SmArts

August 1-7, 2016

Report from the New York State Writers Institute

By Molly Rector

For a week now, I’ve had the privilege to attend workshops at Skidmore College’s New York State Summer Writers Institute. This program, which runs two workshop sessions of two weeks each throughout the month of July, is intended to place writers in a group of peers, who spend the length of the program paying close and intensive attention to one another’s work. Each week, there are nine hours of in-class workshop time (about three weeks worth during a regular semester), along with many opportunities to attend readings and question/answer sessions with visiting writers.

Outside of class, I’ve managed to join a group of poets who are commenting on one another’s book manuscripts – so the work extends beyond class, too, in a way that is immensely helpful. I’m making new poems, and learning about the gaps in the other ones that need to be filled in.

There’s something wonderful and strange about finding community in a space like this one – our time necessarily very limited. It’s different from the kind of long-term community investment I am always advocating at home, in that it serves mostly to nourish the writers involved, rather than being an effort to give something also to those outside of the writing community.

Though something interesting about Skidmore is that many people who come here do not have time to focus on writing during other parts of the year – they are lawyers or teachers who come back year after year to workshop their novels or their collections of poetry with the same groups of people. I like that about this place: that we are all at different levels, in different places in our lives. To some extent that variety serves as a reminder that we do this for the love of writing, that it isn’t all about building a career.

Now, on to week two – which, I expect, will move just as quickly by as did week one.

Molly Rector is a staff writer for the Daily Record. Contact her at molly@dailydata.com.