Category: Blog

Twenty-five women gathered recently at the Bowers House for the Tapping the Creative for Health and Healing weekend retreat.  Led by three facilitators, small groups gathered to write or paint on the upstairs veranda or wander around the beautiful grounds.  Author Sara Baker’s guided participants to “approach the reality of who you are in all your brokenness and begin to make marks on paper … (and) your own true self will show up.”  Fitness Trainer Lisa Knighton mentored participants as they learned to combine guided movement with meditation and focused writing prompts.  Artist Sarah Pattison ushered participants into the discovery that play and creativity can open the door to the healing of mind, body and spirit.

One participant responded to the event with this comment:  “the presenters left me wanting more, this group of women bonded with each other, the doors to healing were flung open! …The house is magnificent, so very welcoming.”  Another commented, “I arrived, open to whatever was to unfold and was amazed with everything about the weekend.  (It was) a very peaceful setting, full of positive energy. I look forward to my next visit!”

Ellen Bowers Davenport , Bowers House Director and Sandra Scott, Bowers House Writing Facilitator are planning future events.  Keep an eye on our website and visit our Facebook page, The Bowers House Writers Retreat to see this historic house as it established itself as the Creative Retreat Center for Northeast Georgia.

A few of the Writers who have stayed at The Bowers House:

Alison Hawthorne Deming is author of four poetry books : Rope: Science and Other Poems, winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets; The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence; and Genius Loci.  She has published three nonfiction books, Temporary Homelands, The Edges of the Civilized World, and Writing the Sacred Into the Real.  She has completed a new nonfiction book titled Zoologies: on Animals and the Human Spirit.  She co-edited with Laurent Savoy The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World, reissued in 2011 in a new expanded edition.  Her work has been widely published and anthologized, including in The Norton Book of Nature Writing, and Best American Science and Nature Writing.   She grew up inConnecticut and now lives in Tucson, Arizona and on Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick, Canada.  Deming is Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona.  Recently she worked at the Jacksonville (FL) Zoo and Gardens as poet-in-residence as part of a national Language of Conservation project.

Playwright Cedric Liqueur performed his one-man show, “Satchel” Paige, at the Bowers House on April 4. The play was written during a recent writer’s retreat Liqueur took at the Bowers House.Satchel Paige, considered the greatest pitcher in the history of the Negro Leagues, went on to play in the Major Leagues and in 1971 he was the first player from the Negro leagues to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.  Cedric Liqueur, a member of London’s Royal Shakespeare Company, writes and performs theatre-stage plays, prose, narratives, poetry, and sonnets. 

The Georgia Poetry Society

(L-R) Keith Badowski, Matthew Payne, from Birmingham; Michael Diebert, an Atlanta-area poet who is one of the other co-editors for Future Cycle Press; Steven Shields, photographer, poet & co-editor for Future Cycle Press; Barry Marks, a lawyer and poet from Birmingham whose book Possible Crocodiles was published by Brick Road Press.

Members of The Poetry Society of Georgia returned for their second annual 3 day retreat at The Bowers House.  As part of this retreat, onSunday, Jan 15, at 7 PM, they conducted an evening of reading of their original works at The Bowers House.  The public was invited.

We had a terrific time at the Bowers House.  There’s a good energy about the place.  We all agreed that we got more done over that weekend than some of us had for many months. ~ Steven Shields

The Georgia Poetry Society

(L-R) Keith Badowski, Matthew Payne, from Birmingham; Michael Diebert, an Atlanta-area poet who is one of the other co-editors for Future Cycle Press; Steven Shields, photographer, poet & co-editor for Future Cycle Press; Barry Marks, a lawyer and poet from Birmingham whose book Possible Crocodiles was published by Brick Road Press.

Members of The Poetry Society of Georgia returned for their second annual 3 day retreat at The Bowers House.  As part of this retreat, onSunday, Jan 15, at 7 PM, they conducted an evening of reading of their original works at The Bowers House.  The public was invited.

We had a terrific time at the Bowers House.  There’s a good energy about the place.  We all agreed that we got more done over that weekend than some of us had for many months. ~ Steven Shields

The Bowers House and The Georgia Review, the University of Georgia’s nationally renowned journal of arts and letters, are pleased to announce the success of  its October 2010  inaugural event, The Comedy of Survival, featuring South Carolina short-story writer and novelist George Singleton and Georgia-based poet Alice Friman.  The day-long workshop included readings and a question and answer session by Singleton and Friman.  After a lunch break the two writers spent the afternoon focusing on the art of weaving humor into even the most challenging material.

George Singleton is one of the finest and hottest fiction writers in the country at this time – ” a big-hearted evil genius who writes as if he were the love child of Alice Munro and Strom Thurmond,” writes Tony Earley.

A Georgia Review discovery some twenty years ago, Singleton has since published four collections of short stories, two novels, and an irreverent how-to book titled Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds: Indispensable Wisdom and Cautionary Advice for Writers. His other titles, which in themselves provide an intriguing introduction to his worldview, include The Half-Mammals of Dixie, Why Dogs Chase Cars, Drowning in Gruel, and Work Shirts for Madmen. A recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Singleton has had work published and reprinted in such magazines as the Atlantic Monthly andHarper’s, and in anthologies like New Stories from the South and Surreal South. He lives in Easley, South Carolina.

Alice Friman’s The Book of the Rotten Daughter contains “astonishing poems which fearlessly jump into hell and out again, that resent or forgive,” writes poet Marianne Boruch, “poems which wryly, exactly and so richly honor the world of the living.”  Her eight poetry collections includes The Book of the Rotten Daughter, Zoo, and Inverted Fire; her ninth, Vinculum, is forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in 2011.

Professor Emerita at the University of Indianapolis, Friman has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Indiana Arts Commission, the Arts Council of Indianapolis, the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies, and the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest. Like George Singleton a steady contributor to The Georgia Review, Friman is currently poet-in-residence at Georgia College and State University in      Milledgeville.

.