Present: Jennifer Snead, Joan Sherlock, Ryan Feitman (book reviewer from Chestnut Hill), Richard Lawrence, Adrienne Mishkin, Samantha Barrow, Arielle Brousse, Gabe Galson, E.J. Horlacher (a soon-to-be-Penn-freshman from Richmond, Virginia!), Sylvie Beauvais, Fred Ollinger, Karen Quinones Miller
Announcements/general business (Jennifer)
- KWH t-shirts are now available in Room 109, for the low low price of $5.00! See Jennifer or Maria to buy one.
- Kerry Sherin Wright Prize and Junior Fellows Award deadlines are coming up next week (April 20) – for more info see
http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/involved/awards/juniorfellow and
http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/involved/awards/kerryprize.php.
We’re going
to
need a small committee of hub members to meet on April 25 or 26, to read through applications and decide on winners for each of these awards. Please let Jennifer know if you’d like to be involved with that.
- PROPOSALS HUBLET MEETING on Wednesday, April 13, 5:00 PM in Room 202 – join us if you can! And please take a look at the proposals posted on the hub website before then, and post your comments!
- Our last hub meeting, with members of Civic House attending to discuss ways that the two hubs can work together, was full of good ideas. Take a look at the meeting minutes for March 28, 2005. We’re planning a reciprocal get-together, over lunch, at Civic House during reading days (probably April 27 or 28). Stay tuned!
Hub member announcements
Sylvie: Jeannette Winterson will be appearing at the Free Library this Thursday; she’s planning on going and highly recommends the event to everyone.
Arielle: Quake – a new Penn undergraduate literary journal dedicated to erotic writing – is getting started and needs submissions. For more information contact Jessica Haralson (jgh@sas.upenn.edu). They’ve made up preliminary chapbooks to advertise the journal, and will be handing those out during Fling.
Arielle: is organizing an April 23 event at the Writers House, “Wordsmiths” – a gathering for writers and editors of undergraduate literary publications from all over the Philadelphia area, from noon till five PM. All are welcome to participate in this afternoon of symposia and discussions about all issues relating to literary journals on campus!
Discussion –
Jennifer asked everyone for input and ideas for things they’d like to see happen with and at the House next year, and here are some of the ideas we came up with.
- Jennifer: would like to see more workshops here, and is trying to focus on planning and scheduling more of them. Much agreement here – Joan Sherlock said she’d love to see one on sonnets. Collective thought – host informal, brown-bag writing workshop series, perhaps with a theme (formal poems, one type per month?)
- Arielle: would love to host a poetry slam, “a real slam” here at the House. Possibly with members of the Excelano project? Or perhaps a relatively friendly, hub-community slam?
- Richard: (A waffle iron! - for that one, you had to have been here...) Given the largeness of the hub, and the difficulty of getting all the members together for meetings once per month, perhaps there should be smaller, weekly(?) hub “breakout” sessions, for smaller groups of hub members, maybe with a specific interest? Jennifer mentioned that a similar idea led, back in the year 2000, to the beginnings of the proposals hublet. Group discussion – perhaps individual hub members should propose breakout sessions on specific topics, on a weekly basis? Small, salon-type gatherings that happen in the parlor or dining room?
- Fred: says that he likes the bigger, monthly meetings because they force him to sit through and listen to announcements and things he otherwise wouldn’t have known he was interested in.
- Karen: Would like to see more practical, hands-on, how-to programs for publishing (perhaps a workshop for writing cover letters, contacting agents, putting together manuscripts for submission?)
- Sylvie: What about a “chapbook support group”? A workshop on putting chapbooks together? Jennifer mentions that she and Jessica Lowenthal were talking about this very thing just a few days ago, and it sounds like a fantastic idea.
- Fred: A speaker on the subject of intellectual property? Jennifer reminds him that he could propose someone via the proposals website!
- Adrienne: Would like to see more hub members involved with planning events, not just showing up for them to help out for a few hours. Conversation about working with volunteers, and planning with volunteers – about how to give volunteers a sense of ownership in programming, and get them more involved. Ways to do this? Assign a specific group of hub members to plan and organize each specific event, with a staff liaison to help them? Proposals hublet could be more active in this respect, by sending out more detailed emails about programming decisions, process, and recruiting other hub members to help with organizing events.
- Sam: Hub meetings themselves could be less of a forum for official “announcements” and more of a facilitated, grassroots discussion among hub members. Perhaps, at each hub meeting, the facilitator could go around and ask each hub member if he or she has an agenda item, and those items would be what would be discussed at the meeting. It would be the facilitator’s job to make sure the items were gone through in a timely fashion. Facilitators would rotate – there would be a different one for each meeting.
All great ideas – much great conversation about them, until the garden got much too chilly for us and, shivering, we ended the meeting.