looking for somewhere other than your cramped apartments to write: check out Paragraph. We've heard the place is great and we like what they have to say on their site re. memberships:

"Publication is not required for a membership; only serious intent and a strong drive to write."

You can check out their yearly membership rates here and here's what The New York Times has to say about them.

The Centre for Creative Practices

A cool new Centre for Creative Practices opens its doors this Friday in Dublin on the same night as Culture Night Dublin 2009.

This is what they have to say:

"The current climate might seem to be against us. We dare to believe the opposite. We want to prove our belief that CULTURE is a fundamental value for every society, that the arts are an indispensable system of reference for personal and collective values and an example of diversity and tolerance. We need them always, but especially now the arts are vital to neutralise the stagnation."

They have a load of courses on all types of writing and we think it's a really exciting thing to see happening in Dublin. Well done! You can check out their courses here.

September Book Swap

So, we had the book swap yesterday morning with crepes and homemade fig jam, rhubarb and apple compotes and blueberry jam.

After eating Johanne Clynne was first with her books Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel and the BBC's publication Coast which depicts the village Johanne grew up in, Warsash, a village in southern Hampshire, England.




Gardenia Spiegel told us about her two choices next: Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, and Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Gardenia chose Didion's book because she too is writing a memoir. While writing the memoir Gardenia will also be working on a screenplay of Calvino's novel.

Last came Dwight Cassin, an artist from Chicago. Dwight donated the Journal of Eugene Delacroix first, a book that documents Delacroix's life from 1822 to 1863. Dwight also gave the library Working by Studs Terkel because, he says, Terkel's book tells the stories of real working Chicagoans, interviewed over forty years for NPR by Terkel.