I hope you can take that wonderful drive out route 2 to Harvard, MA this weekend.  The PRC’s show New England Survey gets a reprise in a delightful setting with a beautiful view (seen above).  The opening reception is Sunday, September 14th from 4-6pm.

Surrounded by 200 acres and right next to a collection of Hudson River School paintings, I couldn’t imagine a more perfect setting for this exhibition.  Come see work by Barbara Bosworth, Tanja Hollander, Janet Pritchard, Thad Russell, Jonathan Sharlin, Paul Taylor again or for the first time.

Click here for directions and more information about this former Transcendentalist and Utopian community and jewell of a museum.

Tuesday was an important newspaper day in Boston. Gracing the front page of the Boston Globe was the Red Sox’s opening day at Fenway and the announcement that their own Mark Feeney won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, as noted in the last post.

Humbly for us, Mark Feeney’s review of the current PRC landscape exhibition, New England Survey, also ran in the very same Globe.  (And luckily for us, he liked it!)   I am thrilled at the confluence of events.  I wrote to congratulate Mark, and he modestly replied that it’s a win for the paper and different than organizing an exhibition.  To his and their credit, we had several people visit today because of his review and lots of calls.  Here’s to the power of well-crafted words and the media!

You can read Mark Feeney’s review of the PRC exhibition New England Survey here.

You can read the official Globe story on Mark Feeney’s Pulitzer Prize in Criticism here.

You can read some of his nominated stories here.

If you’ve answered yes to at least two of the above, then I’m happy to say that the PRC is offering a workshop you might be interested in! I am also happy to say that this workshop is the first (and certainly not the last) collaboration between the PRC and Grub Street. (A non-profit writing center where Boston Gets Writing)

The workshop is called Staring and Wonder and will meet at the PRC on Saturday, May 3, 2008, from 9am – 4pm. It was inspired by the PRC’s upcoming New England Survey exhibition, which, in turn, was inspired by Amherst poet Robert Francis’s poem, “New England Mind.” We’ll begin by discussing some suggestive and provocative statements by a host of writers who care about staring—W.G. Sebald, Flannery O’Connor, John Gardner, Cesare Pavese, Wallace Stevens, George Szirtes, Mark Strand, and Elizabeth Bishop, among others—and then spend the rest of the first part of our day engaged in acts of staring ourselves. The objects of our attention will be the astonishing landscape–based photographs in New England Survey . (Such as the above image by Barbara Bosworth) We’ll dedicate the second part of our day to what happens after that something becomes interesting. We’ll allow these images of the New England landscape to enlarge of our sense of place and our capacities to pay attention, to wonder, and wander in our writing. We’ll follow our eyes-and our imaginations-in words. This workshop is open to all writerly appetites: narrative, poetic, memoiristic, essayistic, imagistic, and beyond.

For more information on the program, including how to register, please visit the PRC’s website.