New College Welcomes
Writer-in-Residence Lenore Hart

(Sarasota) For the past 4 years, New College of Florida has had a treat every spring; a published writer comes to the College to teach classes and hold workshops, providing an exciting resource for students interested in creative writing.

This year, New College’s writer-in-residence is Lenore Hart, a native Floridian who now resides on the Eastern Shore in Virginia. Hart is teaching Introduction to Creative Writing, a course which covers fiction, non-fiction and poetry, and a moer intensive Fiction Workshop, focused on students' short stories or novels in progress.

Hart is the author of the novel Waterwoman (PenguinPutnam 2002), which was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Authors title, as well as a BookSpan and Literary Guild alternate selection. Her most recent novel is Ordinary Springs (PenguinPutnam, Jan. 2005.) She also co-authored a children’s book, T. Rex at Swan Lake (Dutton 2004) with Lisa Carrier. Hart’s first young adult novel, The Treasure of Savage Island, will be released by Dutton this September. She’s also published a variety of short fiction, nonfiction and poetry in the U.S., Canada, and Norway. Hart received her BA in English from the University of Central Florida, after which she became the National Endowment of the Arts writer-in-residence for Lake County.

During the selection process for this year’s writer-in-residence program, the committee was especially impressed with Hart’s teaching style.  

“We admired the attention to the individual that Lenore gave students in her class. Her pedagogical style seemed very fitting for New College,” explains Humanities Division Chair Maribeth Clark. “She shared materials with us that showed how she thought about the specific needs of individual students, and then articulated goals for the students that responded to his or her personal strengths and weaknesses.”

Hart, who grew up in central Florida, is excited to be back in her home state though it is a somewhat bittersweet homecoming.

“I grew up in the ‘old’ Florida, a place of unpaved back roads, miles of rolling orange groves, and alligators crossing the backyard at night,” explains Hart. “However, by the time I entered college, Disney World had moved in across the lake from my parents’ house. From there, I watched rural Florida morph into theme parks and housing tracts.” 

Now, years later, Hart inhabits an area which very much resembles the Florida of her youth. She and her husband own a house on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, a narrow peninsula connected to Virginia by an eighteen-mile bridge-tunnel. Upon moving here, Hart says “it felt like coming home to my childhood, this farming and fishing community with narrow, shell-paved lanes, deer and geese and crooked creeks and long stretches of green forest.”

This was a welcome feeling, after seeing the Florida she knew change so drastically through her childhood. However, not long after relocating to Virginia, Hart began to notice the same trend of demolishment and redevelopment that took over Florida in her youth.

“As I made the sixty-five mile drive down the shore and over the bridge-tunnel to Norfolk each week, I noticed some of the things that had drawn me to the Shore were already becoming history.  The woods were thinning, giving way slowly to convenience stores and housing developments. One day a Big K-Mart moved in; then the small local shops began to close. Stop lights proliferated along the long, straight highway that traverses the Shore. And the farmers and watermen were finding it harder to make a living, crowded out like the deer and geese.”

Hart on the Crystal River in Florida

So affected was Hart by the transformation of the haven she had found that she turned to writing as a way to preserve some part of the past. Her first novel, Waterwoman, was born out of this desire to reclaim this past so quickly disappearing. Set in a staunch Methodist barrier-island society of the early 1900s, Waterwoman follows its young protagonist, Annie, through childhood into adulthood, as she becomes a tall, gawky young woman, a tomboy who wants to pursue the commercial fishing life like her waterman father.

The novel captures the feeling of a simpler time on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, and writing the story helped Hart feel as if she was preserving some of its past.

“It was as if I’d been able to save a bit of the past itself from developers and asphalt and bulldozers and run-off pollution; to preserve a true piece of the old Eastern Shore."

In addition to her classes, Hart will continue writing while at New College. She is currently working on two novels,  a work of historical fiction set in Virginia, and a circus novel in which Sarasota itself may play a key role.

"Before I came here, I was planning on writing a novel about the circus. After being in Sarasota, and working right next to the Ringling Museum, I realized how perfect a location this was to do research and write this particular story."

New College's writer-in-residence program is now in its 4th year. Previous visiting authors have included Betty Pesetsky, Liesel Litzenberger and Matt Sharpe, whose novel The Sleeping Father was recently reviewed in the New York Times' Review of Books. For more information on Lenore Hart, or New College's writer-in-residence program, please contact Becca Nelson at (941) 359-4314.