Writing Course from Winter 2005

BIRD WATCHING AND WRITING, with Bill Griffin and Janice Moore Fuller
A Day-Long Workshop

• Saturday, April 2, 8:30 am - 3:30 pm
• Meets at the Catawba College Center for the Environment in Salisbury
• Participants will eat lunch at the Catawba College cafeteria (cost of lunch not included in workshop fee)
• $85 Network members, and Friends of the Center for the Environment / $100 non-members
• Limit: 15 participants

Designed for both beginning and advanced writers and for beginning and advanced bird watchers, the workshop will be held at the Center for the Environment, a green facility that opened in 2001. With Dr. John Wear, Jr. as director and Karen Alexander, AIA, president of KKA Architecture in Salisbury, as the lead architect, the center was constructed using recycled and recyclable materials and sustainably grown wood. It also relies on a geoexchange system for heating and cooling. The 21,000-sq.-ft. building has served as a model of green design for the state and region.

The workshop will begin with bird watching in Catawba College's 189-acre ecological preserve. The preserve includes a variety of habitats, including a lake, streams, an alluvial flood plain, a hardwood forest, swamp areas, and open fields. Over 150 species of birds have been sighted in the preserve.

After the field experience, the workshop will include an exploration of various literary models for writing about birds, followed by time for participants to begin writing pieces inspired by the morning's bird watching. After lunch, participants will share the work they have written and will respond to each other's writing.

Anyone interested in having an already-existing bird poem or short piece of prose (no more than a page in length) critiqued during the workshop should submit the work when he or she registers.

Participants are asked to wear clothes appropriate for hiking and to bring any binoculars or field guides that they may own. (A limited number of binoculars and field guides will be available for loan.)

Bill Griffin is a family physician in rural North Carolina, where his "writer's group" is a hawkswept footpath that wanders up the Blue Ridge. Every spring for the past ten years, Bill has counted birds for the USGS Breeding Bird Survey. Bill serves on the boards of the NC Poetry Society and Poetry Council of NC and organizes the annual Foothills Favorite Poem Project in his home town of Elkin. His poetry chapbook, Barb Quill Down, was published by Pudding House in 2004, and his work has appeared in a number of journals. Bill's favorite poem is "Hymn" by A.R.Ammons: "I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth / and go on out / over the sea marshes and the brant in bays . . . ."

Writer-in-Residence and Professor of English at Catawba College, Janice Moore Fuller has published two poetry books, Archeology Is a Destructive Science (Scots Plaid Press) and Sex Education (Iris Press), as well as poems and essays in numerous American and European journals. In Spring 2004, she and Catawba biology professor Steve Coggin team-taught an honors course "Birds: Evolution and the Imagination" that culminated in eight days of fieldwork in the Galapagos islands. Her plays and libretti have been produced at Catawba's Florence Busby Corriher Theater, BareBones Theater's New Play Festival, the Minneapolis Fringe Festival, and the Rendez-Vous Musique Nouvelle in France. She has been a Fellow at the Tyrone Guthrie Center, Fundación Valparaíso in Spain, Edinburgh's Hawthornden Castle, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center.