Strapp, a junior studio art and art history major from Goshen, Ky., won first place for a collection that includes art survey texts, historical first editions, and bibles and religious texts.

Sarah Strapp ’10

She has a particular liking for books of hours, and has several facsimile editions of these texts. These were personal volumes kept by Catholics to “mark time throughout the day and the prayers that should accompany those hours,” she wrote in an annotated bibliography submitted under the contest guidelines.

What many of her volumes have in common are colorful illuminated illustrations.

“The books I collect are things of beauty that while pleasing to the eye are also endearing to my heart,” she said. “I have books saved from Hitler’s fires and books that have traveled around the world.”

Strapp grew up in a house full of books on all subjects, but it was a childhood trip to a museum that sparked her intense interest in manuscripts and likely led to the honors project she is working on today. She is using period techniques, and to the extent possible, paints, brushes and other materials to re-create pages out of centuries-old illuminated manuscripts.

Staring at 500-year-old texts in that museum as a middle schooler, she said, “I fell in love with the bright glowing colors and the way that the inks and paints danced under the glass.”

Her book collection is not of one subject, but she says they are all books that need protecting. Strapp sees herself as their custodian, not their owner.

Laura Dietrich ’12

Dietrich’s love affair with gardening books began in the night, on a restless search among her aunt’s shelves for something to read that would lull her to sleep.

She selected “The Indoor Gardener’s Companion,” and within 10 minutes her 8- or 9-year-old self was deciding what plants would thrive in her house.

“I was hooked,” she wrote in the essay required as part of the contest guidelines, which is sprinkled with botany-inspired references.

Books “literally and figuratively opened the door to a whole new kingdom,” wrote Dietrich, who is in her first year at Sweet Briar.

As she began to acquire books on plants, she didn’t focus on any one specialty until orchids captured her attention. ” … before I knew what was happening, I had joined two orchid societies, one of them being the American Orchid Society, and surrounded myself with a plethora of orchid books,” she wrote.

Dietrich has come to think of her collection as a garden, always growing, but also to regard a garden as a library. Starting with that first book, she has used what she learned from reading the texts to grow houseplants and orchids.

Someday, she wrote in her essay, “I want to use my books to help others who share my interest in plants.”

The Nicole Basbanes Student Book Collecting Contest award is sponsored by Sweet Briar College Friends of the Library and Nicholas Basbanes, author of “A Splendor of Letters” and “A Gentle Madness,” among others. Basbanes’ daughter, the competition’s namesake, graduated from Sweet Briar in 2004.

Winners received a cash prize up to $300. A ceremony to present the awards was held at the Friends of the Library spring meeting on March 27. For placing first in the Sweet Briar contest, Strapp will be entered in the Fine Books & Collections Magazine Collegiate Book-Collecting Championship, a national competition with a $2,500 first prize.

— Jennifer McManamay

The 2008 defending champion Savannah College of Art and Design took first place, finishing 10 points ahead of Sweet Briar with an overall score of 182. Centenary College was second with 176. Ten college teams competed for the national title.

“I teased him mercilessly at every turn to say I wanted to be something that didn’t actually move,” White said, saying his lessons with the late Petrus Bosman had officially qualified him to play a number of things — trees, stones, bushes, Corinthian columns.

White is quick to point out it was all in jest, but Magruder recently took him up on his offer. He won’t be playing an immobile or inanimate object, however. “He’s always been teasing me that he wanted to be a tree on stage,” Magruder said. “I told him, ‘Listen to me, man. If you’re going to be in my dance you’re not going to be a tree.”

At 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, April 24 and 25, White will join more than 20 dancers on stage at Murchison Lane Auditorium in a piece choreographed by Magruder for the annual Spring Dance Concert.

Magruder said the dance, called “Wave Forms,” is the “largest piece I’ve ever choreographed at Sweet Briar.”

During “Wave Forms,” White also will perform on guitar with three of the five members of FaSt, Sweet Briar’s faculty/staff band. For this production, however, Magruder, who also is in the band, has renamed the group “Slim FaSt” because two of their members, professors Rob Granger and Steve Wassell, won’t be joining them.

Magruder describes his dance as high-energy and sometimes humorous, and said the dancers are transformed into a “sound and music” orchestra. Prompted by a conductor, the dancers make sounds — anything from barking to screaming — accompanied by creative movements.

“If the students can keep it together over how funny they’re being, it’s actually kind of cool,” he said.

Magruder’s wife, Ella, a dance professor at the College, also has choreographed a piece for the spring concert. Called “Chromatique,” the work features seven students, all dance majors, and music by Slim FaSt. Magruder did not withhold praise for his wife, saying the dance was one of his favorites from her repertoire.

“Technically, it’s quite stunning, movement-wise,” he said. “Just a beautiful piece. The movement is very powerful and the students’ technical ability is really standing out. Ella uses all of these big colored pieces of fabric that are moved through space. … Visually, it’s a stunning dance.”

In addition to pieces choreographed by Sweet Briar’s dance faculty, the concert will include eight to 10 student works, including one choreographed by sophomore Sara Buttine. The five-to-six-minute piece will feature six dancers and focuses on what she calls as “the linear patterns of the stage.

The dance is so high energy, she said, that after rehearsals the dancers tell her they feel like “they just ran a marathon.”

Buttine also will dance a solo during the concert, a piece she also performed in March at the American College Dance Festival. She describes it as a “text and movement piece” based on a collection of poems she wrote about her life.

“It’s a technical dance and at the same time it’s an emotive dance,” she said. “It expresses meaning, while incorporating the technique of the dancer. … It’s kind of like a window looking in on my life [with] someone outside watching in.”

Buttine, a dance major, also will perform in Mark and Ella Magruder’s pieces, as well as in those choreographed by Mallory Duff ’10, Aili McGill ’10 and Meagan Oliphant ’11. In Oliphant’s dance, Buttine teams up with Tiffany Miller ’11.

“Her piece works really with the relationship with two people and the reliance on friendship,” Buttine said. “It’s always pulling back, going toward each other, helping each other with things, pushing people out of their way, that sort of thing.”

Admission to the Spring Dance Concert is free. For more information, call Mark Magruder at (434) 381-6150.

— Suzanne Ramsey

“Free Union,” titled for his poem and the Albemarle County community near his Earlysville home, was published in February by the University of Georgia Press. It is the seventh book in the VQR Poetry Series, a project of the Virginia Quarterly Review where Casteen serves on the editorial staff. He also is a visiting professor at Sweet Briar, teaching English and poetry workshops.

That Casteen was balancing his home life with a conversation about his first book fits with where he finds himself these days. For years he wrote poetry when he wasn’t making fine furniture to earn a living for his family.

Although building things was what he wanted to do for a time, it is physically hard, dangerous and lonely besides, he said. After graduating from the University of Virginia, he went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for his Master of Fine Arts to be a better writer for himself, not because of ambitions to publish or teach. Ten years on, he knew he preferred the company of people to machines and was rethinking his calling.

“It seemed to me that I could do more good for more people in the classroom,” said Casteen, who’d also concluded, he could “either be a writer all of the time or not be one at all.”

He sold his company, Fern Hill Furniture Works, and jumped into teaching and writing with both feet — and with all of his fingers still intact. His arrival at Sweet Briar in 2007 coincided with finishing the manuscript for “Free Union.” Finding both professional and personal support at the College, he is now about halfway through writing a second volume of poetry, he said.

Casteen also found time to establish and direct the inaugural Sweet Briar Undergraduate Creative Writing Conference in March. Drawing about 60 students from nine Virginia colleges and universities, it was a success in attendance and in the quality of work that came out of it, Casteen said.

He was just 18 or 19 and a student at U.Va. when he wrote the oldest poem in his book, “The Night Pasture.” Several works in the volume have appeared in literary magazines, such as Shenandoah, The Southern Review and The Paris Review.

Charles Wright, Casteen’s teacher at U.Va., wrote in the 2003-2004 Winter Ploughshares that his former student always had a raw, edgy talent that he “smoothed and solidified” over time. “He has a real ear for the strong, Anglo-Saxon beat of words; he has a sure hand for keeping them in order and making them sing,” Wright said.

Casteen himself talks about a “music of language,” and says his penchant for “playing with words, thinking about where they come from and why they sound the way they do,” is among the several influences of his father. He is the son of John T. Casteen III, the president of U.Va. and a professor of English.

Casteen said he is always writing about landscape, no matter where he is. He attributes that in part to his father, too. “Most of the places and subjects that I write about are influenced by the things that he shared with me. Most of the places that I love, I love because he showed them to me.”

It may also derive from his approach to poetry, which starts with observing things and writing them down. If he decides there’s something there — a lucky circumstance, he says — he works on it.

“So it’s close observation, rendition of what’s concrete and real into the abstract of language, and refinement of the abstract to suit the thing that moved you to write the poem in the first place,” he said.

His poems rove from the furniture shop to Virginia farm fields to the Maine woods. They’re strewn with characters, places and things that will feel familiar to many, especially Central Virginians — “Like murmured things old women said at cards when I was small: ‘Good night,’ they said. ‘Great day in the morning.’ And, ‘Lord, Lord. Lord have mercy.’ ”

Casteen also is a hunter. It’s a pastime he says affords the solitude to think about things that he may write about, although the act itself is not a subject of his poems. Even “Night Hunting,” previously published in the Winter 2006-2007 Ploughshares, is not about taking an animal’s life, but rather whether it is moral to do so:

Night Hunting
Because we wanted things the way they were
in our minds’ black eyes we waited. The beaver
raising ripples in a vee behind his head
the thing we wanted. A weed is what might grow
where you don’t want it; a dahlia could be a weed,
or love, or other notions. The heart can’t choose
to find itself enchanted; the hand can’t choose
to change the shape of water. How strange, to hope
to see the signs of motion, to make an end
to Peter’s old refrain: He’ll be along, son of a bitch,
and then you best be ready. So sure, and so sure
that when he shines the light the thing will show
along the other shore. What next? Well,
you’ve killed animals before. Invited here
for company in the cold night, and because
ever handy with rifles. What next is wait
and see, what next may be the lone report, the ever-
widening circles, blood-blossom, the spirit rising slow
like oily smoke above still waters. We wanted
a pond to look like a pond: standing poplars,
shallows unsullied, fish and frogs and salamanders.
The gleaming back of fur and fat may not belong,
or may: God of varmints, God of will, forgive us
our trespasses. We know precisely what we do.

Casteen is wrapping up a book tour at a reading this month in San Francisco. “Free Union” is available in the Sweet Briar Book Shop and at Cochran Library.

— Jennifer McManamay

The panel discussed and took questions from callers on the types and range of financial aid available, how to apply for it and how to plan to pay for college, especially in challenging economic times. They also talked about the value of attending college and made a case for considering a private college or university versus a public institution.

Fred Echols hosted the hour-long show, which can be downloaded in two parts from the “Evening Edition” Web site. WVTF is a local National Public Radio affiliate heard on FM 89.1 in the Lynchburg area and 89.3 in the Charlottesville area. “Evening Edition” is produced by the WVTF news department and covers myriad topics of local, state and national interest.

For information about options for paying for college, contact Sweet Briar’s Office of Financial Aid at financialaid@sbc.edu or (434) 381-6156.

— Jennifer McManamay

Highlights of “Sk8tapalooza” include live music by local band 3 Away From Uno, T-shirt, wall and helmet graffiti, and a mini-ramp contest. The public is invited and admission is $3 for skate park members and $5 for non-members.

The mini-ramp contest, in which skaters will compete in beginner, intermediate or advanced classes, costs an additional $2, and for those who have yet to invest in gear, skateboards, helmets and knee and elbow pads will be available for rent. Food and drinks also will be sold.

Students involved in the project include Ashleigh Caisse ’10, Madeline Eubanks ’09, Hannah Hesser ’10, Molly McGonegle ’10, Christine Ponton ’09 and Anne Porter ’09. Additional students from the business program also have volunteered to make baked goods and help out the day of the event.

A rain date has been set for Saturday, April 25. For more information, visit Riverfront Skate Park’s Web site.

— Suzanne Ramsey

A poet, nonfiction writer and doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, Kenarov will read from his nonfiction work at 8 p.m. in the Boxwood Room of the Florence Elston Inn & Conference Center. Admission is free and the public is invited.

Kenarov’s work has appeared in the New England Review, Gettysburg Review, Virginia Quarterly Review and other literary journals and magazines. A piece he wrote for the Virginia Quarterly Review about the Roma — a people sometimes referred to as Gypsies — was recently selected for “Best American Travel Writing.”

For more information, contact John Gregory Brown, director of the creative writing program, at brown@sbc.edu or 381-6434 or visit the International Writers Series Web site.

The International Writers Series is funded through the College’s lectures and events committee and the Ewald fund. Books by authors featured in the series are available at the Sweet Briar College Book Shop.

— Suzanne Ramsey

This year’s event was organized by Ann Dowdy ’09 and Melissa Viar ’09, Sweet Briar students who are doing a special study on marketing for non-profit organizations. Other’s representing the College include the College’s Environmental Club, which will sponsor a booth with children’s activities, and Micaela Weiss ’09, who will be promoting her new stevia-based sweetener, Free and Sweet.

Dozens of vendors and organizations, listed below, will offer information, products and services.

Mind Body Studio’s Mike Cundiff envisioned GreenSpring more than five years ago, but the seeds for the event were planted long before that. In the 1960s, he read Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” a book that, as he puts it, “is now playing itself out on a global scale.”

“[I] was taken aback by how it depicted a world in the not-so-distant future devoid of abundant life due to the ever-rising levels of pollution generated by man’s drive to excel in his capitalistic ventures,” Cundiff said prior to the inaugural event.

“As you might imagine from the title, the book doesn’t paint a very positive picture regarding the impact that humans, in general, have on the environment.”

When he started to envision a health and wellness fair for the greater Lynchburg area, Cundiff began to realize that a “multi-dimensional approach” was necessary to encourage a healthy and Earth-friendly lifestyle.

“We have to become engaged on not only an environmental level, but on a social and economic level as well,” he said.

“With the limitations of our current political system, we stand a greater chance of creating positive change by how we spend our money and [by] making educated decisions regarding lifestyle than by waiting for government to do the right thing.”

For more information on GreenSpring, contact Cundiff at 528-1100 or visit Mind Body’s Web site.

The following vendors and organizations also will offer information, products and services:

Amazement Square
Anderson’s Country Market
Best Start Parenting Center
Bikes Unlimited
Carriage House Inn
Commission on Race & Racism
Earth Munchies
East West Acupuncture
Fresh Air Natural Foods
Frog Bottom Farm
Greater Lynchburg Environmental Network
Greater Lynchburg Transit Authority
Health Nut Nutrition
Horse & Buggy Produce
Hyla Vacuum
1Sky/Green Peace
J&J Weatherization
Juice Plus
Liberty University
Light Chiropractic
Lynchburg Community Action Group
Lynchburg Parks & Recreation’s Nature Zone
Lynchburg Real Foods
Master Naturalists
Melrose Bison
Michael Corbin Bio-Diesel
Mind Body Studio
Mountain Run Farm
New Awakenings
Night Sky Farm
Our Father’s Farm
Outdoor Trails
Peace Education Group
Randolph College
RecycleEasy
Robert E. Lee Soil & Water Conservation Group
Rosetta Coffee Company
Salad Master-Wellness Association LLC
Seg-Ville Segways
Terry Subaru
The Realty Group
Three Wheeler Vehicle
Well-N-Hand

— Suzanne Ramsey