Tim Weed's Blog, page 15

Fall Writing Classes at GrubStreet and the Brattleboro Literary Festival

Very excited for this fall’s fiction classes. At Grub Street, I’ll be teaching four installments of a brand new eight part Novel Revision series. If you’re working on a novel, it would be great to have you in Boston for a class!  Here’s the link. Check ’em out!

To kick off this year’s Brattleboro Literary Festival on Friday, October 2, I’ll be joining two very talented fellow writers, my Grub Street colleague Howard Axelrod and my good friend and local Salonista shaman, Suzanne Kingsbury, in offering these exciting workshops. For a podcast of a radio interview with Festival director Sandy Rouse and yours truly discussing the workshops, click here. If you’re planning to be anywhere near Vermont on that day—and it’s a great time to be here—I highly recommend that you take one!

 

Hemingway talk at the Brattleboro Museum

Thrilled to be giving this talk at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, next Thursday, September 3, at 7pm. If you’re in the neighborhood, I’d love to see you there!

The Expatriate Novelist: Hemingway in Spain and Cuba

“Drawing upon his extensive experience in Spain and Cuba, novelist and travel guide Tim Weed gives a vividly illustrated talk on author Ernest Hemingway’s life in the two countries he loved most, with particular reference to the influence of place and culture on Hemingway’s fiction. This talk will be of interest to writers, travelers, Hemingway readers, and anyone interested in learning more about BMAC’s upcoming ARTravel programs in Spain and Cuba. Admission is free.”

National Geographic Expeditions’ new Patagonia video

Check out this inspiring two-minute video from National Geographic Expeditions’ talented videographer Steve Pickard. It features an interview Steve did with yours truly in my capacity as the featured expert for the Exploring Patagonia program. Warning: it’s going to make you want to go to Tierra del Fuego and southern Patagonia! 

Young writers program in Prague and Southern Bohemia

Very much looking forward to joining a group of young American writers in just a few days as the guest novelist on this exciting international writing program. We’ll begin in Prague and then head down to southern Bohemia, where an historic castle will be the staging ground for field exercises, craft talks, hiking, stimulating conversation about books and literature, and miscellaneous fun.

Putney Student Travel is the same group that has taken me to Dublin and the small island of Inishbofin for the last two summers, and it’s a great experience. Travel and writing go so well together, and it’s always inspiring to work alongside young women and men who are passionate about writing and literature. I’ll post some pics on my FB author page . . .

Young writers program in Prague and southern Bohemia

Very much looking forward to joining a group of young American writers in just a few days as the guest novelist on this exciting international writing program. We’ll begin in Prague and then head down to southern Bohemia, where an historic castle will be the staging ground for field exercises, craft talks, hiking, stimulating conversation about books and literature, and miscellaneous fun.

Putney Student Travel is the same group that has taken me to Dublin and the small island of Inishbofin for the last two summers, and it’s a great experience. Travel and writing go so well together, and it’s always inspiring to work alongside young women and men who are passionate about writing and literature. I’ll post some pics on my FB author page . . .

Star Island lecture series

Looking forward to discovering a brand new corner of the world next week: Star Island, one of the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire. I’ll have a chance to get some creative work done and explore the Atlantic waters around the island, and, as the theme speaker for participants in the All-Star 2 Family Conference, I’ll be delivering a five part lecture series: “Life Stories: Creative Adventurers, Adventurous Creators.” I’ve had a lot of fun planning and researching these lectures, which focus on figures who have engaged in a deep and life-changing way with some of the parts of the world that are important to me from life and work. Here are the subjects:

The Life and Times of Francisco de Goya

Charles Darwin and the Voyage of the Beagle

Ernest Hemingway in Spain and Cuba

Georgia O’Keeffe: American Visionary

In my final talk I’ll discuss how my own engagement with place influenced the writing of Will Poole’s Island.

If you or an organization you belong to is interested in booking me for one of these talks or something new, send me a note. My schedule is busy but flexible, and I love doing this kind of thing.  It’s quite possible that we can work it out!

Vermont Humanities Council Speakers Bureau

After a somewhat harrowing audition process, I’m pleased to report that I’ve been invited to join the Vermont Humanities Council Speaker’s Bureau! Here’s the title and description of my talk:

A Playground for Empire: Historical Perspectives on Cuba and the U.S.A.  Spain lost Cuba in 1898, after nearly 400 years of colonial rule. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 is one of the great underdog stories in modern history, in which a tiny band of young rebels prevailed against all odds and despite the ambivalence of the world superpower only ninety miles to the north. This nationalist Revolution quickly fell under the sway of another world empire, the USSR, and Cuba’s previously close ties with the U.S. were abruptly severed. This visually rich lecture by a long-time observer of the island will highlight recent changes in light of Cuba’s long struggle for sovereignty.

If you belong to any nonprofit organization or municipality in Vermont, you can book this talk through the VHC. Link here for instructions, which should be updated with VHC’s new catalog soon. If you’re interested in booking talks on a different subject, please feel free to contact me directly.

Summer writing seminars at GrubStreet

Looking forward to teaching three intensive one-day seminars on critical aspects of the fiction writing craft this summer: descriptive writing, the novel opening, and point of view/psychic distance. I’m very much enjoying my association with GrubStreet, a Boston-based organization run by kind and wonderful people and frequented by many talented aspiring and established writers. If you’re within striking distance of downtown Boston, come join us!

Here’s a link to all of my upcoming GrubStreet workshops.

Tierra del Fuego article out in Nantucket Magazine

A new article, “Rounding the Horn,” is out in Nantucket Magazine. It combines an account of part of last winter’s trip to Tierra del Fuego with some of the history of the early Nantucket sailing vessels that had to round Cape Horn in order to get to the Pacific whaling grounds. Click here to read the article. I hope you enjoy it!

Author interview: Inside Historical Fiction

It was a pleasure to be interviewed recently by the author M.K. Tod for her Inside Historical Fiction series. We had a nice talk about the ingredients that go into the making of great historical fiction, the research process, recent trends in the genre, and more. Here’s an excerpt:

MKT: Are historical novels inherently different from contemporary novels, and if so, in what ways?

TW: There’s a quote that I love from Andrew Miller, writing in The New York Times Book Review a few years ago, about the appeal of distance, and of “the strangeness such distance produces and of the lives lived recognizably in the midst of that strangeness.” He compared historical fiction to science fiction, pointing out that both genres require the writer to depict the only world he or she can possibly know—“the here and now”—in other terms.

To me, this notion captures much of what I love about historical fiction, both in the writing and in the reading: it’s at once a dream we have to enter and an oblique reflection of ourselves. In my experience, this kind of mind-altering immersion is harder to find in contemporary novels—if by “contemporary” we mean novels that are set in times and places very similar to the quotidian spheres in which we tend to live out our lives.

Read the full interview here.