pokkoli

"Linda’s Lappin's Spirit of Place Creative Writing Workshop leads the writer to locate the heart of memory." Virginia Ripley, writer, Los Angeles, participant in the 2006 Kenyon Review Creative Writing Workshop in Italy

"Linda Lappin's "Spirit of Place" workshop encouraged me to climb into the attic of memory to discover writing riches. Her prompts evoked
details of rooms and places, friends and relatives, sights and scents which poured onto the page. This workshop has given me a wealth of new ideas for story writing," Anna Duke Reach, Kenyon Review Program Assistant

Testimonial by Virginia Ripley, recent participant in the Spirit of Place Creative Writing Workshops

As the bus turned onto the main highway leading us away from Vitorchiano and back towards Rome, I knew the experience there had somehow opened a doorway in my mind and cleared a passageway through which memories of a new clarity could travel. Writers are rememberers. It’s part of the craft. Linda Lappin’s Spirit of Place Workshop leads the writer to locate the heart of memory, where one is able to mine her own soul for material. As the landscape I experienced in person, as well as through Linda’s novel, The Etruscan, slipped away, I began to recall the first part of Linda’s Spirit of Place Workshop.

Linda sent us all out into her neighborhood, the oldest part of Vitorchiano, the walled village, with the mission of silently seeking out the corners that spoke to us. I stepped into a courtyard of potted geraniums, lichen covered walls, and a single pillar set into a corner. I allowed the landscape, a collage of different eras, the past as constant as the present, to speak to me. Linda provides the writer with a lens through which to view the porous stone walls, the thick block window ledges, the sagging staircases, and the layers of reality reveal themselves. You wander further into the small streets and turn a corner that opens out to the gorge, a valley of infinite shades of green. When we reconvened in the Centro Pokolli we each returned with stories, all different, since we had each seen through our own unique eyes. An endless number of stories can sprout from one corner of the world. We share the physical world, but what we each bring to it creates the difference. It is the sharpening of this ability to use our senses that will enrich our descriptions and understandings of place.

Linda discussed character as a “function of the landscape,” and my mind was instantly brought to the mysterious count in her novel The Etruscan. Count Federigo del Re’s stout, olive toned body seems to have risen out of the landscape; he is part of Vitorchiano, body and soul. To eat the porcino mushrooms and to walk among the overgrown brush, watching out for vipers is to get to know Federigo del Rey. The characters we write must give our readers this desire to return to the landscape of our writing, to drink in the very air the characters breathed. How our characters interact with the environment can mirror their inner-beings. As writers, the more conscious we are of how our characters experience their surroundings, the more real our characters become. The Spirit of Place workshop provides the space and the tools for writers to explore their own ways of perceiving and connecting with our surroundings.

During our second workshop we focused on the richness of our own memories. As we sat around the table each writer seemed a vessel for an entire universe, an abundance of memory in need of a method of making its way to the page. Linda gently draws her workshop members into a place where they attempt to capture memory as not just a flat, visual thing but a three dimensional, multi-sensory experience. Steeped in memory, the writer can render both places far away and directly in front of her. I left the session feeling full of possibility and connected to other writers who also seek meaning in the world.

---Virginia Ripley

Centro Pokkoli’s co-director, Linda Lappin ,originally from Kingsport, Tennessee, is a novelist, poet, essayist, and translator. A graduate of Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, she holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Her first novel, The Etruscan semi-finalist for the Three Oaks First Novel Award given by Story Line Press of Eugene, Oregon in 2000, was published by
Wynkin DeWorde publishers in Galway, Ireland in 2004. This novel, a literary gothic tale selected as Book of the Week, by Book View Ireland in July 2004 , has been acclaimed by Italian critics as a new classic in American writing about Italy. Poet Charles Wright has called the book “A haunting story and a great read.” David Lynn, editor of The Kenyon Review has praised it as “a wonderful achievement.” Says poet Andrew Frisardi, “The Etruscan delight the way dreams do. It’s a tale like a labyrinth.”


Lappin has created a special series of writing workshops entitled “Tapping into the Spirit of Place” addressed to writers of fiction, travel writing, memoir, and poetry which a unique and stimulating approach to memory, place, and identity. She has taught these workshops for students of the University of Tuscia, Converse College, the Kenyon Review Creative Writing Workshop in Italy, and for Feltrinelli International in Rome.


Coming Events: Lappin will be reading from The Etruscan in Paris at Shakespeare & Co.
on November 6, 2006, at 7 pm


Another session of the Spirit of Place Creative Writing Workshops will be held at Feltrinelli International in Rome this fall. Watch this space for updates.

Upcoming publications: “Escape to Bandol,” The first chapter of her new novel, Katherine’s Wish is forthcoming in an upcoming issue of The South Carolina Review “A Public of Two,” a chapter from the novel dealing with the relationship between Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, will be out shortly in The Southern Indiana Review

Watch for “Fish Soup,” forthcoming in the anthology Greece A Love Story , edited by Camille Cusumano, to be published by Seal Press.

Work in Progress: Signatures in Stone a mystery novel set in Bomarzo.