Welcome to VCCA's community newsletter focused on keeping Fellows, staff, and supporters connected. Fall is officially here! In honor of the shift in seasons, it's time for our "Wednesday Lemonade" newsletter to dress up as "Wednesday Cider" until springtime.

Today we share news from the kitchen at Mt. San Angelo, where the fall spirit is alive and well. In more highly autumnal news, we invite you to take part in this month's Fall Volunteer Day at Mt. San Angelo and to cozy up around the virtual fireplace in our next livestream event.

Applications for Fall 2022 residencies at Mt. San Angelo opened on the first of the month. Below, we highlight four fully-funded fellowships included in the application. If you know someone who's eligible for these opportunities, please help spread the word before the January 15 deadline.

We also have a November 1 application deadline coming up for VCCA Fellows interested in a residency at the Moulin à Nef in Auvillar France. France is doing a great job of containing the virus with positivity rates much lower than those in the U.S.

Residency season at VCCA's Moulin à Nef in Auvillar, France, officially started on September 27 with the arrival of Hester Simpson, our first Fellow in residence there since December of 2019!

🔶 Residency space in 2021 is currently available at the Moulin à Nef from October 25 – December 14. We also have residency time available from March 14 – December 15, 2022. Residencies begin on a Monday and typically end on a Thursday. Apply by November 1, 2021.

Questions? Please email Resident Director Cheryl Fortier.

Writers, visual artists, and composers are invited to apply to Fall 2022 residencies at Mt. San Angelo in Virginia. Residencies will be scheduled between September 1 and December 31, 2022.

🔶 Alonzo Davis Fellowship for American writers, visual artists, and composers of African or Latin American descent

🔶 Sara Pennypacker Fellowship for composers of music for children

🔶 Steven Petrow LGBTQ Fellowship for writers who self-identify as LGBTQ

🔶 Richard S. and Julia Louise Reynolds Poetry Fellowship for poets

The dining room is decorated with pumpkins, and our outdoor dining spaces (have you seen the video of our tent raising?) are a great way to enjoy the season.

Date: Saturday, October 23, 2021

Time: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. ET

Location: VCCA @ Mt. San Angelo

Sign up to volunteer.

Amanda Galvan Huynh was the inaugural recipient of the Reynolds Poetry Fellowship in 2019. She is a Mexican American writer and educator from Texas. She is the author of a chapbook, Songs of Brujería and co-editor of Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics.

Patricia Spears Jones, a poet, writer, educator, literary curator, and organizer, completed her residency as a Reynolds Poetry Fellow this summer. She is the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems and five chapbooks.

The Richard S. and Julia Louise Reynolds Poetry Fellowship is a fully-funded, three-week residency for poets (currently accepting applications for Fall 2022).

We're honored to feature five composers this month, with a tribute to James Primosch who passed away earlier this year and who just over a year ago was a guest in our virtual Fireplace Series. He is survived by his wife, VCCA Fellow and visual artist Mary Murphy, who will be in residence next year.

Fellows, please share your news. This is a way to tell the VCCA community about your work. We're always especially interested in stories about work created in connection to your VCCA residency.

"My debut novel, The Body Scout, was released recently and received a rave in the New York Times: 'Timeless and original . . . a wild ride, sad and funny, surreal and intelligent.'"

An endorsement from Yusef Komunyakaa: “J. C. Todd’s Beyond Repair is woven of war and aftermath. Survival lives in the blood-wit of each turn in this wrought collection, singing and daring the heart awake. This voice is refined to an edge . . . The speaker grows whole through the act of witnessing. Leaps and associations feel calibrated as the reader finds oneself sizing up the angle of heart and head, becoming part of the accumulative turns — an accord of people, voices, places, times — and we confront what war does to one who has a capacity for grace.”

"My new novel-in-stories, The Sleep of Apples, has launched. Largely written at VCCA, the story centers on nine closely linked characters confronting crises related to mental illness, mortality — sooner, rather than later — and gender identity."

🧡 Stay safe, and be well.

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