Category: Creative Writing

Leanna Marden: The Captain’s Lady (Staged Reading)

Writes Professor Lin Haire-Sargeant:

Leanna Marden wrote “The Captain’s Lady” as her second project in the Playwriting course I taught in fall 2019, and the play she chose to present in staged reading form for the course’s end-review festival. She told me she had been influenced by reading the Captain Horatio Hornblower novels by C.S. Forester, and decided to set her shipboard romantic comedy in the Napoleonic era–but with a 21st Century twist.
In the segment of rehearsal shown here, Rio Castaneda-Guthreau plays the Captain, Jameson Bernard plays his First-Mate-lover, Natalie Martinez plays the Captain’s lady disguised as the ship’s cook, and playwright Leanna Marden plays the would-be sailer lover of the Captain’s lady. Video by Leslie Pierre-Louis, Editing by Robert Gerst.
If it hadn’t been for the school’s virus shutdown, I would have nominated this play to be performed during the Creative Writing Expo. Too bad!

Jeanette Luise Eberhardy Remembers Carol Dine

Carol Dine (foreground) & Samuel Bak (rear) signing Orange Night (2012)

Writes Jeanette-Luise Eberhardy:

I remember one of the first times that I met Carol. She came to my home to share some poems. 

Holding sheets of crumpled, yellow legal–size paper, she stood in my living room and read one of her poems.

I was stunned. I asked if there were more. She said yes.

One week later she returned with more poems, and she read to me.

I responded: We need to gather all these poems and make an artist’s book so beautiful that someone will give you the money to publish it. Together in my home office, we went to work on an artist’s book for those poems and images of art by Samuel Bak. That book became Orange Night. An image of the front cover of the book hangs in our Liberal Arts/Art History office.

Carol’s dream was to share her poems and her love of art with all of us. In 2012, Carol was awarded the prestigious honor of delivering one of the Hellerstein lectures. This honor was given to her by Professor Emeritus Louise Meyers.

When Carol was due to deliver the Hellerstein lecture, she was battling with cancer again. She was concerned whether she had the strength to deliver the talk. Also, she was concerned that her wig was just right for the performance of poems (so the audience would stay focused on the poems and not her health!). I picked her up from her home and drove her to MassArt to help reserve her energy for the presentation. To be with Carol in that moment gave me such a feeling of joy.

For Carol’s Hellerstein lecture, Professor Louise Meyers delivered one of the most beautiful introductions that I have witnessed in all my years of attending readings. I remember that Bob Gerst was sitting in one of the first rows listening with such a deep sense of loving care. For Carol, delivering the Hellerstein lecture was a dream come true. She was given the opportunity to share what she loved most: poetry and art.

I am so grateful for my moments with Carol Dine.

In Memory of Carol Dine: Floating Lanterns

Floating Lanterns (Toshi Makuri)

Professor Carol Dine received the Editor’s Choice Award for her poem,”Floating Lanterns” which appeared in the literary journal, Ekphrasis. Her poem was inspired by the art of Toshi Maruki which depicts the orange lanterns placed yearly in the Hiroshima rivers in remembrance.

In addition, her memoir Places in the Bone (Rutgers University Press, 2005) will be discussed in a chapter of an upcoming book, Still Here: Memoirs of Trauma, Illness and Loss  (Rutledge Press, 2019).  Carol’s memoir will be released as an e-book in January by Lincoln Square Books, NYC.

Poetry Students Augment Augment…

Nick Cave’s Augment!

Writes Professor Cheryl Clark:

Students in the Poetry Workshop gathered to write in response to Nick Cave’s Augment, a practice called ekphrastic writing.  Students are working on individual poems, then in class will stitch together lines of their poems into one collaborative Frankenstein-like poem.

In A Greensick Eye

Left: La Bercuse (The Woman Who Rocks A Cradle, Vincent Va Gough (1889)., oil on canvas. Right: Woman With Sunflower Print Curtain, James Chapman-Taylor (1900-1930), autochrome photograph

Writes Professor Carol Dine:

At first, I didn’t see a comparison in the two images in that the greens, which immediately drew me in, seemed of such different tones. And the women, of contrasting eras and statures. Then I looked again at the faded sunflowers — aha — on the green curtain.

This poem from my book, Van Gogh in Poems, is written as if in Vincent Van Gogh’s voice. It’s meant to reflect his last day.

 

Story>Script>Storyboard>Animatic in FilmScript Writing: Adaptation



Stage One: Story (Angela Gerst, The Fibonacci Sequence)

Stage Two: Screenplay (Evan Willard, The Fibonacci Sequence)

Stage Three: Storyboard (Evan Willard, The Fibonacci Sequence)

Stage Four: Animatic (Nelly Peshlova, Claudia Thomas, Serena Gabriels, The Fibonacci Sequence)