OCTOBER 13 - NOVEMBER 2, 2008
WRITER'S RESIDENCY

Application Deadline: May 23, 2008

HONOR MOORE, non-fiction/poetry

Honor Moore's most recent book is The Bishop's Daughter, a memoir, published  in May, 2008 by WW Norton, and of three collections of poems: Red Shoes, Darling, and Memoir. She is the editor of Amy Lowell: Selected Poems for the Library of America and co-editor of At the Stray Dog Cabaret, A Book of Russian Poems translated by Paul Schmidt. Her biography, The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter, was a New York Times Notable Book in 1996, and, in 2004,  she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her play Mourning Pictures, was produced on Broadway and published in The New Women’s Theatre: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women, which she edited. She has also been a theatre critic for The New York Times. 

Honor Moore has received awards in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and in playwriting from the New York State Council on the Arts. Poems and prose have appeared in the New Yorker, The American Scholar, Salmagundi, Conjunctions, The New Republic,  Open City, the Paris Review and other journals and anthologies. She presently teaches in the graduate writing programs at the New School and the Columbia School of the Arts and has been a visiting distinguished writer in nonfiction at the University of Iowa and visiting poet at Wesleyan University. She lives in New York City.

Residency Statement

Writers of all genres employ memory, either overtly or covertly, in fragments or in long sweeps of recollection.  One might even say writing that seems to bear sparse relation to actual memory may court, contradict or be haunted by it. The task of this residency will be to expand how one can use memory as a resource for writing, a resource that one can mine, break into, distort, embellish, dis- or reassemble, interrogate or doubt. It will suggest that far from being merely personal, writing from memory has a hand in creating cultural, social and historical memory. Participants can be poets, memoirists, essayists fiction writers, or writers who work in more than one genre. As texts, we will read the Combray section of Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, in the Modern Library edition, translated by Moncrieff,  Kilmartin and Enright and The Emigrants by WG Sebald.

Think of these weeks as a laboratory rather than a conventional workshop.  The group will meet together to discuss and share ideas about the use of memory in writing (including sources relating to historical, social and cultural memory), but work on text will take place in one on one conferences.

Application Requirements

Prose writers: 15 pages
Poets: 5 poems, not more than 10 pages
A letter responding to the description of the residency.
During the residency the structure will be as follows: three meetings a week as a group, and at least two conferences a week.