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This week I was hired to run the Writers Workshops at the Spencer Hotel on the grounds of the Chautauqua Institution. The Institution dates back to the heyday of a nineteenth-century educational and cultural movement that swept the Northern States and the frontier for several decades. In the decade after the end of the Civil War, “chautauquas” sprung up across the country, bringing a sense of “eddicatedness” to the remotest outposts of the country. The facility in Western New York State was originally founded as a Methodist summer camp in 1874, and has continuously run a seasonal program that is now nationally- if not internationally-known. It occupies a 750-acre curve of shoreline along Chautauqua Lake in what is geographically known as the Southern Tier. This term refers to the ridges and hill valleys that follow the New York-Pennsylvania border and are geologically considered part of the Appalachian Mountains. The lake is a couple of miles wide and twenty miles long. Jamestown, the city where Lucille Ball was born, is at the southern end.

The Spencer is a four-story, 24-room, 100-year-old hotel just up from the Ampitheater where many of the Institution’s big-ticket events (lectures, symphony performances) are held. It’s owned and operated by a woman who lives elsewhere in the Institution, and she and her manager scheduled a series of writing and wellness workshops this fall. They are reasonably priced—less than $800 (double occupancy) for a five-night stay that includes the writing workshops, daily breakfast, lunch and dinner, gratuities and taxes. The chef in charge of the hotel dining room recommended me to the proprietress and I was hired over the phone while I was in New York City. The owner has a serious and ambitious vision for what the hotel’s workshop program could become, and I can’t believe my good fortune in being handed responsibility for it. Writers have been scheduled for most of the weeks after Labor Day; a few of the weeks or weekends are given over to Wellness Workshops. I will be responsible for booking writers for the 2009 calendar, for promoting them and the already-scheduled workshops to the region, which will require me to build and create some serious public relations and marketing connections beyond the Buffalo area. I’m very, very excited about this prospect. For the time being I will be doing most of the work out of my "office" in Buffalo, but will be down in Chautauqua once a week to promote the workshops on site. I'll be curious to see if that changes. Personally, I don't mind the driving--as long as I remember to use the time well. I will continue to teach for Just Buffalo, I have another teaching artist position possibility, and I remain committed to helping my brother and sister-in-law in any way I can. And of course I intend to reserve time to write.

Speaking of time, the timing of all this is a bit beyond the limits of my ability to describe. I’d been hoping that someday something like this would come my way; I didn’t expect it to fall out of the clear blue sky, and I wasn’t expecting it to happen now. But I suppose that’s how things like this come—out of nowhere.