My story-telling workshop at the Lower Adirondack Regional Arts Center (LARAC) in Glens Falls, N.Y., begins tonight (Thursday) and I’m much looking forward to it. Although the group is full, we opened it up to a 14-year-old aspiring writer and it will be a nice element to have someone that age in the class. We are meeting for four Thursdays and will work on coming up with story ideas, and at finding ways of telling them.
Stories are important. They are the fabric of our lives. They are critical to our identify and ability to free our inner, creative selves. They are central in much of the work we do, and in our own sense of identify.
I believe everyone has a story to tell and at the workshop, we’re going to help one another tell them. If the stories are good, we will find a way to get them out – a book, a show, some way of sharing them. The four-week workshop at LARAC will also be offered in August. This one is full. I can’t wait to meet the class. Izzy is coming along. Photos to follow.
Every day, you struggle to get and stay healthy and healthier. It’s a series of small steps, really, listening, thinking, and doing. Hard work. I find one of the challenges is to learn how not to give pieces of myself away.
This week was challenging for me in a number of ways. And frightening, in a number of ways. I am learning to take care of myself, trying to convince the little boy that he can figure things out. He is skeptical sometimes.
Walking around Brooklyn this morning taking photos, I came across this wall on Union Street, and was delighted to see my motto and mantra up there in the morning light. I say this to myself every morning. This is what I vow to do each day – Live, Work, Create. I might add, and Love. I love this photo, just about everything in it works. It’s one of my favorite, and I might print it out and hang it up in my study.
Last night, leaving Em’s book party, walking around Brooklyn with Maria, I could see living there. This morning, battling traffic on Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, I was eager to get back to the farm. The real estate market is beginning to pick up around here, so I’ll have to make some farm decisions. Today, my idea is a smaller farm nearby. A New Bedlam Farm with a few animals and the dogs and cats. But my idea changes every day.
March 17, 2010 – Maria and I went to Brooklyn yesterday to celebrate the publication of “90 per cent of the game is half mental,” by my daughter Emma Span, shown above with her best friend Katherine, who flew in from London to come to the book party, which was in a basement of a trendy Park Slope bar. It’s a long and strange trip from Washington County to Brooklyn, but I am loving it there and it is a great place to take pictures, for sure. I was the book party’s official photographer.
Emma has a lot of wonderful people who love her, and it was a great experience to see her celebrate years of hard work and a funny and poignant book with her friends, editors, fellow writers and bloggers, family and agent. Could not make a father happier or prouder.
She drew a large crowd and sold out of copies of her book. I told her I forgave her for saying she wished Joe Torre was her father (and glad it didn’t happen) and also pointed out that before her, everybody felt sorry for my editors at Random House (just kidding).
Emma is starting out on her book and she is coming upstate to do some joint appearances with me and Pearl, the gorgeous Yellow Lab who used to live on Bedlam Farm but who became, after years of pestering and pleading, Emma’s companion and writing dog. Em and I will be at the Red Fox Bookstore in Glens Falls at 7 p.m. Friday, March 26. She is bringing Pearl. She will read from and talk about her book – which is a book about baseball and life in New York – I call it a cross between Red Smith and O’Henry, and I will offer a sneak preview of my new novel, “Rose In A Storm” out in October. (Holt has just announced that my first children’s book, “Meet The Dogs of Bedlam Farm” will be out at the beginning of 2011.)
On May 8, Emma and I will appear at Northshire Books. On April 10, we will both be appearing at the first New York State Book Festival in Albany, N.Y.
Em and I will also talk about the process of book and other writing, if anyone is interested. Should be a fun night in a wonderful bookstore. Note: Bedlam Farm notecards for Spring – flowers, chickens, and eggs are being printed and sold at Redux Gallery in Dorset, Vt.
