Congrats to Millay Alum Amy Brill!

Amy Brill was a resident with us in 2004 (and one of the very first Winter Shakers, too!). The novel she was working on back then, now called The Movement of Stars, will be published by Riverhead Books on April 18, 2013!

 

 

"In spare yet luminous prose, Brill shows Hannah achieving emotional and spiritual growth to match her intellectual gifts…Probing yet accessible, beautifully written and richly characterized: fine work from a writer to watch.” —Kirkus, starred review

http://www.amybrill.com

From Amy:

"It's hard to believe that nine years have gone by since I first sat in the Millay Colony barn, gazing out the window at the single, beautifully twisted tree outside, and pondering the fate of the protagonist in my novel, The Movement of Stars. In the years since, I've seen that tree in every season: blooming in summertime during my first residency, when I still thought I was writing an epistolary novel hewing closely to the true life-story of the first professional female astronomer in America (I wasn't); still and snow-covered in winter, when I was one of the first "Shakers" and spent some of time painting said barn and the remainder trying to tell the story I wanted to tell (not epistolary, and not "about" Maria Mitchell, after all). I saw the tree in autumn, when I returned to visit then-director Drake Patten one weekend with a fellow former resident. And I saw it in the spring, on a road trip with my now-husband, to whom I wished to point out the special and beautiful place that so inspired me. It was at Millay that I had the time and breathing room to lie under the wide night sky, memorizing the constellations; it was there I met an artist who gave me wisdom I never forgot: "How do I feel about my work?" he mused one day over dinner. "Who cares? It's my work. How I feel about it isn't that important." In so many ways, my time at Millay was fundamental to both my novel and myself: the Colony shaped both, indelibly, and I'll forever be grateful."