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About Pit Pinegar

PIT MENOUSEK PINEGAR is a writer, photographer, teacher, performer, creativity and life skills consultant. As principal of A Creative Life, she works with individuals and organizations (schools, businesses, and special interest groups) to help maximize creative potential. As a teaching writer, she helps students of all ages—elementary school through adult—give voice to their passions and observations, to move from the spontaneous self-expression of a first draft or journal to the careful crafting of written communication that may be poem, story, essay, or drama.

On Living a Creative Life—

Pit Pinegar left her job as an editor and director of the international student program at Miss Porter’s School nine years ago. During the eight years she worked at MPS, she directed a student internship program, was director of public relations, and taught creative writing.

“I’ve been very lucky in my working life. I’ve been blessed with great bosses, amiable work environments, opportunities to develop many professional skills, and a great deal of freedom and encouragement to invent new ways of doing things, whatever the job. To have bosses willing to turn things over to invention really is great good fortune.

“It also seemed sometimes as though no job ever made the best use of my most strengths and skills, though certainly working at MPS came closest. Still, I wanted to see what I could invent for myself. I wanted to put my money where my (creative) mouth was. I’d always loved the blank page, and the notion of inventing a working life for myself was a really big blank page.”

Almost 10 years later, Pinegar’s working life is an interesting combination that includes her own writing work (two books of poetry, Nine Years between Two Poems and The Possibilities of Empty Space (1996 & 1997, Andrew Mountain Press); the manuscript for a third collection, The Physics of Transmigration: Poems of Love and Adventure ; and the completion of a novel, Intersections.

In 2002, after experimenting with images and words for several years, she hit upon a form that she calls Broadside Miniatures™, a combination of poem and photograph that has been described as quiet meditation. She is experimenting with larger forms.

In addition to her own writing and photographic work, Pit Pinegar has a number of working roles that might be called writing- or creativity-based. She is a…

• teaching artist (poetry, fiction, drama, creative non-fiction) at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, a magnet high school for gifted young artists;
• teaching artist – poetry in elementary and middle school programs sponsored by the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts; professional development for teachers;
• teaching artist – fiction and/or poetry at the Center for Creative Youth, Wesleyan University;
• director – the Cheney Hall Broadside Series, a reading series, now in its seventh year, at the Cheney Hall Center for the Performing Arts, Manchester, CT;
• director — urban outreach program, the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival;
• facilitator – private adult students working on writer’s craft or special projects; writing and creativity workshops and retreats;
• creativity and life skills consultant – for individuals and groups who wish to initiate creative change in their lives.
• editor – manuscripts and special projects for individual clients and organizations;
• writer-(or creator-) in-residence/visiting writer – residencies designed to fit the needs of the school or university. At Bucknell University, for example, in 2003, a two-week residency included: a public lecture on multi-genre writing, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Form, a Women’s Resource Center lunch talk, discussions with students in senior and freshman creativity seminars (one-on-one sessions with seniors to review and critique their creative writing projects), classes with advanced fiction and poetry students, a three-hour class with advanced opera students designed to work on character development, and a poetry reading;
• lecturer/reader/performer – readings in all genres; lectures on creative living, developing creativity, writing, the experience of raising a child with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) (All Available Space, a performance monologue, performed at the Sixth Annual Festival of One Woman Shows in New York City, in 1996, is central to presentations about ADHD.), experiences in Saudi Arabia.