News
Writers find a local haven in Manhattanville
From the Journal News web site lohud.com
4.27.08
By Georgette Gouveia
Sister Ruth Dowd isn't a writer, but she knows from good writing.
"I always say I'm not a writer. But I am a reader," says Dowd, dean of Graduate & Professional Studies at Manhattanville College in Purchase. "I read in the hope of more writing."
In that hope, Dowd started a weekend writers conference at the school in 1983, with novelist Shelby Hearon and essayist Phyllis Theroux among the guest faculty and Toni Morrison as the keynote speaker. Since then, the conference has grown into the Summer Writers' Week, which celebrates its 25th anniversary June 23 to 27. Open to aspirants and professionals alike, the week features six three-hour morning workshops. The 90 students - about 15 to a class - can choose from two fiction workshops; one in writing for children and young adults; a poetry workshop; and one in creative nonfiction, which includes essays and memoirs. The sixth workshop this year is on mystery writing.
Afternoons are reserved for various related sessions, including the popular editors & agents panel, as well as individual conferences. Evenings are for student- and faculty-readings.
There's a special reading on June 24 by Paul Rieckhoff, author of the Iraq War memoir "Chasing Ghosts," and a keynote address on June 25 by Nan Talese - senior vice president of Doubleday, where she is publisher and editorial director of her own imprint. Both events are open to the public.
"We hold the programs in the castle, which has a lot of charm to it," says Dowd, who directs the Writers' Week, as well as the Master of Arts in Writing Program. She is sitting in Reid Castle, the crenelated stone mansion that belonged in the late 19th century to Whitelaw Reid, owner of The New York Tribune.
The paneled, chandeliered rooms, with their large paintings, have both a coziness and Whartonian elegance about them. To these qualities Dowd, a member of the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (R.S.C.J.), brings a matter-of-fact intelligence.
As Dowd guides you through the castle, she speaks of the wisteria that soon will twine all-too-briefly about the facade.
Clearly, the workshops are not just about writing. They are about writing in community. Just ask Linda Simone, an alumna of the college's graduate writing program and Writers' Week.
"Before I came into the program, I'd see ads for Writers' Week, and I'd be salivating," says Simone, a poet. "I did it two years. We have a lot of people who come back."
Over the last three years, Writers' Week has had an average 22 percent rate of return on attendance.
"It was a fantastic experience," says Simone. "There is this camaraderie and such an energy about it."
Simone liked writing at Manhattanville so much that today she is associate director of the graduate writing program and Writers' Week.
"Each person who comes to the workshops gives himself the gift of time," Simone says. Time not only to write but to test that writing among fellow writers and readers.
For the writer - who is often more comfortable in the world of his thoughts and imagination - such a gift can be scary. But it's necessary, Simone says:
"When you create a world, it's like tunnel vision. But if you allow yourself to be open and hear what your first readers are saying, you get good feedback."