Friday P.M. ~ 1:30 - 3:00

Coordinator:  Michael O’Sullivan

Coordinator Contact:  (603)742-4621 or michael_osullivan@uml.edu

Location:  Durham Community Church

This series of programs will explore the art of writing from memoire, poetry, fiction as well as the Life of Edith Wharton.

October 25 – The Art of Memoir. Presenter: Rebecca Dawson Webb, former high school English teacher and instructor of Freshman Composition and Creative Nonfiction at UNH, is a writer, workshop leader, freelance editor and writing coach. Rebecca has a master’s degree in nonfiction writing and 20 years of teaching experience. As a writing teacher, she is passionate about helping people share their stories and speak their truths.

November 1 – Portsmouth Poet Laureate – Kimberly Cloutier Green is a poet, collaborating artist, and teacher living in Kittery Point, Maine. She is a first place prizewinner in a number of competitions, including The Aldrich Poetry Prize (2001).The prize included the publication of Ms. Green’s chapbook, What Becomes of Words. Her poems have been published in several literary journals, including Mid-American Review, The Café Review, The Comstock Review, Presence, Vineyards, and The Anthology of New England Writers. Ms. Green was selected in 2005 for the Maine Community Foundation’s Martin Dibner Fellowship in Poetry, and she is a recent MacDowell Artist Colony Fellow. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her full-length collection of poems, The Next Hunger, was released in April, 2013.

November 8 – The Art of Fiction. Presenter: Thomas Payne, Asst. Prof. of English, UNH.Last year, Tom Payne’s short story, “The Hot War,” led off the stellar literary magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story. Paine is the author of The Pearl of Kuwait (2003), a novel set during the 1991 Gulf War. His collection of stories, Scar Vegas, was a 2000 New York Times New and Notable book, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great Writers selection, and a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. In addition to Zoetrope, Paine’s short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Playboy, and the Oxford American, as well as in the anthologies The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize. Payne has worked as a newspaper publisher and editor. He teaches creative writing to undergraduates and to graduate students in the Master of Fine Arts program at UNH.

November 15 – The Life and Art of Edith Wharton. Presenter: Mary Roberge.*  Edith Jones Wharton was born in 1862 into an “old New York” family, descendants of early English sea captains and Dutch patroons who constituted the highest level of NY society. From an early age she had a compulsion to ”make up stories” and in spite of an early unhappy, childless marriage to a another member of the elite, she continued to write , mostly about the milieu she knew best; however, her intelligence and knowledge of the human heart took her outside that insulated world to write her best known work, “Ethan Frome”, a tragic love story of a New England farmer, that is still taught and read today.