It’s almost here–in fact, the organizational meeting and reception is Sunday.

What’s almost here?

The Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival is held for two weeks each summer on the University of Alaska Fairbanks Campus, and attracts students and artists from around the world. I think it started out with music, but visual arts, dance, ice skating, healing arts and literary arts have been added over the years. Most classes are an hour or so a day, often combined with private lessons. Creative Writing, which I’ve been taking almost since it started, is all day, five days a week, for two weeks, plus homework. Needless to say, this is going to interfere with my usual blogging, so I’ve decided that for the next two weeks I’ll post class assignments, both the prompts (which will differ each day) and what I’ve done with one of them as a first draft. If I can get other class members’ takes on the same prompts, I may post them as well or encourage the other students, or anyone else who wants, to post theirs as comments.

Our usual class format has been four writers–three in the morning and one after lunch–plus some extra activity in the afternoon–a field trip, a writer outside the faculty guests, even a totally different activity, like the collage art we did last year. Peggy Shumaker,  the main organizer and a poet, is always one of the writers featured, and we usually have a writer from the UAF English faculty and at least one writer from outside the Fairbanks area. This year it’s Peggy, David Crouse (fiction) and Jeanne Clark (non-fiction) from California. I don’t know yet what the format will be, with just three people listed, but I’ll find out at the first meeting, Monday.

Creative writing isn’t the only thing going on at the Festival, of course. There’s Lunch Bites–brown bag noons with performances by both guest artists and (especially the second week) students. Concerts just about every evening and both weekends, at least one public reading by our guest writers, demonstrations, and art shows. This year there are a number of mini-workshops, lasting from 45 minutes to half a day for a single day. I was tempted by the glass blowing and fusing classes, and by the one on using modern technology to create short DVD’s. (A book trailer, perhaps?) I’ll check it out Sunday, but I’m likely to be too tired to take it in by the 28th.

So, on with the Festival! Hope to see you there or in the comments, if not this year, then in the future.