Experiences

Who are SLS Students? SLS students range in age from undergraduates in college to senior citizens—and every age in between. There is no university affiliation necessary, only the desire for a once-in-a-lifetime literary experience. The following are statements made by former students and faculty to give you a sense of the program, in their own words. While we at SLS may have encouraged them to send something, we did not edit what they wrote (well, maybe only minutely, for space and the faint of heart) nor did we direct them what to say.

Read work by SLS alumni as well as other Russia-themed writing at SLS Transatlantic.

2006

Mark Miklosovich (SLS'06): SLS was music for me. Dave Brubeck comes to mind; a piece called La Paloma Azul. Perfection in this very delicate way; powerful with an overwhelming sense, this song reminds me of St. Petersburg. But what could be more overwhelming than the white nights? Nothing, nothing could, but the Summer Literary Seminars managed to keep my mind as awestruck and inspired as watching fireworks on a sunny night. Amazing staff, teachers, colleagues, mentors, food, functions. A sense of class; I am thankful to all who were a part of 2006.

William Stobb (SLS '06): My SLS experience was great. Two weeks in St. Petersburg felt like a whirl of imagery and language and experience--the freshness and immediacy of my perceptions of the city were focused around the excellent literary community that the SLS program constructs. The writers I worked with--the faculty in the program and the students--brought a variety of experiences to the program and were excellent company in the physical and intellectual journey of the trip. Last: the trip has had a substantial and immediate impact on my writing.
While I was in St. Petersburg, I journaled a lot while receiving really valuable instruction in poetic technique from Christine Hume. Since I've been back (just more than a week, as I write this), I've been composing poems out of the language in the journal--these have a new freshness in their syntax and a new relationship to the page. I'm sure this development wouldn't have happened now, in this way, without the SLS program.

Joshua Chapman (SLS '06): Hate to gush, but the program was kind of larger than I feel able to encapsulate. Meaning not just that the experience of returning to Russia at this time in my life and in her history was, as promised, rich and invigorating, but also that the folks I met there changed my sense of where I am and where I should go from here in my career and life. There was a refreshing lack of hierarchy and competition, which was a function of the program's structure and faculty, but also of the place; that we were all so dramatically recontextualized made it a common project and adventure, and that opened social boundaries that can be otherwise rigid in a writing conference or academic setting.

Carol Roan (SLS '06): The diversity of participants and the breadth of learning opportunities set SLS apart from other workshops. I learned, for the first time, Guam's devastating history from a young Guamanian poet; I learned, again for the first time, the role played by the arts during the Siege of Leningrad from a playwright doing research in St. Petersburg; I cried during a Russian interpretation of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" and came away with a new conception of the play; my views on Russia changed completely after the lectures on its constitution; and I will not soon forget an uproarious breakfast with women of various ages, all of whom had been born in different countries, after the conversation turned to (what else?) sex. I learned a great deal about my writing in Gina Ochsner's workshop, but I may have learned more about who I am from the city and those with whom I experienced it.

2005

Eugenia Gusev (SLS '05): The SLS St. Petersburg program was an eye opening, brain surging, soul searching experience. SLS does an incredible job catering to the very varied needs of its participants: from helping people figure out how to use Russian phone cards, to pointing out the best place to eat blini (Russian pancakes) around the corner. I can't seem to list all the highlights because every single day for me was full of stimulating activities: readings, trips and classes. If only I could have stayed up all day and all night during the entire session of SLS St. Petersburg! (I didn't say I didn't try.)

Lois Baker (SLS '05): I had high expectations for the St. Petersburg Summer Literary Seminars before I left Oregon, but they were surpassed in every way by the classes, the lectures, readings and excursions, and the marvel of the city itself. It was really extraordinary--the best writing seminar I've attended.

John Cottle (SLS '05): The St. Petersburg Summer Literary Seminarss were a fascinating and life-enriching experience. The faculty was outstanding, the lectures stimulating, the participants intelligent and interesting, and the workshops provided invaluable feedback. The city itself is amazing--a place not to be rushed through tourist style, but to be experienced with deliberation and reflection, one layer at a time. The seminar schedule allows you to explore this remarkable city at your own pace so that there is never the feeling of being rushed. As for the SLS staff, I can't say enough about them. They were knowledgeable, friendly, courteous, always available, and enthusiastic about helping with any problem that came up. I highly recommend this seminar to anyone looking for an interesting and challenging cultural experience.

2004

Elizabyth Hiscox (SLS '04): Opening any guidebook to the city would give you an idea of what to expect in terms of art and architecture: the Hermitage et al (and there is a lot to et al). What your Frommers or Rough Guide couldn’t possibly do is prepare you. The city is vivid. The white nights bring the St. Petersburgers into a second spring that we creative types get to wallow in for a while. Three hundred and sixty degrees of pink on an after-midnight sunset cruise, the seemingly constant rainbows springing up after rain, ponies clopping by, miles-away spires, and borsch like the Russians invented the stuff. Add to this the breathtaking phenomena of finding yourself here with a bunch of other word-happy folk, including a generous instructor whose work makes you, well, happy they’re reading yours.
   The SLS staff was also out-of-their-way-ready to help. They knew the city, they knew the culture and they knew the needs of a bunch of white nights energized creative writers: need food—what do you feel like? Want to go to a great underground literary club? Take a left at the second canal. Need tickets to tomorrow’s opera? Done. But more than just great tour guides, these are people who care about what we care about, see the world through word-colored glasses and understand why having readings in libraries, in the strongholds of great Russian writers is more than just a nice touch. There is an undercurrent of ongoing literary exploration.
   Most surprisingly, SLS has followed me home. My time in Petersburg has colored my work: the gilt and blue enamel of the The Church on Spilt Blood’s mosaic walls keeps popping up in my most unlikely Arizona . The cacti and Tzars get along far better than I’d expect and the southwest really has benefited from the onion domes. In short: if you like to write, go. It’s good.

Susanne Davis (SLS '04): The Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg was a door opening onto a wonderful adventure. First, I went to be immersed into a literary culture I had read and loved, and then I found myself enchanted as I walked along canals, admiring the gold domes, and beautiful architecture, including the Church of the Savior on Spilt Blood on a night when its colors lit the lapis sky.
   At SLS, I met fellow writers who became friends, received valuable feedback for revising my novel and developed new insights into my own artistic vision. But none of these experiences was ordinary. St. Petersburg is an extraordinary place -- in its beauty and history and its indefinable nature, shifting like the light of White Nights and its effect is lasting.

Mary Petrosky (SLS Alumni '04): When Mikhail Iossel said at the opening reception that SLS Russia is about pushing your boundaries, getting outside your comfort zone, I found myself nodding. It's intimidating to travel alone to a place where you not only can't speak the language, you can't even read it. To immerse yourself in a foreign culture. To open yourself to the creative
friction of workshops and seminars.
   I admit, those first few days in St. Pete I was tempted to drop bead crumbs wherever I went. But between the opening bus tour, literary walks, and a handy guide of walking tours prepared by the SLS staff, it wasn't long before I was wondering the city on my own. It's impossible not to - St. Petersburg lures you with its bridges and canals, cathedrals and museums, parks and palaces.
   I'd wanted to travel to Russia for some time, and the opportunity SLS offers to live in St. Petersburg for several weeks as a student, rather than simply a tourist, was a real draw for me. So was SLS's unique combination of cultural program and writing conference. In addition to
outings planned by the SLS staff, I had the good fortune to visit the Ethnography Museum and the Museum of the Siege of Leningrad with a Russian acquaintance.
   Then there was the Hermitage, the Russian Museum, the Summer Palace and Garden, St. Isaac's, the Church on Spilled Blood. SLS offers so much to do and the summer days are so long in St. Pete, that time had a different dimension. (OK, some of that was probably jet lag, lack of sleep, and/or vodka.)
   This was my first writer's conference and I was impressed by the range of attendees, the discussions on everything from craft to translation that occurred over breakfast, lunch and dinner. I particularly enjoyed the evening readings - the chance to hear so many writers (including fellow attendees), to socialize afterward at late dinners, then wander about in the phenomenal white nights. I met some wonderful people and shared incredible experiences with them (Paul McCartney's voice echoing off the Kazansky Cathedral, sampling ice cream from carts on Nevsky, standing quietly in a room in the Akhmatova museum).
   I think it would be hard to go to SLS St. Petersburg and not grow as a writer, a person; the programs, the people you meet, the Russian culture, the city itself -- all enrich you.

David Stromberg (SLS '04): A new community of writing, not based in any single locale, is growing throughout the world. Its members seek each other out, and one of the main meeting-points for these seekers is the SLS program in St Petersburg. This literary community has no stationary center and depends on cornerstones such as SLS St. Petersburg: a congregation of individuals traveling to Russia in order to partake of an experience that they cannot imagine ahead of time. SLS St Petersburg, in its very special corner of the world, is championing a true dedication to literature in its most authentic sense.

Terese Svoboda (SLS Faculty '04): There I was, trying to say Ahkmatova so that Russians wouldn't laugh, standing in her home about to read my own poems into air she put her
breath into! Being also enamored of the even less pronounceable Tsvetayeva who surely met and drank those same molecules not so very long ago--at least in the geologic time which the granite promenades and sweeping cobblestone of St. Petersburg continually suggest, I dp not
read my poem dedicated to her, avoiding certain auditory slaughter. But on paper, I'm a bear. My students find their way into this Russia too, their poems assimilating Cyrillic syllabics that make their written-in-English poems sing. Soon we are haunted by historic plaques erected to writers every ten steps throughout the city, not to mention the size of the Mayakovsky statue in Moscow, and an entire town named after Pushkin. Oh, Mr. Bear dancing and nursing a bottle in the shadows of the Hermitage, you too wouldn't have written a perfect strophe, would you? A curl of wordy paper as white as the night blows by us, with a heading that reads Svoboda!

Fred Andresen (SLS '04): As the memory of July’s SLS fades over the Russian horizon, its value becomes clearer. What has become special as the days move on and I continue to rewrite on my story--and write other things is that I am writing better. After all, isn’t that what's it all about? Better writing. The quality of the workshop with John Dufresne was the best ever and I have been to many. John himself worked hard on each submission and had lots to contribute. His teaching was respectful of the student's opinions. His four pages of notes for me and an hour personal conference was so very helpful - and not unusual as I know he did the same for others.
   Equally important were the other students in our class where the level of articulate understanding and divergent perspective was unusually high. The teaching staff mixed with the students out of class sometime making it hard to tell who was who. That does not happen elsewhere. Maybe being in Russia is the difference, where, like in a lifeboat, everyone has to know and count on each other. Because of that I got to know others, Halperin, Brewer (I had to lend him shampoo), Svoboda. I made worthwhile friends.
   The value of two weeks over one is the other classes that were available--Zorin's was great, and also Padgett's one-page class was helpful, and Halperin’s poesy class was new stuff for me. The staff were super. I am sure that just because I brought those pretty girls chocolate covered almonds their good service to me was not unusual (or maybe it was.) And Jeff--the banya was lethal but inspirational. I have some pretty rosy pictures from that, but Gaylord threatened me and the negs are in his safe in Middle Tennessee, wherever that is. A few little glitches in scheduling were nothing. Hey, it's Russia , and if everything in Russia ran as well--but it doesn’t. Again, thanks for a fun and valuable time.

Catherine Alvira (SLS '04): Wow! What an experience. I'm a changed human being. The writing workshops were great, but you can participate in writing workshops anywhere nowadays. The reason to participate in SLS is to experience St. Petersburg's lush historical, cultural, and literary gems. You can visit the czar's tombs, peruse the awe-inspiring paintings of the Hermitage, take a tour of Dostoevsky's former neighborhood, and stroll by the site of Rasputin's assassination, all in a single day (well, that's ambitious, but you understand). I'll be honest -- I've never been to Russia or thought I'd every want to go -- the whole Berlin Wall/Cold War/former communist regime seemed too daunting. But I took a chance, not knowing much about Russia or SLS, and what a fantastic pay-off. The program is so well-organized, so many chances to explore the city in structured, accessible ways -- from literary walks, to palace tours, to operas and ballets, to midnight boat rides -- there's never time to just sit around in your hotel room. Lots of social gatherings, too, keeping all the writers mixing and meeting each other. It's a great opportunity to combine personal literary goals with an amazing international experience. The only requirement is the right attitude to enjoy it. SLS really takes care of the rest.

Yvonne Zipter (SLS '04): I have been home from SLS in St. Petersburg for less than a month, and already the experience has had a positive impact on my writing, with one poem about St. Petersburg completed ("At the Siege of Leningrad Museum with Valeria") and new details incorporated into my historical novel (which is set in late nineteenth-century St. Petersburg).
   The city itself was clearly central to my experience but so were Misha, Jeff, and all the young women in the SLS office, each of whom was always willing to answer my myriad questions, who helped plan exciting and interesting excursions, and who was helpful in a hundred different ways. I have also benefited from the allure of SLS's programming in that I formed friendships among my fellow seminar goers that I feel certain will be around a long, long time.
   Jet lag, scratchy toilet paper, having to use bottled water for everything--such minor concerns of travel to a foreign environment were FAR outweighed by the countless positive aspects of the SLS St. Petersburg experience.

2003

Melanie Culbertson (SLS '03): I highly recommend the SLS program. At first I was worried that the writing workshops would seem too basic or general to me because I've been in many workshops; however, they were high-quality workshops filled with bright, wonderful people. What a perfect situation: getting to see Russia and getting to hang out with a bunch of creative people. Aren't creative folks always the most interesting! Many in the group also sang, played music, and acted.
   I was surprised at the number of bus tours, walking tours, etc. organized by the staff. They worked extremely hard taking care of us, translating menus, etc. We got to see many local spots in St. Petersburg that many tourists wouldn't get to see. This city is an inspiration, in part because it's so wildly different. Where else do you see bears on leashes or people riding horses along the river, at 3 a.m., under the white nights?

Mariya Gusev (SLS '03): A brilliant concept--writing workshops taught by great people in a great location! The SLS experience in St. Petersburg is so skillfully over-scheduled, it proves to be a true "Choose Your Own Adventure" for writers--there was never a lack of things to do, whether one sought a more academic or a more leisurely time. Many hours of sleep were lost, and many new friendships were forged, and my writing continues to be influenced by what I had experienced. And if all else fails to keep you awake, there is always the Mariinski!

Dean Ellis (SLS '03): ...in between, everything: pastel palaces, blue mosques, peach-faced waitressses (with rabbit ears), borscht-haired writers (with owl eyes), orange soup, green liquor, phosphorescent clouds, holes in the sky, holes in the street, holes in the day ("It's what time?"); prose doughnuts, dreams of boxing Jesus and rescuing Joan (of Arc) and prisoners of conscience and subconscious prisons; the invisible circus, the invisible night, the invisible dead, the eternal flame snuffed by teens making their own, girls galloping down the Nevsky on horseback, the twin accordionists on the bridge; the not-blind violinist, invoking 'The Godfather' and staring straight ahead; exquisite voices echoing from crumbling courtyards, Ian's balilaikas ringing out, realgonejazz right on the river; absurd pop songs, boomboxed from the boulevard ("Little Russia, where is the love tonight?"); cello prodigies and their prodigious dads, Croat and full of chestnuts; unbroken well-spoken Hoboken poets, poetry! poetry! poetry!, dance critics doing verbal (and actual) pirouettes; bloodied ballerinas, resurrected, and their crotch-heavy princes; shirtless South Africans, resolute, doing the boogie ("What's the word? Johannesburg!"); pet bears, drunken birds (I swear!), dour faces, sculpted heads, pickled babies, juiced geniuses, marinated bolsheviks, stewed soldiers, jeweled rooms, babushki in clusters, devushki for days, pianists and Mr. Coover could you explain, again, what exactly hypertext is? (I mean I got "The Babysitter" and all that really cool deconstruction stuff, but...); gypsies and krishna and fear of gypsies, a con of mobsters and the mob of consorts: a Cairo, a pair of Adams, no Eves but Rebecci galore and tons of Tanyas, an Antony, no Cleopatra, a couple of Karens, one Jo, two Saras, a Susan, a Molly, Melanie, Marilyn and Mariya, a Monica, Lev and a Leon, lots of Lenas, a Will and a whisper of Bjork, plastered all over the city (just like Jamie); writers on safari, searching for plotlines and pizza; the herd instinct; the hookups, the hookah, the hangouts, the hoards; the museum of castration, snaking around the Academy; poplar flakes ("Stalin's snow") falling in flurries; "..the lilacs blossom in the yard..."; Celebrity Duels! Pushkin vs. D'antes, Jesus vs. Joan, Indira Gandhi vs.Marshall Tito, Bobbie Dylan vs. Katie Hepburn; "Quo vadis?" "Quo Vadis!"; prostitutes (what prostitutes?), poets (what poets!), purchases-by-point ("vat do you vant?"), classical pianists with ballgame crowds, adults with children's faces (and vice versa); churches without altars, banyas without Tanyas, Tanyas for days, das vadanyas for days; spasiba, spasiba, spasiba, spasiba, Mischa, McD's (Just once, I swear! Everything else was closed! I swear!), solyanka, chicken kiev, chocolates in Peter's palace, Seamus in Akhmatova's parlor, Sweet Caroline of Kenya, the midnight boat rides (dearjesusgod), that heartrending sculpture in the Russian Museum basement (dearjesusgod); and William Meredith, standing up to read his greatest poem, in Nabokov's study (dearjesusgod)...and absinthe, aflame.
    Of course, these are just one man's SLS bookends, everyone else has their own...

2002

Lucy Jilka (SLS '02): It's 1:00 a.m. at the outdoor café in front of Kazan Cathedral and SLSers are drinking beer or maybe water with gas and eating pistachios. The orthodox Russian proselytizing to teenagers has gone home. The babushkas have sold their flowers. The pay toilets are locked. It's not day and it's not night. Somebody asks about Daniil Kharms. Somebody else talks about (Robert) Olmstead's reading at the Akhmatova Museum.
   SLS is all about discovery in a city where East meets West, where WWII still
pockmarks St. Isaac's, where Russian and American poets pass sheets of paper
to each other beneath a sun that never sets.

Robert Creeley (SLS Faculty '02): It was extraordinary to walk those streets in such charming company as were one's peers and the students in the SLS program, witnessing such profound fact of change in the echoing city about us. To sit listening to poetry in Anna Ahkmatova's salon or to look out Alexander Blok's apartment window at the canal waters still passing were privileged glimpses into another time and place now fading into the past so quickly. Daily it seemed the city was transforming into a one having as yet no simple identity. So it was just where all writing hopes to come, so to find its inspiration and work—and "to tell what subsequently I saw and what heard."

Heather Hartley (SLS '02): Articulating a literary & life-changing experience is not particularly easy. Four weeks in Petersburg with SLS was unlike anything I have previously known. The Program has been able to carve out its niche in an amazing, not-always-easy city. The pace of the program seems to lend itself to the rhythm of Petersburg in the summer with short, intense days and long, fun nights. There are writing classes in the morning, culture and language courses in the afternoon, and white nights stretching out for hours and hours after that. In between, there is ample time to speak with and get to know a very receptive and helpful faculty. We also had the opportunity to spend time together visiting the Hermitage, experiencing the banya, riding trolleys, and tasting many blini. I am only now beginning to realize the effect that Petersburg and the people whom I met through SLS have had on my writing and life. And that is what the SLS Program encourages: the writing life--with Petersburg as a stunning and surprising backdrop. Inspiring and inspired.

Andrew Edwards (SLS '02): So for me, it was one of those rare moments in my life where I was not only meeting great people and focusing on my work, but I had made a decision about a place that I wanted to be without really knowing what I was getting myself into. The program provided a constant source of rediscovery through sometimes personalized and sometimes very depersonalized constructions created by active and engaged minds, whether it was Prigov's Buddhist Chanting of Pushkin to withstand authenticity or the very "I" in Robert Creeley's poetry that longs for the common place. We were all together, one by one, lost to this amazing city. To walk down one block and see the Church of the Spilled Blood was a dreamscape. Anyway, it sticks with me, and meeting Robert Creeley and him writing back to me was far beyond my dreams of hearing him read.

Carolyne Wright (SLS '02): This conference is a marvelous experience of literary and cultural encounter and growth. After morning lectures and discussions, as well as workshops in poetry and fiction and nonfiction, we've walked all over St. Petersburg in the afternoons, getting close to the actual sites where many great works of Russian literature were created. We strolled through Dostoyevsky's neighborhood, and saw the flats on which he modelled Raskolnikov's flat (with
multi-lingual graffiti, such as "Where's the axe, Radya?") and also the pawnbroker's flat--no axe graffiti there. Also a visit to Pushkin's comfortable upper-middle class home on one of the canals; it's a museum now to his life and times, restored to much the same condition, with period furniture and decor, as it had in the poet's life.
    We spent several hours on a bus tour to Tsarskoye Selo, the fabled Imperial Village where Anna Akhmatova lived as a child and young woman, and where the last Tsar, Nicholas II, was arrested with his family in Feb. 1917. Not quite a village--it's all palaces and gardens and pavilions, very grand, the most spectacularly beautiful site so far. Most moving were the elaborately restored neo-Classical rooms of the Catherine Palace, along with black and white photos of the ruined state of many of these rooms at the end of World War II, when the Nazi troops occupied this area during the 900-day siege of Leningrad. That was another moving experience, the visit to the mass grave and memorial site at Piskaryov. We visited there with one of the SLS staff, a yong Russian woman who had grown up very close to this site, and who narrated some of her own family's accounts of surviving the seige.
    Friday night the 21st was the height of the famous White Nights, the summer solstice, Midsummer, etc., and truly there has been no darkness at all, all night--just a deep twilight between about 1 - 3 a.m. It's very energizing--sleep is not quite optional, but after jet lag passed, many of us are doing fine without the usual 7 - 8 hours. We walked down Nevsky Prospekt, among crowds of shoppers and revellers, at midnight--it could have been 7 p.m. on a summer night in Oklahoma City! The city is really a living historical and literary museum, a sort of New Orleans of the North, built on top of a swamp at the mouth of a river, at the command of a visionary Tsar, Peter the Great. Since the end of the Soviet era, the city has been starved for funds, but now, with Vladimir Putin (a St. Petersburg native) in power, and for the 300th anniversary of the city in 2003, there's a lot of restoration and renovation work to the facades of the most important buildings.
    I will reflect on the many good meetings and new friends from the SLS. The last night, the farewell for those faculty and students who were staying only the first two weeks, was a super event--at the renowned Stray Dog Cabaret, famous literary spot where Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, and all the legendary pre-Revolution writers and poets gathered. Only New York's Algonquin Hotel with its Round Table may have the same renown and resonance as a gathering place for American writers.

2001

Liz Webster (SLS '01): There was a moment before I got on the plane when I wondered, what am I getting in to here? The answer turned out to be more supremely lovely than I ever could have guessed. The SLS crew staged a theatre of playful inquiry that at times felt blissfully interminable. I wept and jumped around in my seat at readings, hugged strangers over love of Kandinsky at the Hermitage, danced myself sweaty, and eventually became nostalgic for a place I hadn’t even left yet.
With the sun down only four or five hours the amount of life absorbed into each day defied comprehension. My own inability to tire was mystifying. In just two weeks I broke bad writing habits, discovered some good ones I thought I’d lost and picked up new ideas. If given the opportunity I would’ve stayed for the entire summer.

Josip Novakovich (SLS Faculty '98 - 02) I have been to Russia four times in a row for several reasons. I enjoy the atmosphere of St. Petersburg during the white nights—around
midnight, the old streets despite the ugliness of detail, potholes, peeling mortar, accrue amazing beautiful, with dusky, dusty pastel tones, enhanced by an occasional glimpse of light from a golden dome and shining through transparent darkness. The long forlorn streets with the ghosts of history make me melancholy in an inspiring way. I grew up reading Dostoyevsky and tried to learn from him and Gogol, so for me walking on Nevsky Prospekt, at the end of which Dostoyevsky is buried gives me a sense of being in my spiritual home. Now and then I stray into concert halls, see ballets with my daughter and cello recitals with my son, who takes lessons from a member of the Nevsky string quartet.
    The literary seminars strike me as a natural graft in this habitat—all the students enroll because of their love of writing, not for the grade, or for the MFA thesis committee. Learning without ulterior motives, suspended in the perpetual twilight of the tormented city—what could be more nicely twisted, and a bit of twistedness catalyzes our writing as well as talking about writing. Russian writers, such as Arkadii Dragomoschenko, flit about, some jovially, others gloomily, creating a provocative mix with wealthy American writers (from the Russian perspective, nearly all American writers are wealthy); there is a clash of literary cultures here, easily reconciled on the canals and in Georgian restaurants over red wine and vodka, and in the witty presence of the American/russian scholar from New York, Iampolski, who can put all the literary phenomena in an entertaining perspective.

Cynthia Gaver (SLS '01): If you've ever wondered about Russia or the Russians, the Summer Literary Seminarss is a marvelous entree into a world incomprehensibly different. It's a rich experience for a writer to study in a context like St. Petersburg, Russia -- a city and a country keenly aware of its literary and cultural history. And so aware of the power of literature.
   Mikhail has created a critical bridge for American and Russian writers to begin to understand the shape and importance of literature in times of constraint and freedom. The learning aspect of the program pushes far beyond the boundaries of the classrooms. Pulsing and present, Russia's soul is everywhere for the sentient writer/traveler. I'd recommend SLS for anyone who wants to expand his or her definition of the world and take her writing to the next level.

Ron Carlson (SLS Faculty '01): It was great. A huge window on the larger world.
    Look, everyone has been in a lot of literary venues, cities where writers lived or stories took place. I remember standing in Melville's house outside Pittsfield while the guide shook dust from the rafters with a hearty sailing song. Then we went outside and drove to lunch. St. Petersburg is still there in a way no place I know is. The stairways and the courtyards still have the years on them. It's eerie. It's good we were there during two weeks of daylight in all its incarnations because darkness, real darkness, in that faded beauty would crack you like Raskolnikov. What I took from the Russian writers was to keep it close, take a minute and then another, let it pool, but my outlook has too much America in it now, too much possibility, the opposite of looking into the dark waters of a post murder canal.
    The whole session drifts behind me these days like a dream and the inventory: the drivers, the Nevsky Prospect and the women walking there, the ubiquitous drinking, the wonderfully cheap chicken platters and buttery herring, caviar, vodka, the gypsies working the plazas, the sun in its low slingshot trajectory, shadows moving like the second hand, the creaking floors and orange water, the thrilling three a.m. twilight, the vertigo of the cathedrals, etc. etc. will at some point come off the wheel. I think being called awake to the larger world is always necessary, absolutely necessary. I worked hard with SLS, but I loved the whole deal.

Amy Boutell (SLS '01): SLS is the only program I know of that caters to both serious writers and people who simply want to explore an extraordinary city and culture. Aside from the brilliant and generous faculty, expect to meet students in various MFA programs, editors at magazines and publishing houses, talented undergrads, retired professors, Doestoevsky scholars, and maybe a pilot and a marine or two. Not to mention the amazingly charming Russian assistants who lead tours around the city, help you change money, and hang out in the lobby of the (surprisingly comfy) Herzen University Inn, located right in the center of the city, waiting to help you make the most of your experience.
    The program is very well-organized and offers plenty of activities (excursions to cathedrals and palaces and artist studios; faculty and student readings, lectures by Russian poets, American book editors and writers, big group dinners and parties), as well as time to write and explore the city at your own pace. It's incredible how much work can get done and how much fun can be had at the same time. And from the moment I was picked up at the airport (even though I'd been rerouted to another airline, without having notified SLS!), I felt incredibly taken care of.
    If you compare with other programs, SLS is quite reasonably priced; Breadloaf costs almost $1800 for ten days in Vermont! You can really make what you want out of SLS--if you're obsessed with getting published, you will certainly make connections; if you're dying to find a few good readers, you will undoubtedly meet them; if you want to try your hand at a new genre, there are plenty of opportunities to do so. If you want to meet all kinds of writers at various stages of their careers, you’ll be able to talk to first novelists and Pulitzer Prize winners alike, most likely on a midnight boatride through a canal, more often than not while passing around a bottle of vodka...So apply for another credit card, take out a small loan—you’ll have an entire year to pay it off while reading all the books you’ve discovered, finishing all the stories and poems and plays you were inspired to begin, and planning reunions and exchanging work with all your new friends.

Dagoberto Gilb (SLS Faculty '01): You arrive with an American crust of fear and forboding, like you're a fly going to that bright light (ironically, the white nights): mystery, curiosity, excitement, adventure. You fall into a distortion of reality, the heat, the never darkening day. That crust cracks off like a shell. For me, it was when I took off and found a church, a real religious place I would say, across from the Vladimirskaya metro station, and outside were these women on the sidewalk selling homegrown herbs and flowers and vegetables, and then I went inside an open air farmer's market, so lush with thick sour cream and honey, the darkest cherries and fattest dried apricots, tomatoes, beets, cabbage, you name it--fish and pig and beef still in the sweat of slaughter, all this buzz of human hunger, the colors of the produce against white smocks.
   I finished Crime & Punishment there (had ambitiously brought The Devils with me as well, but not close to getting to it). I have a thing about time--I don't really believe so much in it. You walk Nevsky Prospekt, and it's now. You understand Raskolnikov. And all the issues are the same, nothing has altered. You still understand his passion for keeping his sister from marrying the rich jerk bureaucrat to save her family, for him feeling linked to Sonya the prosititute. You are still bothered by his so cold "compassion."
   For me, before, if I were to think of Russia, I had no image--well, the only images were of hats, Lenin's and of cossacks, and those fur ones, and snow. You go there, you see the human faces, the streets and canals, the Neva, all the sudden it is a real place of immense palaces and dark, pitiless apartments. I also saw Dostoyevsky's melodramatic style so much more clearly--his lack of place description, filled in by my being there, I found overcome by these long, seething, fascinating intellectual dialogues, which I come away thinking is also so much of what happens in the city.

James Wallenstein (SLS '01) What made my two weeks at SLS so good? Petersburg, for one thing. But for another, and maybe even more importantly, the other people on the program, some thirty or forty of them, and virtually no duds! You have only to consider the percentage in any other group you know to see how remarkable this is. How did it happen? I can't say for sure, but I have a strong suspicion that the man at the helm really knows how to read between the lines (He also knows how to read the lines themselves, but that's another story.), and chooses his crew by what he discovers there. Except on those occasions when I decided to keep myself company, I found intelligence, sympathy, and humor everywhere I turned. And in the background, an imperial city whose monuments floated in the snow-flurry of a myriad poplar seeds.

Jessica Anthony (SLS '01): A loose idea of Russia drew me to the SLS program. Loose, raw, somewhat unshaped and quite likely unsubstantiated; only /russia/snapshots of images
from television, magazines and translations of Russian literature. After spending a month living in St. Petersburg, I assure you, the real Russia exists. And it is unimaginable. I could give you details about the aspects of Russian life that struck me the most, but that seems to me to be false somehow. I wouldn't want to try and begin to craft for you an expectation
of what you will find there, because a writer's experience is his own. So go, and go blindly. Embrace surprises; write them down, and be changed.

Josh Melrod (SLS '01): Besides making lots of new friends and benefiting from a tremendously enriching workshop, what I enjoyed most about SLS was the opportunity to live and experience St. Petersburg. Such an inspiring and chaotic city; I would gamely stare at the buildings and the traffic all day and not tire of it. A strange arhythmic pulse beats there, and when you're walking home at three a.m. in the pale blue twilight, it's easy to see why so many great writers chose this particular city to live and die.

Stacy Bierlein (SLS '01): SLS is a one-of-a-kind program for writers who crave travel, and travelers in love with language and literature. The workshops inspire and the events amaze--Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover reading at the Anna Akhmatova Museum, Robert Coover presenting hypertext at a grand theater museum, Constance Congdon creating a stage play right before your eyes. Where else can you discuss contemporary fiction with Josip Novakovich and Aimee Bender while cruising one of history's great rivers? You'll follow the trails of Dostovesky's novels, stroll the landscape of Akhmatova's poems. A favorite discovery of many 2001 participants was the Museum of Oddities, and really the entire city may seem a sort of Museum of Oddities, streets filled with galleries of the unexpected. Every corner you turn you'll see a wonder of architecture, crowds of bright eyes, scenes you might not have known you had the words to describe. My partner, always teasing, jokes that I have lived a book nerd's dream, and I think he's right. It's an incredible thing. This program is a great gift, and its founding director, Mikhail Iossel, deserves high praise.

2000

Susan Smith Nash (SLS ’00): My expectations were very high and I wasn't disappointed! I had a great time--I loved the flexibility of the schedule, which allowed me to focus on the topics and writing projects that I found to be most compelling.  The instructors, writers in residence, local professors, and the staff were fantastic--I was very impressed by the fact that the instructors were extremely knowledgeable scholars as well as being very effective teachers. Liz Rosenberg taught my poetry workshop, and she was spectacular.  Her writing activities, suggestions, and readings were consistently engaging, and she took a real interest in her students.  I've taken many writing classes, both creative and non, and I have to say that this was the best I've ever experienced. As for St. Petersburg in July--amazing! It was incredible to be able to walk to the Russian Museum and to see works of the Russian Futurists--ones I had only read about, or had seen in traveling exhibits at the Guggenheim in New York or in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona.  In fact, there were so many museums, parks, palaces, fortresses, writers' homes, artists' studios to see, it was difficult to make time for dancing all night and going to nearby lakes to swim on weekends, but we managed (!)
    Russians are intriguing people, and they were helpful and patient, especially if you made the effort to communicate Russian Version (even with a lot of mistakes). Finally, the work that was produced by the members of the seminar was incredibly good--we read at a reading the last night, and it was stunning to see the high caliber of the work produced.  I'm planning to come back next year!!

Liz Rosenberg (SLS ’00 Faculty): SLS is based on a brilliant idea: to learn something about the world and to hone one's craft as a writer at the same time. Like most brilliant ideas, it is both simple and rare. I wish there were more programs remotely like this one.  But of course SLS is, by its very nature, inimitable. St. Petersburg is a writer's city; it may be the most exciting and beautiful and difficult city in the world, rich with literary history: home to Pushkin, Ahkmatova, Doestoevsky, et. al. It is also a city for all of the arts, filled with some of the best museums and theaters in the world-- and available to visitors at (relatively) bargain prices.  The seminar involved not only American and Russian writers, people actively engaged in their teaching and their art, but  students who were gifted, self-motivated, adult in the true sense of the word. This, and the miracle of being strangers in a strange land together, led to an unusual comradery, with none of the hierarchical divisions that can make these summer workshops an exercise. 
    Together, in well-organized, loosely organized and/or spontaneous gatherings, faculty and students met to travel to the Winter Palace, Summer Palace, to readings and seminars, to the home of gifted Russian visual artists; we came together for lunch, for coffee and pastries, for shopping expeditions, for late-night dancing, talking, walking, and (for some) drinking.  The itinerary allows for plenty of freedom--flirting at times with anarchy--freedom within structure, allowing writers time to actually do their writing, and to experience the complicated miracle that is St. Petersburg. Larry Wright, the much-published New Yorker staff writer, taught a class on non-fiction that involved students proposing, investigating and writing stories for the St. Petersburg Times, a fine English-language newspaper in the city. My class would break for coffee together each day in a local cafe, and often continue there after the official class time had ended. Our last two weeks together ended in an unforgettable night-time boat ride through the canals of St. Petersburg (cleaner than Venice) during the twilight hours of Russia's famed summer White Nights.
    Mikhail Iossel, the program's director is flexible, imaginative, and, importantly, a writer himself. He seems to intuitively understand what writers need most: a mix of free and scheduled time, a wide variety of possibilities, dedicated students and  teachers, brilliant visiting writers from America, Russia and elsewhere. I taught wonderful, eclectic students. I wrote poems. My family, colleagues, students and I heard  terrific readings, traveled together by bus, taxi and hydroplane to see great paintings, cathedrals, palaces, ballets, the brilliant bustle of a city more filled with art and with literature than any other in the world. Not for the faint-hearted, SLS is nonetheless one of the most valuable venues I know for writers looking to expand both their craft and their knowledge of the world. Samuel Johnson wrote, "A man who is tired of London is tired of life," but anyone who tires of St. Petersburg was probably never alive to begin with.

Irina Kendall (SLS ’00): I guess it's easiest to say of the program that it will never be what you  expect.  I thought I would come, lock myself in my room, and write until my  fingertips fell off.  This is far from what happened.  The experience of SLS is so much one of community and support, that any plans you make, or schedule you set, are sure to go to pot in no time.  I was entranced by white nights and distracted by fantastic people, and when I returned home I realized that not only had I written anyway but it was some of the best writing I had done in a long time.  I found the writer that I am came to terms with a lot of self-doubt I had and grew immeasurably in the two weeks I spent with SLS.  I wouldn't promise that it's perfect for everyone, but I would certainly encourage taking the chance.

William Jack (SLS ’00): I've never attended a writers' workshop that was so intensive and so helpful, with so much individual attention from people who know so much and are so willing to share. The workshop sessions alone would have been worth twice the price.  But added to them are lectures and discussions with local writers, poets, critics, and historians....not to mention the benefits of living in the center of a fascinating, unreal city loaded with literary history, guaranteed to make any writer write. And, the bars don't close until 8:00 AM.

Sarah Ossipow (SLS ’00): Having had the oppurtunity to attend the entire four-week session of SLS, I can recommend it to everybody who likes reading, writing and spending a good time in a city as beautiful as St.-Petersburg. I am not a native English speaker, but I must say that it wasn't a problem at all, because people are tolerant about it. I found the non-fiction seminars extremely enlightening and I appreciated how the teachers encouraged us to keep writing. I also appreciated how they shared their experiences about their own writing. For a European, it was very interesting to discover writers from the U.S. Personally, this experience was quite fruitful for me, as I've just finished an article based on an interview of the choreographer Boris Eifman whom I had the oppurtunity to interview there. In short, I'm very enthusiastic about my stay in St. Petersburg.

Gaylord Brewer (SLS '00): The doubts and minor inconveniences of the first week in St. Petersburg gave way to a sense of wonder and appreciation during the second. It's a remarkable city, full of deep resonances, and I like the relaxed, familial approach Mikhail Iossel takes to running his program. I wish I'd been able to stay the full time, and I look forward to a return. Good, cheap booze; plenty of smoked fish and caviar; world-class art and literature; haunting architecture; a challenging and fascinating people; a tough language; unforgettable plumbing. I don't think a day has passed since I got home that Russia hasn't rumbled bittersweet and hungry through my dreams.

John Owens (SLS '00): The Russian play I picked up while at SLS last summer, "Adrift" by Alexander Obratzsov is being done in Grand Rapids, Michigan, April 19 thru the 22, 2001. I have produced and directed it and I was able to get funding for it from 4 different nonprofit sources to cover production costs and to bring Marina Shron and Melissa Smith to Grand Valley State University as visiting professors and to attend the opening of the play. I finally was able to get funding to bring the author here, but it appears that he will not be able to attend for personal reasons. If anyone wonders whether SLS can do them any good academically (after they get their transcripts that is) this production as my Master's project was a large factor in my acceptance into the Ph.D. in Theatre program at Arizona State University next fall (including a free ride, assistantship and scholarship). Who knows maybe someday I can return as faculty.

1999