The Seasoning of Lake Glass

You can check out a link to a recent piece of Tom Montgomery-Fate's book in progress here.

It just came out in the "Society and Culture" section of the Summer issue of Notre Dame magazine.

Tom was here on a La Muse/University of Iowa fellowship last year and has written a collection of essays called Beyond the White Noise and a memoir Steady and Trembling.

July Art Expo

So, we finally got around to having another expo, mainly because of all the help we got from the two great artists that showed, Dave Beazley (you can also check out Dave's blog here) and Andrea Simper! We'll upload video of the expo to Youtube soon and then upload it to the blog.

Andrea and Dave have been here on a residency as barters for six months working on jewelry (Andrea) and painting (Dave).

They both hail from the North Island of New Zealand, from the town of Whangarei. They will be going on to Sri Lanka and London soon, for the next three months.

We're really going to miss them!

Tom Montgomery-Fate on NPR

A previous La Muse attendee and Fellow, the writer Tom Montgomery -Fate, was recently on National Public Radio in Chicago, reading the introduction of the book he's writing right now.

Here's a link to the audio snippet of the piece. It's about Thoreau's Walden, relaxation and seeing things as they really are. You should check it out.

Tom is a professor of English at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. You can check out his other books here on Amazon.

La Muse Interview with Anne Mini

A recent attendee and well known blogger, the writer Anne Mini, is running a week long interview, An Inside Look at a Formal Writing Retreat, with us on her great blog about La Muse.

The interview will run for the rest of the week in parts, so as to address all the aspects of what a retreat is and how it runs.

Anne was at La Muse last month working on a novel and we had a lot of fun answering her questions.

Thanks for taking the time to do the interview, Anne!

June Book Swap

So another retreat started and we got some more great books!

Andrea Simper was first to go with her books: Unclasped by Derren Gilhooley and Thrift to Fantasy by Rosemary McLeod, the latter about where she's from, New Zealand, and the former about contemporary British jewelry.








Andrea also showed us some of her great recent work, above.

Our University of Wisconsin-Madison Fellow Edward Porter was next up.

Ed told us about one of his mentor's Charles D'Ambrosio and his great book of short stories The Point.

He also introduced us to Joseph Mitchell's book Up in the Old Hotel. Mitchell was an American writer who used to write for The New Yorker and is well known for his descriptions of New York city characters.

Aron Taylor, a builder and designer from New Zealand, who is here on a barter talked to us about Chris Johnson McCandless "going Bush" in Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild and about the "funny Pommy" Joe Bennett's A Land of Two Halves.

Nandi Szabo followed Aron with Julia Cameron and Mark Bryan's The Aritst's Way which she uses in the course she teaches at Sacramento City College in California.

Nandi is a writer and artist who works as a creative arts therapist. She also donated the Chilean-American Isabel Allende's novel Daughters of Fortune.

The artist Dave Beazley told us again - Dave and Andrea have been here almost six months now - about the art book Vitamin P - New Perspectives in Painting by Barry Schwabsky. Dave feels it's an essential resource for the contemporary painter. We also got to see some of his Dave's characters but unfortunately I don't have any photos of them. Until next time.....

Chalet for Sale in the Mountains

Below is a video of our friend's house/chalet which is for sale. Here's a link to a blog he set up to show you what it's like:

May Book Swap

First off was John Hunter who brought Anne Enright's Booker Prize wining novel The Gathering because it is set in Dublin in the New Ireland of the "economic miracle." John also donated Margaret Atwood's book of essays Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer on Writing. John was here to work on what he said people are now calling "life writing." His biography is about Samuel Smiles.

Next was John's wife Janet who donated I Never Knew That About Ireland by Christopher Winn, a book full of interesting asides on historical characters and places in Ireland. She also brought along Ken Hom's cookbook Ken Hom's Vegetarian Cookery.

Liza Filby who was here on the retreat before this one came next. She reintroduced Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim and Wynton Marsalis' road trip memoir Jazz in the bittersweet blues of life.

The Irish poet Tadhg Ó Dúshláine donated another of his great books of poetry Mallacht Famaire which he finished last year as well as a copy of some new work tentatively titled "Home and Away" or "Is Abhaile Againn."

Anne Mini, an American author, who has a great blog for writers that you should check out, who was also here last retreat, reintroduced Philip K. Dick's, Valis and F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise.

Lori Neville, a Canadian writer and artist who lives in California, donated The Virginia Woolf Writers' Workshop: Seven Lessons to Inspire Great Writing. Lori also donated Gary Snyder and Tom Killion's book The High Sierra of California. Killion did the illustrations from woodcuts, in what Lori called "a feast for the eyes" and Snyder wrote the poems and journals. The poet works where Lori works at University of California, Davis.

The South African artist Deborah Clarke, who lives in France, brought a photo memoir of her father JFC Clarke's book A Glimpse Into Marabastad which documents a township in South Africa back in the early 70s.

Small Expo of Nora & Julie's Work for the other May Attendees

The writer Joanne Elliot checking out Julie Baugnet's book collaboration work.




John and Nora Lee McGillivray talking about Karl Blossfeldt's nature photgraphs.

Photos of American Artist and Occitan Poet Collaboration in May

Above are photos of some of the beautiful work that the Minnesota artist Julie Baugnet (on the left in the photo below), did at la Muse in the month of May. The paintings were inspired by the work of the local occitan poet and linguist Aurélia Lassaque (on the right in the photo below).






Julie shared the studio that month with another Minnesota artist, her friend Nora Lee McGilvry.

Labastide Onion Festival

These are pictures of the mad occitane onion festival - Lo camin de la ceba - we have in front of the village church, St. Andre, every year sometime in the middle of May.

In an ancient ritual people walk from Mazamet to our village of Labastide Esparbairenque to buy onion plants, drink wine, eat saucisson and french fries, and listen to these crazy goatpipes and dance a fun circular dance hand in hand.

Thanks to artist Julie Baugnet for the photos!

Montolieu and Booktowns

So, last Wednesday, the day before everyone left May's retreat, John drove everyone to the Booktown in Montolieu. They have over 15 bookstores, a museum of the book, a huge gallery space cooperative called the Centre D'Art et de Litterature, where the artists and text artists of our group had fun, as well as various other places such as the typography space, an illustration gallery. The list goes on and on. The place is a trip. We'll upload photos of the picnic amongst the cactus garden as well as other stuff taken by the attendees when everyone has sent us their photos!

Anyway, we just wanted to post some links to the rest of the Booktowns in Europe, as we intend to visit them all at some stage in the coming years, and there doesn't seem to be a consistent site listing of them all. So, here they are:

France has the most Booktown's in Europe, six, with places like Spain having just one, directed by Fundacion Siglo para las Artes in Valladolid, in the North. Here's the French ones, other than Monotolieu. They're all further north:

Becherel, Fontenoy-La-Joute, (this place has 280 inhabitants and can still fit 18 bookstores, one art store, one paper maker, and a calligraphy store in it. ) La Charite-Sur-Loire, (a UNESCO protected village) Montmorillon, Cuisery (they have a book market the first Sunday of every month).

England:
Hay-On-Wye - Wales (They were the first Booktown, founded by Richard Booth in 1962. They have 35 bookshops and 60 other independent stores. They also have one of the world's biggest book festivals every year. This year it's from the 21st of May until the 31st. Hay-on-Wye is a small (pop. 1300) town with an estimated 2 million books!)
Wigtown - Scotland (over quarter of a million books to choose from...)

Belgium:
Redu (They get over 200,000 people every year)
Damme

Holland:
Bredevoort

Switzerland:
Saint-Pierre-De-Clages (in the heart of the Swiss Alps, they have some cool churches too)

Luxembourg:
Vianden

Germany:
Wunsdorf
Muhlbeck

Italy:
Montereggio

Norway:
Fjaerland (that's it in the photo below!)

Sweden:
Mellosa (Right beside the Prime minister's place, this one's also a Peace Booktown)

Finland:
Sysma

Estonia:
Votikvere (can't find a link?)

Went on line to find one in the US. Are there more?:


Minnesota:
Stillwater (here's their amusing story: " Stillwater, as a small town with 35 booksellers, had developed sufficiently by 1994 to encourage us to petition Richard Booth, King of Hay-on-Wye, Lord Protector of All Booktowns, for official Booktownstatus. In a flurry of faxes, letters, applications, testimonials and gifts to King Richard, we attempted to get him to visit Stillwater, a requirement under the Booktown bylaws. It was not until Tom Loome made a personal pilgrimage to Hay-on-Wye in March of 1994 that the King agreed to consider the matter and follow up with a personal visit. The rest is history. In a ceremony attended by the mayor and other city notables, Stillwater was declared the First Booktown in North America by King Richard Booth on August 26, 1994."

If any of you out there know of other Booktowns, tell us, and we'll upload links to them too!

DO-OVER! - Robin Hemley

Our friend Robin Hemley just came out with another book this month, DO-OVER!

Robin has published seven books altogether, and his stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune, and many literary magazines and anthologies. Robin got his MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop and he's the current director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He lives in Iowa City.


Here's what Publisher's Weekly had to say about the book:

"When Hemley ... decides that he wants to do over some of the experiences he flubbed as a child, he isn't just dreaming. The 48-year-old father of three makes a list of times and places he'd like to revisit, including kindergarten, the prom and summer camp, doggedly pursuing all the contacts and background checks necessary to 'storm the walls of childhood' as an adult. Surprisingly, the kids and teachers he meets along the way accept him in his overgrown state; some even express envy . . . Hemley is endearing, funny and more than a bit courageous . . . A big kid at heart, the author draws readers in with just the right mix of humor and tenderness."