I’ve been trying for several years to find a home for my writing workshop, and I may have finally found one at Hubbard Hall, the wonderful old opera house and arts center in Cambridge, N.Y. Met with Hubbard Hall people today and it looks like we are going forward with plans to gather some writers and story-tellers and hopefully put together a book on rural life. The workshop may also have some synergistic connections to Hubbard Hall’s theater program – some of the stories could be plays, as well as video and other projects.

I believe stories are our lives and that it is a powerful experience to tell them, and to be encouraged to tell them. I also believe that rural life in America is undergoing profound changed, little noticed by a media that mostly argues in studios in New York and Washington and covers celebrity trials in LA. I would love to put together a book with the students in the class that tells the rich and varied stories  of rural life in America.

In a month or so, we will begin the process of choosing students for the class. There will be some screening, as we are looking for people who are serious about working on their stories and seeing them to completion. The workshop might go on for some weeks or even months. I’m very excited to be doing this again. I am very focused on this being a creative year for me. The story-telling workshop, an E-Book original, another children’s book in September, and also in September, my first short-story collection. We learn to blame the outside world for our failed lives – ideologies, the economy, Washington, Wall Street, the grim nature of the world.

I am with Joseph Campbell. It is not for me to blame others for my circumstance, but to find the zeal in my life and bring it out. If I fail, the place to look for blame is within; did I have the courage to bring up my full moon and live the life that is my potential. We’ll see. My plan is for this to be the most creative year of my life.

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Gallery 99 begins tomorrow evening, 5 to 8 in Glens Falls. Maria and I will be there, she selling potholders, quilts and streaming pieces, me selling 10 matted photos, six of which are chicken photos. details on her website.