Every year in May, the Work Center is alive with activity: painting, testing computer equipment, preparing the print studio and darkroom. With the help of Fellows who extend their time in Provincetown and a staff headed by Buildings and Grounds Manager Dan Towler, the transformation is accomplished.

By June, the Common Room doors open to receive the first group of students attending Summer workshops. What follows are ten weeks of energetic and playful engagement -- the very thing on which the Summer Program's reputation is built. To date, it continues to be one of the most extensive and prestigious programs of its kind in the country -- inspiring, challenging and stimulating artists and writers from across the country and from all walks of life.

The Summer Program grows every year, not just in the number of students attending, but also in the variety of faculty and classes offered. In addition to welcoming back perennial favorites including Grace Paley, Mark Doty, Amy Bloom and Michael Mazur, as well as faculty returning after a few seasons away, the Work Center continues to expanded its offerings. In 2001, Dramatic Monologue with writer/ actor James Lecesne and Documentary Photography with photographer Amy Arbus were added to the course listings.

SUMMER SCHOLARSHIPS The Fine Arts Work Center has had the good fortune to offer several scholarships to students attending the Summer Workshop Program. Last year's funders included the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, which provided twenty scholarships to educators from the state of New Jersey, and the Bertha H. and Hudson D. Walker Foundation, which provided eighteen scholarships to students of racial or ethnic minorities. Additionally, several private donors made local scholarships available to residents of the Lower Cape. At this writing, the Work Center is busy working to replace grant money for people with HIV/AIDS, to establish a scholarship fund for local residents, and to increase overall the number of scholarships available for people to attend courses at the Work Center. If you would like to help fund FAWC scholarships, please contact Programs Administrator Melanie Braverman at (508) 487-9960, ext. 103.

Along with classes, the Work Center hosts faculty readings, student readings, faculty slide talks, open studio nights and gallery events which are attended by Summer Program students, community members and visitors to Provincetown. Most evenings pair faculty writers with visual artists, adding to the feeling of camaraderie and dialogue across genre and media.

Several special events round out every summer. In 2001, the July exhibition of works by board member Judith Shahn was accompanied by an auction of donated art to benefit the Dugan/Shahn Endowed Fellowship. Shahn's opening reception was followed by a reading by her husband, poet Alan Dugan, author of Poems Seven, a 2001 National Book Award Nominee.

In August, the Work Center partnered with the Lannan Foundation to stage two remarkable events back to back. The first was a reading by former Poets Laureate Stanley Kunitz and Robert Pinsky, followed by an interview with Michael Silverblatt, host of NPR's "Bookworm."

The next night, poet Mary Oliver gave a rare and beautiful reading, which was followed by an interview with poet and translator Coleman Barks. The events brought several hundred people to the Work Center, with outside sound and video provided by the Lannan Foundation. (For video tapes of these and other poetry events, you can contact the Lannan Foundation at (505) 954-5149.)

FALL WORKSHOPS & EVENTS

After Labor Day, Provincetown begins its transition from a bustling summer destination to a small seaside town. The streets are less crowded, the beaches quieter and artists and writers resume the creative work that has taken a back seat over the busy summer.

At the Work Center for the past two years, October and November weekends have also welcomed a quiet, intense session of workshops in creative writing and the visual arts. The courses are small, the time short and the spirit is one of gearing up for a winter of the solitary work that comprises most of a writer's or an artist's creative life.

In partnership with Campus Provincetown, a consortium of non-profit educational groups working to augment Provincetown's off-season economy -- including the Center for Coastal Studies, Provincetown International Art Institute, Provincetown Theatre Company and Cape Cod Community College -- the Work Center took up residence at Provincetown High School for six consecutive weekends. Faculty, culled from the Work Center's long roster of former Fellows and Summer Program instructors, included perennial favorites such as Richard McCann and Louise Rafkin, as well as newcomer Tony Hoagland.

In conjunction with the workshops, the Work Center hosted weekly readings by fall faculty members, filling the Stanley Kunitz Common Room every Saturday night through the middle of November.