MFA Summer Residency - Star Island in the Isles of Shoals
Get back to nature during the SNHU M.F.A. summer residency, which begins with a six-day stay on Star Island in the Isles of Shoals, off the coast of New Hampshire.
Artists, writers, even families have been going to Star Island since the late 1800s to recharge, renew and find inspiration. While there, members of our M.F.A. writing community will have plenty of time and wonderful locations for writing. You’ll stay in cottages, dine in the hotel with faculty and fellow writers, enjoy bonfires and attend intimate back-porch readings, peer reviews and mentor meetings.
Star Island is known for its environmentally friendly lifestyle, including producing its own drinking water and optimizing energy usage.
Writer, musician and gardener Celia Thaxter began, on Appledore Island, the oldest artists’ colony in the U.S. for musicians, visual artists and writers. The colony began as a salon in her father’s hotel and her cottage in the second half of the 19th century, and inspired others, such as her close friend and “colonist” Edward MacDowell, to found salons and colonies of their own. Thaxter’s famous garden on Appledore has been recreated for visitors to enjoy today. Beside Appledore is Star Island with its old hotel, numerous cottages, and chapel — for decades it has been a place of retreat for spiritual and artistic renewal and now is the setting for Southern New Hampshire University’s summer residency for writers in our M.F.A. program.
Writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne (who describes Thaxter in “American Notebooks”), Henry David Thoreau, John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell (Thaxter’s first editor), came to Appledore as well, as did the great editor James Fields and his wife, Annie, herself a writer and famous keeper of Boston salons. Richard Watson Gilder, editor of Scribner’s Monthly, joined the colony’s “editorial board.”
Thaxter encouraged MacDowell to attract to her salon such major figures in 19-century American music as William and John Mason and John Knowles Paine (dean of American composers), as well as composer Arthur Batelle Whiting. William Mason was Liszt’s first American student and good friend.
Visual artists such as Childe Hassam and his teacher, Ignaz Gaugengigl, John Appleton Brown, William Morris Hunt (who committed suicide in Thaxter’s pond), and Ross Turner came to the hotel; two of them maintained studios on the island. Art historians have said that the Isles of Shoals became Childe Hassam’s Giverny.
This rich heritage informs the spirit of the Isles of Shoals, 12 miles off the coast of New Hampshire, and provides SNHU’s M.F.A. program with a place of true retreat and inspiration for faculty and students alike. We are the only M.F.A. program to hold our residencies on the islands and we work closely with the Star Island staff to ensure a rare creative experience for our writing community.
This unique MFA residency experience begins with a brief orientation period on the SNHU campus.