April 27, 2006 podcast

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Local "Happenings" in the Arts

Local Arts Events from the Mississippi Press Coast Calendar

Thursday, April 27—The Creative Crochet Club meets every Thursday from 10 a.m. to noon at Ina Thompson Moss Point Library. Meet others who are crazy for crochet. Get ideas for new projects, exchange yarns, learn new stitches and get tips on where to get supplies. There is new leadership for this group. Call the library at (228) 475-7462 or Nina Bratt at (228) 475-7990 for details.

Thursday, April 27—Gulf Coast Opera Salon will meet at 10 a.m. at the home of Anneliese Lyons, 2017 Pointe Clear Drive, Biloxi. Members are asked to bring finger foods. Call Pat East at (228) 818-5609 or Rosemary Wallace at (228) 385-1099.

Saturday, April 29—Friends of the Ocean Springs Library book sale from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the library, 525 Dewey Ave. Ocean Springs.

Saturday, April 29—My Higher Nature book and gift store is hosting its fourth psychic/alternative health fair from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the store, 1111 Robinson Ave., Ocean Springs; more than 30 healing arts practitioners will offer their services. Call (228) 872-9711 for details.




Art show highlights student talents
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
By ALLISON MATHER
PASCAGOULA -- About 50 students at the Pascagoula School District Opportunity Center will display their art work and creative writings at the school's first art show tonight.
The show is the culmination of a program students have been involved in since the fall when the school was given a grant to implement arts education.
"It's called Communities in Schools and it's a grant to work with at-risk kids," said opportunity center principal Tina Bankston.
Professional writers and artists have come into the school to conduct art classes in a school that is often the last chance students in Pascagoula School District get to shape up before they're shipped out. About 80 students have participated in the classes.
Bankston said the program has improved student performance and behavior.
"Some of the kids will come to school more if they know that it's art day, if they have something to look forward to," she said. "It's just a motivation for them."
Teacher Helen Cooper said she's noticed positive changes in her students who have taken part in the art classes.
"The kids that may not be academic, some of them have found a niche in art," she said. "I think that overall it's improved their self esteem, their confidence in doing something well."
"I'd say it's helped all of them in some way," Cooper continued. "It's really been a good incentive for them and a great program."
Author Beverly Blasingame worked with students in the creative writing classes. She said she noticed changes in student behavior and esteem.
"I've seen them go from little short, undetailed (writings) with their first drafts to more detail, more sensory appeal," she said. "I've seen a lot more description and concrete detail and ability to express emotion,"
Many students approached the program with the expectation of not being able to write, Blasingame said. However, writing assignments and exercises helped them grow, she said.
"I think they have a lot more pride and confidence in what they do, and to me that's the big thing. It's not just about writing, it's about life," she said.
Sophomore Taylor Wilkerson said he has been involved in the art classes for about three months. He said he's looking forward to the art show and has enjoyed the chance to be creative.
"We did pastels, chalk," Wilkerson
"We did clay art. We did chalk drawings," classmate Robert Horton added.
Wilkerson said the art classes are better than regular lecture classes.
"It's more one-on-one than a regular classroom," Wilkerson said.
Horton agreed.
"You can have a peace of mind and you can focus," Horton said.
Reporter Allison Mather can be reached at amather@themississippipress.com or (228) 934-1495.

Read the actual online article here.




Choirs prep for show
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
PASCAGOULA -- The Pascagoula High School IMPACT Show Choir rehearsed for hours Monday, hammering out the details in preparation for their annual spring variety show.
The show, which will feature the show choir and varsity concert choir, will be at 7 p.m. Friday at the Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College's Jackson County Campus gym in Gautier.
"We call it a variety show because there's not just singing and dancing, or just singing. I have solos, duets ... we just do a conglomeration of stuff," said choral director Shanna Luckett.
About 90 singers, dancers, stagehands and instrumentalists will bring their performance season to a close with the public performance.
The show choir placed in the top three at all four of their regional contests this year, winning the Petal Show Choir Invitational. The concert choir received a rating of "excellent" at the District 8 choral festival this spring.
Admission to the performance is $5, with all proceeds going to fund the annual choral awards banquet in May. Concessions will also be available for purchase.

Read the actual online article here.



Bluff Creek Music Festival Story

Local kids arts camps being planned

Ocean Springs plays host to “Mary C” Writing Weekend



More from the Mississippi Press online:

Sounds by the Sea set for May 28 in Pascagoula
PASCAGOULA -- Mark your calendar for Memorial Day weekend, Sunday, May 28, at 7 p.m. The fifth annual "Sounds by the Sea" celebration will feature a free outdoor musical celebration by the Gulf Coast Symphony.
The concert is free to the public and will take place at Beach Park in Pascagoula. The night will include wonderful patriotic music, food and a spectacular fireworks display.
"We are excited to once again have this glorious and moving concert, featuring patriotic music, on Memorial Day weekend," said Amy Brandenstein, Sounds by the Sea event chairwoman.
The night will begin with music from the Freedom Chorus, made up of community residents, followed up by a spectacular and memorable concert by the Gulf Coast Symphony Orchestra. Jerry St. Pé will emcee the event this year.
Sponsorships are available at several different levels. Call the Gulf Coast Symphony at (228) 435-9800 for more information.
Underwriters of this year's concert currently include the Jackson County Board of Supervisors, the cities of Pascagoula, Moss Point and Gautier, Chevron Pascagoula Refinery, Northrop Grumman, Sav-Rex Your Family Pharmacy and The Mississippi Press.

UM announces music camp registration
MOBILE, Ala. -- The University of Mobile Center for Performing Arts has opened registration for the 13th annual Summer Music Camp. The camp is scheduled for June 12-16 and will be in Moorer Auditorium on the UM campus.
To reserve a place in the camp, contact camp director Barbara Laurendine in UM's Center for Performing Arts at (251) 442-2402 or go to www.umobile.edu/smc for a copy of the brochure and a registration form.
The registration deadline for UM's Summer Music Camp is June 1. The camp specializes in inspiring young musicians to increase technical proficiency, expand knowledge of music literature and develop performing skills in their area of choice.
The day camp is open to students rising into grades 4-12 for the 2006-07 school year. Students are required to have completed a minimum of one year of disciplined study on a music instrument and submit a recommendation by their music teacher.
Areas of musical focus include: voice, piano, all symphonic instruments, chamber music, guitar and composition. In addition, senior campers may take jazz guitar.
Cost of attendance is $155 for junior camp (grades 4-7) and $175 for senior class (grades 8-12). An additional $20 application fee is required. Full-tuition and partial-tuition scholarships are available by audition.
Audition applications are available upon receipt of registration form. Registration deadline for scholarship auditions is May 18. Auditions will be May 25, beginning at 1 p.m. in Martin Hall on the UM campus.
Contact UM's Center for Performing Arts at (251) 442-2402 or visit www.umobile.edu/smc for more information about the camp.


Ballet Competition's Dance School, Teachers' Workshop
JACKSON, Miss. -- The USA International Ballet Competition recently made applications for the 2006 USA IBC International Dance School and Teachers' Workshop available.
The event, held concurrently with the competition, will take place in Jackson June 17-July 1. Potential students can download applications from the USA IBC Web site at www.usaibc.com.
The International Dance School provides an opportunity for intermediate- and advanced-level ballet students, ages 12 or older, to study with some of the world's leading dance teachers.
Students can attend competition performances in the evenings as well as attend a wide variety of dance-related exhibits, lectures and classes. Curriculum for the two-week program includes ballet, jazz, modern, contemporary and character work and the USA IBC arranges students' food and lodging during their stays in Jackson.
The USA IBC International Dance School and Teachers' Workshop are sponsored by the Chisholm Foundation, Dance Teacher Magazine and Merrill Lynch. Visit www.usaibc.com or call (601) 355-9853 for more information about the USA IBC and its companion programs.
The USA IBC is a two-week "olympic-style" competition, where tomorrow's ballet stars vie for gold, silver and bronze medals; cash awards and scholarships. Designated as the official USA competition by a Joint Resolution of Congress and sanctioned by UNESCO, the USA IBC is held every four years, in the tradition of sister competitions in Varna, Bulgaria, and Moscow, Russia. The next USA IBC will be June 17-July 2 in Jackson.

USA International Ballet Competition ticket packages now available
JACKSON, Miss. -- All-inclusive ticket packages for the 2006 USA
International Ballet Competition (USA IBC), scheduled for June 17-July 2 at Thalia Mara Hall, will go on sale to the public Jan. 2.
Ticket packages include admission to all 16 performances during the two-week event and are discounted 15 percent off the price of individual performance tickets. Individual performance tickets will be available for purchase April 3.
Every four years, Mississippi dance enthusiasts are part of an international audience that converges in Jackson to see some of the world's best dancers perform in dazzling competition. Because of the popularity of the event, the public is encouraged to purchase tickets in advance.
All-inclusive packages include tickets for each round of competition, as well as the opening ceremony and the awards gala. Package prices are $202 for rear-orchestra and lower-balcony seating, $275 for loge and orchestra seating and $339 for dress-circle seating.
Each night, the USA IBC offers spectacular dance performances from the classical and contemporary ballet repertoire. Typically, audience members who attend each performance develop a preference for their favorite dancers and cheer them on to advance to the next round.
For more ticket information or to order packages for the 2006 USA IBC, call USA IBC Box Office Manager Aislynn Thomas at (601) 973-9249, Monday through Friday, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Additional ticket information can be found at www.usaibc.com.


GLT granted rights to produce the musical CATS'
GULFPORT -- The Rodgers and Hammerstein Theatre Library has granted Gulfport Little Theatre the rights to produce the Broadway musical "CATS."
Auditions will be in May. Production dates are scheduled for July 14, 15, 16, 21, 22 and 23.
Audition notices will be published at a later date.
Call Lee Green Pope at (228) 864-7261 or Jackie Dauphin at (228) 875-7268 for more information.

A hearty congratulations to band directors of the year

Louise Thomas (who has been band director at Gautier Middle School for four years) and Joe Cacibauda (from Ocean Springs High) have been recognized by their peers and named the Gulf Coast Band Directors Association's Middle School and High School Band Directors of the Year for 2006.

Keeping a Writer's Journal--21 Ideas to Keep You Writing

(From The Writing World listserv)


KEEPING A WRITER'S JOURNAL: 21 Ideas to Keep You Writing
=================================================================
by Sheila Bender

Keeping a journal is one of the best tools to practice trusting
your writing and to make sure you keep writing. You can keep a
journal in a cheap or an expensive notebook, on scraps of paper
dropped into a box, in computer files or in letter form. Just as
long as you write as much and as often as you can without editing
yourself and you have access to the words you've written, you are
keeping a journal.

If you haven't been journaling or doing it as often as you wish,
think about where you write and when you are likely to have time
to write. If this is away from home, be sure the notebook you
choose is one you like carrying with you. Train yourself to keep
your notebook with you. If you are most likely to write at home,
keep your notebook in a place in your home where you like to sit.
If your favorite way to keep a journal is using a computer,
accommodate yourself by naming folders in ways that will amuse
you and make you feel good about opening them. If you use
different computers at home and at work, you might want to email
entries to yourself and keep them on one computer in one file.
There is also a wonderful software product out now called
LifeJournal. If you like to use your computer to journal, this
product provides prompts, inspirational quotes, a way to review
your journaling each week to find out what you've been dealing
with and a easy to use and thorough way to assign topics so you
can always retrieve what you've written about in certain areas.

It may seem intimidating to develop the journal-keeping habit,
and you may be thinking defeatist thoughts already, such as "I
can't do this regularly forever. I don't know how many times a
week I'll really remember," and so on. However, you can commit
to keeping your journal if you shorten the time of your
commitment and promise yourself you will not judge your efforts,
but just write. If you are already keeping a journal, you might
commit to using the ideas below sprinkled in among your regular
entries.

Make a specific commitment for a month. For example, tell
yourself that for this month you can make an entry every day or
every other day or perhaps on weekends or on Mondays and Fridays.
Write your commitment down in your journal, and then, whatever
you decided, make sure you write at least that often. You might
want to start the month off with an entry that describes why you
created the system you did and why you bought the notebooks and
pens or pencils or made the files or why you committed the
particular amount of time that you did. At the end of the month,
use your last entry to evaluate how your system worked for you.
Decide in that entry whether you want to stick with your original
system for another month, make some alterations in it, or move on
to a different system. After you write that last entry for the
month, reread your very first entry. How do your
end-of-the-month thoughts about journal-keeping compare to those
you wrote down at the beginning of your month? You might want to
write about the comparison.

Next, make a commitment to the same system or to a new
journal-keeping system for an additional month. Write this
commitment down in your journal and then keep your entries going
for another month. Do this month by month until keeping a journal
is a habit.

Here are 21 ideas to help make keeping your commitment
effortless:

Idea 1: A Travel Journal
------------------------
When you travel, write about your surroundings. Describe the
rooms, buildings, streets, landscapes, people, and activities in
which you are involved. Jot down dialogues and conversation.
Describe yourself in your new surroundings, being sure to show how
you react to the people around you.

Idea 2: Journal Your Journaling
-------------------------------
Choose an activity other than journal keeping and keep a journal
for several consecutive days about that activity. Some examples
might be: training a puppy, having a visitor, planting a garden,
or searching for the perfect gift for someone. Or take the same
walk on journal entry days and write about the walk each time you
take it. Whatever you do, capture your thoughts and behavior as
you do the activity you have chosen to journal about.

Idea 3: Word Meditations
------------------------
Locate five words from anywhere around you: your bulletin board,
a newspaper headline, a shopping bag, a warning label, or a card
in your wallet. Write each of the five words on a scrap of paper
and put the scraps in a bowl or hat. Choose one scrap and begin
to write about that word. Write for ten to twenty minutes without
stopping or editing yourself.

Idea 4: Tidbits, Odds and Ends
------------------------------
On some days you might just want to enter an apt phrase or
description or an ironic question that comes to mind. Leave them
as short paragraphs entered under dates. Someday you might
collect them under one title, such as "Winter Thoughts" or "What
My Mind Wandered to in Spring."

Idea 5: Your Writing Process
----------------------------
If you are engaged in writing anything -- a story, poem, essay,
play, or paper for school or for work -- make some entries about
your writing process. Be sure to say what your feelings are as
you begin, revise, and finish what you are working on. What
questions do you ask yourself? What are you learning that helps
you write? What do you think you are working against?

Idea 6: Poems
-------------
Do entries in the form of poems, even if you don't think what you
are writing about is poetic. Take what might seem prose-like and
chop the paragraphs into lines like a poem. When you see the
writing this way, you might find that images stand out, and with
some editing (such taking out extra words), you could have a rich
piece of writing.

Idea 7: Letters
---------------
Write letters you would never mail. Tell old boyfriends what
you'd like them to know now that you are older or wiser or
dumber. Tell family members or friends something you never told
them before. Tell a toy from childhood or a teacher from long
ago about something that makes you think of them now. Try
writing their letter back to you. Make a list of people and pets
and objects you remember from your childhood and make entries
from time to time in the form of ten- to twenty-minute freewrites
(where you keep writing without editing or stopping yourself)
about a person, pet or object on this list.

Idea 8: Worries
---------------
Sometimes unloading professional worries and goals into a journal
clears space for the writing self. You can allow one day a week
or a month for this kind of entry.

Idea 9: Revision for the Fun of It
----------------------------------
Choose something you have already written in your journal. Begin
to revise it, imagining an editor has asked you for a specific
kind of piece -- a memory piece, a poem, an essay on bus
riding -- and you have gone to your journal (inventory) to find
something and develop it. Don't worry about perfection. Instead,
try to make the revision into something that will interest the
editor.

Idea 10: Fellow Enthusiasts
---------------------------
Meet with someone who shares your interest in something --
gardening, fishing, knitting, reading, baking -- and then write
about your meeting with the person and the person's knowledge of
the topic.

Idea 11: Weather Center
-----------------------
Become sensitive to the weather and try describing the weather in
your journal entries. Put your eyes and ears to work on how the
weather affects the landscape, sky, people, animals, buildings,
and vehicles. Write it so that when you reread that entry, you
feel as if you are in the weather.

Idea 12: Writing From Where You Are
---------------------------------
Write entries that describe where you are as you write. Even if
you write from the same place every day, describe it as it seems
to you at the moment. Things change -- what is on the desk, out
the window, under your feet -- and you will become a keen observer.


Idea 13: Prompts
----------------
Challenge yourself to write using a prompt. For example, "The
last thing I ate before I sat down to write this entry was
_______ and the next thing I might eat is______. This is because
_______.

When I look up from the page, the first thing I see is_____. I
like/don't like this because_________.

If I could describe the place I am sitting to a set designer for
a movie or play, here is what I would say: ___________.

Here are five things I should not have put in the trash and why.

Here are five things I ought to put in the trash and why.

When I go to the White House for dinner, I always wear my
__________ and take along my _________. That way _________.

When the nightly news director put words under the shot of me to
identify me to the people, the words were ________. This is what
had happened: _________.

Write a list of five to ten prompts of your own that you can use
from time to time. Or ask a friend to invent some for you to use.

Idea 14: The Alphabet
---------------------
Make the alphabet your friend. Challenge yourself to put down
your thoughts entry by entry with titles that start, with each
letter of the alphabet for 26 continuous entries. Or challenge
yourself to start each entry itself for 26 days with words that
begin with the alphabet's letters in order. Or write 26
meditations, one each on each letter of the alphabet.

Idea 15: Reading Lists
----------------------
After you read books, write reviews of them in your journal.

Idea 16: Library Searches
-------------------------
Go to library online catalogs and investigate a subject and
writer. Search for some of the books. Write about your search.

Idea 17: Responses to Writers' Groups and Writers
-------------------------------------------------
Write about your creative writing class, your writers' group,
your reaction to a writer you are reading.

Idea 18: Radio or TV
--------------------
Turn on the radio or TV for twenty seconds. Write about what you
heard.

Idea 19: Other People's Entries
-------------------------------
Invent journal entries your friends or relatives or bosses might
write. If you are a fiction writer, invent journal entries your
characters might write.

Idea 20: Your Journal-Writing Employee
--------------------------------------
Invent a persona for your journal -- a character who is employed
as a journal writer for you, whose job it is to make entries on a
schedule you propose, someone whose creativity in dreaming up new
ways to approach the genre will be rewarded. Write the job
description in your journal. Write the interview with the job
applicant. Assign this persona a wardrobe, a history, a reason
why he or she wants this job. Write your new employee's entries.
Let him or her react to the world and the people around him or
her.

Idea 21: You Are of Age
-----------------------
Use the journal to write whatever it is you want to write! There
is no wrong way to keep a journal; it is for your eyes only or
for the eyes of exactly who you want to see it.

However you do it, you will probably come to an understanding as
the poet does in Lydia Davis' novel, The End of the Story
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995). She considers a title for her
collection of material and thinks:

"The best possibility may be MATERIAL -- TO BE USED, which does
not go as far as to say that it is ready but only that in some
way it will be used, though it does not have to be used, even if
it is good enough to use."

If you learn to look at journal material the way Davis' character
does, keeping a journal becomes the best kind of inventory --
always there and never taxed. It might need some dusting off,
but that is part of the pleasure for a writer who reaches into
old material and begins to use it for essays, poems, articles and
stories.

>>-----------------------------------------------------<<

Sheila Bender is a writing teacher, poet, essayist, columnist and
the author of many books, the best known being books on personal
essay writing and journaling. She runs
http://www.writingitreal.com -- an online instructional and
informational magazine for those who write from personal
experience. Her latest book is "Writing and Publishing Personal
Essays". For more information, visit http://www.sheilabender.com/

Copyright (c) 2006 by Sheila Bender