Summer 2005 Youth Programs

Creative Writing Day Camps & Workshops for Children & Teens

For details about SummerWrite 2005, including registration fees, see the SummerWrite 2005 General Information Page.

Week 4: July 18–July 13

Bienvenue! Welcome to French

• Ages: 8-11
• SY5-M2V4
• Instructor: Odetta Norton
• MORNINGS: July 18–22, 9 am–Noon
• $95 W&B members / $105 general public

Bienvenue! Learn French songs, make puppets and eat French snacks in an introduction to French language and culture from France and other French-speaking countries. Open your heart and mind to another way of being in the world—through a different language! French games, conversational role play, dance and poetry for children. No previous knowledge of French required. Children with previous experience speaking French are also welcome. On Friday, we will present some of our French for our family and friends, and serve them French goodies!

Where’s Walden?

• Ages: 9–12
• SY5-M3B6
• Instructors: Edgar Brown, Angela Cannon, D.J. Kitzel & Wendy Low
• ALL DAY: July 18–22, 9 am–4 pm
• $190 W&B members / $210 general public
• Note: Held at the Gell Center of the Finger Lakes. A bus will be offered from 740 University Avenue in Rochester, leaving at 8:10 am and returning at 5:00 pm
• Additional transportation fee if taking bus from University Avenue: $85

Summertime, sunshine, green rolling hills, wildlife, and you! Spend a week communing with nature and with the writer within you at our retreat in the Bristol Hills. You will travel with professional writers and naturalists, take hikes along the Finger Lakes Trail and observe the natural environment around you. You will write stories, dramatic monologues, and poems probing the past, present and future of the landscape and ecosystem before you. We will publish our own small anthology. Please dress to hike, and pack a bag lunch each day. New this year: building a naturalist’s journal! Offered in collaboration with the South Bristol Cultural Center.

Outdoor Writer

• Ages: 13–16
• SY5-M5E6
• Instructors: Edgar Brown, Angela Cannon, D.J. Kitzel & Wendy Low
• ALL DAY: July 18–22, 9 am–4 pm
• $190 W&B members / $210 general public
• Note: Held at the Gell Center of the Finger Lakes. A bus will be offered from 740 University Avenue in Rochester, leaving at 8:10 am and returning at 5:00 pm
• Additional transportation fee if taking bus from University Avenue: $85

Summertime, sunshine, green rolling hills, wildlife, and you! Spend a week stalking the natural world! Commune with nature and with the writer within you at our retreat in the Bristol Hills. You will travel with professional writers and naturalists, take hikes along the Finger Lakes Trail and observe the natural environment around you. You will write stories, dramatic monologues, and poems probing the past, present, and future of the landscape, plants and animals before you. We will publish our own small anthology. Please dress to hike, and pack a bag lunch each day. New this year: Campfire circle and sleepover!

Wednesday for boys and Thursday for girls. Offered in collaboration with the South Bristol Cultural Center.

Writing Your Life

• Ages: 12–14
• SY5-N4A2
• Instructor: Camy Sorbello
• MORNINGS: July 18–22, 9 am–Noon
• $99 W&B members / $110 general public

By now, you've seen a lot of what life has to offer—the good, the bad, the exciting, the worrisome. Why not write about it before it flies out of your head and is gone forever? Write about all of your fun and funny friends, your favorite summer place, or your least favorite restaurant (and the time you found a gruesome insect in the twice-baked potatoes). Your experiences can become essays, memoirs, or even the basis for fiction. Write about your worst vacation, favorite relative, scariest moment, proudest achievement, earliest memory. Tell your own story, of your life—the story that’s yours and yours alone. Join us for a week of creative mornings. We’ll prevent your original ideas from slipping into the outer atmosphere by collecting them in a take-home anthology.

The Write Stuff

• Ages: 12–14
• SY5-M4B2
• Instructor: Donna Marbach
• AFTERNOONS: July 18–22, 1–4 pm
• $99 W&B members / $110 general public

Why do we like to write? What makes a good story? Where do ideas come from? How can we express our feelings in the best way? When is a poem really a poem? Can non-fiction be creative? This class is a kind of training camp for young writers who want to reach the stars. In it, we will read, play writing games, experiment, and mostly have fun. Meeting other young writers and sharing ideas, we will help each other grow creatively. Together we will uncover secrets and techniques used by “professionals.” And, we will seek out new places to publish or present our best pieces. Best of all, we will explore new worlds—outside and within—by writing and writing and writing.

Taking Life Personally in Poetry and Prose

• Ages: 14 & up
• SY5-M5K7
• Instructor: M.J.Iuppa
• MORNINGS: July 18–22, 9 am–noon
• $99 W&B members / $110 general public

Most poems and all personal essays start with the “I” of the beholder. Most writers start in their teens when they are both keenly observant and deeply aware of their own reactions to life. We will look at how you, as the human observer, feeler and thinker at the heart of life can report from the knife-edge of experience in ways that will inform and move your fellows. We will look to examples from young poets, writers and lyricists who have opened eyes and minds over the ages. We will learn how to use sense imagery, precise words and sound effects to make our writing more vivid.

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