SOUL MOUNTAIN RETREAT, 1/1/11

Best new year greetings to all
Soul Mountaineers and friends
of Soul Mountain Retreat!

In its March/April, 2010 issue Poets and Writers magazine published an interview with me about Soul Mountain and its future, titled “Nelson to Descend Soul Mountain.” The interviewer, Kaveh Bassiri, himself a Soul Mountaineer, asked “Will Soul Mountain close after this year?” I replied that I hadn’t given up hoping that Soul Mountain Retreat would be able to raise enough money to be able to survive the financial downturn. Yet Soul Mountain Retreat has been pretty much a one-woman enterprise for several years, testing the limits of my physical energy and my financial resources. And administrative responsibilities and fund-raising encroached on my writing time and limited the amount of time I could be away to give readings.

The time has come for me to give up Soul Mountain Retreat. My lifelong dream is more than fulfilled. What pleasure it has been to watch the rising stars of so many Soul Mountaineers. A hundred writers, most of them poets and many of them members of groups traditionally underrepresented in U.S. letters, have been my guests over the course of these seven years.

(Continued on News page)