The Bowers House

The Bowers House: A Writers’ Retreat and Literary Center is located in the lush, rolling hill farm country of Northeast Georgia.  Nearby Hartwell Lake serves as the boundary waters between Georgia and South Carolina and just to the west are the Great Smoky Mountains, part of the Appalachian Mountains.

TAPPING THE CREATIVE

FOR HEALTH AND HEALING

A weekend workshop of creative discovery

Saturday, June 2 & Sunday June 3, 2012

$85 for the weekend,

Registration and payment by May 23

see schedule at Programs and Events

This weekend workshop is about how creativity inspires health and well-being. Many reputable sources site the benefits of embracing creativity to sustain health and vitality. The three presenters for this weekend will provide experiences in their artistic mediums of writing, painting and guided movement to tap our creative sources. Each presenter brings a special perspective and process to make for a diverse yet focused and interesting time. You’ll likely leave with ideas of how to design your own creative space and time at home. Anyone interested in creating a more focused, attentive life by maintaining practiced awareness will find this an inspired weekend retreat. Those working in healthcare, counseling, life coaching or perhaps are dealing with loss, significant life changes or chronic illness will find great benefit in this weekend experience.

The Writer and Keynote Speaker:  Sara Baker

Sara is a poet, short story writer and novelist. Her work has been widely published and produced. She holds a Masters Degree from BostonCollege. She has taught English at UGA, Georgia Tech and Piedmont College.  Her own journey with chronic illness led her to create Woven Dialog Workshops, which aid in facilitating the healing process. Sara blogs at: www.saratbaker.wordpress.com

The Artist:  Sarah Pattison

Sarah believes the key to healing mind, body and spirit is available to us if we can express and be with our innermost feelings through play and creativity. She holds a BFA from UGA, trained with and assisted Stewart Cubley of The Painting Experience . She has been teaching classes and conducting workshops in the Athens area since 1997.   www.wildeyestudio.com

The Fitness Guide/Trainer:   Lisa Knighton

Lisa is an ACE Certified Fitness Trainer with an exercise studio near Athens. She has both BS and MS from UGA and is currently a student of well-known author, Natalie Goldberg. Lisa brings us Writing Practice by combining guided movement with meditation and focused writing prompts. Lisa requests participants read Writing Down the Bones or Wild Mind, by Natalie Goldberg, before the workshop.  www.knightonscardiofit.net

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Internationally Acclaimed Georgia Writer Terry Kay 

at The Bowers House

In April the Bowers House Literary Center in Canon, Georgia, and the University of Georgia’s award-winning journal The Georgia Review welcomed writer Terry Kay at the Bowers House.

Terry Kay, a Hart County native who currently makes his home in Athens, is the author of some fifteen books—among them eleven novels, a collection of essays, a children’s book, and a recently released volume of short stories, The Greats of Cuttercane.

Three of Kay’s novels have been produced as Hallmark Hall of Fame movies: The Runaway, The Valley of Light, and his best-known work To Dance with the White Dog—the last of these starring the famous acting couple of Hume Cronin and Jessica Tandy.

Readers around the world can find Kay’s books translated into more than twenty languages; most notably, To Dance with the White Dog has sold some two million copies in Japan.

After Kay’s reading in the house’s spacious living room/parlor, Georgia Review editor Stephen Corey moderated a conversation between Kay and the audience. A reception followed, during which attendees enjoyed refreshments while walking the grounds or sitting on the first- and second-floor wraparound porches.

The Georgia Review, published quarterly at the University of Georgia since 1947, features short stories, poems, general-interest essays, reviews, and visual art by the famous and the newly discovered. Winner of National Magazine Awards in both the fiction and the essay category, and a recipient of the Georgia Governor’s Award in the Arts, the Review has a long tradition of sponsoring and cosponsoring reading events in the Athens area. For more information, go to www.thegeorgiareview.com or call 706-542-3481.

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A few of the Writers who have stayed at The Bowers House:

Alison Hawthorne Deming is author of four poetry books : Rope: Science and Other Poems, winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets; The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence; and Genius Loci.  She has published three nonfiction books, Temporary Homelands, The Edges of the Civilized World, and Writing the Sacred Into the Real.  She has completed a new nonfiction book titled Zoologies: on Animals and the Human Spirit.  She co-edited with Laurent Savoy The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World, reissued in 2011 in a new expanded edition.  Her work has been widely published and anthologized, including in The Norton Book of Nature Writing, and Best American Science and Nature Writing.   She grew up inConnecticut and now lives in Tucson, Arizona and on Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick, Canada.  Deming is Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona.  Recently she worked at the Jacksonville (FL) Zoo and Gardens as poet-in-residence as part of a national Language of Conservation project.

Playwright Cedric Liqueur performed his one-man show, “Satchel” Paige, at the Bowers House on April 4. The play was written during a recent writer’s retreat Liqueur took at the Bowers House.Satchel Paige, considered the greatest pitcher in the history of the Negro Leagues, went on to play in the Major Leagues and in 1971 he was the first player from the Negro leagues to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.  Cedric Liqueur, a member of London’s Royal Shakespeare Company, writes and performs theatre-stage plays, prose, narratives, poetry, and sonnets. 

The Georgia Poetry Society

(L-R) Keith Badowski, Matthew Payne, from Birmingham; Michael Diebert, an Atlanta-area poet who is one of the other co-editors for Future Cycle Press; Steven Shields, photographer, poet & co-editor for Future Cycle Press; Barry Marks, a lawyer and poet from Birmingham whose book Possible Crocodiles was published by Brick Road Press.

Members of The Poetry Society of Georgia returned for their second annual 3 day retreat at The Bowers House.  As part of this retreat, on Sunday, Jan 15, at 7 PM, they conducted an evening of reading of their original works at The Bowers House.  The public was invited.

We had a terrific time at the Bowers House.  There’s a good energy about the place.  We all agreed that we got more done over that weekend than some of us had for many months. ~ Steven Shields

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 The Bowers House & The Georgia Review

The Bowers House  and The Georgia Review, the University of Georgia’s nationally renowned journal of arts and letters, are pleased to announce the success of  its October 2010  inaugural event, The Comedy of Survival, featuring South Carolina short-story writer and novelist George Singleton and Georgia-based poet Alice Friman.  The day-long workshop included readings and a question and answer session by Singleton and Friman.  After a lunch break the two writers spent the afternoon focusing on the art of weaving humor into even the most challenging material.

George Singleton is one of the finest and hottest fiction writers in the country at this time – ” a big-hearted evil genius who writes as if he were the love child of Alice Munro and Strom Thurmond,” writes Tony Earley.

A Georgia Review discovery some twenty years ago, Singleton has since published four collections of short stories, two novels, and an irreverent how-to book titled Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds: Indispensable Wisdom and Cautionary Advice for Writers. His other titles, which in themselves provide an intriguing introduction to his worldview, include The Half-Mammals of Dixie, Why Dogs Chase Cars, Drowning in Gruel, and Work Shirts for Madmen. A recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Singleton has had work published and reprinted in such magazines as the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s, and in anthologies like New Stories from the South and Surreal South. He lives in Easley, South Carolina.

Alice Friman’s The Book of the Rotten Daughter contains “astonishing poems which fearlessly jump into hell and out again, that resent or forgive,” writes poet Marianne Boruch, “poems which wryly, exactly and so richly honor the world of the living.”  Her eight poetry collections includes The Book of the Rotten Daughter, Zoo, and Inverted Fire; her ninth, Vinculum, is forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in 2011.

Professor Emerita at the University of Indianapolis, Friman has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Indiana Arts Commission, the Arts Council of Indianapolis, the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies, and the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest. Like George Singleton a steady contributor to The Georgia Review, Friman is currently poet-in-residence at Georgia College and State University in      Milledgeville.