2010 WRITING COMPETITION
Submission deadline: September 7, 2010
Download the Entry Form for Submission Guidelines and Eligibility Information

The Westport Arts Center, in partnership with Ina Chadwick's MouseMuse Productions, is seeking well-crafted memoirs of up to 1500 words for its upcoming writing competition.

As a multi-disciplinary arts organization, WAC is committed to integrating the literary and visual arts within its regular programming. Building on the success of our two previous writing initiatives, the Writers Artists Collaborative will rely on the Arts Center's visual arts exhibitions as a starting point for literary exploration.

This writing contest will culminate with professional actors reading the winning works at a festive reception and award ceremony in the WAC gallery on Sunday, October 17, 2010.

Top winners will also receive:

• $175 from the Writer's Endowment, sponsored by eChook Digital Publishing.
• Online publication on the WAC web literary archive
• Memoir read live on radio
• Publication in Weston Magazine and its affiliate magazines

IMPORTANT DATES
September 7 - Entries due
September 15 - College student entries due
September 24 - Winners notified / posted online
October 17, 4pm - Reception & winning stories read
October 22 - Winning stories published online

The Fourth Wall Down Cartoon Lab
…Meanwhile, Back at WAC, Pulitzer Prize Winning Political Cartoonist Matt Davies and the Fourth Wall Down Team Continues On Their Search for The Secret Formula. They Need Your Help. Join the Dynamic Trio As They Mix It Up With Cartoon Lab. Explore the Process of Imagination into Animation.. Experiment with Your Own Writing and Comic Formulas And Experience the Art Of Cartooning As Never Before…to be continued…..
 

April 28, 2010
7-9pm / $25
Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Matt Davies, who is frequently approached by people that say, “I have an idea for a cartoon, but I can’t draw”, will lead the Fourth Wall Down series launch, along with his lab partners Ina Chadwick and Simon Billig.

Davies will show you how the drawing part of cartooning is the easiest. However, it’s the process in between— such as the initial writing and careful editing that make cartooning an often elusive, intriguing but doable art form that starts with words.

Davies, who actually makes a living from the doodles he scribbles onto napkins, will take you on a tour of the laboratory in his mind.

May 12th and May 26th, 2010
May Cartoon Labs are canceled.

Join the Westport Arts Center and Fourth Wall Down Production’s, WRITE/LEFT@CENTER, on Sunday, November 1, at 4 pm, for a lively performance of the top three winning entries from our contest, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place.” The afternoon’s festivities are meant to celebrate the efforts of writers who submitted their essays, and/or short fiction about situations that at first seemed bleak but were somehow transformed into stories of unexpected beauty and hope. Professional actors will read from the works in a theatrical style.

Congratulations to the top three winners, that were each awarded $175 from the Westport Arts Center / Fourth Wall Down Writer's Endowment.
Essays can be read below.

Emily Lutringer
Diminuendo
A glaring, brutal environment provides the backdrop for a young woman’s deliverance from chaos. Written with a rhythmic force, the author’s deft and inventive narrative crescendos and then fades in an imagistic and philosophical onomatopoeia.

Christine Pakkala
Some Trees
Robbed of their innocence in a craggy, barren and dust swept trailer park, two young sisters survive an unjust existence, and ultimately find the joy of childhood that the world had so long denied. Written with cadences that evoke the land and what it can yield, this memoir transcends the ugliness of a harsh world, and resolves with poignancy, bounty and love.

Megan Smith-Harris
Makeover
A love affair in disrepair causes a woman to inadvertently invoke God, who arrives wearing skin tight lycra and a push-up demi bra, and proceeds to paint beauty back into life of our protagonist. The author, both comedic and soulful, sets a glaring scene with perfectly timed juxtaposition between laughter, irony, and self-recognition.

WRITER OF PROMISE AWARD
A newly established scholarship and award, the Jean Sherman Memorial Scholarship Fund was created from an anonymous donation. In memory of Jean Sherman, the fund provides opportunities for emerging and aspiring writers at the university level to apply to WAC literary competitions and the winner to receive a $50 prize.
Adren Church
Maternal Instinct
An unexpected intrusion changes the outcome of a romantic 10th anniversary dinner.

 

The following Honorable Writers all placed high on our judge’s lists.
Sarah Balsley: “Divorce Day” & “One In a Million”
Barbara Bleemer: “Decisions”
Christina Cotter: “Letting My Baby Go”
Julie Curtis: “Failure to Comply”
Deirdre Doran: “Sleeping on the Analyst’s Couch”
M. Teresa Duse: “Federal District”
Elsie L. Ferrara: “I Want a Wedding Ring”
Eugene Gottesman: "A Testimonial” & "Parallels"
Rose Horowitz: "The Business at Hand”
Karen G. Jordan: “The Collector”
Nneji Lilian: “Moirai: A Case of Serendipity”
Libby Mitchell: “The Lucky One”
Laurie J. Stone: “The Wish”
Allen Swerdlowe: “The American Son”
Anne Torry-Ballou: “Creamsicle”

WRITE/LEFT @ CENTER
Writing Competition
Submission deadline extended to: October 6, 2009
Download the Entry Form for Submission Guidelines and Eligibility Information

Westport Arts Center, in partnership with Fourth Wall Down Productions, presents an integrated literary arts program. We invite writers to explore a synergistic theme for our upcoming exhibition, “Aggregate: Art & Architecture - a Brutalist Remix,” curated by Terri C. Smith. Enter this juried contest that culminates with professional actors reading winning works live in the Westport Arts Center gallery on Sunday, November 1st, 2009.

PRIZES
Each of three winning entries will receive $175 from the Fourth Wall Down Productions Writer’s Endowment.
Winners may also have the opportunity to have their work published in Weston Magazine and read on live radio.

IMPORTANT DATES
September 29, 2009, 4pm - Entries due
October 23, 2009 - Winners notified / posted online (an email will be sent to all people that have submitted)
November 1, 2009, 4pm - Reception & winning stories read
November 5, 2009 - Winning stories published online

 WAC's Inaugural Literary Arts Event:  Writing Home
 
On April 5 from 4-6 pm, The Westport Arts Center will host a reception for the Center's inaugural literary event at 51 Riverside Avenue.  Writing Home, a "Third Mind Series" programming event is running  in conjunction with the WAC's spring visual arts exhibition, Home: The Architecture of Perception, Imagination and Memory, curated by Eric Aho.

“The Third Mind” series is a multi-disciplinary literary arts program that demonstrates the dynamism of the collaborative left-brain, right-brain process.  It is meant to represent a confluence of creativity, where the visual arts spark ideas for written works.  The contest Writing Home called for published and non-published writers who are over the age of twenty-one and residents of Fairfield County, to submit approximately 1500-word memoirs, essays or short fiction about their personal, social, imaginative or emotional explorations of “home.”   

An editorial board has selected ten entries that will be recorded onto digital media and incorporated into the eight-week long Home exhibition.  In addition to being published on the WAC site, several of essays will be read at the reception by professional actors and on WPKN radio.  Weston Magazine is also planning on publishing some of the essays in an upcoming issue. 

The “Third Mind” literary arts program is the brainchild of Ina B. Chadwick, aka Ina Chadwick Wilde, of Westport.  Ms. Chadwick has been involved in the literary arts since the 1970s as a poet, short story writer and editor.  Over the years her work has appeared in dozens of publications including the Paris Review.

FROM THE DESK OF INA B. CHADWICK The Third Mind Literary Arts Project March 27th, 2009 Top Ten Writing Home Selections, Plus the Judges' Wild Card Favorites Out of more than 100 submissions, the following entries were repeatedly favorites on at least three out of five judges' top ten lists. All of the judges had a couple of wild cards—creating hard, but necessary, decisions. Wild card authors' names are included at the end of this list.

1. The Doodlebug Summer
By Margaret Rumsford

A young girl learns the meaning of home when she’s uprooted from New Zealand to England in the midst of World War II. A memoir of chaos and finding security in a makeshift bomb shelter.  Click Here to View the Essay

2. The Million-Dollar View
By Valerie Seiling-Jacobs

A lawyer intent on selling her deceased parent’s mid-century, misfit house in Staten Island bumps up against an unctuous, greedy realtor. The writer draws you in with spare prose and declarations of intended unemotional conduct, slowly turning until it ends with a deft emotional twist.  Click Here to View the Essay

3. The Music of Noise
N. Benchly O'Neall

An author reaches for a high concept with writerly conceits that attempt to tie art and science together. The purposeful verbiage underscores the romantic nature of a six-year-old boy's desire to assert his thinker's persona in this lofty meditative memoir.  Click Here to View the Essay

4. My Radioactive Home
By Julie Curtis

A mother's hilarious malapropisms ultimately define the author's 21st Century family structure, redefining her own rigid literal meanings of the nuclear family, while nurturing adaptation in this light-hearted, verve-filled memoir.  Click Here to View the Essay

5. Eminent Domain
By Nancy Shulins

A ten-year-old girl watches a stubborn farmer die in a fire he sets to his own home, rather than allowing the state to bulldoze his land and uproot him. This startling memory is reignited as the author, a journalist, takes the reader traveling on a decades-long quest for both losing, and finding, one’s roots. Click Here to View the Essay

6. Home
By Nancy Flannagan

When a young wife realizes that her husband’s family tells the same anecdotes at every gathering, she rails—judging her own family’s spontaneous interchanges to be honest, if unpredictable. After many of her blood relative’s spontaneous, opinionated blowups wind up as cold-shoulder estrangements, the author comes to understand the value of crafting a repetitive  “family” story in order to preserve respect, affection and love. Click Here to View the Essay

7. Home
By Catherine Tandy

A young girl is disheartened by the outward appearances of her family’s unkempt home—between the rodents and the eccentricities, it’s noisy and weird. When her mother, equally responsible for the home’s chaos, divorces her father, the author acclimates, learning that a family is not always about a dignified residence, but about the unique and loving people who inhabit it. Click Here to View the Essay

8. When Janice Bailey Walked
By Tessa Smith McGovern

Upon her release from prison for the self-defense killing of her only family member, a violent husband, Janice Bailey feels lost and mistrustful. She attempts to get herself arrested again in order to have a safe home in jail. Click Here to View the Essay

9. Au Revoir, Corbu
By Elizabeth Clement

A young woman with her mind set on living in New York City forever, marries a purist architect who builds her his dream house in Weston, CT.  Through the triumphs and tragedies of a marriage, physically contained within the architect’s esthetic, the author struggles, eventually understanding her own sense of comfort and place. Click Here to View the Essay

10. The Nomad
By Paul Einarsen

A nine-year-old boy growing up in a small town in the Pacific Northwest values the less than dramatic interchanges that make an old-fashioned hamlet a home.  When his father brings a nomad, who happily lives in his car to dinner, the boy's perception of home starts to shift.  The regional writing voice of this memoir clearly illustrates how an author's geography informs a story.  Click Here to View the Essay

Authors whose entries appeared on more than one judge’s list of notable submissions, and additional author favorites:
Steve Lance, Michelle Coppola Ames, JoAnn Kienzle, Stephanie Bass, Joanne Perlman, M. Teresa Duse, Margaret Brooks, Sophie Barnes, Ann Chernow, Leslie Chess Feller, Howard T. Stutz, Diana Bowes, Max Adam Wender, Caryn McAllister, David Baxley, Bradley Moroni
 

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Sandi Haber Fifield’s Walking Through the World: Book Signing and Talk

Westport-based photographer Sandi Haber Fifield will give a presentation of her work and discuss her recently published book, Walking Through the World, Thursday, February 26th at 7:30 P.M. at the Westport Arts Center. She will be available to sign copies following the talk. The book, designed by Karen Salsgiver Coveney, includes essays by art historian and Westport resident, Tom O’Connor, as well as the founding director of the Museum of Photographic Arts, Arthur Ollman. The publisher Charta is based in Milan, Italy.

Haber Fifield will be showing her work at Gallery Kayafas in Boston during the coming year and she is represented by Littlejohn Contemporary in New York City. 

To purchase copies of Haber Fifield's book go to http://sandihaberfifield.com/walkingthroughtheworld/

              

Above, from left: Vermont Road, 2008; French Curtain, diptych, 2007; Elisabeth, 2007