Culture
Stuart’s Opera House Presents Creative Writing Class For Seniors
< < Back to stuarts-opera-house-presents-creative-writing-class-for-seniors-2Stuart’s Opera House in Nelsonville, Ohio presents a Creative Writing for Seniors class starting this October! This class is part of an Ohio Arts Council Artist-in-Residency at Stuart’s Opera House with Athens resident, writer, and poet Wendy McVicker. This class is FREE and open to Athens County Senior Citizens and you can sign up now through September 30th by contacting Emily Prince at Stuart’s Opera House at (740) 753-1924 or emily@stuartsoperahouse.org.
Classes will meet weekly on Tuesdays from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. starting in October at the Stuart’s Opera House Education and Community Center, 30 Public Square, Nelsonville. This class is sponsored by Stuart’s Opera House and The Ohio Arts Council. Everyone has a story to tell and this class will help you tell it!
Wendy McVicker has been writing since childhood, publishing poems since 1986, and inviting people (in schools, libraries, and elsewhere) to join in poetry adventures since 1987. Ms. McVicker has a background in Philosophy and has studied with poets Wayne Dodd and John Haines. Her work has been featured in collaboration with a group of Advanced Typography students from the University of Dayton which was displayed at the Dayton Metro Library, as well as other venues. Her poems have been included in the anthology A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford, a collection of modern American poets edited by Becca J. R. Lachman and her collected work A Dancer’s Notes was published in 2015. Wendy will supplement the class with a reading from her most recent publication A Dancer’s Notes.
The desired goals for this program include providing an outlet to be social, a space for participants to communicate and express community identity, to evolve multicultural awareness, a sensitivity to the expressive qualities of art, and the realization of the creative instinct. The class will provide an opportunity for area seniors to interact and engage in their community, and to challenge themselves creatively to improve (or ‘enhance’) their all-around quality of life. A chapbook will be produced through the class and made available for purchase to members of Stuart’s Opera House as well as the general public. The proceeds will benefit the Arts Education program. The program will allow the opportunity to include learning and experiences relating to the unique indigenous cultural, artistic, and historic elements of our region as well as other non-mainstream cultural sources. Through these experiences we will work to offer an opportunity to discover these unique approaches to understanding human values as well as reveal and recognize both the differences and the connections across disciplines and cultures. Improved access to programming, an increased interest in adult programming, and a reading will be produced for interested participants.