June 18-20 , 2004
For thirty years, The Sun’s commitment to publishing honest, real voices has set it apart from other literary magazines. People write in The Sun of their struggle to understand their lives, often baring their innermost feelings with remarkable candor. The results are by turns mystical and down-to-earth, reverent and irreverent. We’ve long admired this extraordinary publication, which is the same age as Rowe Conference Center.
Join four of the Sun’s writers, plus founder and editor Sy Safransky, for a weekend of readings, workshops, and discussions designed to help you approach difficult personal subjects through the written word as writers do every month in The Sun. Experience the soul of the magazine in an intimate, joyous, and facetoface way, as a community that comes together to honor the brokenhearted glory of being alive.
This workshop is not just for Sun readers, but for anyone interested in the kind of reading and writing that lives up to The Sun’s motto by Victor Frankl: “What is to give light must endure burning.” The writing workshops will help you enrich and deepen your personal style, rather than develop formal writing skills. Workshops for nonwriters will also take place. If you want to know more about the magazine, call 919 9425282 for a sample issue or visit www.thesunmagazine.org. All five presenters will read from their work.
“No other magazine provides quite the same atmosphere of intimacy as The Sun....It’s a magazine completely unlike any other, always personal, always meaningful, always unexpected.”
–Utne Reader
“No matter how hard it is sometimes to read, The Sun opens me up to the truth, not as it is portrayed in the media, but as it exists in the minds and hearts and lives of my fellow human beings.”
–T.B., a Sun reader in Verdi, NV
Writer and Sun manuscript reader Gillian Kendall works as a reporter in Australia’s Victorian State Parliament. Although she used to teach English to college students, she prefers coaching writers who have either been out of college for a while or who never went. A high-school dropout with a Ph.D., and the author of two books, she believes that good writing comes from “loose living and tight language.” Alison Luterman is a poet, essayist, playwright, and theatrical improviser. She teaches creative writing privately in her home and through California Poets in the Schools. She also performs improvisational theater with Wing It. She has been telling personal stories since she learned how to talk. Sparrow’s poems have appeared in The Sun magazine, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. He is the author of two books, a gossip columnist for The Phoenicia Times, and a substitute teacher who lives with his wife and daughter in the Catskills. Sparrow’s workshops aim to teach intuition, devotion, and spontaneity. Genie Zeiger is the author of three books, a commentator for NPR, and regular contributor to The Sun. She has led writing workshops at her home in western Massachusetts for eighteen years and taught writing in senior centers, hospice, public schools, and civic groups. Sun founder and editor Sy Safransky will share stories, answer questions about the magazine’s history, and meet privately with those who would like to talk with him.