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Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, CT

March 5, 2012 by · Comments Off on Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, CT 

Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, CT, Just check out the Mark Twain House & Museum April 21 and listen to A.R. Gurney (“Love Letters,” “The Dining Room,” “The Cocktail Hour”) and Alfred Uhry (“Driving Miss Daisy,” “Last Night at Ballyhoo”) talk about writing, theater and no doubt other writers.

They will be part of a eriters’ weekend that begins Friday evening, April 20, and copntinues all day Saturday, April 21, as the museum launches its first Writers’ Weekend.

Participants will hear legendary Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham — and now editor of Lapham’s Quarterly — keynote the conference April 20 and then follow it up the next day with a range of activities from 15 panels, talks and workshops — starting with a kickoff talk by novelist Jon Clinch (Finn, Kings of the Earth).

A panel of faculty and students in the Writing at the Mark Twain House program, which has offered evening courses in fiction, non-fiction and memoir over the past few years, will discuss the ins and outs of teaching the writer’s art.

Two winners of the Connecticut Book Award Lifetime Achievement Award will be participating: Lary Bloom, longtime editor of Northeast magazine, columnist, author of many books (including The Writer Within), and sage teacher of writing at the Mark Twain House and many other places; and Bessy Reyna (Memoirs of the Unfaithful Lover), the Cuban-born poet who has been called “a clear-eyed guide to the world we see but don’t see” by Martin Espada.

Among other authors slated to lead 50-minute sessions on Saturday are Susan Campbell (Dating Jesus), Susan Schoenberger (A Watershed Year) Suzanne Levine (The Haberdasher’s Daughter), Denis Horgan (Ninety-Eight Point Six) Cindy Brown Austin (By the Waters of Babylon) and Wendy Clinch (The Ski Diva). There will be sessions on fiction, non-fiction , memoir, poetry, travel writing, blogging, the business of getting published, and new forms of storytelling unleashed by the existence of the Internet.

The event will run from 7 to 9 p.m. on Friday, April 20, and 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturday, April 21. A box lunch will be provided on Saturday, and the Weekend winds up Saturday evening with a closing reception.

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