DAILY LECTURES AND READING FROM 5:30 pm - 8:00 pm.

CHOBE GAME RESERVE, BOTSWANA

MAY 29, 2005 - JUNE 5, 2005

BREYTEN BREYTENBACH, we're thrilled to have Professor Breytenbach on our journey to Botswana. He's a highly respected South African Poet, Novelist, Screenwriter and Painter. Some of his published work includes: 'A Season in Paradise', 'The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist', 'Return to Paradise', and 'Dog Heart: A Memoir' ............... He'll be joined by writer and scholar IFEONA FULANI, 'Seasons of Dust' (THIS SESSION IS NOW FULL)

June 26, 2005 - JULY 03, 2005
	"VOICES", BREYTEN BREYTENBACH, ANNE LECLAIRE. Anne has written seven novels, including the critically acclaimed books 'Entering Normal' and 'Leaving Eden'. (LIMITED SPACE)

DORDOGNE, FRANCE

JUNE 11 - 18, 2005
	"CREATIVITY IN WOMEN", DOROTHY ALLISON, AMY BLOOM, IFEONA FULANI, JACQUELYN MITCHARD. A ONE ACT PLAY, "THE FEMALE WITS", STARING FIDELIS MORGAN, CELIA IMRIE (from the movie,'THE CALENDAR GIRLS'), HERMIONE GULLIFORD and MICHELE WADE. LITERARY AGENT JANE GELFMAN

DOROTHY ALLISON, author of the highly acclaimed book, 'Bastard Out of Carolina'. A movie version of the book was directed by Angelica Huston. Allison's second novel, 'Cavedweller', was a New York Times Best seller .... .....

JACQUELYN MITCHARD, Inspiration: Breathing Story in with Every Step: Bestselling novelist of ‘The Deep End of the Ocean’ and ‘The Breakdown Lane,’ Jacquelyn will describes the process by which an idea becomes a story and a story becomes a book, what makes a novel read like life and how even a great idea can fail to reach a reader.

FIDELIS MORGAN, will perform "The Female Wits",Fidelis, together with 3 actresses (from a pool which includes Celia Imrie, Michele Wade, Rosalind Knight, Jane Wymark, Jill Benedict, Pauline Moran, Anne Lambton, Selina Cadell, Jane Nash and Hermione Gulliford), performs a show based on this book. The performance lasts anything from 45 minutes to an hour and a half (depending on the demands of the venue).The Female Wits is a whirlwind theatrical tour through the lives and plays of the celebrated female playwrights of the late seventeenth century – including Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley and Susanna Centlivre – performed by four illustrious English actresses. So far The Female Wits has played at: Royal National Theatre Cottesloe, Lilian Baylis Theatre at Sadlers Wells, festivals in Amsterdam, Utrecht, Eastbourne, Birmingham, Chipping Norton, Nottingham, Loughborough, Walton on Thames, Newark and Bodmin, and the British Library.

JUNE 18 - 25, 2005
	"A PILGRIMAGE TO THE PAST", WITH MARGARET DRABBLE, MARGARET GEORGE, JACKIE MITCHARD. A ONE ACT PLAY OF, "THE FEMALE WITS", STARING FIDELIS MORGAN, CELIA IMRIE (from the movie,'THE CALENDAR GIRLS'), HERMIONE GULLIFORD and MICHELE WADE. LITERARY AGENTS JANE GELFMAN AND REBECCA SWIFT

MARGARET DRABBLE: "The truth is that the novelist can conquer time and bring back the dead. The novelist, like the palaeontologist and the archaeologist and the historian, is in the resurrection business. We gaze at the skulls and bones of the long dead, and at the memories of the more recently dead, and we try to give them living faces. (Margaret Drabble: Millennium Lecture, ‘Runes and Bones’. How would you bring your past back to life? And how far back in time do you think we can travel? In this workshop I would like to discuss the many ways in which fiction can explore the past. We can explore our personal past, through the family and the individual, and the historic past over a much longer timescale, using geology, landscape, history and archaeology as tools and metaphors for constructing plot and understanding psychology. I’ve always liked books which suggest a great hinterland of human endeavour and evolution stretching back behind the contemporary world, and our location in France seems a good place to look at these issues. Novels like William Golding’s The Inheritors, which is set in prehistory, and Russell Hobans’s Riddley Walker, which is set in a post-nuclear-disaster Stone Age future, use the past in extremely innovate ways (and we will all be able to think of many other examples). But I am equally interested in the sense of the contemporary present as a stage of our continuing history. I don’t know whether or not, or on what level, I believe in communal history, or in the collective unconscious, but I am very interested in these issues (though not an expert on any of them.) My novel The Peppered Moth (2001) was an attempt to extend family history back not only through four generations but also through a timescale of many millennia, through recent discoveries of DNA, through archaeology, and through a sense of the formative landscape. I am hoping that participants will examine elements in their personal histories and their literary objectives in the light of these questions about the past". Margaret Drabble, January 2005 has written many novels, including 'A Summer Bird-Cage' (1963); 'The Garrick Year' (1964); 'The Millstone' (1965), filmed as "A Touch of Love" in 1969; 'Jerusalem the Golden' (1967); 'The Waterfall' (1969); 'The Needle's Eye' (1972); 'The Realms of Gold' (1975); 'The Ice Age' (1977); 'The Middle Ground' (1980); 'The Radiant Way' (1987); 'A Natural Curiosity' (1989); 'The Gates of Ivory' (1991); 'The Witch of Exmoor' (1996) 'The Peppered Moth' (2001), and 'The Red Queen' (2004).

MARGARET GEORGE: “If a man dies, shall he live again?” Job 14:14. Yes, if he or she is given life again by art---a painting, a dance, a play, a novel, a poem. It is an awesome responsibility to call someone out of the tomb and into our modern daylight. I would like to explore how one does that and the pleasures and perils of attempting it. I feel I have truly met and spent time with my subjects, obtained their permission and their wisdom for my biographical novels. I cannot even think of doing it without a base of research, but that is only the base---the rest is chemistry between me and them. Without that the novel has no life.

FIDELIS MORGAN, will also be performing "The Female Wits", Fidelis, together with 3 actresses (from a pool which includes Celia Imrie, Michele Wade, Rosalind Knight, Jane Wymark, Jill Benedict, Pauline Moran, Anne Lambton, Selina Cadell, Jane Nash and Hermione Gulliford), performs a show based on this book. The performance lasts anything from 45 minutes to an hour and a half (depending on the demands of the venue).The Female Wits is a whirlwind theatrical tour through the lives and plays of the celebrated female playwrights of the late seventeenth century – including Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley and Susanna Centlivre – performed by four illustrious English actresses. So far The Female Wits has played at: Royal National Theatre Cottesloe, Lilian Baylis Theatre at Sadlers Wells, festivals in Amsterdam, Utrecht, Eastbourne, Birmingham, Chipping Norton, Nottingham, Loughborough, Walton on Thames, Newark and Bodmin, and the British Library.

TUSCANY, ITALY

JULY 09 -16, 2005
	"THE POWER OF MYTH", PETER BEAGEL "LAST UNICORN", AWARD WINNING WRITER MICHAEL BISHOP, "UNICORN MOUNTAIN", SOPHIE POWELL, "MUSHROOM MAN" : SCREENWRITERS' AND FICTION WORKSHOP: with Emmy Award-Winners, ***** JOHN ROACH and **** LISA ROSENBERG. Also, award-winning writer ....... ***** CHUCK WACHTEL

MICHAEL BISHOP: I’ll discuss myth (Graves’s The White Goddess; Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces), but in more specific terms about using myth to undergird contemporary works like Joyce’s Ulysses (The Odyssey), Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat (the Arthurian cycle), Delany’s Nova (a grail quest), Zelazny’s Lord of Light (Hindu mythology), as well as my own use of Mesoamerican (Mayan) myth in Stolen Faces and a recent novelette “The Sacerdotal Owl.” I also have a recent Vietnam War story, “The Door Gunner,” which incorporates a helicopter descent into Hell through a portal in a rock spire jutting up from the South China Sea; the main character is a dead army LURP, who refuses to lie down and die despite the wounds that have taken his life.

SOPHIE POWELL: From Snow White To Harry Potter: The Odyssey of The Fairytale. Its literary origins within the mythic tradition, its ancient and modern counterparts, the revival in its popularity today. Using examples from fairytales from all over the world, some lesser known than others, as well as her own "fairytale" novel "The Mushroom Man" (Putnam Penguin), she will fly us through the history of this magical fictional form.

JULY 16 - JULY 23, 2005
	INSPIRATIONAL WOMEN WRITERS':ANNE LECLAIRE, 'Entering Normal'; JOCELYN LIEU; JACQUELYN MITCHARD, 'The Deep End of the Ocean';JOYCE MAYNARD, 'To Die For'; KARIN SLAUGHTER, 'Kisscut'.

JACQUELYN MITCHARD, Inspiration: Breathing Story in with Every Step: Bestselling novelist of ‘The Deep End of the Ocean’ and ‘The Breakdown Lane,’ Jacquelyn will describes the process by which an idea becomes a story and a story becomes a book, what makes a novel read like life and how even a great idea can fail to reach a reader.

JULY 23 - 30, 2005
	"DEVELOPING A CHARACTER,SETTINGS and LANGUAGE", DAN CHAON, 'You Remind Me, of Me'; KAREN JOY FOWLER,'The Jane Austen Book Club';JOYCE MAYNARD, 'To Die For'; CHUCK WACHTEL, 'Joe the Engineer (LIMITED SPACE)

KAREN JOY FOWLER, 'The Jane Austen Book Club'. What she'll be discussing for the seminars, "A vivid setting is often the difference for the reader between reading a story and being transported into a story. But setting can also provide rich sources of character detail and plot movement. Karen Joy Fowler will talk about setting both as a source for stories and also as an active, intrusive, changeable, and influential component of fiction".

CHUCK WACHTEL, Fiction: Keeping Yes and No Unsplit: In difficult and transitional historical moments, such as the one we live in, the first purpose of nearly all public discourse seems to be persuasion. Language, as it is read and heard, bounces back and forth between the polar extremes of meaning -- Yes and No – and the words we speak, and write, feel drawn toward the seemingly provable certainties of empiricism, while the language of the imagination -- its reflection of the sensations of life that resist being contained in easily communicable forms of meaning -- can thin out to a barely audible whisper. Thus (I paraphrase Lionel Trilling), The human fact can remain hidden within the veil of circumstances. In his poem “Speak, You Also,” the German-language poet, Paul Celan, writing in post-WWII Europe, asks us all to challenge the language we write in: Speak - But keep yes and no unsplit. This is an issue that affects writers in all narrative forms, and especially writers of fiction.

JULY 30, 2005 - AUGUST 05, 2005
	"MEMOIRS, TWO SOUTHERN WRITERS" **** CONNIE MAY FOWLER, 'Before Women had Wings'; BARBARA ROBINETTE MOSS, 'Fierce'; Literary Agent **** JOY HARRIS,

SEPTEMBER 10 - 17, 2005
	"MYSTERY WRITING" MATTHEW PEARL, 'The Dante Club'; FIDELIS MORGAN, 'The Rival Queens'.

SEPTEMBER 17 - 23, 2005
	BORDERS CROSSINGS: POLITICS IN FICTION AND ART ANDREI CODRESCU (AUTHOR AND NPR COMMENTATOR) AND ART HISTORIAN PETER SELZ.

BELIZE

NOVEMBER 5 - 11, 2005
	"TRAVEL WRITING" ANNE LECLAIRE and JOYCE MAYNARD