This fall, the Gloucester Writers Center will present the first Dogtown Writers Festival - a weekend of workshops, panel discussions, and speaking events that explore our personal connections between the "geography of our being," and the places in which we live, work, and create. The Dogtown Writers Festival will celebrate what Gloucester's poet Vincent Ferrini referred to as the "Holy Local," a lens through which we look at the world.

Gloucester is the center of rich literary and cultural history. This is why it is so important for our community to encourage the practice and the art of writing as a means of civic engagement among our younger citizens. For this reason, we have included, in the festival, a workshop for young people only, to inspire in our next generation creativity, stewardship of our local culture and history, and a unique civic pride in our community. Gloucester Writers Center is asking Awesome Gloucester to underwrite the ticket cost for ten local students, ranging in age from 14 to 18, who might otherwise not be able to afford to attend this event.

Acclaimed poet and professor, Dorothy Shubow Nelson, will lead the student workshop titled Somewhere Near in Your World. Think of this workshop as a jam session with words, a chance to compose poems, songs, stories, letters. An opportunity to try out other ways of writing. Published prose and poetry will be passed around. There will be conversations about the music of writing. Students will be invited to read from their work in a welcoming atmosphere, and their words will bounce off each other.

By closing time, our young community members will have come to know one another and will have made new connections with their home terrain: the city with its history and festivals, the rugged coastline, the sounds in the Dogtown woods, the beaches of fun and exploration, the mighty ocean, the multitude of working and pleasure boats, the many jeweled colors in the quarry granite, and, significantly, how the