The view from my hotel room, looking north up Miami Beach.
I’m writing this from the Miami Airport, where the air conditioning is cold and the air outside is warm and heavy with humidity. I’ve been in South Florida for eight days now, and I’m ready to get home to the crisp and dry air of Southern Colorado. Even though it is cold.
Bitter cold: it was minus thirteen this morning, bound for a high today of 15 degrees above zero. It’s been so cold while I’ve been away that my water meter froze. If my neighbor Bev hadn’t been watching out for my house and the shop, I would have come home to a disaster….
When I left for Miami, the weather was seasonable, so I hadn’t prepared for this unusually bitter cold. And I haven’t had time to even think about it during Young Arts Week, six-plus days of non-stop teaching, mentoring, master classes, evaluations, performances, and generally celebrating and nurturing an extraordinary crop of young writers and their compatriots in dance, cinema, theater, music (jazz, classical, voice), visual art, and photography.
In addition to the day-long workshops and master classes, there was at least one performance every night in this one-of-a-kind, week-long celebration of the country’s best emerging artists aged 16 to 18 years.
A quiet moment in the courtyard at Books and Books, reading in the courtyard while waiting for the bus back to the hotel.
We writers spent a wonderful afternoon with novelist Rob Van Wagoner, hearing his new work and doing new writing ourselves, talking about story and ideas. Another afternoon we took at “field trip” from our base (the Deauville Beach Resort right on the beach) to go to Books and Books, where bookstore owner Mitch Kaplan, founder of the Miami Book Fair, talked to us about the business of writing and publishing.
Mitch also gifted us each a copy of Blue Christmas, an anthology edited by noted Miami fiction writer John Dufresne and published by the bookstore, along with a gift certificate, so we spent a happy hour browsing the store and selecting new books to read.
Bouganvillea grows “wild” through beach grass, Miami Beach Botanical Gardens.
There was the morning at Miami Beach Botanical Garden working with fiction writer Beth Kephart and her photographer husband, Bill, who are collaborating on a booklet of the writers’ work.
And there was “our” writers’ Friday night performance, a reading of two-minute excerpts of their fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction that had the audience hushed and on the edge of their seats, drinking in every word, and then standing as one afterwards to give these courageous and creative young writers an ovation as they danced their way out of the hall at the Miami Performing Arts Center.
In short, it was a magical, inspiring, high-energy, transformative, seriously exhausting week. Worth every minute.
I snatched 20 minutes to walk on the beach one day, long enough to actually get my feet in the warm Atlantic.
When I say I’m headed off to Miami to work with teen writers, people often assume we’re working with sappy, angst-ridden love poems with tiny hearts dotting the ‘i’s or stories about sports figures and video games. And that we get in serious beach time. False on both.
These writers may be short on years, but they’re long on wit and sophisticated thinking, depth, creativity and an enduring passion for words and story. Their writing is strikingly ahead of their age–I was not nearly so self-aware and focused when I was their age!
As I wrote in the introduction to the anthology excerpting the work of this year’s 24 finalists:
How does a young writer get to Arts Week? By paying attention to the craft, digging deep for freshness, authenticity, resonance. By having the courage and tenacity to pursue their unique creative voice–listening intently within, and by honing their words until those words sing, rail, make us laugh and sigh and exclaim out loud….
Here’s to you,Young Arts 2013 Finalists in Writing: Lois Carlisle, Kathleen Cole, Allison Cooke, Amanda Crist, Alexa Derman, Stefania Gomez, Emily Hittner-Cunningham, Julia Hogan, Shelley (Anne Shelton) Hucks, Flannery James, Libbie Katsev, Peter LaBerge, Natalie Landers, Amy Mattox, Annyston Pennington, Kathleen Radigan, Laura Rashley, Anne Malin Ringwalt, Lizza Rodriguez, Fances Saux, Lila Thulen, Victoria White, Catherine Wong, and Ashley Zhou.
I can’t wait to read more from you all.
i love hearing about your young writers. it seems like it takes a huge amount of energy for you to be a mentor/teacher, but oh, the rewards. thanks susan, for keeping us in the loop. i think this work is very important.
Velma, It does take a huge amount of energy to teach well. (You do it every day–you know all about that!) It’s such a beautiful moment when you see a student truly understand something they never did before, whether it’s the worth of their art or a concept, a fact and how to interpret it or a new perspective on the world. Whoever said “knowledge is power” was right. It can also be beauty and joy, challenge and growth, and pride and simple comfort. I teach for those moments. I’m sure you do, too.
So, the rumors of the death of sensible teenagers have been greatly exaggerated?
Being ensconced smack dab on the beach, yet luxuriating for all of twenty minutes (from your FB post) of “serious beach time.” Reminds me of being smack dab next to that ground opening idea, yet not being able to get the writing to stay there, except too briefly.
Standing ovation after hushing an audience of fellow artists. And you got to be part of that. Woohoo!!
Sounds like I’d best keep my pen sharp, lest I be left behind.
Eduardo, I can’t say that these are “sensible” 17- and 18-year-olds (that’s an oxymoron, isn’t it?), but they are wildly creative and very focused on their writing. One has even started a literary journal (Adroit) with two issues out (in print). On that connection between not having enough time in a packed schedule to get to the beach for more than a 20-minute walk and writing about that “ground-opening” idea, I’d say with writing, I go with the flow. If my work wants to go somewhere, I follow it and see what it has to say. What I “want” in my creative work and what my writing “muse” has to say are not often the same thing. In fact, it seems to me that the best writing comes from that kind of following the work where it will go, not trying to make it go or stay in a particular place. As for sharp pencils, we’d all best keep our pencils sharp, and well-used. The word needs our stories….