VCCA IS CURRENTLY ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS FOR THE FOLLOWING FELLOWSHIPS:DEADLINE TO APPLY: JUNE 15, 2012

NEW! 2 Fellowships for Social Media Artists

VCCA is breaking ground with two new fellowships specifically for the emerging genre of social media artists. These fellowships are for artists new to VCCA.

Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, VCCA is offering two fully funded, six-week fellowships for artists who are using social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube. The fellowships are for artists who are exploring ways to seamlessly integrate the social media platform into the work itself, thus finding new and compelling ways to use social media as a tool of self-expression. The fellowships are accompanied by a $2,000 stipend.

Craig Pleasants, VCCA Program Director says, “the artists selected for these fellowships will be working in ways that move art from the gallery or museum to the web, seeking ways to free art from geographical and temporal constraints. We are not defining social media artwork for this fellowship, leaving that to the artists who are pioneering this field, but the finished work must be presented on the web and be fully accessible to the netverse. We expect that the successful work will be tied to the logic of social media as well as being conceptually rich.”

The deadline for applying is June 15, 2012.This opportunity is for artists who have not previously been in residence at VCCA.

Residencies must take place between October 1, 2012 and May 31, 2013.

via Special Programs Now Accepting Applications | VCCA: Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Friday, May 18, 2012, 7 PM–FREE EVENT: Learning How to Laugh with author Jim Minick

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• March and May seminars at WriterHouse (cvillewords.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Encyclopedia Virginia is looking for an Assistant Editor. Knowledge of and interest in Virginia history a big plus. This will be a full time classified staff position at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. For more information, contact Brendan Wolfe at EV.

And there’s more! According to Brendan:

We’re entering into a partnership with the Library of Virginia that involves publishing on our site the entirety of the Dictionary of Virginia Biography. At the same time, we’re beginning to edit our pre-colonial and colonial history sections and are developing a smart-phone application that uses one’s current geographical coordinates to identify nearby historical events and connect them to encyclopedia entries. It’s pretty cool — all of which is to say that this is a great time to join the staff.

Just a reminder that this Thursday at 7pm, WriterHouse welcomes critically acclaimed young writer Josh Weil, whose book of three novellas, The New Valley, is set in southwest Virginia. He’ll be discussing “The Renegade Form: The Case for the Novella in Contemporary Fiction.” Book signing to follow. Free and open to the public.

”Weil meticulously imagines people and their histories, and presents them as a product of their places. This is perhaps the hardest thing for a fiction writer of any age, working in any form, to accomplish….Keep writing novellas, Josh Weil, because you write very good ones.” —The New York Times Sunday Book Review

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This Saturday is the first session of our new class “Essentials of Mystery Writing,” taught by Meredith Cole, author of Posed for Murder. Space is still available, but if you don’t have time to register before Saturday morning, please call 296-1922 or email us (classes@writerhouse.org) to let us know you’d like to come. The rest of the classes begin next week: “Shaping the Language of Poetry” and “Creative Writing: Beginning the Journey” on Monday, “Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Telling the Truth” on Wednesday, and “Evening Fiction Workshop: A Dialogue Between Writers” on Thursday. Complete descriptions and online registration:

http://www.writerhouse.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=61&Itemid=89

But don’t wait—register now if you want to learn about blogging, social networks, websites and how to be a freelance writer on the web. This is a soup-to-nuts picture of what it means to be a writer in the digital world, led by copywriter and communications consultant Kristen King. The first part is an introduction and the second part is a hands-on follow up. Part 1: Saturday, August 15, 9am – 4:30 pm, Part 2: Saturday September 12, 9am-4:30pm. More info…

via One Reason Magazines Are Suffering: Their Covers – The Daily Beast

Whether they write novels or cover stories or op-eds, even the most talented women writers often aren’t validated in the same way that their male counterparts are. While there are few Neanderthals who would publicly say that the byline gap in literary journals and periodicals is due to the fact that women can’t write as well as men, the usual justifications include shrugging dismissals like, “We don’t get enough quality submissions by women.” When I pointed out the 5:29 byline ratio of the fall 2006 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review on my website, for instance, the journal’s editor, Ted Genoways, commented on the post that, “Unfortunately, the disparity in our issues is, I think, more reflective of a symptom than a root cause; there simply seem to be fewer women who are freelance journalists, travel writers, and political pundits—three areas that now largely compose our editorial content. As a result, the good ones are in high demand and often out of our price range.”

via The Ambition Condition | Bitch Magazine

Perhaps this is not the best example Clark could have used. I think Genoways’ response falls short of being dismissive. He’s not excusing himself by saying that he’s failing to find quality female contributors, he’s saying he can’t afford them, and that does speak to a possible problem with the available pool of talent. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem to some extent (why go into freelance journalism if no one like you ever gets published?) but chicken-egg problems tend to be systemic, not the kind you can pin on one particular editor.

What I find more egregious is the ongoing trend of relegating women to the soft stories in the back of magazines like The Atlantic or the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, or to “XX” sections of websites. I could not be more weary of reading articles about how challenging it is to find just the right shoes for a party or how difficult it is to find good domestic help. One more story about best friends who almost lose their friendship over a misunderstanding but then bring it back from the brink over skim lattes will send me over the brink. I’d rather read a measly five meaty articles in VQR than 500 more personal essays about purses or menopause or mammograms. And I much prefer a magazine like VQR that markets itself to the general reader to one that feels it has to set aside a few pages for the ladies.

But other than that small point, the Bitch article is great — go read it.

WriterHouse offers solace for Virginia writers – 10.14.08

Virginia has been home to many famous authors from Edgar Alan Poe, Willa Cather, and Booker T. Washington, to John Dos Passos, William Styron, Tom Wolfe, and John Grisham. Now some Charlottesville women have opened a place where the next generation of writers can meet, work, and party. WVTF’s Sandy Hausman paid a visit to WriterHouse, just off Preston Avenue, in the shadow of Bodo’s Bagels.

Listen

via News and Notes | WVTF Public Radio – Classical, Jazz, NPR