Welcome to SwampFire online, showcase
for the annual SwampFire Retreat,
hosted by Steve Smith of 4 Corners Gallery
and organized by Mary Catherine Harper
and Dawn Burns.

 

Click here for Zoom workshop details

Photo by Dawn Burns

Celebrating fifteen years of SwampFire

2023 marks fifteen years of SwampFire activities (not counting the lost year of 2020). The founder of SwampFire, Dawn Burns, celebrated with the three people invited to the first retreat in 2008: Jan Bechtel, Rachel Baker, and Mary Catherine Harper. Steve Smith, who has hosted the yearly retreats since 2011, again opened his 4 Corners Gallery to the 2023 participants.


Eva English captures the relaxing mood of SwampFire in this photo of Steve Smith and Dawn Burns bathed in the glow of the 2023 bonfire.


SwampFire founder, Dawn Burns, sitting in the just-harvested wheat field.


Participants of the first SwampFire retreat: Dawn Burns, Jan Bechtel, Mary Catherine Harper, Rachel Baker.


Organizers and host of SwampFire, Dawn Burns, Mary Catherine Harper, and Steve Smith. Notice one of the retreat participants, Andrea Baldwin, hamming it up in the background :)

 

Dragonflies, SwampFire symbol,
for how they so often hover over
gatherings.
(Photo by Dawn Burns)

Mary Catherine Harper:
The joy of our 15th anniversary

Mey Hasbrook's 2018 project:
Naming our grandmothers

Eva English's 2014 photos:
Steve Smith's Raku workshop

 

 


Some of our SwampFire members at their 15 October 2022 reading at Everybody Reads, Lansing MI: Mike Copperman, Dawn Burns,
Scott Harris (bookstore proprietor), Mary Catherine Harper,
Kait West.(Photo by Andrea Baldwin)

 

Photos from earlier SwampFire retreats


Art talk between poet Rachel Baker and potter Steve Smith of 4 Corners Gallery


Marian Plant and Jennifer Repka duel over who gets the last s'mores as Marcy Bauman watches the show.

Marcy Bauman and Joyce Meier relax on a lazy SwampFire afternoon

Linda Bale Krouse takes a little snooze after a breakfast of Dawn's Belgian waffles.

On these pages the artists and writers of the enterprise share what it means to push the boundaries of visual and language arts.


Students write all day and a professor carves on a clay bowl after a writing session


Link for group members:
FacebookForSwampFireGroupMembers

update 3 Aug 2023