and thanked who thought it best to subsidize

someone like me who writes without repute.

We do this for each other, if we're wise - 

for otherwise we'd all be mute.

Seth Hurwitz, of St. Louis, July 6, 2012

From Lissa Lord in Kansas City:

Please don't go Dairy Hollow for I will miss our time together. Getting up at 8:30 and fixing coffee so we  could sit together on the loveseat in the writing room to look out on Dairy Hollow Street through the spruce and cedar and fir and magnolia and dogwood and sycamore. Please don't go for you will miss my goings to town and my comings in with treats to set out and look at like "made in America socks" and sterling silver earrings with Hungarian glass beads hanging down and the tie dyed skirt from Granny's. I will follow you back to here, right here where we first met and I will hug you longer than I ever have. As I pack my car with all we have done together--the joy of making poems, the blues of shredding the imperfect ones only to remember memorable lines from them, watching the sunset and then rushing in to write about it. We sat in the dark with the window open listening to the raucous sound of night creatures. I watch you in my rear view mirror as you move away behind me and disappear as I drive around the Spring Street bend just beyond Grotto Springs---

I have returned to keeping a journal in a sketchbook. Stories become tactile to be smudged or sharpened on page inviting playfulness in the retelling of my day. Analysis begins to jump around and twirls out on a ribbon of color---I can't hold back the desire to draw the shadowed window separating me and the serpentine cedar as seen through glass panes above the writing table in the Peach Blossom Suite at Dairy Hollow.

- Lissa Lord, Kansas City

 Dairy Hollow revisited

I am here in this place where I belong. How do I know this? The hands within my heart are clapping. And it is raining in a season of drought. I heard in the shop where I buy "socks made in America" that the dry earth is 5 feet deep but now it is raining and all rejoice. While here I hope to tie up some lose ends on the poems about difficult experiences as well as to begin a new crop based on what I see right now. I am reading The Journey from the Center to the Page by Jeff Davis and it is perfect for this time and in tune with "a life found at the center of our authentic selves." The practice of Yoga is between the lines and on the pages of this text on learning how to incorporate the asanas of Yoga into writing practice.

- Lissa Lord, Kansas City

               Eliza, eleven, wants to be a writer.  Yesterday, the first day of my week-long residency here, was also Eliza’s first day of “Calling All Authors,” a summer class offered by our public school district. On the phone, I told her about how nervous I’d been--about how I wasn’t even sure what genre to pursue for these precious few days. “Writing can be like a story, Mom,” she reassured me. “At first, you may be all over the place before you find out where you’re going.” Calling all authors, indeed! 

               The walls of Eliza’s room are painted peach, as are the walls of the writing room where I sit now, in the Peach Blossom suite, named by the founder of the Writers' Colony, author Crescent Dragonwagon. The tall bookcase in Eliza’s peach room is bowed with books, including scores of picture books that have taken up permanent residence on her bottom shelf because she is the youngest in our family. A few of these books are among our family’s most precious things: early editions of Do You Know What I’ll Do? and Big Sister and Little Sister, both by Crescent Dragonwagon’s mother, Charlotte Zolotow. We also have, in newer reprints, Zolotow’s Over and Over and Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present. But I especially prize the first two, both mottled with age and use. I turned those very pages in the late 1960s, in my own mother’s lap when she read them to me. When I read them with my child, I read myself as a child, and I read my mother.

               We read our mothers all the time; we can’t help it. The volume of my mother contains a large chapter on children’s books--many books I haven’t even ever seen--and in that chapter, many pages are devoted to these few books by Charlotte Zolotow. Or maybe I am talking about myself. The thin, gentle strokes of Garth Williams’s illustrations in Do You Know What I’ll Do? are etched on my imagination--the little girl protagonist with cheeks puffed like Aeolus to blow away her baby brother’s nightmare; her proud march in her party dress, as she carries home for him a piece of birthday cake “with the candle still in it”; her dreamy, intent posture on the opening page, hugging her knees, watching her brother as he plays nearby, and making vows to him (he isn’t listening, he’s focused on his toys), vows about taking care of him, the vows an elder is blessed to dream over the unconcerned head of a toddler.

               Maybe that, too, is what engraved Do You Know What I’ll Do? on my heart: Zolotow honors her story’s child speaker, who, no more than six or seven herself, speaks out a grown-up wish, or just a deeply human wish--to make the world happy and safe for the young.

               There is indeed a nightmare in the book. I was a bit frightened by that page when I was small. But there’s also the blessing of a brave and determined child who vows to chase that nightmare away. My mother gave me that blessing, and it’s safe on the shelf of the peach room where my daughter writes books of her own.

- Ellie DesPrez, writer in residence, June 6, 2012

If you've ever been to The Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow - this will make you smile. If you've never been - it'll make you want to come! Our new video will explain why we exist. Enjoy!

Crescent Dragonwagon, Colony founder

http://www.youtube.com/embed/RpGQXxH3aew

Oh, how I love waking up at an artist's colony, the day stretching before me to think my thoughts and practice my craft. Thank you Dairy Hollow!

Ann Hood, author of The Knitting Circle, The Red Thread and Comfort, A Journey Through Grief

I scored the Culinary Suite and I've found a new favorite room! It's a beautiful space. The kitchen is so large that I lost the drawer with the dish towels -- twice. I needed salt and found a spice drawer with tiered racks and a pull-out spice pantry with a total of 62 spices. (I had to count them. I've been a computer programmer too long, clearly). I was later told the salt was hiding in a shaker that matches the stoneware; I looked right past it.

My door at the Colony (above).

Day two at the Colony and I see I need to break my habit of NOT writing. I realized that while reading an article from the stack of Writer's Digest mags I brought with me. (Sept 11 issue, "Ways to Harness Fear and Fuel Your Writing", Sage Cohen).

Day three at the Colony, and I'm rolling! There is nothing like spending time alone with your writing project. Word -- be careful what you read before attending your writing boot camp. I recently finished The Hunger Games. Loved it, but now I see my main character creeping around with a bow and arrow, ready to shoot whatever is rustling the bushes! My chant "This is not science fiction, this is not science fiction."

"Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working." - Pablo Picasso

May 27: Back from my Colony visit a week and missing it! Thank you Colony staff and founders for this lovely spot where we can immerse ourselves in our writing projects and leapfrog them closer to completion.

I have plans, of course.

I already had a good start on a new book, which will be Devoted to Crocheting. I honestly thought I was starting at square 1. I knew I had done something to it before, but I didn’t remember what that was.

I had 13 devotions already roughed out. They all already had the prayer, crochet tip, and Bible verse put with them. Since I got here yesterday, I already have three more and one in progress.

In talking to a friend before I left to come here, I thought I might be able to get it half done before I return home. Now, I think I might actually be able to complete the first draft.

It’s amazing how easy it is to get back into the groove.

Happy writing.

From resident writer Jen Nipps' blog: blog.jen-nipps.com

May 25: My story, "They Call Me Malak" is up on TheWorldofMyth.com. Click the picture to get in. Then click "Stories" at the top on the far left. It is the first choice in the drop-down list (and also under my pen name of Kat O'Reilly).

May 27: I've been here a week today. I've done a lot but feel like I haven't quite done enough. Go figure. I'm always my harshest critic. I didn't get much written today, so I blogged about what I've been thinking about -- Are QR codes in or out and who decides anyway?

 Who Decides?

blog.jen-nipps.com

May 28: I had a different experience last night. About 8:30, someone knocked on my door. It was a boy with a book.

One to Watch

blog.jen-nipps.com

One to Watch

Inimitable published author of five cookbook-memoirs, 31 children's books, two novels and a book of poetry, Crescent lived in Eureka Springs for 33 years before moving to Vermont in 2002. She visited her former home between appearances at Historic Arkansas Museum and the Arkansas Cornbread Festival in Little Rock, the Fayetteville Public Library. She lead the 2nd Annual Fearless Writing Workshop in Fayetteville at Mount Sequoyah Retreat Center Nov. 9-12.

* To benefit the writers Colony *

Crescent gave One Full Scholarship ($695 in Value ) for the Fearless Writing Workshop in a random drawing at Poetluck. (and other last minute Serendipity Surprises!)

In her first Visit to the Writers Colony since 2001, Crescent gave a celebratory half-hour reading/performance/talk, partly about WCDH's opening chapters which  followed by readings from the Resident Writer's at the Colony & any Eureka Springs writers who may wish to read.

Poetluck is always an evening of fabulous food, fun, fiction, & fellowship. This time it was also a chance to meet or catch up with Crescent, benefit the Colony, and celebrate the vibrant vision of a place where writers write, uninterrupted, uniquely enriched and nourished by the creative Eureka Springs community.