GPL Book Arts Project...A new blog

A grant that I wrote to the Alabama State Council on the Arts (ASCA) was recently funded.  I was so thrilled, I almost peed my pants (no surprise to all of you who know that's what I want to do when I get excited).  Since I will have to do some reporting back to ASCA, and because I already blog, I asked ASCA for permission to blog about the experience.  They thought it was a cool idea, so I have started a new work-related blog, a place for my dealings with GPL Book Arts Project.  I have just started it ten minutes ago, so it still needs a bit of work.  Please feel free to visit it to see what I am up to over there:

http://gplbookartsproject.wordpress.com

In case you don't have time to go there right now, here is the post that I just published there:

A year ago November (November 6, 2010 to be exact), my partner Eric and I had the good fortune to be invited to the inaugural meeting of the Alabama Center for the Book at in Tuscaloosa, AL.  Now, you may be thinking, “Hey, wait a minute.  The Alabama Center for the Book has been around for awhile.  How could you have gone to the inaugural meeting of the Alabama Center for the Book just last year?”  Well, last November, the Alabama Center for the Book was moved from the picturesque antebellum home, Pebble Hill, in Auburn, AL to the Amelia Gayle Gorgas Library on the campus of the University of Alabama.  The move prompted a gathering of book artists, letterpress printers, bookbinders, papermakers, librarians, book arts students, and pretty much anyone else in the book/book arts industry to discuss the role of book arts in the community and the best methods to create a greater visibility for book arts through outreach, exhibits and teaching.  I saw people whom I had not seen in years (Jay Lamar), people I knew of very well, but had never met (Jeanie Thompson, Glenn House, Sr., Ian Robertson), and people I had just had recent grad school dealings with in some form or another (Dr. Aversa, Dr. MacCall, Dr. Miller).

Brainstorming happened.  Ideas were shared.  I was able to talk with several folks about my thoughts on having a book arts series at the Gadsden Public Library, a series that would give the community a taste of, and a better understanding of book arts as an art form.  I envisioned workshops that started from the beginning of a book’s life with papermaking, to working our way through letterpress printing, bookbinding, and creative writing workshops to fill those empty pages!  I saw us having in-house lectures, as well as take the whole shooting match on the road as outreach!  I tentatively pitched these thoughts to some of the folks with whom I was sharing break-out sessions.  My ideas were well received.  So well received, in fact, that Jeanie Thompson of the Alabama Writers’ Forum encouraged me to look into writing a grant to the Alabama State Council on the Arts.  So, I left Tuscaloosa with a fire lit under my butt to quit THINKING about the book arts project, and start DOING it…

 More to come...