Writers to Gather in Hindman Aug 1- 6
News Date:
07/26/2010
Hindman, KY—With its upcoming 33rd Annual Appalachian Writers Workshop (Aug 1-6), Hindman Settlement School continues to build on an extraordinary literary tradition that began more than a century ago.
Through the years, many beginning and accomplished writers have made the trek to Hindman to for a week of learning and fellowship. This year, the workshop includes sessions on writing nonfiction, poetry, short stories, children’s stories, memoirs, novels and a special session on historical fiction. The sessions are taught by a talented group of published writers who mentor workshop participants, both in groups and individually.
Each evening workshop staff will read from their works. Unless otherwise noted, evening programs start at 7:30 pm and are free and open to the public. All readings will be in the May Stone Building at the Settlement School.
Sunday, Aug 1—Music & Dancing (starts at 8 pm)
Monday, Aug 2—Crystal Wilkinson, Diane Gilliam, Marc Harshman
Tuesday, Aug 3—Pam Duncan, Mark Powell, Darnell Arnoult
Wednesday, Aug 4—Robert Morgan, George Ella Lyon, Karen McElmurray
Thursday, Aug 5—“Jim Wayne Miller/James Still Lecture” Silas House
During the Jim Wayne Miller/James Still Lecture, Silas House will be reading from Chinaberry, a soon-to-be published work by James Still. After the lecture, there will be a book signing, reception and music. For more information, visit www.HindmanSettlement.org.
Family Folk Week June 6-12th
News Date:
06/04/2010
HINDMAN, KY—Traditional music, crafts, story-telling and folk-dancing are all part of what’s in store for participants of Hindman Settlement School’s 33rd annual Appalachian Family Folk Week June 6-12.
Families from around the U.S. and abroad gather at the Forks of Troublesome Creek to take part in this unique week of workshops, performances and shared traditions geared for people of all ages. Folk Week features traditional music and dance programs each evening at the May Stone Building on the Settlement’s campus.
All evening programs are free and open to the public. Programs start at 7:30 p.m. except Friday night, which begins at 7:00 p.m.
| Evening Schedule: | |
| Sunday, June 6 | Lee Sexton; Nora, Ben & Eli |
| Monday, June 7 | Aubrey Atwater & Elwood Donnelly; Jim & Ada McCown |
| Tuesday, June 8 | Deborah Thompson; Sparky & Rhonda Rucker |
| Wednesday, June 9 | Randy Wilson; John Haywood & Rich Kirby |
| Thursday, June 10 | Sara Grey; Al & Alice White |
| Friday, June 11 | Participants Perform |
Detailed schedule for participants.
Settlement Eyes Energy Improvements
News Date:
05/03/2010
With an eye toward saving money and reducing our environmental impact, last summer Hindman Settlement School contracted with the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development (MACED) in Berea, KY to conduct an energy audit of all campus facilities.
A team from MACED’s Energy Efficient Enterprises (E3) program met with staff to discuss the Settlement School’s needs and then conducted a building-by-building evaluation. The evaluation included a detailed analysis of the Settlement School’s energy bills over a 12-month period.
The analysis revealed that during a 12-month period from early 2008 through early 2009, the Settlement School paid $63,061 in energy costs. The E3 team produced a summary list of recommended actions for reducing energy costs and environmental impacts. The team also provided a thick binder with detailed utility bill analysis and building-by-building recommendations.
The Board’s Facilities & Equipment Committee has since met to review the report and recommendations. Some recommendations, such as replacing incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs, have already been implemented, but there are many larger scale recommendations yet to be addressed.
Electricity rates in Kentucky are expected to continue rising faster than the national average. As part of its strategic planning process, the Settlement will be looking at ways to mitigate these increasing costs through conservation measures. A more detailed Capital Improvements Plan will be developed that is expected to incorporate many energy audit recommendations.
MACED’s Energy Efficient Enterprises project works to promote energy efficiency to small businesses and nonprofits located in Appalachian Kentucky.
They offer:
· An energy audit equipment library with free borrowing privileges.
· Excel calculators to calculate energy and cost savings.
· Information sheets on energy efficient technologies and approaches for specific business types.
· Technical assistance to building trade contractors.
· Financing through an energy microloan and Enterprise Development team.
· Energy consulting by a Certified Energy Manager.
To learn more, contact E3 Project Manager Elizabeth Graves at 859-986-2373.
Kentucky DAR Presents Award to Folk Arts Program
News Date:
03/28/2010
The Kentucky Society Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) presented a Special Historic Preservation Award to Hindman Settlement School's Folk Arts Program for "Promoting and preserving the traditional arts and crafts of Eastern Kentucky through education, community activities and special performances."
Sharon Withers, Kentucky State Regent, presented the award to Mike Mullins during the Society's state conference in Lexington on March 26, 2010 during a luncheon featuring a performance by children from Jones Fork Elementary School in Knott County.
Hindman Settlement School is one of six schools in the country that are supported by the National Society DAR, which promotes education as one of its three main goals. The Society includes more than 3,000 chapters and 167,000 members in the U.S. Hindman has been receiving support from Daughters since 1904.
Jack Combs' Photographs Reflect Cuban Spirit
News Date:
03/22/2010
Editor's Note: Jack Beckham Combs is an attorney and photographer who grew up in Hindman, Kentucky. He is the son of Beckham and Virginia Combs. Combs says his trips to Cuba began at the behest of the late James Still. "He did not urge me to go, he told me to go and to write a book. I did." Combs currently serves on the board of directors of Hindman Settlement School.
The Cubans
Photographs and text by Jack Beckham Combs. Foreword by Jennifer L. McCoy. Essay by Julia E. Sweig.
University Press Of Virginia, Charlottesville, 2010. 192 pp., 130 color illustrations, 9½x12" English and Spanish.
From the Publisher
Asked to conjure an image of Cuba, most Americans see a country of elegant, crumbling buildings and old American cars. While it takes less than 25 minutes to fly from Miami to Havana, the United States and its island neighbor have been mired in hostility and distrust since the Castro Revolution ousted the American-backed puppet Batista 50 years ago. Shared family connections have allowed both Americans and Cubans to separate the governments of each country from its people, but there is still misunderstanding on both sides.
Photographs that purport to represent Cuba and its people often reproduce the narrow American imagination of the place, starting and ending in Old Habana. While it is true that the buildings in this small section of the city, many of which are 300 years old, have been crumbling for 150 years, and many of the cars are from the pre-Revolution era, this quaint image bears little reality to the country and its people.
The documentary photographer Jack Combs has been making photographs of the Cuban people over the course of eight years and 15 visits to the island. His images range from the urban to the rural, from saturated colors and polished night skies to vibrant street scenes full of movement and serene agricultural landscapes. Much of Combs’ time was spent outside Havana, traveling to cities, smaller towns, villages and farms in every Cuban province. His pictures of agricultural life are beautiful pastoral compositions. Rarer still is the emphasis his eye places on ordinary people living their everyday lives. Their faces and settings demonstrate that Cubans may have less than they need, but they are nonetheless a people of strength, good humor and great national pride. The breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of its massive economic subsidies may have shattered the Cuban leaders’ dream of economic independence, but not the people’s spirit.
Heather Clay Publishes First Novel
News Date:
03/22/2010
Editor's Note: Heather Clay serves on the Advisory Board of Hindman Settlement School. This article is reprinted from the March 21, 2010 edition of the Lexington Herald-Leader. Heather Clay will read from and sign her new novel "Losing Charlotte" at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lexington at 7 p.m. on April 21, 2010.
Midway native releases debut novel
Heather Clay harnesses her homesickness for Midway
By Amy Wilson
awilson1@herald-leader.com
Author Heather Clay left the Bluegrass when she was 15 and has been "desperately homesick ever since," she says.
The daughter of the owners of Three Chimneys Farm in Midway, Clay left to go to Groton, a boarding school in Massachusetts, and then to Middlebury College in Vermont. She earned a master's degree from Columbia University in New York and stayed there.
Three Chimneys is where Seattle Slew lived out his elegant days and where Smarty Jones and Big Brown now share the fields that Clay could walk in her sleep.
Clay married a man in 1998 whose family is deeply rooted in the East, through politics and business, so maybe there is no coming home for good. In June 2003, when Clay was 32, her short story, Original Beauty, made The New Yorker magazine's debut fiction issue. She lives on the Upper West Side. Her daughters, ages 3 and 6, are so thoroughly Manhattan that they are already handy at hailing cabs.
Still, those 15 years in the Woodford County countryside that launched Clay are "so deeply idealized that I sometimes want to repeat them with my girls," she says.
Every year, the Kentuckian comes home and brings her husband and two daughters with her. It is usually June, when the air is freshly spring-cleaned, the colts and fillies are growing and the land is fertile enough for everything. In recent months, Clay's 6-year-old, Amelia, told her mother that she is "not a city person," Clay says.
Clay thinks horse fever is kicking in, and along with it, a not-unfamiliar "desire to be in a place where everything, the landscape, the history and the stories, expand you."
From that desire, Clay has written her debut novel, Losing Charlotte. To be released Tuesday by Alfred P. Knopf ($24.95), the book is getting some notable buzz and is on dozens of Web and reader group watch lists.
The book was a long time coming: nine years from start to finish. That's nine years of people asking her, "When's your book going to be done?," she says, enjoying the moment at last when she can say, "It is."
She has always been busy, she says, laughing softly. And, no, she did not write steadily on the book that became Losing Charlotte; instead, she worked on short stories and magazine pieces and her life.
"Unless you're very centered, there is a sense in so many of us that we have to be all things to all people," she says during an interview scheduled around her children's busy lives.
"It's not War and Peace," she says, trying to assure the potential Losing Charlotte reader, but "I did have babies and a few choppy years."
She thinks the time it took might also have to do with her melding of an old-fashioned plot — a widower courting a surviving sister — with the demands of a present-day sensibility.
She also spent some time writing "around things," she says, deleting sections and worrying about trying to avoid what she knew she had to do with the characters, and worrying about botching it when she finally got around to it.
What is that saying? she asks, and she pauses, before she lilts: "Dying is easy; comedy is hard. Well, so was this."
In Losing Charlotte, Clay came home, metaphorically at least, to begin her fictional story of the complicated unfinished business between two sisters who chose vastly different paths. It is the story, too, of how one sister must shoulder the grief of the other's death and the burdens she left behind.
It is a book split between lives lived in the Bluegrass and in Manhattan, managing what cleaves us from and binds us inextricably to our siblings.
Clay laughs and says she has spent a lot of time recently assuring people that her brother, Case, is alive and that they remain close.
She also tells them that she is neither of Losing Charlotte's two main female characters. If she had to pick one, Clay says, she most easily identifies with Knox, the sister who stays in Kentucky, rather than Charlotte, who flees to New York.
It was Three Chimneys, she reminds, that "fed my temperament and helped me create a relationship with nature on my own. I can return there in my mind, and it is joyful."
The Clay children have not always stayed down on the farm. Heather's brother, Case — president at Three Chimneys since their father, Robert, retired — was once a stand-up comic.
Heather Clay describes herself only as "a cheerleader and observer." And, she is quick to note, her love of the farm has nothing to do with its success. It has to do with its soul.
In the acknowledgements section of the book, Clay gives thanks to her parents, Robert and Blythe, "who have made every good thing possible, and who I'm just plain crazy about."
Her parents' advice to her and to her brother, she says, was always this: Go and find your passion.
Her parents, she says, came from very different places. Her mother was an Army brat whose family moved "every two years and throughout Europe. I think she considers herself rootless.
"There were skills that came with that. She can enter a situation and suss it out quickly. She can bloom anywhere. She gave us that."
Her father was rooted in Mount Sterling. His stories of that small town were always a part of Clay's life, she says. And although his grandfather had been successful in tobacco, her father thought making his own way was important.
"He put a lot of value in being your own person. He certainly gave us that," Clay says.
And so as a child and boarding school student, Clay wrote as a way to connect to home.
"Just because your childhood has given you everything doesn't mean you have to stay there," she says.
And yet, she and her husband, Nick Frelinghuysen, are talking about moving out of New York in the next few years.
Maybe they'll get a place in the country.
Nine years is a long time to spend with people and situations you have created. Clay grew attached to certain voices in Losing Charlotte, especially the father's, but she eventually had to give them up to move the story in the direction it had to go.
She says she had to focus the book on the two characters — Knox and Charlotte's husband, Bruce — who had the most to lose when Charlotte died. And she had to continue to have them bump up against each other in the aftermath of Charlotte's death.
Clay says she would regularly send chapters home to Three Chimneys to let her parents see what she was doing. In the book, the farm becomes Four Corners, and the owners of the farm — Knox and Charlotte's parents — are vividly drawn, and not far from the original models.
"I appreciate that my parents are so cool" about inspiring the characters, Clay says. "I knew they would recognize some of their mannerisms. I didn't want that to be an elephant in the room."
There is some rough language in the book and some sex, a section of the book from which Clay says she will not be reading when she comes to Lexington in April and her mother is in the audience.
"I get it," she laughs.
She also gets how grateful she needs to be about her flat-out good fortune.
"I am so lucky I got published," she says. "I've had every lucky break. I want to make myself worthy of that."
Her deal with Knopf calls for a second book, which she has started tinkering with, she says. It's conceived as an ensemble. "It's about a matriarch of a certain age," she says, "and a summer house and a family reunion returning to populate it and what ensues."
She hopes, she says, "it will pour out of me. You should know I'm rolling my eyes right now."
After nine years, it was surprisingly easy to let Losing Charlotte go. It was a relief, in fact. "It was a sad place to be dwelling for a long time," she says, and besides, there are so many short stories that Clay has been waiting to tell.
At its simplest, she says, Losing Charlotte was "informed by a sense of longing for home."
That might be shifting, too. She says she is enjoying her life in New York more than she ever has. Maybe that comes with being 39.
"I used to be that girl who walked through Washington Square Park with my head down and not say hello to anyone, protecting myself."
Now, she says, with her children in tow, everyone smiles and comments on the day and the baby and the weather. "It's forced me outward."
Living away, she says, has expanded her, just like the endless rolling green of home used to.
Expanding is good. It makes for good stories.
Reach Amy Wilson at (859) 231-3305 or at 1-800-950-6397, Ext. 3305.
Verna Mae Slone Among Women Remembered
News Date:
03/16/2010
The late Knott County author, Verna Mae Slone, was among three women recently inducted into the Kentucky Women Remembered exhibit at the state Capitol in Frankfort, Kentucky. Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear and the Kentucky Commission on Women (KCW) noted the exhibit recognizes outstanding Kentucky women and their lifetime achievements. Gov. Beshear also proclaimed March Women’s History Month in the Commonwealth.
“For years, many contributions women have made in the fabric of Kentucky history have gone unnoticed and unrecorded,” said Eleanor Jordan, executive director of KCW. “This annual ceremony and recognition of women’s history month is our way of writing some of those women back into history and highlighting how significant their roles have been to the Commonwealth.”
Emphasizing the importance of the role women have played in Kentucky’s history,
Gov. Beshear unveiled the portraits of Dr. Grace Marilyn James, Lillian Henken Press and Verna Mae Slone. Their portraits will hang alongside the 59 portraits already displayed in the west wing corridor of the state Capitol.
Gov. Beshear unveiled the portraits of Dr. Grace Marilyn James, Lillian Henken Press and Verna Mae Slone. Their portraits will hang alongside the 59 portraits already displayed in the west wing corridor of the state Capitol.
The late Verna Mae Slone, of Pippa Passes, is widely known for her extraordinary writings, which brought honor and pride to the people of Eastern Kentucky. Concerned over the many stereotypes that plagued the region, Slone began to put her thoughts on paper.
At age 65, she authored, What My Heart Wants to Tell, a work that shattered many of the myths about the Appalachian culture. She penned five other books over the course of her life. In 1993, her portrait became the centerpiece of photographer Barbara Beirne’s exhibit, Women of Appalachia, at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. What My Heart Wants to Tell is now in its eighth publication in the United States and abroad.
Kentucky Women Remembered began in 1978 and consists of portraits depicting outstanding women in Kentucky’s history. The exhibit found a permanent home in the Capitol in 1996 after many years of traveling around the state. Thousands of visitors to the Capitol view the portraits each year and learn about the heritage and contributions of Kentucky women.
Each year, the Kentucky Women Remembered Committee selects up to three Kentucky women to become part of the exhibit and assure their place in the state’s history. Nominees must have been born in or spent a significant part of their lives in Kentucky and may be living or deceased.
For more information on the Kentucky Commission on Women, visit www.women.ky.gov.
Settlement Receives United Way Funds
News Date:
03/15/2010
Pam Richardson, Knott County board of directors of the United Way of Southeastern Kentucky, recently distributed checks totaling $7,648 to human service agencies in Knott County.
Hindman Settlement School received $5,000 to help fund scholarships for students participating in its 2010 Summer Tutoring Program. The program offers six weeks of intensive tutoring for students who are having difficulty with reading and language development. The United Way of Southeastern Kentucky has supported the program for several years.
The UWSEKY board of directors is comprised of representatives from each county. Its mission is to increase the capacity of people to care for one another. Through a network of volunteers and community service agencies, the United Way serves as an advocate on behalf of people with needs that otherwise might not be met. The board takes pride in the fact that 99 percent of all funds raised are used to support organizations in Eastern Kentucky.
For more information about the United Way of Southeastern Kentucky, contact Richard Crowe at 606.439.0329.
Theatre Group to Perform Play About Hindman
News Date:
03/11/2010
Looking for Lilith Theatre Company of Louisville, Kentucky will be re-staging their first play, Crossing Mountains: To Teach All We Can and To Learn All We Can, which premiered in 2002 for the centennial of Hindman Settlement School, after debuting in New York City in November, 2001.
The play celebrates 100 years of education and change in the Kentucky Mountains and explores the many obstacles against which an Appalachian mountain community struggled to create exceptional educational and cultural opportunities for youth and adults of the region.
Hindman Settlement School has remained vital by responding to the needs of the community. The play reflects upon its founding by two ladies from the Bluegrass and the cultural clashes and reconciliations that ensued, to the present, as it continues to offer education, cultural heritage and community service opportunities to people of the region.
The play explores the Settlement’s inspiring history, its significance to the local community and its resonance with the entire human community. At the play’s core is the universal struggle to achieve progress and growth while continuing to treasure one's heritage and culture.
Performances will be March 18, 19, 20, 25, 26 and 27 at 7:30 pm, with a March 27th matinee at 2:30 pm, at The Rudyard Kipling in Louisville. Tickets are $15, with special discounted tickets for students and seniors. For dinner and show reservations, call 502.636.1311. For show-only reservations, call 502.638.2559.
The upcoming production will be directed by Kathi E.B. Ellis and the cast includes company members Shannon Woolley, Jennifer Thalman Kepler and Trina Fischer as well as Karole Spangler, of StageOne Children's Theatre and Laura Ellis, who is also the sound designer. Graphic and costume design is by company member Typh Hainer Merwarth. Christe Lunsford is the set designer and the stage manager is Elden Richard Neal.
Local musicians will provide acoustic pre-show music 30 minutes before each show. The schedule for these musicians is as follows: March 18 (7 pm) Sue Massek;
March 20 (7 pm) Jeff Guernsey & Tammy Burke;
March 25 (7 pm) Troubadours of Divine Bliss;
March 26 (7 pm) Dewey Kincaid;
March 27 (2 pm Twisted Sisters; and
March 27 (7pm) Tim Morton & Friends
Also for the first time, Looking for Lilith will be collaborating with MotherLodge for their MotherLodge Spring 2010: Live Arts Exchange which runs March 22 - April 18, beginning in Louisville, then traveling to Summit City Lounge (April 7th) in Whitesburg, KY and ending up in New York City's West Village.
Started by Louisville native and New York musician Ray Rizzo, "MotherLodge develops live shows with artists, venues, organizations and individuals who want to approach their work, their neighborhood and their place from a new perspective. Their programming gathers diverse artists and cultural creatives from local communities to cook up a stew of populist, absurd, abstract and communally motivated perspectives, doling out game changing art and life-affirming organized chaos to artists and audiences simultaneously, creating a community of the moment."
LOOKING FOR LILITH THEATRE COMPANY is a nonprofit, ensemble theatre company, founded in New York City in 2001 by Shannon Woolley and Trina Fischer, both Louisville natives, along with Jennifer Thalman Kepler of Winchester, VA. Its mission is to present plays that re-examine history through women’s perspectives, mainly through the collaborative creation of original theatre, based on historical research. The company is funded, in part, by the Kentucky Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Settlement Offers Digital Photography Workshop
News Date:
03/10/2010
Malcolm J. Wilson, digital artist/photographer and Harlan County Kentucky native, will lead an intermediate digital photography workshop May 20-23 at Hindman Settlement School.
"Documenting Appalachia: An Intermediate Digital Photography Workshop" will focus on photocomposition, lighting, camera settings and preparation of photo files for archival display. Drawing inspiration from the historic Settlement School campus and Knott County’s cultural heritage, participants will have the opportunity to capture the splendor of Appalachia in the spring, using Hindman and Knott County as backdrops.
For nearly 20 years, Wilson has worked with digital photography. Before moving to Bristol, Tennessee several years ago, he worked as a commercial photographer in Cincinnati for 19 years. He currently uses his digital photography skills in advertising and marketing work and for his personal fine arts projects. His photography has been exhibited in the Appalachian region and nationally. His work is included in permanent collections at University of Kentucky Appalachian Center, Southeast Community College Appalachian Archives and The Kennedy Center Gallery & Archives in Washington, DC.
“With the explosive growth in popularity of digital cameras in the last few years, so many people now have access to the convenience and ease of digital photography,” says Wilson. “Students crave information on how to unleash their full creative potential using the digital camera. That is the precise goal of this workshop.”
Workshop fieldwork will include visits to local Hindman businesses, parks, scenic vistas and the Settlement School campus. The workshop will begin on Thursday, May 20, with dinner at 6 p.m. followed by a course introduction after dinner. Fieldwork will comprise the day sessions on Friday and Saturday. Friday evening will be devoted to class instruction and demonstration. Saturday night, students will exhibit their work “Knott County Heritage: A Visual Diary,” in a gallery-like public reception at Hindman Settlement School.
Participants should have a basic understanding of digital photography and have familiarity with the basic controls of their own camera. The workshop will emphasize creativity, not technology.
The workshop will conclude at noon on Sunday, May 23. The cost is $350, which covers most meals, shared lodging, tuition and print exhibition materials. Those who wish to commute pay $200, plus the cost of any meals.
Participants should bring their own digital camera and equipment. A non-refundable deposit of $100 will be applied to the cost of the workshop at the time of registration.
Hindman Settlement School is located at the Forks of Troublesome Creek in Hindman, Kentucky. Established in 1902, it was the first rural social settlement school in America. The Settlement School’s mission is “to provide education and service opportunities for people of the mountains, while keeping them mindful of their heritage.” While the mission has remained the same, the Settlement’s programs have changed over time to meet the changing needs of the region. The Settlement’s major work today includes education and service programs that address critical needs of the region’s youth and adults, promote cultural awareness and build upon Appalachia’s rich cultural heritage.
Class will be limited to the first 20 registrants. For more information, call 606.785.5475 or e-mail Info@HindmanSettlement.org. A complete schedule and registration forms are available at: www.HindmanSettlement.org/Photoworkshop.
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