• Write in the historic cottage where Jack Kerouac wrote Dharma Bums and learned On the Road would be published
• Stay in an historic art deco, period-furnished hotel
• See the original Dharma Bums manuscript
• Enjoy classic Kerouac spoken-word and jazz recordings
• Participate in a public reading
• Learn about one of the most prolific periods of Kerouac’s life from pop culture historian Bob Kealing, author of Kerouac in Florida: Where the Road Ends.

Work and learn within the very walls where Jack Kerouac lived hand-to-mouth, plied his trade, and ultimately made literary history.? ~ Bob Kealing

$295 fee includes a 3-day seminar, 2 nights at the Wellborn Hotel, admission to the Orange County History Center, transportation between the hotel and the Kerouac House, and a copy of Kerouac in Florida. Meals are extra, at restaurants that are an easy walk on roads Jack Kerouac traveled. A portion of the proceeds will support the work of the Jack Kerouac Writers In Residence Project of Orlando, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving Kerouac’s home and legacy in Orlando. (Cost sans hotel: $145.)

For a full schedule of events, registration and questions please contact Darlyn Finch by email darlyn.finch@siemens.com

Feb. 12 Alicia Shandra Holmes Farewell Reading at the Kerouac House 8:00PM

Feb 13-14 Corozon Festival see poster and Information Below

Feb. 26- 28, Darlyn Finch has the Writer’s Weekend at the House

March 18, Urban Flats Fundraiser Downtown 5:30-7:30pm, (Tickets available! Email kerouacproject@gmail.com if you want some)

April 9-11, “Beat Reunion”, David Amram, Joyce Pinchbeck (Johnson), Chris Felver, John and Mellon Tytell, Details TBA (Program by Bellamy Road, with support by David Turner Warner Foundation, Inc.)

***More Detailed Information for the Corazon Art & Music Festival***
ArtsFest 2010: Arts Day at The Kerouac House

The Kerouac House
1418 Clouser Ave.
Orlando , FL 32804
Please respect the residential neighborhood setting. On-street parking on Shady Lane Drive.
Doors will be closed during Special Reading, while Workshops are in session and/or if capacity is reached.

Friday, February 12, 2010
8 PM Doors Open, 9 to 10 PM Special Reading
Alicia Shandra Holmes, Resident Writer Bids Farewell

Kindly bring refreshments or snacks to share.

Alicia Shandra Holmes is the current Writer in Residence at the Kerouac House. Alicia has been writing up a storm of fiction and non-fiction during her time in Orlando. At this Special Reading, Alicia will share her work and discuss her process and experience here. Alicia has published fiction in The Bitter Oleander, Rosebud, CRATE, Many Mountains Moving, and The Blue Earth Review. She was also a resident at the Sanskriti Kendra cultural center in New Delhi, India, funded through the UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for Artists Programme, and the recipient of a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant for nonfiction. She has a background in newspaper journalism.

Saturday, February 13, 2010
Arts Day at The Kerouac House
12:30 PM Doors Open, Workshop Sessions 1 PM to 3 PM

Writing Workshop 1 PM to 3 PM
Facilitators: Geoff and Janna Benge (Silver Fern Writing Workshop)
In Attendance: Alicia Shandra Holmes, Resident Writer
Art Inspiration: Pamela Z. Daum, Photographer/Artist
Bring pen and paper or writing implements of your choice.

With brief instruction by accomplished authors Geoff and Janna Benge, attendees will produce their own creative writing piece. Participants will enjoy this rare experience to write in the environment where Jack Kerouac lived and worked at the time he emerged as an important American literary figure.

Geoff and Janna provide a risk-free atmosphere along with helpful critiques emphasizing positive elements of the writers? works. To ?open the door? for a flood of creative juices, writers will be prompted to consider a mysterious image generously donated by local photographer/artist, Pamela Z. Daum.

Both novices and experienced writers will find this exercise valuable for developing their craft and voice. There will be opportunities to read short pieces or poems at the ?Artistic Jam? open forum later in the evening at the Corazon Festival venue, Rock Bottom Farms Community Center.

Art Workshop 1 PM to 3 PM
Facilitator: Kimberly Buchheit (Kerouac Project Board of Directors)
Come as you are?take a minute to get creative !!

Participants will be provided with materials and ideas to create their own handmade art cards suitable for all occasion greetings, an old fashioned thank you, a love note for your Valentine, or whatever message comes to mind. A handpicked playlist of background music will honor Jack Kerouac?s desire to promote creativity in all forms of artistic expression.

Additional Supplies are welcome: Bring used holiday or greeting card fronts and/or colorful spent calendars to ?turn the page? for a totally recycled experience. Scissors, glue sticks, markers and ink stamps won?t hurt. Or simply dust off that sketch book and old box of art supplies in the back of your closet, bring it with you and get busy. Get inspired to start or restart your own art, even if you cannot attend !

Stay tuned for many more words from Alicia as she enjoys the winter time in Florida.

Welcome Alicia!

That night the sky was expressionless (if you overlook the stars). It had a colorless blankness the twins would come to intimately know.

Their father had been a soldier who’d seen some of the world. A steadfast Catholic, he always attended daily Mass at the still-dark hour of 7 a.m. That morning he gazed at the dark wood altar, yet again admiring the intricate perfection of wood so flawlessly shaped and sanded that it seemed as though it hadn’t been made but had always existed in this form. The whole church felt like this – the stone walls, the stained-glass and Stations of the Cross, even the empty space overhead stretching up and up to the high peaked roof.

As he returned his attention to the Priest, who was just then turning bread and wine into body and blood, he decided on names for his daughters: India and Indiana. He smiled. And both girls would have the same middle name. Mary. It had been his mother’s name.

When the twins were seven years old, they wore matching blue frocks on Easter. By then their black hair had grown long, though their mother cut their bangs with a rusty pair of scissors, a straight line just above their eyebrows.

For Easter Mass they wore these dresses with black patent leather shoes and white tights, and when neither one was smiling, which was often so, they were identical.

In that town the sky can be gray nearly all year: murky like dirty snow and slushy gravel roads.

“Like your wool sweater when it’s wet,” said India.

“Like the sharp end of the shovel,” Indiana replied.

Saturday November 14th @ 8PM (please do not arrive early- reading will begin at 8:30)

Click below to view Bill’s book, Alaska Unsalted

College Park Historic Home Tour Stops at the Kerouac House

Sunday November 15th 12:30 to 4:00 PM Mini readings by Bill Miles given throughout the day and historic tours of the Kerouac House given throughout the day.  Click here for more detailed information.

Upcoming Kerouac Writers Weekend

The next Kerouac Writers Weekend will be February 26th through the 28th, 2010 led by Darlyn Finch. Enjoy a professionally led writing workshop in the house where Kerouac wrote Dharma Bums. More information coming soon.

As always, we thank you for your support.

The station was nothing more than a slant-roofed log box, whole lines of chinking blown out by winters’ winds and spring storms. A simple gallows had been erected, dirt freshly turned where barked Lodgepole pine logs were stuck into the ground. A stout log, peeled shiny as a polished andiron, served as the hanging bar. It glistened in the setting sun. Wooden hominy cases made do for steps up to a pair of nail kegs. Toppling ropes were tied to the keg rims and lay like long, dead snakes in the dust. Twin nooses were looped loosely over the crosspiece. A dozen riflemen circled the gallows, half facing the station house, half facing the crowd. There would be no mishaps during a Judge Cletus Cleveland hanging.

A pocket of men, heads tipped together in conspiratorial whisperings, smothered their chatter as Phoebe and her mother passed. The women took a place in the back of the pack beside a senora. Behatted and elegantly garbed in a fuchsia bolero of serge cheviot, the senora wore a jacket trimmed in black mohair, matching skirt full and flowing. She stood rigid, a fencepost for a backbone, her brown, smooth, flawless face rouged pink, her lips heartily coated crimson. Men in the crowd stole looks at her as often as possible.

They all faced to the west, each hand in the crowd shading eyes against the sun, now low on the horizon. They’d be riding back to Cheyenne in part darkness.

Two prisoners, an Indian and a white man, ankles tethered with rawhide hobbles and chained to an anvil, were pushed from the trail station. The Indian, barefoot, wore nothing but a breechclout. The white man had been dressed down to red balbriggans faded pink, and grimy brown boot socks. Both had crusty lacerations on their faces. The Indian’s left eye was purple and puffed shut. The white man had pissed himself more than once.

At the prisoners’ appearance, the women averted their eyes. The slouching deputies
snapped to attention. One unhooked the anvil and nudged the prisoners up the steps. To
Phoebe’s surprise, neither prisoner showed any reluctance to step up onto the kegs. Two
deputies looped the nooses over their heads, backed down the hominy cases and took hold
of the toppling ropes, ready to send the prisoners to their maker.

Phoebe thought it disgraceful that the Indian was paraded out in a skin that barely covered his privacy. As if reading her mind, the Judge raised his hand, halting the proceeding. He rested the Mauser against the gallows’ stanchion, fetched a lap robe from the phaeton and tied it around the Indian’s waist.

When the Judge again faced the prisoners, he reverently removed his tall Kalispell. The hat, a beige widebrim with a crown as high as Elk Mountain, had neither a crease, dent nor punch to it. The Judge wore it for formal occasions only, and, once removed, it revealed a face with tight lips cut into cast steel, coffee-colored eyes that squinted into crow’s feet at the temples, neat, close-cropped hair more gray than brown. His gray handlebar was waxed shiny and curled up to fine pointy tips. He read from a small slip of paper: “By the authority vested in me, I declare the sentence of hanging for one John Montenegro and one Indian known only as Buck to be carried out post haste.” The Judge looked up from the paper, spoke to the gathering. “For those of you unaware, I found these two guilty of stealing a hog hindquarter from the back of Morley’s Butcher and Mercantile right here in Dead Pines. This is a misdeed equal to out-and-out rustling. There is no such crime in law as rustling a part of a steer, part of a pig.” Heads bobbed their agreement.

The Judge spied a man of the cloth off to the side of the crowd. The parson held a good book, hands gnarled and lumpy as day-old porridge. Biggest man of God Phoebe had ever seen.

The Judge said, “Preacher, you seem to be the only parson about. Do you have words?”

The preacher stepped forward, prized a finger inside his sweat-yellowed church collar. The deputies shifted. One cocked his carbine. Most witnesses had their eyes on the poor souls about to end their days. The lady with the crimson lips stared at the Judge, stared hate at him as though he were a demon from hell.

Phoebe removed a silverine-cased Waltham pocket watch and clicked open its holding snap, the watch being another present from her grandpap when she’d graduated from the Cheyenne School. Her grandpap said a hanging fall sometimes broke a man’s neck. Other times, death took a full five minutes as the body strangled itself of its own accord. She would test his notion of time.

The preacher gazed toward heaven and said, “Heavenly Father, be kindly toward these unfortunates. Show them your mercy today and in the hereafter. Amen.”

The Judge said, “Brevity is godlike.” To the white prisoner, he said, “Do you have last words?”

The white man spat at the Judge. Without waiting for a signal, the deputies yanked on the rim-ropes, snatching the casks from beneath the prisoners. They awked; their eyes bulged. A muffled snap–not much more than the sound of a carpet-thrasher beating against a rug–issued from the Indian. His head twisted to one side at an unnatural angle; his tongue fell from his mouth. The white man stretched his toes toward the hardened earth, then kicked violently, thrashing like a drowning man trying to propel himself out of a roiling, white-frothed river. The Judge ducked beside the stanchion and took up his rifle. The white man’s leg whipping abated; he began to revolve like a slow spin-top. A rivulet of saliva dripped over his lower lip, caught on his chin and stretched out like a string of clear honey. When he finally stilled, his fists were balled in tight knots.

Phoebe kept her face to the west, her hand shielding her eyes, her eyes darting from the crimson lady to the lifeless, dangling bodies. The Judge signaled for Doc Joel. He climbed the steps to the white man and listened with his chest-breather. Nodded solemnly. A watery stain spread down the man’s balbriggans, darkening them wet to the knees. The doctor didn’t bother to listen to the Indian.

Phoebe had forgotten to start the timing.

Fall 2009, Bill Miles
Winter 2009-10, Alicia Holmes
Spring 2010, Kelly Luce
Summer 2010, Emily Carr

In conjunction with Mad About Words and the well known Writing Around Town series.

This workshop will delve into the intersections between visual and written/spoken arts. For centuries poets have written pieces in direct conversation with paintings and sculpture. We will discuss methods of approaching Ekphrastic art and then we’ll write one of our own.

You won’t want to miss this chance to write in the Kerouac House with a fun group and a wonderful leader.