Tuesday, August 22, 2006
RopeWalk Writers Retreat announces the creation of RopeWalk Press
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In anticipation of its 20th anniversary, RopeWalk Writers Retreat announces the creation of RopeWalk Press. Since 1988, RopeWalk Writers Retreat has given hundreds of participants the opportunity to attend workshops and confer privately with prominent writers in Historic New Harmony, Indiana, the site of two nineteenth-century Utopian experiments with a history of creative and intellectual achievement. Workshops at RopeWalk are consciously restricted to a dozen participants in order to retain a sense of intimacy between faculty and attendees in New Harmony’s retreat-like atmosphere. RopeWalk Press shares those values of high quality and small scale. Dr. Thomas Wilhelmus, a founding director of RopeWalk and professor of English, said, “Since we started the writers’ conference, we’ve added several additional programs: the literary magazine, Southern Indiana Review, a winter weekend version of the conference, and an on-campus series of monthly readings. Ropewalk Press is another part of our continuing effort to enhance the creation and appreciation of the literary arts in this region as we approach our 20th year in 2008.” Borrowing the slogan of the National Endowment for the Arts, Wilhelmus said, “‘A great nation deserves great art,’ including great literature. We’re interested in improving the quality of life and making Evansville and this region an attractive place to live, work, and enjoy the benefits of highly accomplished cultural activities, including those for people who appreciate reading and writing.” Matthew Graham, co-founding RopeWalk director and director of Creative Writing at USI, said, “Starting RopeWalk Press is a logical extension of the RopeWalk umbrella. In our 20th year, we want to commemorate our accomplishments by introducing a 20-year anniversary anthology containing the poems, short stories and essays of all the writers who have participated in the conference over the years.” Twenty Years in Utopia: The RopeWalk Writers Retreat Anthology is slated for release in 2008. The first release from RopeWalk Press is Matthew Guenette’s A Hush of Something Endless. A graduate of Southern Illinois University's MFA program, Guenette was an instructor in English at USI from 1999 to 2002. He currently teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at Madison Area Technical College. He said, “If there's a consistent theme in A Hush... I would say it's the very poetic tradition of a narrator wringing order from the chaos of desire and loss. My goal with these poems was to generate velocity and construct a voice that is both distracted and amazed by a world of strange, beautiful details that hint at a higher order. I also wanted to create a voice that finds humor in this world, as way of negotiating defeat.” |
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