Thursday, October 25, 2012

Grand Opening, Living Labyrinths for Peace, Taos





Mayan light labyrinth: photo from tenthousandthingsfromkyoto.blogspot.com 

  
Grand Opening
Living Labyrinths for Peace, Taos

November 3, 2012
3PM – 9PM

Free Community Event

We invite you to join us as we dedicate the new
National headquarters of Living Labyrinths for Peace, Inc.
 relocated from Washington D.C. to
1021 Salazar Road, Taos, New Mexico.

Experience the light, sound & mystery of the “Dance of the Labyrinth”  
  Feel inner peace after walking the “Rainbow Labyrinth of Peace.”

Schedule of Events
3PM – Walk the Labyrinths and Enjoy the Center
5:30PM – 10-minute Film Screening about Living Labyrinths for Peace
6PM – Dedication of the Center and Peace Ceremony with Drumming
7:00PM – Enjoy indoor & outdoor labyrinth walking, art, music, books
Finale: Raffle Drawing for Sandra Wasko Flood Labyrinth Art

For more information contact:
Sandra at 575-377-6369 or Julia at 575-779-4778
Email: livinglabyrinths@gmail.com

Inner Peace to World Peace through Labyrinths

Priscilla Long on Taos Light


The American Scholar - Science Frictions

Let It Shine

Print
Light, from the Southwest’s high desert to the surface of Mars

By Priscilla Long


In Taos, New Mexico, in July, the sky morphs its blues as if a painter were at work. One day last summer the sky was lapis lazuli with clouds so white they couldn’t be real. To the north, Pueblo Peak rose jagged and hazy green. This is high desert: sagebrush, ferric red dirt pocked with prairie dog pitfalls. On black asphalt, a pile of sand on a crack crawled with red ants. I stayed at the Sagebrush Inn—thick adobe and old brick walkways—while teaching at the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference. Georgia O’Keeffe painted in one of these rooms. She traveled to Taos for the uncanny quality of the light.
And just what is this light and just what are these colors?
Color is a form of light, and light enters our eyes in waves. Different wavelengths cause us to see different colors. Red arrives in long light waves, blue in short. But the light spectrum is much wider than we can perceive. The shorter the wave the faster it moves and the more energy it carries. Shortest and fastest are gamma rays. Following gamma rays are x-rays; then ultraviolet light; then the visible light spectrum starting with the shorter waves we see as violet and ending with the longer waves we see as red; then, infrared; and finally, radio waves, long and slow. (Yes. Radio waves are light waves. Your radio converts light into sound.) The range from infrared to radio is sometimes referred to as microwaves.
Telescopes work due to the tremendous amount of information that light carries. Any given substance, whether your purple shirt or the red planet Mars, absorbs some wavelengths and reflects others. The reflected light waves give the object color. For example the element iron absorbs shorter wave lengths and reflects longer (red) waves, giving Mars that red look. My lapis lazuli ring absorbs long light waves and reflects shorter ones—blue.
In a vacuum, light travels at the rate of about 186,000 miles per second (at, by definition, the speed of light). But what is light? It’s both a particle (a thing, like a baseball) and a wave (a pattern). Light comes in pieces, called photons. And photons exhibit both wave behavior and particle behavior.
A particle is simple, but what’s a wave? An ocean wave is not water moving. Instead, it is energy moving through water. The energy vibrates the water molecules, which pass the energy to the next water molecules. When you toss a pebble into a pond, the ripples ripple, while the leaf floating on the surface merely bobs up and down. Energy is moving through the water, bobbing the leaf as it passes, different from water passing through.
Light is an electromagnetic wave.
Consider the concept of a field. A field is associated with a force that affects particles. We have gravitational fields, magnetic fields, and electric fields (areas surrounding charged particles such as electrons or protons). Magnetic and electric fields are linked. When charged particles vibrate they create electromagnetic fields, and these fields transport “electromagnetic radiation”—that is to say, light. In the words of my astronomy book, “Light waves are vibrations of both electric and magnetic fields, caused by the motions of charged particles.”
All of which explicates, but fails to capture, the intense blue—both thick and pale—of the Taos sky.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Greg Martin Reads from Stories for Boys November 8 at 7 pm


In case you missed Greg Martin's faculty reading at the Taos Summer Writers' Conference this year, next month you have another chance to hear him read from his new memoir Stories for Boys (Hawthorne Press), which was selected by Barnes & Noble for their "Discover New Writers" series.

When: November 8 at 7 pm
Where: Dane Smith Hall, Room 123 on the University of New Mexico campus in Albuquerque

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Robert Taylor wins first place in Royal Palm Literary Awards Competition



Robert Taylor’s manuscript, Ping Pong with the Aga Khan, has won first place in the Royal Palm Literary Awards Competition for an unpublished memoir. The winners were announced October 20th at the 2012 Florida Writer’s Association Conference. Robert attended the 2011 Taos Summer Writers’ Conference where he won the Barbara Robinette Moss prize for his essay Beauty in Pakistan: Hidden and Revealed. He also attended Debra Monroe’s Masters Class where he introduced a first draft of his memoir. “Debra’s guidance and the tough love of my classmates were exactly what I needed at the time,” he said. “They hammered me with ‘Yes, Robert, but how did you feel’ until my nerves were raw.” He’s now hoping to attract a literary agent and publisher.

Monday, October 22, 2012

Emily Rapp's Blog Little Seal hits TIME charts


Little Seal has made the annual list of the TIME, 25 Best Blogs of 2012. You can find Emily's blog here.


Emily Rapp is the author of Poster Child, her 2007 memoir about her life with disability.  Emily was born with a congenital defect that required that her left foot be amputated at the age of 4.
In January 2011, Emily and her husband, Rick Louis, learned that their 9 month old son, Ronan,  has Tay-Sachs disease.  Tay-Sachs is a rare, incurable, genetic, progressive disease that will claim Ronan’s life in the next few years.  Shortly thereafter, Emily began Little Seal, her blog to chronicle her family’s time with Ronan and their struggle with the disease.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Robert Wilder's Newest Project



We are excited to announce that Robert Wilder will once again be joining us for the 15th Annual Taos Summer Writers' Conference. He will be teaching a class on personal essay.

In the meantime, have fun with his newest project Letter America.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Joy Harjo inducted into MVSKOKE Hall of Fame



TULSA, Okla. – The Muscogee (Creek) Nation has announced the first four inductees into its MVSKOKE Hall of Fame, and they will be honored at an Oct. 11 gala at the River Spirit Event Center.
The MVSKOKE Hall of Fame takes the place of the tribe’s Living Legends ceremony that was held each June at the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Festival. Living Legends honored in previous years include former MCN Principal Chiefs R. Perry Beaver and Bill Fife, and Bataan Death March survivor Phillip Coon. Muscogee (Creek) Nation Living Legends honorees will be grandfathered into the MVSKOKE Hall of Fame.
Tiger said the MVSKOKE Hall of Fame received a number of excellent nominations, however, four were selected as 2012 inductees.
Muscogee (Creek) Nation citizens Simon Harry, Elsie Martin, Joy Harjo and the late Allie Reynolds are the 2012 recipients of the award.
Harjo is a prominent poet, musician and author, and has had 15 works of poetry published. Her accomplishments cover many genres in the art field, and she’s a major proponent for Indian issues and Muscogee (Creek) issues, and always stresses her heritage as a proud Muscogee (Creek) citizen. Harjo has produced five well-received albums, written two children’s books, a memoir and co-wrote a screenplay.




The mistress of ceremonies for the Oct. 11 gala will be Salina Jayne-Dornan, Mayor, City of Eufaula and Muscogee (Creek) citizen.
The MVSKOKE Hall of Fame induction requires that the individual must have brought recognition to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation or have made outstanding contributions to the quality of life and development.
“I felt like a MVSKOKE Hall of Fame was long overdue, especially to recognize people that have contributed to the success of this Nation, whether it was on the community or national level,” Tiger said. “It’s a celebration of the Nation to be able to display the type of people who are contributing to the Nation. I’m excited that it’s come to fruition.”
MCN Director of Tourism & Recreation William Lowe said the final details of the event are coming together.
“Plans for the MVSKOKE Hall of Fame Induction Gala are coming along great. We are planning a fabulous evening that includes cocktails, dinner and a silent auction,” Lowe said. “All proceeds will benefit the Creek Nation Foundation, Inc. and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Festival.”

Tuesday, October 09, 2012

Amy Beeder #12 on Poetry Foundation Best-Seller List


BEHIND THIS WEEK'S LIST

Trethewey, Collins, and Smith are still rocking the top three spots on this week’s contemporary best-sellers list. Last week Mark Strand’s Almost Invisible disappeared from the list, only to materialize this week in the #4 position. Topping off the top five is a revitalized Nikky Finney, moving from #17 to #5 with Head Off & Split. We have a whole slew of new titles this week, starting with Richard Blanco’s Looking for the Gulf Motel, “a genealogy of the heart, exploring how [Blanco’s] family's emotion legacy has shaped—and continues shaping—his perspectives,” debuting at #7. Also new to the list at #12 is Amy Breeder’s latest, Now Make an Altar. Entering the list at #24 is Valzhyna Mort’s Collected Body. From The California Journal of Poetics: “Collected Body is the first book Valzhyna Mort has written in English. It is a rich and complex tapestry of characters and their memories, histories, and—most importantly—their personal stories, which often take on mythical elements as they proceed on their shared journey of survival and transformation.” Jumping over to the small press list, Joshua Corey’s The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral tops the list this week, while the Les Figues anthology of conceptual writing by women, I’ll Drown My Book, comes in at #5. Of note is Ben Friedlander’sOne Hundred Etudes, described by K. Silem Mohammad as “…virtuoso performances that reflect movingly on the historical conditions through and against which writers have adapted their strategies and attitudes. Over a century of poetic principles and theorems are focused here into a concerted series of expressions, operating within the rigorous, even alienating, requirements…” Finally, David Lehman’s The Best American Poetry 2012 leads the away again on the best-selling anthology list.
About the List
Our poetry best-seller lists are based on data received from Nielsen BookScan, which tracks sales from more than 4,500 retail booksellers. Retailers included in the list include both large, high-volume retailers such as Borders and Amazon.com, and more than 400 smaller, independent bookstores. We generate the lists each week by tallying the number of books sold for recently published volumes of contemporary poetry, poetry anthologies, and children's poetry. The contemporary poetry best-seller list is meant to reflect the current market for new poetry, and so excludes translations and new editions of classical works. Our small press list is based on Small Press Distribution's poetry sales to bookstores and individual customers, which are reported to us on a monthly basis.





Out of this book's gathering of speakers (arsonist, leper, Captain Haddock, the maitre d' of an unusual restaurant) and subjects (dung beetle, Aristophanes, medieval surgeon, methamphetamines) emerges a baroque, musical, and formally inventive history of creation and destruction. Now Make an Altar dispassionately suggests that there can't be one without the other. And there is nothing, however broken, absurd, atrocious, or sublime that cannot be brought into ecstatic focus in this "mysterious feast" of dense and exacting language. "Come in, come sup," Beeder invites us in the book's opening poem. "You'll never feel full."

Interview with Gregory Martin - Author of Stories for Boys

NW Book Lovers
Making Sense of Memory: Questions for Gregory Martin
An Interview by Sally McPherson




At Broadway Books, we’re great fans of the books published by Portland-based publisher Hawthorne Books, under the guidance of owner and publisher Rhonda Hughes. They’re well chosen, well written, and well edited, and the books are beautifully produced, right down to the double-fold French flaps.
So I was thrilled to be asked by NW Book Lovers to interview Gregory Martin, author of Hawthorne’s recently published memoir, Stories for Boys. With a theme of fathers and sons–Martin and his father; Martin and his two sons, Oliver and Evan; and his father’s relationship with his own father—the author attempts to redefine his relationship with the father he thought he knew, after his father attempts suicide. As a result of the suicide attempt, Martin learns that his father was abused by his own father for years. He also learns that during the almost forty years of his father’s marriage, he had been having anonymous sexual encounters with men. Shortly after the suicide attempt, his mother and father divorce, and his father begins living his life as a gay man.
The book explores the question: are your memories valid if you suddenly find that they’ve been based on a life of deception and lies? How can Martin reconcile the man he knew as a loving, happy, “normal” husband and father with this person who had a whole other life he knew nothing about?
Cheryl Strayed calls Stories for Boys “moving, brave, and unforgettable.” And Pam Houston says, ‘This finely made, deeply felt memoir restores our faith in the power of language and story to make sense of a broken world.”
I found this book simultaneously quirky and heart-wrenching. I was left with admiration for the author’s courage in revealing his own struggles and his sometimes less-than-noble responses as he worked to reconcile his memories with this revelation and to re-establish his relationship with his father.
Martin teaches creative writing at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where he lives with his wife and two sons. His first book, Mountain City, is a memoir of the life of a town of thirty-three people in remote northeastern Nevada. The book, published in 2000 by North Point Press, received a Washington State Book Award.
Martin will read from Stories for Boys at Powell’s City of Books this Thursday, October 11 at 7:30 pm. He’ll also read and teach a class at Wordstock. I interviewed him recently via e-mail.—Sally McPherson, Broadway Books 

SM: What prompted you to write this book? Will you tell us about its evolution from an essay that was published in The Sun (Oct. 2008)?
GM: I started writing the essay “The Family Plot” only a few months after my father attempted suicide. I hoped at the time, and maybe my father did as well, that writing that essay would get the story out of my system. But it didn’t, because the essay only captures those first few months after his suicide attempt, when shock is only beginning to turn into other things, like acceptance and also anger. The essay doesn’t capture the evolution of my relationship with my father, much less his relationship with my sons. None of that had happened yet.
But I didn’t want to write about it. I really didn’t want to expose myself, and my mixed feelings, any more than I already had. I already felt unsettled by how much of myself I’d revealed. So, instead, I chose the hardest possible subject I could imagine and wrote a piece of literary journalism about pediatric hospice. I’m glad that I wrote that essay, and I think I did my subject justice, but it’s pretty clear to me now that doing so was an act of avoidance. I wanted to process something hard, something tragic, but just not the hard, tragic subject that was my father’s secret life and homosexuality and childhood abuse and betrayal of my mother. Couldn’t I just write about some other tragic subject? Apparently not. Because after I finished that article, whenever I sat down to write, out 
came this book. After a few months, when I finally acknowledged that I needed to write a book and committed to it, I wrote for 100 days straight and more than 300 pages came out like wrenching open a fire hydrant on a summer day.
SM: How does your father feel about you writing this book?
GM: Not long after I finished the first complete draft of the book, I called my father and told him that I was about to email it to him and asked him if he would read it. He said sure. He’d print it out and read it right away. He had three reams of paper and a new ink cartridge. This was on a Friday night. The weekend passed. Then it was Monday night. Then it was Tuesday night. I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t eat much or sleep well. Rocky, our dog, was following me around the house, which is something he does when one of us is worried about something. Christine, my wife, said, “Why don’t you just call him?” My father answered on the second ring. “Hey, Son. How are you?”
I said, “I have an ulcer.”
He said, “Wait. I’m watching Jeopardy. I have it taped. Let me pause it.”
I said, “Did you read it?”
He said, “Oh, yes. I’m reading it through again. I taught myself how to use that track changes feature in Microsoft Word. I’m making a few comments in those balloons that come up in the margins. Mostly small things. My father worked in the Newport News shipyard, not the one in Norfolk.”
“Is it okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you okay with this? Is it okay for me to write this?”
“Oh. Of course. I hadn’t really thought about that.”
“Really?”
“Son, it’s yours,” he said. “It’s your story. I can only imagine what you went through putting all this into words. I cried a few times. I thought about my life in ways I’d never thought before. Of course I approve. You made this.”
SM: Memory is one of the big themes of your book— “the burden of memory and its costs and consequences.” You write that memories are “not fixed but ever-changing, because memories do not record the past but are only constructions invented in the present. They are a feat of imagination.” Will you talk about this?
GM: Since memory is highly unreliable, a real problem that every memoirist faces is: how do you become credible? One way, I think, is to explicitly refer to memory, its failures and gaps, and to make the book not just about the author’s particular memory—what I remember, what I don’t, what I wished I remembered, what I wished I could forget—but also about memory itself, about anyone’s memory. So a memoir can comment on the process of its own making, speculate about the past and its possibilities rather than render it without any qualification. One of the books I love the most, which I read and re-read while I was writing this, is William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow. In it Maxwell often interrupts his story to say things like:
“What we, or at any rate I, refer to confidently as a memory—meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion—is really just a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.”
Memory isn’t linear and it doesn’t sit still. It can be as hard to transcribe a memory as it is to transcribe a dream. In So Long, See You Tomorrow, Maxwell acknowledges everywhere the difficulty of recapturing the past, and the longing for a more straightforward understanding that would make invention unnecessary. I wanted to emulate this way of thinking about memory and storytelling.
SM: You don’t always present yourself in the most flattering light in this book. How did you resist the impulse—or did you not have the impulse—to ‘clean up’ your reactions and actions when telling your story?
GM: The best stories hold their characters accountable, for their flaws, their actions, their mistakes. When this happens, the characters are given agency, rather than having their choices explained away or rationalized. This is just as important in memoir as it is in fiction, and especially so for the narrator, in an era when the memoir as a genre has credibility problems. Readers arrive at any memoir with justified skepticism, and the author’s task, on every page, is to attempt to earn their trust. I understood that there was no way I could characterize my father and his choices and mistakes and tragic circumstances, without at the same time showing the reader that I, too, did not always act with grace and poise. No one does. If I characterized myself as being noble all the time, no one would believe it, and it would also make for a lousy story. I was confused and unsettled and hurting, and so was my father, both of us in different ways. We blundered our way forward, doing the best we could, and failing one another at times along the way. That sounds a lot like life to me, and if the author doesn’t complexly render the mistakes, including his own, then the grace that does come, the connections and repair which emerge out of those mistakes, can’t be fully understood or appreciated by the reader.
SM: Your book offers some “micro” chapters, some photographs, some emails. How did you determine the structure this book would take?
GM: Figuring out the architecture of the book was one of the things I enjoyed most. I like ‘raw materials’—photographs and emails which are unadorned and uninterpreted—to give the reader another vantage point from which to view the story and understand the characters. I included my father’s emails in a deliberately patterned way so that readers could hear his voice at length, come to understand how he was trying to communicate his struggles to me, and, in some ways, judge him for themselves. But along with the emails and photos, there are also, arranged in somewhat of a pattern throughout, small sections on Whitman, or the social science of secret lives, or the “psychological immune system,” and with these, I was trying to show the reader how I was trying to come to terms with what my father was telling me.
SM: You grew up in a family in which reading books was important and was modeled for you by your parents. Do you think that goes away when people move to E-books, which conceivably will mean fewer shelves stocked with favorite reads, and parents holding electronic glowing gadgets instead of printed books?
GM: Unfortunately or not, I’m one of those parents with the glowing gadgets. I’m reading two books right now simultaneously:  Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell, in a paperback version, and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain on my iPad. I’m not sure what effect this will have on my sons, Oliver and Evan. After a quiet Saturday morning in our house, like the one we’re living out now as I type, there are comic books and graphic novels and books of every stripe—from Calvin and Hobbes to Watership Down to The Hobbit—in unruly piles on the living room rug, the coffee table, the couch. That, to me, is a great morning.
Obviously, the E-books on my iPad don’t pile up on the floor and something is lost when you can’t just stand at a bookshelf and pull a book off and wonder, what is this one about? There’s something far more deliberate about choosing to read a book electronically. But I love reading on my iPad at night in bed with the brightness on low while Christine is sleeping next to me. I used to have to go in the next room, which isn’t as good.
I’m hopeful we all will adapt. And the reading will still get done, just as the writing will get done. One very clear downside to reading on an iPad is the ease of distraction that comes when you’re holding a device on which you can also check your email or your fantasy football team standings. That kind of distraction is all too present in my life, and while I don’t much like it, at the same time I also like being able to check things online when they occur to me. I think many of us have mixed feelings about technological innovation.
SM: What kinds of books do you like to read? What books have you raved about recently?
GM: I’m pretty eclectic in my reading. I’ll try just about any book of any genre that is impressed upon me by someone I trust. I also have my go-to authors, which I’m reading and re-reading all the time: Alice Munro, Marilynne Robinson (even the difficult essays), Tobias Wolff, Antonya Nelson, George Saunders. When I find writers that speak to me, I try to read every single thing they’ve written.
Lately, I can’t stop talking about (Oregon Book Award winning) The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt. It’s hilarious and riveting in this truly strange way. Reading most influences my writing by making me want to do the hard work of trying to write myself. When I’m reading a great book, I often set it down after only a paragraph or a page and open up my laptop and get after it.
SM: What advice do you have for would-be writers?
GM: It’s ironic—the more I write and teach, the less I want to give advice. When I was a younger writer and teacher, I was always looking for the gem, the nugget, that piece of advice from one of the writers I just mentioned that I believed would point the way and save me from my ignorance—strategies to manage plot or character, ideas about process. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still doing this, still trying to learn the next thing. But I no longer believe that there is any one thing I need to know. That kind of craft intelligence is cumulative and takes a lifetime to gain. There are no clear steps, no method, no sequence—no plan or pattern to follow. Art just doesn’t work like that.
Putting in the hours is a good idea, because in some way, those hours are a real measure of commitment. I ask my MFA students to put in 18 hours a week and even to keep a journal to track those hours, so that they don’t kid themselves about how much they’re working. But even that requirement—18 hours, recorded in a certain way—is sort of arbitrary and perhaps a little silly. It’s really just an exercise in self-awareness and provides a kind of helpful illusion that there’s this path to follow.
What I try to do also, as a teacher of MFA students, is to give them a range of books and essays on writing strategies by a variety of writers, and say ‘these are your teachers.’ There’s all kinds of stuff here that will speak to you at different times: learn from them. Let your own desire to know more be your guide. Don’t look for any gurus. Devour it all. I mean books on craft like Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House, or Robert Boswell’s The Half-Known World. These are master writers who have written entire books full of their ideas about writing. They’re invaluable, and they’re as gripping to the writer who is hungry to know more as the best novel. Also, Vivian Gornick’sThe Situation and the Story, Patricia Hampl’s I Could Tell You Stories, Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel, and Stephen Koch’s The Modern Library’s Writer’s WorkshopOn Writing, Stephen King’s book on craft is great, too. There are just so many—I’ve read them cover to cover multiple times and, in different ways, they’ve sunk in and affected my sensibility.

Monday, October 08, 2012

"New Mexico Poets Celebrate Bless Me, Ultima"




"New Mexico Poets Celebrate Bless Me, Ultima"
 
The National Hispanic Cultural Center is partnering with the City of Albuquerque libraries on the Big Read of Bless Me, Ultima which runs from October 19 - November 20, 2012.
 
In collaboration with Levi Romero, New Mexico Centennial Poet, the NHCC is inviting select youth and established New Mexico poets to write an original poem inspired by the characters, themes and story of Bless Me, Ultima. A reading of the poems will take place on Saturday, November 3, at the NHCC.
 
This event will be both a celebration of Bless Me, Ultima and an opportunity to honor the literary contributions of Rudolfo Anaya through poetry and spoken word. 

Tuesday, October 02, 2012

Annie Dawid wins A Room of Her Own Flash Fiction Orlando Prize



Congratulations to Annie Dawid on winning the 2012 Orlando Prize for Flash Fiction awarded by A Room of Her Own Foundation for her piece "Nitza Kosher Pizza." After print publication in the Los Angeles Review, you will be able to read “Nitza Kosher Pizza” in its entirety on the AROHO website.

Annie Dawid has taught at the Taos Summer Writers' Conference and we are pleased to announce that she will be joining us again in 2013 for the 15th anniversary. You will be able to find more information about her class in November and online registration opens December 3, 2012. Visit  our website for more information.

Monday, October 01, 2012

Topographies of Light donation to English Department

We would like to thank TSWC participant Paula Hughson for her recent, generous donation of David Rachlin's book of poetry, Topographies of Light, to the English Department.

We are always thrilled to feature participants' works during the Conference and thank Moby Dickens for their help in making that possible. It is also wonderful to see the mutual respect and support that participants show one another and which is demonstrated in this generous donation.

Please feel free to let us know when you have something published so that we can let everyone know!

Thank you Wendy Weil


Just this past summer, Taos Summer Writers' Conference once again had the pleasure of having Wendy Weil teach a weekend workshop on publishing and offer consultations. She has been an enrichment to the Conference over the past fourteen years and will be missed by all of us.





WEIL--Wendy E., 72, of New York City, died September 22, 2012 at her home in West Cornwall, Connecticut. Her career as a literary agent spanned over 40 years. After 25 years in book publishing, she founded The Wendy Weil Agency, Inc in 1986. A native of New York City, she attended Friends Seminary, and Wellesley College. Daughter of the late Leon and Margery Weil, she is survived by her beloved husband of 28 years, the painter Michael Trossman, her stepsons Josh and Andy Trossman, her dogs, and an enormous circle of friends, colleagues and authors who loved, respected, and sustained her. Donations in her name may be made to Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Plans for a Memorial Service later this fall will be announced.
Published in The New York Times on September 29, 2012