A Country Where You Once Lived

We're delighted to hear that the essay Sheryl St. Germain wrote at La Muse last year has received an unprecedented number of positive letters to the editor at The Sun.

The title of the essay is A Country Where You Once Lived and you can read it here.

Sheryl's most recent book is Let It Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems, and her collection of lyric essays Navigating Disaster will be published by Louisiana Literature Press soon.

Sheryl comes from New Orleans but lives in Pittsburgh where she directs the mfa program in creative writing at Chatham University.

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.

August/September Book Swap

We had the book swap with wine last night and La Muse made off with a load of music scores and cool books...

Eibhlís Farrell, the composer, went first, donating a plethora of her older and newer scores. Eibhlís is our An Foras Feasa Fellow for 2009.

The scores included: "Time Drops," a solo piano work she wrote for David Quigley and the Northern Ireland Arts Council, "Exandi Voces," which was commissioned by the International Cork Music Festival, Arioso, composed in 1994 for a young jazz saxophonist for the first International Saxophonist Festival in Japan, and "Time and Space Died Yesterday," a solo instrumental that was premiered in 2007 at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Eibhlís also donated 4 music CDs: "Cór Na nÓg: Caislean Ruairi" composed by Siobhán ó Dúbháin, a local author and composer from Eibhlís' hometown, Rostrevor, as well as the same choir in "Cór Na nÓg in Madrid 2005," and two CDs "Contemporary Music from Ireland Volume 8" and "Volume 2" from the Contemporary Music Centre in Ireland.

Next came Johanne Clyne who is here working on a non-fiction book related to travel this retreat. Johanne donated 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.

David Georgi, who is here this retreat on a barter working on a translation of François Villon's poetry (you can read an essay David wrote about François Villon here for the Chicago Review on Stephen Rodefer's translation of Villon) brought a Buffalo book about where he's from in upstate New York. The book, The Last Fine Time, follows a Polish family living on the Polish east side between 40s and 50s Buffalo.

David also brought along a novella, The Following Story, about lost loves, where the narrator, a travel writer, wakes up in Portugal pretty sure that he went to bed in the Netherlands.