June 2010 Linda Lappin ties for first prize in the Katherine Mansfield Society International Essay Contest. The theme of the contest was the relationship between Katherine Mansfield and D.H.Lawrence. Lappin's essay, A Parallel Quest compared Mansfield's spiritual adventures at the Prieuré in Fontainebleau with Lawrence's experiences in Taos, New Mexico and in Italy where he explored the Etruscans. Judges included the Mansfield scholar, C.K. Stead. The winning essays will be published in volume 2 of Mansfield Studes issued by University of Glasgow Press.

Writing Seminar Concludes:
An update concerning the writing retreat/​seminar on spirit of place taught by Linda Lappin in May June 2010 will be posted shortly.

YOUR SECRET MAP New exercise from The Genius Loci: A Writer's Guide to Capturing the Soul of Place available on line

In March 2010,after the publication in the November issue of The Writer of a section of my forthcoming writing book:
The Genius Loci: A Writer's Guide to Capturing the Soul of Place, I was invited to guest blog for a couple of bloggers, Christi Craig of writing under pressure
and Candice Ransom
a Southern writer, who also runs the virtual The Honeysuckle Cafe I offered these two bloggers and their followers a new exercise from the book and asked for feedback and comments. I chose the "Secret Map" exercise. Like the other exercises and prompts included in The Writer article, the map exercise was created for my spirit of place writing workshops at Centro Pokkoli and my travel/​memoir writing students of the USAC program in Viterbo. Many thanks to Christi and Candice and their readers for the opportunity to share this exercise.

To read the exercise and see comments, please click on the links.
Feel free to try the exercise and offer comments.

your secret map exercise at writing under pressure


your secret map exercise at under the honeysuckle vine

I would be delighted to share other exercises from the book.

Linda Lappin presents Katherine's Wish to the Katherine Mansfield Society Symposium in Menton

In September 2009, Linda Lappin presented Katherine's Wish to the Katherine Mansfield Society Symposium, held at Villa Serena in Menton and organized by the French and New Zealand governments to honor Mansfield's two visits there in 1920. Vincent O'Sullivan , distinguished NZ author and Mansfield scholar, co-editor of Mansfield's Collected Letters ( OUP) had this praise for Katherine's Wish “It's not an easy or simple thing to write fiction which keeps faith with the life it is based on, so the reader will say, 'There is nothing here that falsifies', as well as 'This has the imaginative flair of story telling, the freedom of its form.' Linda Lappin has immersed herself in Mansfield's life,
and emerged from it with a story to narrate on her own terms; a fiction charged with the enthusiasm of a good researcher, and carried through with a novelist's verve.”
For more information concerning the Katherine Mansfield Society, click here
The Katherine Mansfield Society

RECENT EVENTS WITH LINDA LAPPIN
ROME! LINDA LAPPIN AT FELTRINELLI INTERNATIONAL
Benedetta Bini and Richard Ambrosini presented KATHERINE'S WISH in NOV.2008

PARIS, CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP
for poets, memoirists, fiction and nonfiction writers Nov. 1 2008

All writers have their secret spiritual geographies. In this workshop, writers and poets will retrace those inner itineraries and attempt to unlock the voices and impressions hidden in places of the past. Through special exercises we will learn to evoke and recreate atmospheres of those remote, exotic, or intimate spaces and make them come alive through words.
TIME: Saturday morning, Nov. 1st. 2008,10am-1pm
PLACE Boulevard Saint Germain, steps away from Shakespeare & Company

PARIS! LINDA LAPPIN GUEST OF PARIS SOIREES
Linda Lappin will be speaking to the guests of Patrica La Plante's Paris soiree TIME Nov. 2, 2008 PLACE: see Paris Soirees

PARIS! LINDA LAPPIN AT SHAKESPEARE & COMPANY
Linda reads from Katherine's Wish at the fabled Paris expat bookshop TIME Monday, Nov. 3, 2008 at 7 pm
PLACE Shakespeare & Company, Rue de la Bucherie

Coming Soon Katherine’s Wish podcasts

from the novel read by the author. Watch this space for information.

NEWS: THE ETRUSCAN and KATHERINE'S WISH are now TALKING BOOKS!

The Etruscan and Katherine's Wish are now available in the “Talking Books Program” sponsored by the National Library Service . Talking Books are available only to patrons of the program.

Gaetano Prampolini's complete essay on The Etruscan

is now available in Italian in the critical anthology "Oltre il Racconto,Passaggi tra giallo e noir, mito, cinema e teatro" edited by Martha Canfield, published by Mazzanti Prampolini is a professor of US literature at the Università di Firenze

Just out Collected Poems by Aldo Vianello, translated by Linda Lappin, Richard Burns, and Peter Jay, Anvil Press Poetry

At the invitation of Pino Matteucci, manager of Feltrinelli International in Rome, on May 18th, Linda Lappin conducted a creative writing workshop focusing on the creative travel essay. Among the twenty participants were professional journalists, screenwriters, poets, and university students hailing from Rome, London, Copenhagen, Los Angeles, and other far points of the globe. Lappin's lesson dealt with recreating a vivid sense of place. Watch this place for future updates.

In April, Lappin was invited to give a presentation at the Santa Chiara Study Center in Castiglion Fiorentino. This center offers its campus space to several US universities, including Texas American University, where Professor Susan Stabile has added
The Etruscan to her course on American expatriate women writers in Italy. Lappin met with Professor Stabile's literature class to discuss the book and answer students' questions. Later that evening Sergio Baldassarre presented his DVD "The Etruscan, A Tale of Tuscia" at the Santa Chiara Theater and Lappin read from the novel.

The Etruscan Tours Europe

After a successful launch in Rome at Feltrinelli
International , Rome's most prestigious international bookstore, the next stop on Lappin's European tour was Siena , where she read from The Etruscan at Lisa Fanlon's English Bookshop srl on Dec. 10th.

Located in the heart of old Siena, just steps away from the Duomo in Via San Pietro 19 , the Bookshop occupies spacious quarters with handsome vaulted ceilings, lots of browsing room, a couple of comfortable armchairs, and a reading area for events. In business for just over a year, the Bookshop is well-stocked with classics and contemporary fiction, art books, children's books, cookbooks and travelguides, meeting both the needs of the expat community and tourists. Lisa, the manager, hopes to create a gathering place and cultural center for the English-speaking community of Siena and its outlying areas.

After a brief discussion of the Tuscia and its magical and mysterious sites , Lappin read an extract from Harriet's diary in The Etruscan The evening concluded with prosecco.

While in Siena, Lappin and her husband were guests of the bookshop at the Palazzo Ravizza , one of Siena's most elegant hotels with exquisite period furnishings and a view of the Sienese countryside. Lappin found it a perfectly Jamesian atmosphere.

Then in January,despite the bitter cold, a small crowd turned out to hear Linda Lappin read from the Etruscan at ESCAPE BOOKS, located at Oberstraße 8 30167 in Hannover Tel. 0511 - 769 21 61 www.escapebooks.de This charming bookstore is located in the university district and serves students, tourists, and anglophone residents of Hannover.
Copies of The Etruscan are available here.

From Hannover to Berlin where Linda met with Uwe Herms, formerly of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where Linda worked years ago.

Then on to Geneva for the Geneva Writers Conference where Linda met with colleagues David Applefield, editor of FRANK, the Paris-based literary journal, and Thomas E Kennedy, author of The Copenhagen Quartet and international editor of
the Literary Review, to discuss upcoming plans for podcasts of American writers living in Europe.

This spring Linda Lappin will be conducting a creative writing lab at Feltrinelli International in Rome. A presentation of The Etruscan is scheduled at Feltrinelli International in Florence in
May. Keep posted.