Prices Starting At:
$255/night (per person) - Single Occupancy
$193/night (per person) - Double Occupancy
* All Inclusive
This session is SOLD OUT. Click the link below to see additional availability for this program on June 13-16.
Join a group of like-minded women for a reading and writing retreat. Activities will include writing workshops, reflective paddling, arts-based activities, technical writing, experiential learning, and Adirondack-based readings to contemplate the role of sense of place in nature writing.
Great Camp Sagamore is pleased to offer this workshop in collaboration with the Adirondack Center for Writing of Saranac Lake, an organization dedicated to building a community of reading, writing and listening across the Adirondack region. This weekend is dedicated to the memory of Anne LaBastille, whose passion for the Adirondacks led to her writing the landmark series of "Woodswoman" books documenting her experiences and observations of the natural world. This program is made possible through the Anne LaBastille Estate.
Choose from a two-night or a three-night option. Formal instruction will begin on Friday evening after dinner. New this year, the paddle excursion on Twitchell Lake, the lake on which Anne LaBastille built her cabin, will occur in the afternoon on Friday. Those signing up for the two night option may arrive early on Friday to participate in paddle if they so choose.
Instructor
Mary Sanders Shartle
Mary Sanders Shartle is a poet, fiction, and essay writer. Her novel about a woman living alone in the Adirondacks: The Truth and Legend of Lily Martindale, is available from SUNY Press. She was awarded a 2007 individual artist’s grant from the New York State Council of the Arts, a state agency, to complete the book. The novel has since won a number of prizes including the ALA Indie Fab award for best fiction, IPPY gold medal for best novel in the Northeast, SUNY’s Editors Choice award, and two awards from the Adirondack Center for Writing (best fiction and people’s choice.) In January, 2014 she was a finalist in the Tupelo Press Open Prose competition. The story, “The Spider Web” appeared in their on-line Quarterly.
Shartle has been very involved in Great Camp Sagamore in Raquette Lake, hosting programs like book groups for Road Scholar historical residencies and an annual women’s writing workshop for the Adirondack Center for Writing through the Anne LaBastille Foundation. She has also hosted book groups for the Galway Public Library in Galway, New York, through the New York State Council on Humanities.
She is a member of “The Three Poets” with colleagues Marilyn McCabe and Elaine Handley, who were three times winners of the Adirondack Center for Writing Literary Award for best book of poetry for their chapbooks Notes from the Fire Tower–Three Poets on the Adirondacks (2005) and Glacial Erratica: Three Poets on the Adirondacks, Part 2 (2006); and Winterberry, Pine: Three Poets on North Country Winter (2010). Their full length book, Tear of the Clouds, was released by Ra Press in 2011.
Shartle has taught numerous writing workshops for adults, children and teens. She is one of eighteen authors and also co-editor of A History of Bethesda Episcopal Church: Worship and Healing in Saratoga Springs (2018). She was an editorial committee member and contributor to The Galway Story Quilt: Poems of a Place by the People Who Live Here, published in 2007 which won the Joseph Shubert Award for Library Excellence, New York State’s most prestigious library award.
Shartle was the director of the Saratoga Poetry Zone in Saratoga Springs, New York from 2004 until 2007, hosting poets such as Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Dan Hoffman and Rachel Hadas. She has been a board member of the Adirondack Center for Writing.
