| From the Sunderland basement photo archives... |
Ruth Anderson Barnett, Joan Aleshire,
Margaret
Hoffman
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Gary Hawkins (now Director of the undergrad
Writing Center at WWC)
and Crystal
Bacon
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Ellen
Bryant Voigt, Joan Aleshire, Linda Dyer and Alan
Williamson
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Dear Warren Wilson MFA
friend,
The biting cold of this year's
Chicago-based AWP conference is receding at last to a
distant memory, as crocus break through the earth and
frost-bitten toes begin to heal. But we hope the ideas
and readings shared by MFA alum and faculty on dozens of
AWP panels have stuck with you, and we look forward to
seeing everyone next year in Denver.
This spring
brings further bleak financial news for all nonprofits,
as endowments everywhere continue to take a hit. That
includes Friends of Writers, and we ask you to remember
great causes such as the Holden Scholarship which
provide critical support to your fellow writers. Please
consider giving even a modest donation to Friends of
Writers right now via Paypal here: http://www.friendsofwriters.org/donation.html or by mail to PO Box 128, Marshfield VT
05658.
The Holden Scholarship has
supported many wonderful writers through the years,
including Victoria Chang, who is interviewed below about
her second book of poems. This newsletter also includes
information on this year's Alumni Conference, a poem
from Brooks Haxton, and an exciting new Sunderland
Basement project - so read on!
Lastly, don't forget that
every time you click on a book's link below to go visit
a friend's or faculty's Amazon.com page, a percentage of
any purchase you make on that Amazon visit gets donated
to Friends of Writers. And instead of Google, use
GoodSearch as an easy way to generate funds for Friends
of Writers scholarships. Go to www.goodsearch.com and type "Friends
of Writers" in the box "Who do you Goodsearch for?"
GoodSearch is a search engine that donates half its
revenue, just over a penny per search, to the charities
its users designate. Thanks for the support, and
happy reading.
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Antonya
Nelson doesn't
Twitter
But she does watch The Simpsons. A former
student asks her what makes her laugh.
 Her stories take place in the most ordinary
settings: a hotel bar, a sterile housing complex, a high
school gym. Over the course of three novels and five
story collections, WW MFA faculty Antonya Nelson has
been lauded for fiction that is unsentimental,
unflinching and - despite the familiarity of her
domestic settings - always surprising. In her
fictional universe, desire and despair coexist with
flashes of dark comedy. Her newest book, Nothing Right:
Short Stories, bristles with Nelson's spiky
wit and flair for offhanded heartbreak. It is peopled
with characters who, as the title implies, really can't
do anything right. They sleep with the wrong people.
Their plans fall apart. Their families inevitably
disappoint.
Nothing
Right has earned a glowing review from the
New York Times, which praised Nelson as a writer who
"values insight over epiphany." The San Francisco
Chronicle hailed Nothing
Right as "unforgettable" and observed that
Nelson, "witty and sympathetic, articulates our pains
and troubles better than we do." Recently, Nelson's
former student Diane Arieff (fiction '06) asked Nelson
about how she goes about inventing trouble for her
characters.
You have a knack for creating
vivid teenage characters and adults who yearn in for the
power of their younger, rebellious selves. What is it
about adolescence that draws you as a
subject?
Adolescence looks a
lot like middle age, to me. When I realized that my
daughter was going through an identity transformation
that resonated very profoundly with my own identity
transformation (the simple fact that one never does,
actually, get over high school business), I had a lot of
work to do fictionally. More here >>
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2009 Alumni Conference
Details
This
year's annual alumni conference will once again be held
on the beautiful grounds of Mt. Holyoke College in
Massachusetts. Those of you who have never attended a
conference before, y'all come! We've been through the
same Wally fire that you have. Grad Susan Methvin would
say, we are our own tribe. And after every
conference, we see the same first-timer testimonials: "I
was nervous...but it was great!" So come. We will
welcome you.
Where: Mt. Holyoke
College, South Hadley, Massachusetts
When: August 1-8 (full
stay) or August 4-8 (short stay)
Getting there: by plane
Bradley airport in Hartford-Springfield, by train Amtrak
into Springfield, by car Rt. I91 not far from Mass
Pike
Costs: $720 for full
stay (single room, all meals, facilities, events), $481
for short say (same amenities), $457 for commuters
(facilities and meals)
Scholarships: six $400
scholarships are available through Friends of Writers,
one to a poet in name of Lin Dyer, one for attendee
whose home is 1500 or more miles from South Hadley, and
four unrestricted
Registration Materials and
Deadlines: forms & materials will be made
available in April through the Wally listerv, the
message board, and Facebook. Registration & $250
deposit deadline is May 16; late registration (with
higher fee) runs through May 30.
Silent Auction: Benefit
for Holden Minority Fund. Bring your items to sell and
your checkbook to buy
For
more information on the alumni conference, including
testimonials and a list of last year's classes, click
here.
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Featured Poem: Brooks Haxton's
"My Father's
Suit"
 This past fall,
Warren Wilson MFA poetry faculty Brooks Haxton published
a new volume of poetry They Lift Their
Wings to Cry, titled after a meditation on
the song of the snowy tree cricket.
Publishers Weekly praised how "Haxton's stripped-down, careful
appreciations of flora, fauna and man-made things make
him a reliable witness to what life gives and to what
life takes away" and novelist George Saunders commented
in a Chicago
Tribune interview that Haxton is "one of the most
gifted and natural poets in America." In this poem from
They Lift Their
Wings to Cry, Haxton displays his exquisite
talent for delicate leaps between the physical and the
mystical.
MY FATHER'S
SUIT
The suit we chose was navy blue.
He sold them, hundreds,
which we helped to fit,
our hands impersonal,
adept, that signed the papers
now,
while someone dressed his body
in the suit. Without cosmetics,
in the viewing room, the face
looked green and uninhabited,
lips wide and thickly set,
no ghost of him, not sad,
not funny, not one bit
afraid - the freckle on the hand,
hair, veins, what had been his,
without him now, extraneous,
inane,
brow under my trembling right
palm
cool with an inhuman density,
as though immovable, but
not.
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The new Alumni Bookshelf Project
Calling all alums
to donate a copy of their own
published
works
The MFA office staff would
like to create a giant
bookshelf in the office to be filled with
books written by WW
MFA alums. This
shelf in the Sunderland basement will
serve as a tribute to
published alumni authors, and will offer inspiring
reading to the graduate and undergrad students who
use the office.
If you would be willing to
donate a copy of your book to the office
bookshelf, please mail o ne copy
to:
Amy
Grimm
MFA Program for
Writers
Warren Wilson
College
PO Box
9000
Ashevillle, NC
28815-9000
And don't forget: anytime you have a new book published, please inform
Patrick Donnelly at PatrickSDonnelly@aol.com. Patrick maintains
an ongoing database of Warren
Wilson MFA alumni book publications, and he needs your
help to keep the bilbiography up to
date.
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A conversation with Wally poetry alum
Victoria Chang
On working at Morgan Stanley,
evil, and weeds
 "Many poets display a single
strength. Some write beautiful nature poems, others
write well about relationships, still others have a gift
for addressing issues like politics or economics. Chang
can do it all." So raved a Kansas City journalist about
the second poetry collection from WW alum Victoria Chang
(poetry '05), Salvinia
Molesta, published this fall by the Virgina Quarterly Review book series.
During Chang's time at
Warren Wilson, she worked with Pimone Triplett, David
Baker, Elizabeth Arnold and Linda Gregerson. We asked
Gregerson, a Renaissance literature scholar, to read
Chang's newest collection and talk to her former student
about her book titled after an insidious weed.
You
trained early on as an historian, and I'm struck by the
depth of your historical engagement in the poems of Salvinia
Molesta. Could you speak a bit about the role of
history in your poems and also about poetry's obligation
to history, as you see it? What is the difference
between the way you engage history in a poem, and the
way you engaged it as a scholar?
I
have a BA in Asian Studies and an MA in Asian Studies so
I spent most of my early academic years studying Chinese
history. I wrote poems at that time too, but they were
mostly personal self-obsessed poems. It wasn't until I
returned to poetry in my late twenties that a flood of
poems with historical references started coming out. I
try not to force anything from my poems or to ask
anything of them so I let the poems write themselves
with as much guidance as they would allow me, hence the
historical poems influenced by my studies. I think
poetry should be obligated to whatever the particular
poet feels necessary to write about, whether it is
history, politics, illness, love, death. I just happen
to have a motley background and the type of personality
that is interested in everything, so that everything I
touch tends to appear in my poems in some shape or
form.More
here >>
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Alumni Residency Fellowship
open
for July 2-12, 2009
Application
deadline: May 1, 2009
The
MFA Program is once again delighted to offer an Alumni
Residency Fellowship for the upcoming summer residency,
July 2-12, 2009.
The
primary job of the Residency Fellow will be to record
each lecture, class, and reading that takes place during
the residency. In addition, you will get a lesson in how
to download each audio file, edit the files as
necessary, and burn each file to a CD, which will
require approximately one hour a day be spent in the MFA
Office. We also ask that you be prepared to assist the
staff with check-in (and very limited other duties in
case of emergency, like Amy hit by
meteor).
In
addition to being able to attend lectures, readings, and
classes, the Residency Fellow will receive room and
board, and a stipend of $1,000 to offset travel
costs.
The
application for the Alumni Residency Fellowship is
simply a letter stating one's interest and ability. This
summer, the Residency Fellow will need to arrive on
campus on July 1 and depart July 12.
Requirements
include good humor, discretion, stamina, and some
mechanical aptitude (enough, say, to operate a digital
recorder and its software).Applicants
must have graduated from the program at least one year
ago.
Application
letters should be sent, no later than May 1, to Amy
Grimm, MFA Program for Writers, Warren Wilson College,
PO Box 9000, Asheville, NC 28815-9000 or emailed to
agrimm@warren-wilson.edu.
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The MFA online message
board
Thanks to Ross White, MFA
alumni have a new electronic meeting place: an online message
board. The
Board will help us meet one another in a new setting and
archive thread discussions. The forum is not intended to
replace the Wally email listserv, but to supplement it
and provide more control over the way you get
information from the Wally
community.
You must be registered to see
the discussions, as they are closed to everyone but
the Wally community. When you register, please
create a username that helps others easily identify you.
For example, Ross's username is "Ross
White."
Topics range from the
introductory (see the "Introduce Yourself Here" thread
located under Off-Topic) to discussion of craft in
the Fiction and Poetry forums, and even a spot for the
forty-some of us who pledged on January 12 to write at
least 20 minutes a day for 90 days (see the W90X
thread). You can peruse by topic, see all new
posts with one click, or skip topics that aren't
relevant to you. The forums also allow for private
messaging between
members.
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News from WW MFA Alumni
Toasting our
books, journals, fellowships, and
degrees.
If
you have news to share, we'd love to know. Email your
latest publication news or milestones to Faith Holsaert
at writerwk1@mac.com with "WW newsletter" in the
subject line. Be sure to include your graduating year,
whether you worked in poetry or fiction, and links
to any of your work online.
Dawn O'Dell Abeita (fiction '95) had flash fiction stories published:
"Nest" & "Harvest" in Potomac
Journal, and "Snippings" in Fiction Weekly.
Colleen Abel's (poetry
'04) poem "Loving BF Skinner" was nominated for a
Pushcart Prize by The
Southern Review.
Lucy Anderton (poetry
'05) will resume the position of writer-in-residence for
the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) in
Auvillar, France through August 2009. Some of her
poems appeared in Barrow Street, DIAGRAM,
Spoken Word Revolution Redux, and the first print
issue of Tarpaulin
Sky. A big first for her: publication of her
essay in the Wally-linked Poem,
Revised. She also has a poem in the
forthcoming in From the
Fishouse Anthology.
Marck L. Beggs Ph.D. (poetry '87) had his third collection of poems, Catastrophic
Chords recently released by Salmon
Poetry in Ireland.
Robin Black (fiction
'05) sold her story collection Yesterday's News and
a still untitled novel to Random House. She worked on
several of the stories while at Warren Wilson, and the
earliest ideas for the novel date from that time. The
books have sold to publishers in six countries overseas
and will be translated into four languages. She was
awarded the 2009 fellowship to The Sirenland Conference
in Positano, Italy. Her essay "Plot, Variations I,
II and III, Chapters One Through Ten" (Colorado Review) was a
Notable Essay in Best American
Essays 2008.
Phil Boiarski (poetry
'80) has a poem in the May 2008 issue of the English Journal, the
magazine of the National Council of Teachers of
English.
Shannon Cain's (fiction
'05) story "Cultivation," initially written at Warren
Wilson, has been awarded a 2009 Pushcart Prize and was
listed among the "100 Other Distinguished Stories" in
Best American
Short Stories 2008.
Martha Carlson-Bradley (poetry '89) was one of the poets featured in A Reading
by Poets Living in New England at the 2009 Northeast MLA
Convention in Boston. Two of her poems are forthcoming
in Spoon River Poetry
Review.
Elizabeth Eslami (fiction,'03) has work appearing or forthcoming in
Thin Air, G.W. Review,
Bat City Review, Weber: The Contemporary West, Coe
Review, Beeswax Magazine, Neon, The Minnesota
Review, and Natural Bridge. Her
first novel, Bone
Worship, was published by Pegasus Books in
January. Visit her website here.
Mindy Friddle (fiction
'05) was awarded a 2008-09 Fellowship in Prose from the
South Carolina Arts Commission. Her second novel Secret
Keeperswill be published by St. Martin's Press in
May. An excerpt is available on her website.
Michelle Gillett (poetry '84) and Nina Ryan have been teaching
writing workshops together and independently and working
with writers on book projects for a number of years.
Nina's experience in publishing and as a literary agent
and Michelle's as a writer and editor inspired them to
make their business official. Check out g&r editing
writing and book development at their website here.
Christine Hale (fiction
'96) has a debut novel, Basil's
Dream, coming from Livingston Press (U of
West Alabama) April 2009. Visit her website here.
Ken
Hart's (poetry '98) collection Uh Oh Time won the 2007 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, judged by Mark
Jarman.
Elizabeth Haukaas's (poetry '06) first book Leap won
the 2008 Walt McDonald First Book Award for poetry and
will be published by Texas Tech University Press. Her
work has appeared most recently in the New England Review, North
American Review, New Millennium Writings, Tulane
Review and William and Mary
Review, and is forthcoming in the Crab Orchard Review.
Donna
Henderson's (poetry '06) new collection of poems,
The Eddy Fence,
will be released in April by Airlie
Press.
Janet Holmes (poetry
'85) had Shearsman Books publish her fifth book The ms of my kin, an
erasure of Emily Dickinson's 1861 and 1862 poems (from
the start of the Civil War) into poems reflecting the
start of the Iraq war.
Kath Jesme's (poetry
'00) book The Plum-Stone
Game was published
this spring by Ahsahta
Press. Two poems from the book appeared online on Poetry
Daily on March 1, 2009.
Margaret Kaufman (poetry '93) continues to lead poetry workshops and a
poetry class at the University of San Francisco's Fromm
Institute, and is working on her manuscript (working
title Tawny
Avatar). A poem, "Brownie Troop, St. Louis,
1949" has been chosen for inclusion in the
online American Life in
Poetry.
Jynne Dilling Martin (poetry '06) won the 2009 Boston Review/92nd Street Y
"Discovery" Prize, judged by Mark Strand, Mary Jo Bang
and Terrance Hayes. She has new poems forthcoming in the
Boston Review,
TriQuarterly, and Southern Review.
Sally
Molini (poetry '04) has poems forthcoming
in New York
Quarterly, Siren, 42opus, elimae, In Posse Review, Babel
Fruit, roger, and South Carolina Review.
Check out her review for Dean Young's book embryoyo here.
Along with Karen Rigby and Fiona Sze-Lorrain, she is
coeditor of Cerise
Press, a new international online magazine based in
the U.S. and France.
Lee Polevoi ('92) has
published his first novel, The Moon in
Deep Winter (Casagrande Press, 2008). In its
review, ForeWord magazine called the story "irresistible ... the
author keeps his narrative threads straight and sculpts
his characters with exquisite precision, never allowing
their intrinsic strangeness to become distractingly
grotesque." Visit his website here.
Edward
Porter's (fiction '07) short story "The Changing
Station" was selected for the 2010 edition of Best New American
Voices, coming to bookstores in October 2009.
He's pursuing a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative writing
at the University of Houston.
Erin Stalcup's (fiction '04) short story "Gravity" is forthcoming this
summer in The
Kenyon Review Online. Her short story "Brightest
Corners" is forthcoming in The
Sun.
Susan Sterling's (fiction '92) "Accidental Dog," an essay about her dog
Maggie, appeared in the fall 2008 issue of Cream City Review.
Another nonfiction piece, "Breaking Through," about two
Maine singer-songwriters, appeared in the fall issue of
Colby
Magazine.
Jeneva Stone (poetry
'07): Her poem "Meditation on a Broken Child, var. 2"
appeared in Literary Mama:
A Literary Magazine for the Maternally Inclined in
March 2009. Another poem, "Country of Origin," is
forthcoming in Poet
Lore's Spring/Summer 2009
issue.
Lisa
Gluskin Stonestreet's (poetry '05) poetry
collection Tulips Water, Ash was selected by Jean Valentine for the 2009
Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, and will be published
in October 2009 by University Press of New England. She
has poems online at failbetter and forthcoming in Blackbird, Third
Coast and West
Branch.
Anne Sullivan (poetry
'92) has a book of poems Ecology II:
Throat Song from The Everglades recently
published by WordTech.
Anne teaches in the Interdisciplinary Studies
program at National-Louis University and is Poetry
Editor of the English
Journal. She lives on the west coast of
Florida and is a Florida Master
Naturalist.
Robert Thomas's (poetry
'02) imaginative work appears in Guernica.
Addie Tsai (poetry '05) has poems forthcoming in Inch. One of her poems
has appeared in Agenda (a feminist political journal from South
Africa).
Rosalynde Vas Dias (poetry '06) had poems appear this fall in The Cincinnati Review and Crazyhorse.
Leslie Walker Williams (fiction '94) received the Peter Taylor Prize for
the Novel and the Morris Hackney Literary Award
for her book, The Prudent
Mariner (University of Tennessee Press, 2008.) She
lives in Vancouver BC.
Ross White (poetry '08)
had a poem "Two Swans" published in this winter's New England Review. It
appeared on Poetry
Daily on February 9, 2009.
Tracy Youngblom (poetry
'03) has a chapbook of poems, Driving to Heaven,
forthcoming from Parallel Press. She has had recent work
in or forthcoming in Aethlon and Emprise Review.
Besides teaching, she has started helping to edit the
on-line journal Emprise
Review.
Jim Zervanos (fiction
'04) has his first novel LOVE Park coming out
this spring. Visit his website here.
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