Total Immersion Creativity Retreats for Women

www.CommittedLiving.org Launches the "Total Immersion Creativity" retreats and workshops for business women. What Committed Living founder, Darla Anderson has done is created a specialized retreat for women that evolves entirely on the Creativity process of the "Right Brain", using exercises, tools and other activities that increases and strengthens the right side of the brain.

The premise is that once the right side of the brain is exercised on a regular basis, it becomes stronger and more developed, in turn the person has quicker access to being creative. This enables them to come up with new solutions to business problems, create new innovative products, find creative ways of doing business in today's slumping economy as well as in America's future business climate.

Committed Living takes the creativity training a step farther than most Creativity Coaching, by including other major aspects of life; culture and cuisine. Exploring and participating in regional creative culture as well as creative culinary cuisine. By adding these additional elements of the Creativity Process into the retreats, Committed Living is giving it's participants the "Total Package" when it comes to Creativity Training.

For more information on Committed Living "Total Immersion Creativity Retreats and Workshops, go to: http://www.committedliving.org/

Mar 4 2010 - Writers' Workshop alumna Leslie Jamison will read

University of Iowa Writers' Workshop alumna Leslie Jamison will read from her debut novel, "The Gin Room," at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 4, in Prairie Lights Books at 15 S. Dubuque St. in downtown Iowa City. The free "Live from Prairie Lights" event will be streamed live and archived on the Writing University Web site, http://www.writinguniversity.org/.

After three decades of dissolute living, Tilly is visited unexpectedly by her niece, Stella and a powerful but fragile bond develops between them. The book has won rave reviews for Jamison's insights and the beauty of her prose.

Jamison's work has been published in "Best New American Voices 2008," A Public Space and the Black Warrior Review. She is cuurently pursuing at doctorate at Yale University.

June 10 2010 - Canadian Journalism Foundation Honours Quebec journalist

Lise Bissonnette, former parliamentary correspondent, editorialist and editor-in-chief of Le Devoir, will be awarded the Canadian Journalism Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award at their annual awards gala on June 10, 2010, in Toronto.

The eight jurors on the Lifetime Achievement Award selection jury reviewed more than 50 nominations before unanimously selecting Bissonnette.

"She is a superb journalist, scholar and administrator," says Geoffrey Stevens, chair of the jury. He points to her impressive CV as proof of her lifelong ambition and achievement. "She has been recognized with no fewer than eight honorary doctorates from universities in Canada and the United States."

She began her journalistic career in 1974 at Montreal's daily newspaper Le Devoir, where she held various positions before ultimately becoming editor-in-chief from 1990 to 1998. At the time of the 1995 referendum, she took a position in favour of Yes, making Le Devoir the only newspaper in Canada to openly support Quebec sovereignty.

In 1998 she was appointed president and general director of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationals du Québec, a position she held until her retirement in June, 2009. Under her leadership, the establishment has become Quebec's largest cultural institution in terms of size and the broad range of its missions.

Juror Norman Webster remembers her as a fair and balanced reporter. "Lise is a Quebec sovereignist, but she always respects the views of others," he said, noting a Le Devoir editorial she wrote that criticized Parti Quebecois cabinet minister Lise Payette for denouncing women supporters of the "No" side as Yvettes (the name of a docile young girl in an old school manual). "It was a turning point against the separatists' cause but the natural reaction of an honest reporter."

Many times lauded for her support and promotion of Quebec culture, she has been awarded the Ordre de la Pléiade (Francophonie) and was made an officer of the Ordre national du Québec as well as a Knight of the Légion d'honneur de France. After receiving a career medal from the Academie des letters du Quebec in 1999, she was named a member in 2004.

Bissonnette joins a distinguished group of CJF Lifetime Achievement Award winners. Past recipients include: Joe Schlesinger, Sally Armstrong, Norman Webster, Knowlton Nash, Pierre Berton (posthumous), June Callwood, Doris Anderson, Trina McQueen, Doug Creighton, Mark Starowicz, Bernard Derome, Peter C. Newman, Peter Gzowski and Robert Fulford.

The Lifetime Achievement Award jury members are: Geoffrey Stevens, chair (Cambridge, Ontario); Miller Ayre (St. John's); Catherine Bergman (Vancouver and Montreal); Pat Carney (Vancouver); Bernard Derome (Montreal); Dale Eisler (Denver, Colorado); Mary Lou Finlay (Toronto), and Norman Webster (Montreal)

The Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to Bissonnette at the CJF's annual awards gala on June 10, 2010 at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel in Toronto. In celebration of the CJF's 20th anniversary, the foundation is planning its most exciting gala yet. CBC News chief correspondent Peter Mansbridge will host the event, which features an honorary tribute to Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, co-CEOs of Research in Motion, for their contribution to revolutionizing modern journalism technology. Other awards to be presented include the Excellence in Journalism Award, the Greg Clark Award, the Tom Hanson Photojournalism Award, the Canadian Journalism Fellowships and the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy.

For more information about the gala or to purchase a table for $5,000, please contact Cindy Hipple at 416-955-0975 or e-mail chipple@cjf-fjc.ca. Individual tickets are also available for $500 each.

Creating the journalists of tomorrow

There will always be a need for professional journalists.

This fact remains a bedrock truth even as newsroom staff and advertising revenue are shrinking and business models are changing. And it's being driven by a ravenous public and its zealous appetite for news and information from diligent, objective sources 24/7.

Motivated by the urgency to help the fourth estate thrive in the 21st century, Ball State University torched -- rather than tweaked -- its courses and programs. By launching the Emerging Media Journalism track, the College of Communication, Information, and Media ( CCIM ) will produce graduates who can provide quality, in-depth news across multiple platforms and drive the necessary changes to help the media industry succeed, said Roger Lavery, dean of CCIM.

"Journalism is changing at an unprecedented pace, and I believe we'll see a shake out that will result in fewer but more relevant journalism programs in this country," he said. "At Ball State, both programs will still exist, but this new one will straddle it. This is the necessary step to emerge as a contemporary, leading program."

One New York Times editor in the newspaper's research and development lab recently said that newspapers and news organizations are not going anywhere. It's how news will be received that's going to change.

As newspaper circulation declines, in-depth news still is being sought out via cell phones and laptops. And soon more news will be coming to e-book readers and to media yet to be invented. Through Ball State's revamped courses, students will have the tools and experiences to navigate these monumental changes, Lavery notes.

"Our faculty and students understand and embrace this change," he said. "They understand that to be marketable, our students -- tomorrow's journalists -- must be able to meet the future demands of the industry by having the skills to tell stories across many platforms. They should play a key role in defining the future of news."

Students will gain these skills by learning core competencies from their first day in class. Student publications, once separate from the curriculum, now will be fused into the course work. Students also will be capable of tackling practical assignments with industry partners in their first two years and excel at even more advanced assignments as upperclassmen, Lavery added.

Academia responding to industry needs

The technology revolution on campus reflects the changes taking place in the media industry. Input was gathered from many editors and reporters from around the country to help shape the curriculum, said John Strauss, journalism instructor and adviser to The Ball State Daily News.

"When we began talking to industry professionals about the education our students would be receiving, they said this is exactly the type of graduate our industry needs," he said. "Even small newspapers looking for police beat reporters want employees who are comfortable with a broad range of new technologies. They want employees with a firm grounding in the art and craft as well as ones with the ability to be flexible to learn new technologies and grow."

This is demonstrated by a recent endorsement by The New York Times. The nation's pre-eminent newspaper has partnered with Ball State to offer an emerging media journalism certificate. Through The New York Times Knowledge Network, enrollees will be able to bolster their multimedia storytelling skills via online coursework focusing on writing, reporting, video, still photography and graphics.

Campus culture

Ball State's culture already is firmly entrenched in technology, as demonstrated by the university's Emerging Media Initiative ( EMI ), a planned $17.7 million investment in focusing the university's historic strengths in this area, accelerating benefits to the state of Indiana with media-savvy human capital.

To stay abreast of the ever-changing software, Internet and social media landscape, the technology courses will be nimble, explained Susan Smith, assistant professor of telecommunications.

"Our students have always had nearly unlimited access to the latest technology," she said. "With the new curriculum, they will be learning core competencies rather than specific programs. This will allow us to focus on skills needed for existing platforms as well as explore new programs and new media as well."

Journalism and telecommunications have played key roles in the university's EMI by leading efforts in news convergence and developing content for small screen devices. And the students have the added benefit of being surrounded by the latest technology of the David Letterman Communication and Media Building, the Art and Journalism Building and the Ball Communication Building.

The philosophy

To begin the process of creating the program, the two departments first defined a unified core philosophy.

"Delivering the news, at its foundation, is serving the public's right to know as guaranteed by the First Amendment; it's encouraging news coverage without fear or favor, promoting resourceful, accurate and ethical gathering and presenting of news," Lavery stated. "Once we identified the shared mission of the two departments, our faculty members were able to build a program to deliver quality news in technologically advanced environments."

To learn more about this program, visit the Emerging Media Journalism Web site or contact CCIM at 765-285-6002.

By Layne Cameron, Associate Director of University Communication

Mar 11 2010 - Staged Reading of Rediscovered Early 20th Century Plays by Women

The NYS Writers Institute's Authors Theatre program will present staged readings of rediscovered short plays by notable women playwrights of the early 20th century, including "Kurzy of the Sea" (1920) by Djuna Barnes and "The Rib-Person" (1918) by Rita Wellman on Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 7:30 p.m. [NOTE EARLY START TIME] in the Assembly Hall, Campus Center, on the University at Albany's uptown campus. Directed by W. Langdon Brown, and performed by equity actors, the plays are highlighted in the new volume "Women Writers of the Provincetown Players" (2009) by Judith Barlow. The event is free and open to the public and sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute in conjunction with Women's History Month.

The one-act play "Kurzy of the Sea" follows the fortunes of a young fisherman in his unreasonable quest to "catch" the perfect wife ("a Queen or a Saint or a Venus"). The play explores problems with contemporary ideas about marriage and wifely virtues. Djuna Barnes, legendary bohemian born in Cornwall-on-Hudson, and an early feminist who helped to shape modernist and avant-garde sensibilities in American and English letters, is best known for her 1936 novel, "Nightwood," which featured an introduction by the poet T. S. Eliot. Beat author William S. Burroughs proclaimed it "one of the great books of the twentieth century."

"The Rib-Person: A Farce-Satire in Two Scenes" lampoons the exploits of Zelma, a would-be "modern woman" who rejects the traditional roles of marriage and motherhood, but who remains happily dependent on the men in her life.

A playwright and fiction writer who explored new social and professional roles for women in her work, Wellman was the first member of the Provincetown Players to have a play produced on Broadway: "The Gentile Wife" (1918), a drama that examined issues of marriage and anti-Semitism at the turn-of-the-century.

Judith Barlow's new book, "Women Writers of the Provincetown Players" features thirteen short plays written by women and performed by the Provincetown Players theatre. The plays included in the book range from naturalistic tragedies to poetic allegories to witty satires. Together they provide a valuable look at women's concerns during a period just prior to the granting of female suffrage. Barlow is Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University at Albany-SUNY. Her previous books include "Plays by American Women: 1930-1960" (1994); "Final Acts: The Creation of Three Late O'Neill Plays" (1985); and "Plays by American Women: 1900-1930" (1981).

Enormously influential in American drama, the Provincetown Players theatre is remembered primarily for productions of Eugene O'Neill's plays, but also featured work by such notable women playwrights as Susan Glaspell, Djuna Barnes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Louise Bryant. From their beginnings on Cape Cod in 1915 to their disbanding in New York City in 1922, the Players staged nearly one hundred dramas, roughly a third of which were composed by women.

W. Langdon Brown is a fellow of the New York State Writers Institute and a University at Albany English Department faculty member. He is director of Authors Theatre for the Writers Institute where new plays by Bill C. Davis, William Kennedy, Lisa Thompson, Warren Leight, Frank Pugliese, and David Rabe, along with Brown's own adaptation of Richard Russo's "Mohawk" have been workshopped. He is a former chair of the University at Albany's Department of Theatre.

For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.

Mar 4 2010 - Author Jody Lisberger Will Share Feminist Theory on Craft of Writing

Fiction writer and feminist scholar Jody Lisberger will discuss how feminism plays a role in her writing when she speaks on Thursday, March 4, at SUNY Cortland.

Lisberger, the director of Women's Studies at the University of Rhode Island (URI), will present "Writing Down the Body: Making the Invisible Visible, the Silent Spoken" from noon to 1 p.m. in Brockway Hall Jacobus Lounge. The talk is free and open to the public and one of several Women's History Month events planned on campus during March. This presentation is sponsored by the Women's Studies Program and the Center for Gender and Intercultural Studies.

Lisberger will discuss the ways that feminist theory - in ways most writers and scholars would never guess - articulates crucial and concrete ideas for helping fiction and nonfiction writers improve their craft.

Lisberger's presentation will explore five particular lessons relevant to writing craft and life: refusing to be silenced; the power of the margins and the unseen; rethinking the dynamics of desire; defying linearity and narrative order; and inhabiting the space between the literal and the metaphoric.

In speaking about Lisberger's fiction, critics and book reviewers have called her stories an "artful, compromising, and moving exploration of human desire," "graceful and seductive, spare in their telling yet unstintingly powerful in their impact," a "first-rate collection… that starts out strong and keeps on accelerating" (The Boston Globe), "ten perfect tales" (The Louisville Courier), and "build[ing] with ratcheting tension, carefully nurtured thought the accretion of small details (Women's Review of Books)."

Lisberger is the author of a prize-winning collection of stories, Remember Love, published by Fleur de Lis Press in 2008, and the writer of several articles. She serves on the fiction faculty of the Brief Residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University in Louisville, Ky. Lisberger has a Ph.D. in English and an M.F.A. and has worked as a journalist, editor and grant writer. She has taught fiction, creative nonfiction, literature and feminist theory for more than 25 years at the University of Rhode Island, Brown, Harvard, Tufts, Holy Cross and Boston University.

At URI, she teaches courses that include Postcolonial Literature, Women Writers, and Narrative Theory. Lisberger participates in the summer Ocean State Writer's Conference.

For more information, contact Women's Studies Coordinator Caroline Kaltefleiter at (607) 753-4203 or caroline.kaltefleiter@cortland.edu.

Mar 4 2010 - Authors Explore Future Of Journalism

Robert McChesney and John Nichols, authors of "The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again," will discuss their bold model for keeping a vibrant free press alive in America at DePaul University on March 4.

The lecture will be held from 1:30 to 3 p.m. at DePaul’s College of Communication lower-level theatre space, 14 E. Jackson Blvd., Chicago. The event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited.

Founders of the Free Press national media reform movement, McChesney and Nichols believe that an independent and viable Fourth Estate must be kept alive in order to preserve democracy. In their book, they provide a strong critique of the current favored solution to this crisis and argue for strong public subsidies to create a viable, independent news media.

McChesney, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his longtime writing partner Nichols, a Washington correspondent at The Nation magazine, believe the current media model, in which newsgathering is supported by advertising, is broken and cannot be fixed. They lay out a plan for revamping the traditional media landscape by turning it into a public trust, along the lines of schools and police.

McChesney and Nichols' address will be followed by a reception and book signing. To reserve a seat, please e-mail Aisha Pulido in the College of Communication at apulido2@depaul.edu or call ( 312 ) 362-7197. For more information about the lecture, please contact Carolyn Bronstein, associate professor in the College of Communication, at ( 312 ) 362-7975 or cbronste@depaul.edu