| From the Sunderland basement photo archives... |
WW graduates Sandy Solomon, Kitty
Hamilton, Chris Bursk, Susan Lewis, Marck Beggs-Uema,
Peter Harris, and Sarah Barnhill.
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Poet Ellen Bryant Voigt and
novelist Wilton
Barnhardt |
WW
poets Naomi Guttman, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Charlotte
Hussey, Karen Whitehill, Rebecca Seiferle, and Beth
Stahlecker.
Kitty Hamilton and Beth
Stahlecker are both deceased, and gifts in their names provide
scholarships to the Alumni
Conference.
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Thank you
everyone for the great feedback on this new electronic
Friends of Writers/Warren Wilson MFA program newsletter.
Dozens of you wrote to express excitement for this
tree-saving, interactive, content-rich format. We hope
to make this an increasingly better place for everyone
to connect and communicate, so please speak up about any
ideas you have for content at news@friendsofwriters.org!
This newsletter includes MFA alum
Cynthia Reeves being interviewed by her former
supervisor Michael Martone; poetry from Matthea Harvey
and fiction from Jim Shepard; a preview of two of the
newer fiction faculty who will be at this July 2008
residency; and a reminder about the $10,000 fellowship
being offered by Friends of Writers to a WW poetry
alumnus this year (fiction fellowship to follow on
alternate years).
Speaking of Friends of
Writers fellowships, here is a newsletter fun fact for
you: every time you click on a book's link below, to go
look at a friend or faculty's Amazon.com page, a
percentage of any purchase you make on that Amazon.com
visit gets donated to Friends of Writers - even if what
you end up buying from Amazon.com is The Da Vinci Code, a
toaster oven, or Season Five of The Wire.
Here's another painless way to make a
donation to Friends of Writers Scholarship funds:
instead of Google, use Goodsearch. 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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Meet
the new MFA fiction faculty
Confessions
about coffee, nerves, and workshop, but not about the
dance
 
One
of the pleasures of the Warren Wilson program is having
new faces at each residency, first-rate writers and
teachers who bring fresh ideas, unique personal stories,
and innovative dance floor moves. Two recent additions
to the rotating MFA faculty are fiction writers Stacey
D'Erasmo and Murad Kalam. Stacey's journalism has
appeared in The New
York Times Book Review and The New York Times
Magazine, and she is the author of two novels, Tea and A Seahorse
Year. Murad
graduated from Harvard Law School, practices law in
Washington D.C., and is the author of the novel Night
Journey.
Both return this July for
their second residency as fiction faculty; Jynne Martin
(poetry '06) asked them what they enjoyed so much the
first time that they'd voluntarily return to a dorm
bed.
So,
how did that first residency go? What was the best part?
And the worst?
Stacey: The first
residency was pretty amazing in every way - I couldn't
believe the devotion that's in the air at Warren Wilson,
the intense sense of vocation. I felt as if I'd entered
a zone slightly other than the ordinary one, where there
was either more or less gravity than usual. I really
loved the team-teaching in workshops; it's something you
almost never get to do as a teacher, and it was
wonderful to have that intellectual company in the
classroom. The hardest part was giving my lecture. I
thought I'd expire from nervousness. When it was over, I
felt I'd passed a crucial initiation
test.
Murad: Went extremely
well. For me, the best part was learning to "talk shop"
about craft with more experienced faculty and teaching
classes together. Loved
the camaraderie as well. Some of the
most engaging conversations I'd had in a long while.
The chance to give an informal lecture helped me
crystallize some of my thoughts about a topic that has
come up often in previous workshops. More important was
the chance to see experienced faculty give their own
lectures and discussions and to teach workshops with
them. The students are profoundly engaged and motivated.
I could go on. Worst part? The weather. Lack of
Starbucks. I coped. More here >>
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Featured Poem: Matthea Harvey's
"Implications for Modern
Life"
 Warren Wilson
poetry faculty Matthea Harvey's third book of poems,
Modern
Life, is now out from Graywolf Press. While
all three of her books are replete with her signature
wit, dazzling braininess, and wild-eyed whimsy, each
collection courageously explores new poetic terrain. In
a recent review of Modern
Life, The New York Times Book Review praised
this courage: "She's willing to risk genuine failure,
and her reward - our reward - is that richest and rarest
thing, genuine poetry." In this prose poem excerpted
from Modern
Life, Matthea Harvey addresses two of her
favorite topics, ham and horses.
IMPLICATIONS FOR
MODERN LIFE
The ham flowers have veins and
are rimmed in rind, each petal a little meat sunset. I
deny all connection with the ham flowers, the barge
floating by loaded with lard, the white flagstones like
platelets in the blood-red road. I'll put the calves in
coats so the ravens can't gore them, bandage up the cut
gate and when the wind rustles its muscles, I'll gather
the seeds and burn them. But then I see a horse lying on
the side of the road and think You are sleeping, you are
sleeping, I will make you be sleeping. But if I didn't
make the ham flowers, how can I make him get up? I made
the ham flowers. Get up, dear animal. Here is your
pasture flecked with pink, your oily river, your
bleeding barn. Decide what to look at and how. If you
lower your lashes, the blood looks like mud. If you
stay, I will find you fresh hay.
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Friends of Writers
Announces a $10,000 Fellowship for Warren Wilson MFA
alumni
The Larry Levis
Post-Graduate Fellowship supports an alum of the Warren
Wilson College MFA Program for Writers producing his or
her first book. The Fellowship will alternate annually
between poetry and fiction. The 2009 award, worth
$10,000, will be made to a poet. The judges are Linda
Bierds, Henri Cole, and Forrest Hamer. The submission
deadline is July 15, 2008. For more information,
continue reading here.
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A. Van Jordan on Einstein,
Marsalis, Neruda, and Laura Bush
Our Guggenheim-winning faculty
gets grilled by fiction alum Anna Clark
 A. Van
Jordan first came to Warren Wilson as a Holden Scholar
and since his Swannanoa days has become an esteemed,
prize-winning author of three volumes of poetry, not to
mention a WW faculty member. Among other recognitions,
Jordan has received the Whiting Award, the
Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN/Oakland Josephine
Miles Award, the Pushcart Prize, and a Guggenheim
Fellowship Foundation.
Jordan's newest collection
Quantum
Lyrics explores cultural identity by moving among
historical, fictional, and autobiographical figures. The
likes of Albert Einstein and Richard Feynmen rub
shoulders with comic book superheroes, which in turn are
juxtaposed with narrators that tell tales from the
author's own life. Jordan builds a documentary
atmosphere, creating spaces where physics and poetry,
comic books and jazz, memory and loss, come
together.
Warren Wilson alum Anna Clark (fiction
'07) interviewed Van Jordan for The American Prospect.
Here they talk together about jazz, slasher films, and
the Nobel Prize.
From
your work, it's clear that you have deep interests in
film and music; how did you come to choose poetry as
your life's work?
To
quote Neruda, poetry found me. I wasn't really looking
for it. While living and working in D.C. as an
environmental reporter, I started spending time in
coffeehouses that played jazz and had open mics for
poets. I got to know the poets in the area, and after
establishing myself as a regular at these venues, poets
started asking if I wrote. I did an open mic and enjoyed
it. I found that it was a new way to communicate with
the world, particularly as an African-American man. When
I read a poem to people publicly, they listened in a
very different way from the way they listened in daily
conversation. I could tell that people leaned in, which
had never been my experience before the poem. For the
first time, I found that I was communicating across a
racial/cultural line that I thought - up to that point,
at least - was insurmountable.
More here >>
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Finally, someone who can tell us what a novella
is...
Fiction
alum Cyndi Reeves explains this and all her white space
to her former supervisor
 All
the toil and trouble that Warren Wilson alumna Cynthia
Reeves (fiction '06) put into her thesis has paid off:
Miami University Press recently published her novella Badlands, drawn largely on writing she
did during the MFA program. The Asheville alternative
weekly Mountain
Xpress admires how "Reeves writes of loss in
sharply gorgeous language with no measures taken to
spare the reader from life's cruelest moments" and the
Potomac Review calls it "an experimental work that is compassionate and
abstains from sentimentality."
While at
Warren Wilson, Cyndi worked with Tracy Daugherty,
Michael Martone, Kevin McIlvoy, and CJ Hribal; we chose
to sic Michael Martone on her to ask all the tricky
questions that Cyndi evaded answering during their six
months of packet exchanges.
Okay,
so after the panel you just put together for the most
recent AWP in NYC, what is a novella
anyway?
The
disappointing answer is that a novella can be defined
strictly according to length - a work that falls between
a short story and a novel, that runs between 15,000 and
65,000 words. But it's the novella's very
"betweenness" that presents a writer with opportunities
- to be lyrical, to be difficult, to be intense.
In fact, the characteristic that defines the best
novellas is intensity. More here >>
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Featured fiction: Jim Shepard's
Like You'd Understand,
Anyway
This
past fall, Warren Wilson MFA fiction faculty Jim Shepard
published to great acclaim his first new story
collection in over a decade, Like You'd
Understand, Anyway. Named one of Time Magazine's Top 10
Fiction Books of the Year, and The New York Times Book
Review called it a "testament not only to Jim
Shepard's talents but also to the power of the short
story itself, forged from the world with a sharp eye and
a careful ear, serving no agenda but literature's
primary oft-forgotten one: the delight of the reader."
In
the following excerpt, Shepard blends dead seriousness
with dark humor, and - as with each story in this wildly
inventive collection - sets his character's internal
conflicts at odds with exotic, far-flung follies.
Pleasure
Boating in Lituya Bay
Two
and a half weeks after I was born, on July 9th, 1958,
the plates that make up the Fairweather Range in the
Alaskan panhandle apparently slipped twenty-one feet on
either side of the Fairweather fault, the northern end
of a major league instability that runs the length of
North America. The thinking now is that the southwest
side and bottom of the inlets at the head of Lituya Bay
jolted upward and to the northwest, and the northeast
shore and head of the bay jolted downward and to the
southeast. One way or the other, the result registered
8.3 on the Richter scale.
The bay is T-shaped and
seven miles long and two wide at the stem, and according
to those who were there it went from a glassy smoothness
to a full churn, a giant's Jacuzzi. Next to it,
mountains twelve to fifteen thousand feet high twisted
into themselves and lurched in contrary directions. In
Juneau, 122 miles to the southeast, people who'd turned
in early were pitched from their beds. The shock waves
wiped out bottom-dwelling marine life throughout the
panhandle. In Seattle, a thousand miles away, the
University of Washington's seismograph needle was jarred
completely off its graph. And meanwhile, back at the
head of the bay, a spur of mountain and glacier the size
of a half-mile-wide city park-forty million cubic yards
in volume-broke off and dropped three thousand feet down
the northeast cliff into the water.
This is all
by way of saying that it was one of the greatest spasms,
when it came to the release of destructive energy, in
history.
More here >> |
Alumni Conference
2008
At Mount Holyoke
College, South Hadley
Massachusetts
Just a
reminder that the 2008 Alumni Conference will be held at
Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts,
from Saturday, August 2, to Saturday, August 9,
2008.
Some of you may have attended alumni conferences
at Mt. Holyoke in the past: we've enjoyed the beautiful
old brick and ivy campus, and the food always includes
veggie options and a salad bar. A moment's walk away is
downtown South Hadley, with the outstanding indy
bookshop The
Odyssey, a coffeeshop, homemade sandwich shop, two
taverns, and more.
For full information including registration
options, prices, and deadlines, click here.
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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
writerwk@comcast.net with
"WW
newsletter" in the subject line. Please remember
to include your graduating year, whether you worked in
poetry or fiction, and links to any of your work
online.
Idris Anderton's (poetry '06) first book of poems was selected as winner
of the May Swenson Poetry Award, to be published by Utah
State University Press in July 2008. The judge was
Harold Bloom. She also has poems in recent issues of
The Hudson
Review and Ontario Review and
forthcoming in Southern Review.
Dinah Berland's (poetry
'95) verse prayer "On the First Day of Passover" from
her recent bookHours of
Devotion: Fanny Neuda's Book of Prayers for Jewish
Women(Schocken, 2007) will be featured April 19 in
Knopf's online poem-a-day project for National Poetry
Month. Sign up at Knopf.com to receive all the poems in
this series. Also, find out more about Dinah's book
events at www.dinahberland.com.
Majka Burhardt's (fiction '07) first book, Vertical
Ethiopia: Climbing Towards Possibility in the Horn of
Africa, came out in February. In March
2007 Majka led a team of four women to Ethiopia to climb
virgin sandstone rock towers. Vertical
Ethiopia chronicles those adventures in
a large-format coffee table book. Majka's on tour
for the year with the book. Learn more
at www.verticalethiopia.com
Patrick Donnelly (poetry '03) has accepted an offer to teach for a second
year at Colby College in 08/09. He'll have a new poem on
Slate.com on 7/1/08, and nine of his translations with
Stephen Miller of classical Japanese poems will appear
in the fall '08 issue of Metamorphoses, the
Five College translation journal. Look for him this
summer as a workshop leader at The Frost Place's 30th
Anniversary Festival and Conference on
Poetry.
Linda Nemec Foster (poetry '79) was honored as a finalist for the 2007
ArtServe Michigan Governor's Creative Artist
Award. She was the only poet/writer selected (the
other honorees were visual artists). Last January
she received the 2008 Creative Arts Award from the
Polish American Historical Association. Linda was
given the honor in Washington, DC at a reception at the
Embassy of Poland. Recent poems have appeared in
Salamander, Witness,
New Millennium Writings, Rattle, and The MacGuffin.
Her new chapbook, Ten
Songs from Bulgaria, will be published in 2008 by
Cervena Barva Press.
Joan Frank's (fiction
'96) second novel, The Great
Far Away (Permanent Press, 2007) has been
nominated for a Northern California Book Award in
Fiction. Her second story collection, In Envy Country,
has been named the winner of the 2010 Richard
Sullivan Prize, and will appear in that year from the
University of Notre Dame Press. More information at
www.joanfrank.org
Ellen Hawley's (fiction
'87) novel Open
Line was published in May 2007 by Coffee House
Press. It's a political satire, about a talk show host
who claims, one night out of sheer boredom, that the
Vietnam War never happened, it was all a massive
government coverup. The claim takes on a life of its own
and neither her life nor American politics are ever the
same again. Publishers
Weekly calls it "a deft and hilarious send up of
the media and political culture."
Hal Herring (fiction)
is a contributing editor at Field and Stream magazine and editor at large for the internet
newsmagazine New
West, which has recently launched a print
magazine by the same name. He has a book coming out in
fall of 2008 from Globe Pequot Press called 12 Famous Firearms, From
Geronimo's Winchester 1876 to Frank Hamer's Remington
Model 8, Twelve Guns that Shaped American
History. It is as much a book of deeply American
stories - the abolitionist John Brown storming
through Bleeding Kansas, or the hell-bent outlaws Bonnie
and Clyde blasting through the Dust Bowl, among others -
as it is a gun book.
Susan Katz's (poetry
'78) previous children's books have been awarded the
IRA/CBC Children's Choice 2008 Notable Children's Book
in the Language Arts, National Council of Teachers of
English Best Children's Book of the Year, Bank Street
College of Education Children's Book Committee Choices
2008, Children's Cooperative Book Center Her current
book Oh
Theodore! Guinea Pig Poems (Clarion, 2007)
was named to the New York Public Library's 100 Titles
for Reading and Sharing and to the the Texas Library
Association's 2 x 2 Awards List.
Judith Krause (poetry
'98) celebrates the arrival of her latest
poetry collection, Mongrel
Love (Hagios Press,
2008).
Gary Copeland Lilley (poetry '02) has a new collection of poems, Alpha
Zulu, which will be released by Ausable, May
2008.
Vyvyane Loh (Fiction
'01) was awarded a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship in
Fiction. She will be working on a new novel for the
duration of the fellowship.
Amy Minton's (fiction
'09) short story, "Overhanded," was published online at
Hobart in May 2007, and was subsequently selected for
the Best of
the Web 2007 Anthologyby Dzanc Books (to be released
in print July 2008).
Sally Molini (poetry
'04) will have poems appearing in Tar River Poetry, wheelhouse,
Georgetown Review, and Beloit Poetry
Journal.
Alex Pierce (poetry
'97) was a finalist for the CBC Literary Awards, 2007.
Her poem, "To float, to drown, to close up, to open - a
throat" won First Honorable Mention in Arc Poetry
Magazine's Poem of the Year Award. She has been named
Editor for the Cape Breton University Press Essential
Cape Breton Writers Series, due to release its first
volume this year.
Nate Pritts's (poetry
'00) new chapbook, Shrug can be ordered
through the publisher, Main
Street Rag or directly from him and he will sign it. Some of the poems date from his
thesis at WWC. An interview with Nate appears here.
And, just for the hat trick, the new issue of Mustachioed includes his
poem.
Jeneva Stone (poetry
'07) has had poems out recently in Beloit Poetry Journal and Poet Lore.
Another is forthcoming in Cimarron
Review.
Sarah Borden Wareck's (fiction '05) short story "At the Drake," was a winner
in the 2004 AWP Intro Journal Awards, judged by Mary
Grimm. Her collection, East Side Stories, was a
semi-finalist for the 2007 Sarabande Books Mary McCarthy
Prize Contest, judged by Mary Gaitskill. She teaches
writing at the Yale English Language Institute and the
University of New Haven. Her work has appeared or is
forthcoming in Open
City, Willow Springs, Beloit Fiction Journal, Chicago
Reader, Controlled Burn, North Carolina Literary Review,
Other Voices, Waiting Room, Bayou Magazine, and
Backwards City
Review. She lives with her two daughters in New
Haven and is working on a novel.
Martha Zweig (poetry
'98) had her poem "Overturn" published on Poetry Daily.
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