In the midst of pot throwers, glass blowers, woodworkers and metalworkers at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Sunshine on Deer Isle, Barbara Hurd sat at her computer last week quietly writing about geology. The spinning, banging, blowing and bending took place in the studios around her own writing space, where she worked alone and, at first glance, seemed like an anomaly at Haystack. Typically, the well-known studio-art school, located at the end of a narrow spine of land near Eggemoggin Reach, draws artisans each summer for two-week workshops. Under the tutelage of international craft artists, they make bowls, jewelry, weavings and vases.

Hurd, a writer and educator, is in the mix as part of the school’s Visiting Artist Program that has, in varying forms, been in place at Haystack since its beginning in 1950. Often, the visiting guest, who stays for two weeks and has a studio buried among the spruces in which to do his or her work, has been a painter. In recent years, the school’s director, Stuart Kestenbaum, has opened the spot to others who work in artistic and cultural fields: architects, puppeteers, basket makers and, at least once a year, a writer. Usually there are three or four a season.

The process for choosing artists is not formal, said Kestenbaum. Usually, he has his eye out during the rest of the year for people whose work has an affinity with the crafts setting. In addition to choosing artists from a national roster, Kestenbaum has also featured Mainers such as basket maker Lissa Hunter and metalworker Tim McCreight, both of Portland, and poets Wes McNair of Mercer and Betsy Sholl of Portland.

Hurd was a natural choice because her work in creative nonfiction examines the natural world. Indeed, her two books – “Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination” and “Three Sources of Light: Nature and Imagination Inside the Cave” – show an immediate crossover with the very materials that crafts people use: mud, clay and stone.

The book she is working on during her time at Haystack is about geology, offering another crossover between her writing and the granite for which Deer Isle is known. The time in Maine, not too unlike stays she has had at the artist communities of Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H., allows her quiet reflection without the responsibilities that come with a home and job.

“This is a place that evokes the piece I’m working on,” said Hurd, who teaches writing at the Stonecoast Program at the University of Southern Maine and Frostburg State University in Maryland, where she lives with her husband, the poet Stephen Dunn. “I hope to weave together the geology of this area and the arts I’m learning about here. So I am interested in the verbs, the actions of all these studios.”

As part of her residency, Hurd agreed to meet with craft students each day in the late afternoon. On the first day, more than 15 of the 80 program participants arrived – still in their paint- and clay-stained outfits – bearing lists of verbs from their work. In an introductory evening the night before, Hurd had asked her Haystack neighbors – most of the students and the visiting artists stay on

campus for the sessions – to share verbs representative of their crafts. She collected the slips of paper, tucked them away, and turned the group’s attention to writing exercises. “Imagine a hidden studio at Haystack,” she said, beginning one of the activities. “Where would it be?” The answers: under the ocean, in a sleeping bag, below the moss, inside a granite boulder, in memory.

During the hour meeting, Hurd tried to stimulate an understanding of language as the material for a craft called writing.

“Think of writing as making,” she instructed. “I’m interested in seeing what artists used to working material with their hands will do. What do you do when you don’t have materials such as clay or wood? We have to get material on the page. And then it’s for you to shape.”

Making connections between the crafts and other fields such as writing is exactly the goal Kestenbaum has in mind for the series.

“The students are so focused on material – which is great,” said Kestenbaum, a poet who attended the first writing session by Hurd. “But this can open up the experience in other ways that can be a surprise.”

Each of the visiting artists also gives a free Monday night lecture, reading or demonstration, which is open to the public. Last Monday, more than 100 people from the school and community gathered to hear Hurd’s presentation. They were given an unexpected treat: Earlier that day, Hurd had won a Pushcart Prize, a prestigious literary award, and Bill Henderson, Maine-based editor at Pushcart Press in New York, made the announcement at Haystack. “It was just a thrill,” said Hurd two days later.

While not every Monday night comes with a national award, it does offer a unique window into art, said Kestenbaum.

“I see the series as a resource for the community and for crafts people in the entire state,” he said. “If you came to every one in the summer, you would have a great education in crafts and in what contemporary artists are thinking.”

On her third day at the school, Hurd spent the morning watching a glass-blowing session. She had seen the process before but never with the intention of writing about it or studying it as a theme.

“There’s such a sense of urgency in that studio, a kind of choreographed operating room where they are hurrying to put the patients on the table,” she said. “It almost seems like what I’m looking at here is two radically different rates of the passage of time. Geologic time is so slow. And then, there was the radically rapid transformation of molten glass into a pitcher in an hour.”

When her residency ends, Hurd will offer her critical perspective on her time at the school in the Haystack Monograph Series, established in the early 1990s to address issues of interest or philosophical importance to contemporary crafts. The scholarly piece that Hurd submits will be the 16th in the series meant to document artist impressions of the school.

“My goal is to work with language the way the craftspeople here work with mud and wood and metal, and to see it as something that gets shaped, just as their material gets shaped,” she said.

For information about the Monday night Visiting Artist Lecture Series, which continues through Aug. 30, contact Haystack Mountain School of Crafts at 348-2306 or e-mail haystack@haystack-mtn.org. Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.