Fellowship Finalists:

Elizabeth Longfellow and John Lunn

Elizabeth Longfellow, Creative Non-fiction Writer, Deerfield

Nashua native Elizabeth Longfellow is working on a memoir entitled Backward Heart. The funds she will receive as a Fellowship Finalist will grant her the precious time she needs to complete a book length manuscript for publication. She is one of the first writers to earn her degree in the new MFA in Creative Nonfiction program at the University of NH and wants to finish the manuscript before committing herself to a teaching job. As she says, “Writers who teach find it very difficult to do their own writing.” At UNH, she had the opportunity to write under the guidance of memoirist Meredith Hall. From her, Longfellow says that she “learned to pick out significant moments that inform the part of the story you’re trying to tell.”

As one who had written non-fiction and read fiction her entire life, she was able to finally meld the two together in Backward Heart. This work, which she wrote as her MFA requirement, “reads” very much like a novel with clearly drawn characters and well developed situations. It seems logical for her to tackle a work of fiction next.

Longfellow summarizes her memoir as “the s tory of an ordinary good girl set loose to negotiate the journey out of her ‘50s NH childhood, through the civil unrest of the 60’s and her call to social activism. It will require of her a shotgun marriage, the death of one child, the birth of another, a coming to terms with her enigmatic mother and her hapless young husband. She will, in this s tory, break hearts, break laws and break the marriage, too, because at every juncture there are choices she never imagined and consequences she never intended.”

Click here to read an excerpt from the work of Elizabeth Longfellow

^^top

John Lunn, Flute Maker, Newport

John Lunn has been studying music since the age of eight and began studying the flute at age 13. Soon after graduating high school, the Toronto native began playing the flute professionally and apprenticed to a flute-making company.

He premiered his first “art nouveau John Lunn flute” at the National Flute Association convention in New Orleans in 1989 and a few years later his flutes began selling worldwide. In 1991, Lunn moved to Newport, New Hampshire and published Hands On, a newsletter for flutists with performance injuries. In 1993 he created several flutes in 14K gold with master flute maker Albert Cooper and shortly after became a juried member of the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen (LNHC). He has been master flutemaker for the Massachusetts based Burkart-Phelan Flute Company in Acton and the William S. Haynes Flute Company in Boston. He has received the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen’s “Best in Show” designation for their Creative Hand II exhibit.

Each Lunn flute is unique and tailor-made to fit his client’s anatomy. This effectively relieves the occupational injuries to which flutists are prone. “I found that I could relieve their symp toms, if not eradicate their stress completely, by making a flute that perfectly fit their hands...” John Lunn has built 150 flutes to date that are currently being played worldwide.

Lunn writes: “Each Lunn flute is sculpted in an organic art nouveau motif and completely hand wrought using traditional hand tools and methods so that no two are identical….With each customer in mind, I create a look and feel as though all the keys grew naturally from the tube of the flute to reach their fingers; my ultimate goal being a perfect blend of beauty, design and function. To reach this goal, I’ve studied acoustics to find the perfect pitch, metalsmithing to create the sculpture, and human anatomy to understand the shape and physical needs of the hands that hold the flute. … there are an overwhelming number of musicians who suffer from performance injuries like tendonitis, carpal tunnel syndrome and focal dystonia. I found that I could relieve their symptoms, if not eradicate their stress completely, by making a flute that perfectly fit their hands...”

For more information on John Lunn visit http://www.lunnflutes.com

^^top

Back to 2008 Fellows page

Last updated: April 20, 2009