2011 Winner of the Writer's Well Retreat

The Writer's Well Retreat announces Vesper Osborne as its 2011 winner. 

"A passionate advocate for arts education, she is designing a creative arts workshop, "Music: Connecting the dots with math, history and language." Born in Washington, D.C., she lives in Bowie, Maryland."

 Vesper currently works for National Geographic Channel, as production manager for Nat Geo Wild. with multi-dimensional skills, she has experienced a wide range of television genres: news, music, sitcoms, sports, and documentaries.  An aspiring musician, composer, and jazz vocalist, her original composition “When the Spirit Moves” placed in the top ten at the Third Annual Composers and Songwriters Competition---First Bar Finals in Los Angeles, California.  Following is an excerpt from her essay Monticello, created in the program and published in 2003.

Osborne, Vesper.
Monticello
Callaloo - Volume 26, Number 3, Summer 2003, pp. 590-592
The Johns Hopkins University Press

Vesper Osborne - Monticello - Callaloo 26:3 Callaloo 26.3 (2003) 590-592 Monticello Vesper Osborne The wind brushed against my skin and remembered. I heard the sound of hoofs muted against the dusty dirt road. The horses seemed to be dancing to a rhythmic phrase, an allegro tempo, with four beats to a measure as they traveled six-hundred feet above the flat plains of Charlottesville, Virginia.

The sun, heavy with fatigue, descended quickly over the western horizon. The smell of rain awakened a distant past. Children laughed. Babies cried. We labored from dawn to dusk. Gabriel Lilly, the cruelest of Monticello's overseers, shouted orders. We rebelled silently, but our bodies obeyed. The smell of French cuisine prepared by slave James Hemings permeated the air adjacent to the kitchen. After dark, we dined on a pinch of cornmeal and a ration of pork. The cold mountain air was unkind to the African.

The slave cabins were built of stonewalls and brick floors, ten feet by ten feet, providing marginal protection from the elements. Monticello, "little mountain" in Italian, was home—refuge—for Jefferson and the white family born of his flesh and blood. For the slave, Monticello was an invisible cage. A prison. An existence with no choices, no voice. America's third president relaxed in the parlor on his mahogany campeachy chair, hand-crafted by slave John Hemings. Warmed by a fire, candles...