The Viterbo Summer Symposium

Lydia Nibley and Russell Martin produced and hosted the first Viterbo Summer Symposium for alumni and friends of School Year Abroad, which offers year-long international study programs for secondary students in China, France, Italy, and Spain.

The inaugural symposium was held June 22-27, 2008 at SYA’s sixteenth-century home on Viterbo, Italy's Via Cavour. The symposium's theme, Not-So-Ugly Americans: Repairing The U.S.’s Image Around the World, grounded wide-ranging discussions of contemporary European culture, globalization, history, architecture, technology, literature, politics, the environment, the arts, and the impact of the U.S. on the international stage.

Russell Martin Speaks about Beethoven's Hair

Throughout the U.S. and Canada, audiences have responded enthusiastically to presentations about Beethoven's ability to create extraordinary music despite a life of terrible physical and emotional pain; a singular lock of hair's powerful meaning to many different people in different times; the role it played in the heroic rescue of the Danish Jews; and the success of two Arizona men in fulfilling Beethoven's own request that his illnesses be explained after his death.

This powerful, deeply humane, and most unusual story of a relic that has survived two hundred years, and which affirms the highest aspirations of people everywhere, is a story about art's ability to transfigure tragedy and to help us make sense of what otherwise we are challenged to comprehend.

Live at Lincoln Center

Beethoven's Hair was the subject of a Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center lecture in New York City. Russell Martin updated readers about new developments in the story and read from the book prior to an evening of Beethoven featuring the Kreutzer Violin Sonata with Leila Josefowicz on violin and Andre Watts at the piano.

Picasso's Guernica, a presentation by Russell Martin

The story of Picasso's celebrated and controversial Guernica—the painting's genesis in the bombing of the Basque town by the Nazis during the Spanish Civil War, the fevered intensity of its creation, its emergence over the ensuing years as the most important artwork of our times, and the role it continues to play in the reconciliation of deep wounds in Spain—is one audiences are compelled by. From Europe to America, and, finally, back to Spain, Russell Martin's Picasso's Guernica presentation sheds light on the conflict that was an ominous prelude to World War II and offers a vivid portrait of a genius whose visionary statement about the horror and lasting wounds of war still resonates today, at a time in which art often remains our best ally in making sense of the troubled world in which we live.

The Splendor of Story: How Narrative Shapes Life,
a seminar by Lydia Nibley and Russell Martin

The creating and the witnessing of narratives are as essential to us as sleep. Stories in their many guises are as base and wonderful as sex, as delicious and irresistible as a cheeseburger with everything. We tell our stories over countless cups of coffee in all the corners of the earth; we unravel them on television; we project stories onto screens, print them on every surface, send them as e-mail, and we simply cannot help but do so. These tales, in their simplicity and all their wonder, occupy the very heart of what it means to be human. Unique among all animals, we are the storytelling species, Homo Once-upon-a-tempus. Our brains are built for seeking out relationships, for creating cerebral order, and for sensing the rudiments of narrative structure: how it was in the beginning, the middle, and at the end. In this presentation, Lydia Nibley and Russell Martin examine the neurology of narrative—its hard-wiring in the brain, its neurological relationship to language, its acquisition and development in childhood, and the role it plays in consciousness.

The Literature of Fact: Writing Creative Nonfiction,
a seminar by Lydia Nibley and Russell Martin

One of the truly transcendent powers of creative nonfiction is its veracity. The carefully detailed retelling of events that actually occurred has the power to change lives. This seminar investigates how the best contemporary nonfiction writers employ meticulous research and reportage to tell their verifiable tales, while at the same time employing the tools of fiction writers to make their stories compelling. It examines narrative arcs from first conflict to resolution, and focuses on providing practical techniques for writing out of reportage, research, or personal experience. The seminar explores the process of initiating a creative nonfiction project, finding the spine of a story, and enriching it with powerful narrative, pinpointing common issues that arise during the writing process.

Lydia Nibley and Russell Martin teach narrative nonfiction and fiction seminars at writing conferences and in university settings, and speak jointly about the richness of story and its enormous impact on our lives. Lydia has been a visiting professor at Colorado College and currenlty teaches at the UCLA Extension in the Writers' Program. For many years, Russell taught creative writing as a visiting professor at Colorado College, and he also teaches in the Writers’ Program at the UCLA Extension in Los Angeles.