COMBOURG, FRANCE

Combourg is found between Rennes and St Malo in north-east Brittany, in the Ille et Vilaine department. Combourg is especially proud of two things: first, the Chateau de Combourg and second, the town's association with Chateaubriand, the famous French author. The sturdy, turreted chateau is still owned by one of Chateaubriands descendants, and is open to the public. Not completely surprising - it houses various artefacts belonging to the late Chateaubriand. The chateau is also surrounded by well-maintained landscaped gardens so allow plenty of time for an amble or a picnic.

Lily Tuck is an American novelist and short story writer whose novel The News from Paraguay won the 2004 National Book Award. Her novel Siam was nominated for the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She has published three other novels, a collection of short stories, and a biography of Italian novelist Elsa Morante. An American citizen born in Paris, Tuck now divides her time between New York City and Maine; she has also lived in Thailand and (during her childhood) Uruguay and Peru. Tuck has stated that "living in other countries has given me a different perspective as a writer. It has heightened my sense of dislocation and rootlessness. . . . I think this feeling is reflected in my characters, most of them women whose lives are changed by either a physical displacement or a loss of some kind".

Dan Chaon is an American author. His first novel was "You Remind Me of Me" (2004). His short-story collections "Fitting Ends" (1996) and "Among the Missing" (2001) were both well-received; the latter was a finalist for a National Book Award and was also named one of the year's ten best books by the American Library Association and as a notable book of the year by The New York Times. Chaon's short stories have won the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been included in the Best American Short Stories of 1996 and 2003. He was awarded the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. His new novel, "Await Your Reply", was published in August 2009 and was called one of the 10 best books of 2009 by Publisher's Weekly. Chaon was adopted and grew up in Sidney, Nebraska.[6] He was married to the late writer Sheila Schwartz and has two teenage sons. He presently lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio and teaches creative writing at Oberlin College

Joan Silber is an American novelist and short story writer. She is the author of "Household Words" (Penguin Books, 1981), which won a PEN/Hemingway Award, and "Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories" (W.W. Norton, 2004), which was a finalist for both the 2004 National Book Award and the Story Prize. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has been published in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize collections, and has also appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and The Paris Review. Silber grew up in Millburn, New Jersey. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and obtained a M.A. degree from New York University. She taught at NYU and now teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and currently lives in New York City.

Aimee Bender (born June 28, 1969) is an American novelist and short story writer, known for her surreal plots and characters. Bender received her undergraduate degree from the University of California at San Diego, and a Master of Fine Arts from the distinguished creative writing MFA program at University of California at Irvine. While at UCI she studied with Judith Grossman and Geoffrey Wolff. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California and heads a class in surrealist writing at the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. She has named Oscar Wilde, Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm and Anne Sexton as influences on her writing. A native of Los Angeles, Bender is a close friend of fellow UCI alumni Alice Sebold. Her first book was The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, a collection of short stories, published in 1998. The book was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and spent seven weeks on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. Her novel An Invisible Sign of My Own was published in 2000, and was named as an L.A. Times pick of the year. In 2005 she published another collection of short stories, Willful Creatures, which was nominated by The Believer magazine, owned by McSweeney's, as one of the best books of the year. Her novella "The Third Elevator" was published in 2009 by Madras Press. Bender has received two Pushcart Prizes, and was nominated for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 2005. In 2009 Bender became the sitting judge for the Flatmancrooked Writing Prize, a writing award from Flatmancrooked Publishing for new short fiction.

JULY 17 - 24, 20010

Accommodations: Shared twin room, $3,500 Single room, $4,250 Price includes: (2) A choice of 2 instructors for two writing workshops. (6) dinners proceeded by lectures and readings. (2) personal meetings with instructors. (1) personal meeting with a literary agent.

The World Heritage Site, Mont Saint Michele, is 30 minutes from Combourg. Mont-St-Michel was used in the 6th and 7th centuries as a stronghold of Romano-British culture and power until it was sacked by the Franks; thus ending the trans-channel culture that had stood since the departure of the Romans in 459 AD. Before the construction of the first monastic establishment in the 8th century, the island was called Mont Tombe. According to legend, the archangel Michael appeared to St. Aubert, bishop of Avranches, in 708 and instructed him to build a church on the rocky islet. But Aubert repeatedly ignored the angel's instruction until Michael burned a hole in the bishop's skull with his finger. That did the trick. The dedication to St Michael occurred on October 16, 708. The mount gained strategic significance in 933 when the Normans annexed the Cotentin Peninsula, thereby placing the mount on the new frontier with Brittany. It is depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry, which commemorates the 1066 Norman conquest of England. Ducal and royal patronage financed the spectacular Norman architecture of the abbey in subsequent centuries. An Italian architect, William de Volpiano, designed the Romanesque church of the abbey in the 11th century, daringly placing the transept crossing at the top of the mount. Many underground crypts and chapels had to be built to compensate for this weight. These formed the basis for the supportive upward structure that can be seen today. Robert de Thorigny, a great supporter of Henry II of England (who was also Duke of Normandy), reinforced the structure of the buildings and built the main façade of the church in the 12th century. Following his annexation of Normandy in 1204, the King of France, Philip Augustus offered abbot Jourdain a grant for the construction of a new gothic style architectural set which included the addition of the refectory and cloister. The wealth and influence of the abbey extended to many daughter foundations, including St Michael's Mount in Cornwall, England. However, its popularity and prestige as a centre of pilgrimage waned with the Reformation and by the time of the French Revolution there were scarcely any monks in residence. During the Revolution the abbey was closed and converted into a prison, initially to hold clerical opponents of the republican régime. High-profile political prisoners followed, but by 1836 influential figures, including Victor Hugo, had launched a campaign to restore what was seen as a national architectural treasure. The prison was finally closed in 1863, and the mount was declared a historic monument in 1874. Mont Saint Michel and its bay were added to the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites in 1979.