Future Library, Katie Paterson
Photo (c) Kristin Von Hirsch 2016

If you want to read Margaret Atwood’s latest piece of writing, Scribbler Moon, you will have to wait a while, say, for another century.

Atwood is the first contributing author to the Future Library project, an artwork created by Scottish artist Katie Paterson for The City of Oslo. Paterson has planted a thousand trees in a forest just outside the city where they will be looked after for one hundred years, until 2114.  In each of those hundred years, one author will be commissioned to write a manuscript of some sort and that piece of writing will be placed, unpublished, in a secure and specially designed room in the new public library being built in Oslo. They will all remain unread until the collection of one hundred manuscripts is complete. Then in 2114, the trees will be cut down and the wood will be used to supply paper for a special anthology of books in which one hundred years of writing will be published.

Katie Paterson’s Future Library icon

Canadian author, Margaret Atwood delivered her manuscript to Katie Paterson last week, deep in the heart of the Future Library itself, in the Nordmarka forest just outside the Oslo. It remains a secret, however, as to whether it is a poem, short story, novel or memoir. No one else will know until 2114.

“There’s something magical about it,” Atwood said as she handed over her work. “It’s like Sleeping Beauty. The texts are going to slumber for a hundred years and then they’ll wake up, come to life again. It’s a fairytale length of time.”

Accepting the sealed silver box containing the precious manuscript, Katie Paterson said, “It is my dream that Margaret Atwood is writing for Future Library. I imagine her words growing through the trees, an unseen energy, activated and materialized, the tree rings becoming chapters in a book.”

The next contributor to Future Library will be David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks. He said, “Imagine if the Future Library had been conceived in 1914 and a hundred authors from all over the world had written a hundred volumes between then and today, unseen until now. What a human highway through time to be a part of. Contributing and belonging to a narrative arc longer than your own lifespan is good for your soul.”

Katie Paterson has created an image to symbolize the Future Library. A tree trunk with a tiny blue “2014” at its center, one hundred growth rings expand until, at the top right outside edge, there is another tiny blue date, 2114.

As the next hundred years pass, future contributors will be announced year by year. Some will be familiar to us now, though it is startling to realize that many will not even have been born yet.

Both Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell have presented their work to Houston’s literary audience as featured writers in Inprint’s Margarett Root Brown’s Reading Series, in 2012 and 2014 respectively

For more information, visit Future Library here.

The post If you want to read the latest Atwood, can you wait a while? Say, 100 years? first appeared on An Open Book - The Inprint Blog.

A former fire-fighter, Chris was also a competitive bodybuilder and model before she brought her literary calling to the fore. Now, however, she knows she made the right choice.

“I can legitimately say that I am doing exactly what I want to be doing and I passionately love the way I get to spend my days. I’m incredibly lucky to be able to say that, I know, but now I really am doing my favorite thing.”

The publication of Whisper Hollow did not, however, happen overnight.

“It took a very long time to get this story to this point. I wrote it, and then I rewrote it, I think, four times from beginning to end. It’s four hundred pages long, and there are at least that many other pages that will never be read because they were rewritten and filed away somewhere.”

Whisper Hollow follows the lives of three women through the first half of the last century in the fictional coal mining town of Verra in West Virginia. Geographically remote and culturally diverse, Verra is full of immigrant families from Poland, Germany, Italy and other European countries.

“These people have a hard life,” Cander says, “literally scrabbling to carve out a life and a community for themselves and their families in this new country. I called the town Verra, based on the Latin root for truth, because the book is very much about the truths which these women and the people around them have, the truths that are revealed and the truths that they choose to bury. Those buried secrets drive much of what happens throughout the story.”

Though a Houston native, Chris Cander spent many childhood vacations with her mother’s family in West Virginia. Even so, she did not feel she knew the area well enough to recreate it in a novel.

“I didn’t have the knowledge I knew I needed. I didn’t know how to mine coal or play the organ, and I certainly didn’t know how to murder people. But one of my favorite things about being a writer is that I get to call people and ask them to share their knowledge with me. It’s incredible how forthcoming people can be. I rented a car and spent two days driving around the southern part of the state with an associate professor from the University of West Virginia. He’s an incredible historian who knew so much about the area – the economics, the geography, the cultural influences. In those two days, he gave me an intensive history lesson.”

“I also spent time in an exhibition coal mine with an 82-year-old retired miner who took me underground on a coal train. He showed me how to mine coal with a pick-axe, just like the men in my story who had to work for more than eight hours in the pitch dark, often in less than 48 inches of vertical space. For weeks after that, he and I emailed back and forth, devising a way to explode a mine, something which I certainly couldn’t have done without him.”

“All along the way there were wonderful opportunities. I talked to a prioress, a Carmelite nun, and a Jesuit priest who is an expert in canon law, and I watched as an organist played a Mass.  I hope that Whisper Hollow has done justice to their expertise, their time and their generosity, because so much of what they offered went into this book, and that means a lot to me.”

I hope that Whisper Hollow has done justice to their expertise, their time and their generosity, because so much of what they offered went into this book, and that means a lot to me.

Back in Houston, Chris Cander spends time offering her own experience and knowledge to others in the same way by teaching creative writing to elementary school students through Writers in the Schools.

“I love teaching those kids. I realized early on that my strength in teaching lay in encouraging young writers to be fearless when they write. So I created a mantra – ‘I am a fearless writer!’ – that we say at the beginning of every writing session throughout the whole year. I hope, if nothing else, that when they are confronted by a blank page, they’ll remember that mantra and be able to tap into that fearlessness.”

I created a mantra – ‘I am a fearless writer!’

As well as Whisper Hollow, Chris Cander’s other published work includes the award-winning novel 11 Stories (Rubber Tree Press) and her award-winning picture book, The Word Burglar (Bright Sky Press). She has also co-written the screenplay for Germs!, an animated feature film currently in pre-production, and she has written hundreds of articles for magazines and newspapers on health and fitness and parenting. She lives in West University with her husband and two children.

For more information about Chris and her new novel, Whisper Hollow, visit her website at www.chriscander.com.

The post Houston novelist brings coal-mining to life in Whisper Hollow first appeared on An Open Book - The Inprint Blog.

When Judith Switek was appointed Director of Creative Writing in 2010, she also took on the challenge of designing the new writing curriculum.

“I went to visit a couple of other fine arts schools,” she says, “and of course, I talked to the other art form department chairs at HSPVA to see how their programs were structured. For example, for the first two years in Art, they give the students a taste of lots of different styles. Then as juniors and seniors, they can decide what they want to focus on. I knew I wanted to do that with my program too. I studied playwriting at NYU without ever having written a play before, but if I’d never had the chance to try playwriting, I would never have known how much I loved it. This way, the kids are able to try everything out and see what they feel strongest in.

“Once they get to their junior and senior years, they can choose from three advanced workshop classes – poetry, dramatic writing and fiction. Although there is some craft instruction in there, the program is definitely workshop-based, meaning the kids bring in their work to be critiqued by their classmates.”

So, as the graduation cheers fade, did the course live up to the students’ expectations?

“I came from public school in Cy-Fair, and I was terrified. People were just running around doing art,” says senior Audrey Griffin, who will be heading to the University of Texas after the summer, with hopes of becoming a cinematographer. “I didn’t come into this with any real expectations, but there were so many things we had to figure out because we were doing the class for the first time. I guess that’s why one of the most important things I learned here was to speak my mind about how I think things should be done and to take charge of my own learning experience.”

“I came from public school in Cy-Fair, and I was terrified. People were just running around doing art,” says senior Audrey Griffin, who will be heading to the University of Texas after the summer, with hopes of becoming a cinematographer.

Classmate, Matthew Toffoletto, agrees.

“I went to a Montessori school, so everything was new to me, but I was allowed to push for what I wanted to learn and experience. It has been great to have a lot of open-ended assignments and projects, because we’re allowed lots of time to sit in the library to work, which for me was very conducive to my writing. Then we could sit down in a workshop and have other people tell us what they liked or didn’t like, what was working and what wasn’t. That’s what made it great for me.”

Matthew is not only a writer, but a musician and a scientist too. He will take up a place at the prestigious Shepherd School at Rice University in the fall, studying music and ecology. He is adamant that his time in the Creative Writing program at HSPVA has been valuable preparation for both subjects.

“My dream is to write an opera, so being able to understand story structure and how words work is valuable knowledge. As a scientist too, I personally believe that everyone should go through a course like this, or at least read fiction in one class, because that’s such an important thing in terms of developing human empathy. When you are reading or writing, you get to look at other people’s experiences, and even though it is contrived on a page, you get to understand what it’s like to be a different human being. That to me is so important for a scientist or doctor.”

As a scientist too, I personally believe that everyone should go through a course like this, or at least read fiction in one class, because that’s such an important thing in terms of developing human empathy.

Although only half of the fourteen seniors will be continuing in creative writing or a related art form at college, Judith Switek is confident that the years at HSPVA will not have been wasted, even for those heading into other disciplines like science or business.

“Learning creative writing, and indeed studying any of the arts in any school, is so important because you learn how to think and look at the world in a different way. You get to the root of a problem in a creative way, and of course, having strong writing skills will help everyone in their career. Sadly, arts funding is often the first to be cut because people don’t understand the value of the skills learned beyond that one class, and that is a real crime in our education system.”

Learning creative writing, and indeed studying any of the arts in any school, is so important because you learn how to think and look at the world in a different way.

As one of the most oversubscribed art forms in HSPVA for the coming year’s intake – over 200 applications for only 20 places – Creative Writing is clearly flourishing. And with a new HSPVA building currently under construction in Downtown Houston (at Caroline and Austin), the creative writers will no longer have to camp in a temporary building in the back parking lot or work in any free corner they can find, sharing space with rehearsing violinists, actors or ballet dancers. They will instead have their own suite of classrooms, though Judith Switek is sure they will not always shut themselves away behind closed doors.

“The new building will certainly mean we can all be in one area, but the kids don’t seem to need peace and quiet to write. They thrive on the noise of the other students because to them, it is more energy than noise. When we are in the new building, I am sure I will be sending them out to other areas, to the big windows overlooking the dance studio, or to sit and listen to the orchestra rehearse. They need to watch other people move and listen to other people talk.

“There is a palpable creativity within the HSPVA building and to me, that’s really valuable as a writer.”

The post Founding class of creative writers graduate from HSPVA first appeared on An Open Book - The Inprint Blog.