Director's Note 4/1/12

April 1, 2012

The grass outside my window is a fierce green. A very-early-spring triumphal green. Who could have imagined that the star magnolia would have already lost most of its thick white tepals? Its more delicate neighbor, the lily magnolia, is still clinging to its flowers but the scent has fled, carried off in the wind or evaporated in the sunshine. Leaves are erupting like a fine green mist high up in the elms, daffodils and forsythia are making their colorful claims closer to the ground, frogs are leaping in and out of the lake, and the turkeys are on patrol. Patrick caught a group—or rather a rafter, as Willy explains--of 23 on video last week.

This unexpected profusion has acted as a natural accelerant for our programming, and we are adding events and workshops, camps and classes to the calendar every day. We just confirmed another writer-in-residence workshop for early June with poet Rod Smith—a collaborative endeavor with Woodland Pattern. Those who attended the workshop with Elizabeth Robinson and Edward Smallfield last June, or stopped in for the closing reading, will recall just how wonderful it is to spend five days at Lynden looking, writing, walking and listening. We are on the verge of announcing a special performance event for July 15, Coming (and Going) Attractions, that we’ve been cooking up with Alverno Presents. We hope it will coincide with the conclusion of Roy Staab’s Lynden residency; he has agreed to make a new work at Lynden this summer and we imagine he’ll be working with campers and visitors, too. We’ll keep you posted!

We begin April with a visit from author Amy Krouse Rosenthal. The following weekend we host the first of our dog days (yes! why shouldn’t the dogs come for a visit ?) and offer an all-ages workshop on turning t-shirts into tote bags. On Earth Day we’ll be flying kites at Lynden, and at the very end of the month our Coracle Craft boatbuilding workshop gets underway. Take a moment during a visit to view Haiti and the Midwestern Imagination, our current exhibition.


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