NORA SMITH
Staff Writer
For more than 30 years, poets, nonfiction writers and married couple Kristin Kovacic and Jim Daniels have witnessed the evolution of Chautauqua Writers’ Center firsthand.
Kovacic said she still remembers the early years of Chautauqua Writers’ Center, where writers took residence in Fernwood, the house of Founder and First Director Mary Jean Irion.
“[Irion] institutionalized writing as an art form at Chautauqua, which is a tremendous legacy,” Kovacic said. “Jim and I have been super proud and happy to have been a part in that and to watch this program grow, and for the community of writers, also, that Mary Jean assembled and strengthened over the years has just been beautiful to watch.”
Daniels said his connection with Chautauqua Institution originally began when Irion read a review for his first book. At that point, he had never heard of Chautauqua, but she invited him up, and now, he and Kovacic come about every other year.
“It’s a special place for us,” Daniels said. “It’s a special place for anyone, really.”
Daniels said the first couple of times he and Kovacic came to Chautauqua, there was nowhere else to put the writers, so they stayed on the second floor of Irion’s house until eventually writers were housed in Alumni Hall.
“It’s been a gift for us,” Daniels said. “I was a young writer when I first started coming and the Writers’ Center was relatively new, and it’s been exciting to see it grow over the years and be a part of the community on a semi-regular basis for over 30 years.”
Returning to Chautauqua is a rich part of Kovacic and Daniels’ lives because they get to reconnect with the community of Chautauquans and writers.
“I’ve watched everybody, these remarkable people adapt and be ambitious for what Chautauqua and the Writers’ Center can do,” Kovacic said. “I just want to applaud Chautauqua for its continual growth, and I feel very grateful that we’ve been able to be a part of that.”
Interim Michael I. Rudell Director of Literary Arts Stephine Hunt said that with Kovacic and Daniels being both poets and nonfiction writers, they often switch in what kind of writing they focus on when they come to Chautauqua. For example, in 2024 Kovacic taught poetry and Daniels taught prose, but now the roles are reversed.
“Jim and Kristin are a great draw for Chautauqua Literary Arts here, in general,” Hunt said. “They essentially have a following at Chautauqua, which is really lovely. Our Writers’ Center community looks for them and asks for them regularly.”
Hunt said Kovacic and Daniels have a heartfelt connection with the community at Chautauqua.
“There’s a great love for them here, so we’re very excited to welcome them back,” Hunt said.
Kovacic and Daniels will return to the Writers’ Center to give a free faculty reading at 3:30 p.m. Sunday in the Hall of Philosophy.
Now both retired from teaching and living in a deconsecrated Catholic Church, Kovacic has taken inspiration and sought connections from this environment for her newest memoir consisting of essays coming out early next year, titled Sanctuary, which she will be reading from.
“I’ve been researching where I live because it was a 150-year-old church that housed a congregation, and it was a language parish …” Kovacic said. “So, (I’ve been) researching the church and also the faith that built the church and trying to find the connections between this place, that faith and my life in this last third.”
Overall, Kovacic said Sanctuary is about the last third of life by numerous definitions and is also “a meditation on spirituality and faith.”
Daniels will read from his most recent publication, a collection of selected poems titled Late Invocation for Magic: New and Selected Poems, that features poems from his last eight or nine books in addition to newly developed poems. Throughout the process of putting together the collection, Daniels went through his books, picked out his favorite poems and then organized them in similar subjects.
“I mixed them all up, and I put poems from different books that are on similar subjects, but the poems are different because I’m a different person,” Daniels said. “When you write about something at one age and then you look at it from a different age, you can kind of see things differently.”
Having grown up in Detroit in a family of auto workers, those experiences work their way into Daniels’ writing. For example, Daniels said he’s interested in environments where there’s not much nature and how that affects humans, in addition to writing about place, social class, urban living and family.
In addition to the free faculty reading, Kovacic’s flexible workshop, “My Life as a Child: Childhood Memoir,” will run from 3:15 to 5:15 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday from July 27 to July 31 in the Alumni Hall Prose Room with an enrollment fee of $145 and a maximum of 15 participants.
Writing about childhood experience is something Kovacic has done during her previous workshops because people often want to write about their childhood, and she said that within this process, there’s lots to learn.
“When you write seriously about your childhood, what you want is to write toward, not nostalgia, but toward meaning,” Kovacic said. “There’s a real art to discovering and crafting the meaning out of your childhood.”
Kovacic said it’s even more important in this day and age with social media and constant self-promotion to reflect and make meaning out of our lives.
“I insist, and people who write memoir insist that our individual lives and the deliberative reflective processing of our individual lives is even more important than it once was,” Kovacic said. “Because there are more forces trying to write over our experience. Everybody’s saying, ‘Look at me, look at me,’ but not enough people are saying ‘Hey, let’s see what my life means.’”
Daniels’ flexible workshop, “‘If a Poem is a House’: Inviting Your Reader In,” will run from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday from July 27 to July 31 in the Alumni Hall Poetry Room with an enrollment fee of $145 and a maximum of 15 participants.
The title of Daniels’ workshop is an overarching metaphor that he plans to explore throughout the workshop in the sense that “the idea of constructing a poem is a huge metaphor in terms of making a house.”
Daniels plans to look at poems in different forms and how poets take things that may not seem poetic and make them their own, while also exploring how to open the doors of poems to a wider group of readers.
“Sometimes the house is a little messy, and that’s okay, because life’s a little messy,” Daniels said.
Every time Daniels visits Chautauqua, he said he’s learned something new, whether from a lecture or evening entertainment, and both Daniels and Kovacic look forward to reuniting with old friends and making new ones.
