The MFA in Creative Writing at Penn State

MFA Community Kudos: Spring, 2011

2011-04-28T15:49:00.000-04:00

Spring has finally arrived in Happy Valley, and look, we're all blooming, too!

Faculty

Toni Jensen’s short story "Looking for Boll Weevil" is forthcoming (in October) in the anthology Best of the West: Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri, and it's in there with stories by Rick Bass, Yiyun Li, T.C. Boyle and others.

Elizabeth Kadetsky’s personal essay "The Memory Pavilion" was accepted at Post Road for publication this summer, while "The Oracle" appeared in Mission at Tenth this March. Both are adapted from her memoir The Memory Eaters. Her short story "An Incident at the Plaza" will appear in Antioch Review’s all-fiction issue this summer—this is from her collection of short stories connected by the theme of travelers and their misreadings in exotic settings, other stories of which have appeared in TriQuarterly, Gettysburg Review, the Pushcart Prizes and elsewhere. "An Incident at the Plaza" was also named top ten in the Open City Trophy prize this winter. In other news, her book First There Is a Mountain was signed for the Dzanc Books eReprint series, while she also became contributing editor at Defunct magazine, edited by Robin Hemley. Her essay “The Naked City,” published in Defunct last summer, was reprinted in the Overland online magazine in Australia. In the best news of all, she signed an additional three-year contract at Penn State as visiting assistant professor in fiction and nonfiction in the Emerging Writer Series.

Poetry in America, a new collection of poems, by Julia Spicher Kasdorf, is due from U. Pittsburgh Press in August 2011. Also in the fall, Penn State Press will release a new edition of The House of the Black Ring, which Julia has been editing with Josh Brown, a graduate student in the German program. This local color mystery, written by the first chair of the PSU English Department Fred Lewis Pattee, is set in Hell's Bottom (aka Happy Valley) and largely based on details about everyday life in the area gleaned from compositions written by Penn State undergraduates in the late 1890s.

In 2008, she and Josh also produced a new edition of J. W. Yoder's regional classic, Rosanna of the Amish, sent in Centre and Mifflin Counties. This year, Julia has been traveling around the state presenting an illustrated lecture, "ROSANNA OF THE AMISH: Fact and Fiction" as part of the Speaker's Bureau of the PA Humanities Council. The talk addresses current questions of truth and facticity in memoir with regard to the 1940 work of autoethnography. Julia’s stint with the Speaker's Bureau will conclude in July when the final lecture will be filmed for the PA Cable Network in Huntingdon, PA, Yoder's last home.

Tom Noyes (Penn State Behrend) was recently named first runner-up in Sycamore Review's 2011 Wabash Fiction Prize. In addition to Sycamore Review, Tom's stories have recently appeared or are slated to appear in New Ohio Review and Image.

George Looney (Penn State Behrend) Recently poems of mine have won the ZONE 3 Poetry Prize and the Jeffrey Smith Editors' Prize in Poetry from THE MISSOURI REVIEW, and my fifth collection of poetry, A SHORT BESTIARY OF LOVE AND MADNESS, has been accepted and will be published this fall by Stephen F. Austin State University Press.

Erin Murphy’s (Penn State Altoona) fourth book of poetry, Word Problems, was published this month by Word Press:http://www.word-press.com/murphy-word-problems.html.

Students

Jo Hsu’s short story "Flashpoint," the first thing she wrote at Penn State and for which she wishes to thank Elizabeth Kadetsky’s fall workshop, will be published in TINGE Magazine at the end of April,

Evan McGarvey was accepted for the summer at both the Juniper Institute at UMass:
http://www.umass.edu/juniperinstitute/, and the Indiana University Writers' Conference:
http://www.indiana.edu/~writecon/.

Rachel Mennies has had poems accepted at Poet Lore, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Boxcar Poetry Review.

Andrea Rochat was the winner of this year’s Toby Thompson Prize for Literary Nonfiction, for her essay, “Spine.”

Emily May Anderson will have two poems appearing in Pudding Magazine (Summer 2011) and three poems appearing in Poetry East (Fall 2011). She has also placed book reviews this semester with Green Mountains Review, Mid-American Review, and Chiron Review; and her chapbook manuscript, Beautiful River, was a finalist for the White Eagle Coffee Store Press chapbook prize (coincidentally won by Rachael Lyon, part time English faculty at Penn State Altoona)

Sarah Blake recently had poems appear on MiPOesias.com and in the Spring issue of FIELD. Her poem, "Form," published in the 8th issue of Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics, has been nominated by Sentence editors for Best New Poets 2011. Finally, she just launched a website about her book! The site features an audio project based on the poem Terrance Hayes named as Honorable Mention for the 2011 Academy of American Poets Prize. Check out http://www.kanyewestpoetry.com (Outside of poetry, she's nine months pregnant with a baby boy!)

Alyse Bensel’s poem "Zinnia" will appear in the Spring issue of The Meadowland Review

She has book placed book reviews with Calyx, Newpages.com and Coldfront.

Book review for Approaching Ice by Elizabeth Bradfield is up on Newpages.com book review section

Jessica Karbowiak’s essay, “Surge Capacity,” will be published in The Chaffey Review (the Winter 2011 issue). Her short story,” Boxes,” will come out in Arcadia’s online edition and in the yearly print journal, and her short story, “Slices of Saartjie,” got picked up by an online magazine, Orion Headless.

Alumni

Silvi Alcivar recently had a gallery show at secession art & design, and her business, The Poetry Store was named one of Daily Candy's Best New Finds 2010.

Cindy Clem’s essay, “My Husband Clive" has been accepted at Memoir (and).

Jarod Rosello’s comics "I'll See you Later" and “Cadenza,” have appeared in Gin Palace 2 and

Entertainer Anthology, respectively. His story, "He Has Options" appears in EDNA.

William Kelley Woolfitt has had fiction published in Riddle Fence, nonfiction in Shadowbox and poetry in Confrontation, Harper’s Ferry Review and Southern Humanities Review.

Allison Schuette—has received tenure and been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor of English at Valparaiso University.

Joel Patton was recently the weekly featured poet at No Tell Motel.

Jeffrey Morgan’s first book of poetry, Crying Shame has just been released on BlazeVOX Books.

Sheila Squillante’s poems have appeared or will appear in Cream City Review, No Tell Motel, Right Hand Pointing, Eratio: Postmodern Poetry, MiPoesias, and Naugatuck River Review. Her lyric essay, “On Fire,” will appear at Brevity in early 2012.

Stephanie Anderson Witmer’s feature story, “Smart Eating Made Simple,” appeared in the March 2011 issue of Better Homes & Gardens. Her regular parenting column called "Family Style" and a blog called "Mommy-logues" will appear in Susquehanna Style magazine, beginning in Jan. 2011

MFA Works-in-Progress Series: Anderson & Green

2011-04-27T12:30:00.000-04:00

The MFA Works-in-Progress Series Presents

LUCY BRYAN GREEN

&

EMILY MAY ANDERSON

Friday, April 29th

4pm

Grucci Room

Lucy Bryan Green grew up in Orlando, Florida and then flew north. Her thesis, Guarding Eden, tells the life story of Susie Hess, the daughter of the mayor of an isolated mountain town in southwestern Virginia. The superstitions of the townsfolk shape her identity and lead her to make a series of ultimately disastrous decisions. Pentecostal preachers, genetically modified seeds, plagues of locusts, and self-taught chemists inhabit this coming-of-age/Appalachian yarn/dystopian future/sci-fi novel.

Emily May Anderson grew up in rural Ohio. Her poetry thesis, titled Beautiful River, features poems about Ohio landscapes and historical events, while also tracing a personal narrative. The poems touch on issues of religion, class, gender, and sexuality as the speaker learns how to separate herself from her background but also how to love the beautiful moments it offered.

MFA Works-in-Progress Series: Blake & Tyrell

2011-04-22T15:52:00.000-04:00

The MFA Works-in-Progress Series Presents

Sarah Blake

Lauren Tyrrell

Monday, April 25th

1:30pm

Grucci Room

Sarah Blake is a poet from Princeton, NJ, though she plans to live outside of Philadelphia, PA, with her husband and son very soon. Her poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, FIELD, andSentence. Her thesis is some strange version of a biography of the icon, Kanye West.

Lauren E. Tyrrell once wrote this six-word memoir: “Scranton salad bitch turned wannabe writer.” Wannabe no more, Lauren is finishing her nonfiction thesis, “Right Before Contact,” a collection of essays tracing her transition from northeastern to central PA, her struggles with Catholicism, and her relationship with a guy who loves trains.

2011-04-16T17:48:00.000-04:00

The MFA Works-in-Progress Series presents

ANDREA ROCHAT

AARON KIMMEL

Monday, April 18th

4pm

Grucci Room

Andrea Rochat is a third-year MFA student in fiction. Her thesis is composed of two parts: Inconspicuous in Nowheresville is a collection of personal essays that examine the boundary between aloneness and loneliness through lenses such as karaoke bars, a bizarre zoo in Branson, and video gaming. We Go Looking is a work of fiction about people leaving people. It is about two mothers who leave their children, about one girl using a metal detector to try to find her parent and about a boy using a coloring-book guide to the universe to understand the loss of his own.

Aaron Kimmel grew up in New Jersey, but he has spent the majority of his adult life in Pennsylvania. His thesis The End of the Caveman Olympics, which occasionally discusses masculinity constructs, more generally explores the interplay of individuality, emotion, and earnestness. His father asked, "So there's a lot of sex talk?" There is, but not as much as people think.

MFA Works-in-Progress Series: Bara & Karbowiak

2011-04-15T08:43:00.000-04:00

The MFA Works-in-Progress Series Presents

RACHEL BARA

JESSICA KARBOWIAK

TODAY!

Friday, April 15th

4:30 pm

Grucci Room

Jessica Karbowiak currently lives in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, but is a native New Yorker. She has studied creative writing at Penn State University and The University of Texas, where she was awarded the Katey Lehman Writing Fellowship, the J. Michener Writing Fellowship, and the Fania Kruger Writing Fellowship. She has taught writing at several universities, and hopes to continue doing so in the near future.

Rachel Bara grew up on the Jersey shore where she often tramped through the marsh, scrambled up the dunes, and ate cranberries straight from the bogs. In her thesis, The Pleasures of Drought and Flood: Stories, Bara writes of the shore towns and Pine Barrens of her youth.

Robin Becker to Read, April 20th

2011-04-13T22:38:00.000-04:00

The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series presents

Penn State Laureate

and Professor of English and Women's Studies

ROBIN BECKER

Wednesday, April 20th

7:30pm

Foster Auditorium, Paterno Library

Robin Becker’s seven books of poems include All-American Girl, winner of the Lambda Literary Award and, in 2006, Domain of Perfect Affection. Becker has received individual fellowships from The Bunting Institute, The Massachusetts Cultural Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. She serves as Poetry and Contributing Editor for The Womens' Review of Books where she writes a poetry column called "Field Notes." During the 2010-2011 academic year, she has served as the Penn State Laureate.

For an audio review of Domain of Perfect Affection by MFA student Rachel Mennies,

please visit WPSU's BookMark.

On Domain of Perfect Affection:

“Becker builds solid, well-crafted poems out of everyday materials, therby capturing life as it is lived. For readers who like poetry that ‘honors the poached fish and the beans,/...our communal selves sheared of the theoretical,' this honest, plain-spoken collection is just the thing." --Library Journal

“Robin Becker achieves what may be one of the early twenty first century’s most difficult accomplishmentsto write a credible poetry of affirmation. In the doing, she doesn’t pretty up the world. Rather, she finds language that embraces our dualities, our many-selved presences, regularly demonstrating her kind of perfect affection: ‘Come up for the lunch I made you, / O handy lover, with your retractable blade, / your small drill, your paint brushes bristling.’” --Stephen Dunn

". . . firmly about the business of living, about the information one must collect and process both to live from day to day and to instigate change. She creates calm and then upsets it, a stunning achievment for any poet." --Feminist Review

The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series is a project of Penn State’s M.F.A. program in English. It receives generous support from the The Mary E. Rolling Lectureship in Creative Writing, the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment, the Pennsylvania Center for the Book, the University Libraries, the Department of English, and the College of the Liberal Arts.

Rebecca Rasmussen to Read April 13th

2011-04-08T16:31:00.000-04:00

The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series presents

Penn State MFA Alumna

REBECCA RASMUSSEN

reading from her debut novel

The Bird Sisters

Wednesday, April 13th

7:30 pm

Foster Auditorium

Rebecca Rasmussen is the author of the novel The Bird Sisters. Her stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, The Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. A finalist in the Glimmer Train short story contest as well as Narrative Magazine's 30 Below Contest ,she received her MFA in fiction from Penn State and the Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She lives in St. Louis with her husband and daughter, and teaches writing at Fontbonne University.

The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series is a project of Penn State’s M.F.A. program in English. It receives generous support from the

The Mary E. Rolling Lectureship in Creative Writing, the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment, the Pennsylvania Center for the Book,

the University Libraries, the Department of English, and the College of the Liberal Arts.

Alumni Kudos

2011-04-04T16:01:00.000-04:00

Congratulations to Ashley Kunsa, whose story, "A Woman's Glory" (which she wrote while an MFA student!) has won the A Room of Her Own Foundation's Orlando prize for flash fiction!

The prize is $1000 and publication in the fall issue of the Los Angeles Review. http://www.aroomofherownfoundation.org/orlando.php

Alumni Kudos

2011-04-03T09:27:00.001-04:00

Congratulations to Sharon McGill, who has been awarded a 14-week summer residency at ART342 in Fort Collins Colorado!

Sharon's short story, "Fish," also recently appeared at Girls With Insurance.

Tracing the Life of a Short Story

2011-04-03T09:09:00.001-04:00

Elizabeth Kadetsky, Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, shares the life-cycle of one short story, reminding us to remain open and flexible as we write, and to listen carefully to what our own work wants to say.

***

In 2004, while making a publicity tour for my first book, I had lunch with an old friend in Santa Barbara who told me a crazy story. He was nearing sixty, and was about to become a father for the first time. This surprised me owing to his age and the fact he’d always been a consummate bachelor.

It surprised him, too, he said, and it had surprised no one more than the mother. She was thirty-nine, on the pill, and as a precaution had also taken the morning after pill. When she realized she was pregnant anyway, she had an abortion. When she didn’t recover from bloating and mood swings after the abortion, she went back to the doctor. She was still pregnant—there had been twins—and she was in her second trimester. The pregnancy would go forward.

I had already started a cycle of short stories set abroad or in ethnic enclaves in which cultural miscues drove the plots. One had won a Pushcart, and I’d received several fellowships to work on the project. I decide to combine this idea with an abortion plot based on my friend’s, and came up with a story set in Chinatown, New York, in which a Western woman pursues acupuncture to manipulate her fertility. I wrote a few drafts, showed it to a few friends, and won finalist in a couple of contests. I wasn’t sure I wanted to publish it yet, so I didn’t submit it to any magazines, and then I rewrote it again.

Now it was about 2006. I work-shopped the story at Squaw Valley Community of Writers, with Lynn Freed, famous at the time for having published a new essay in Harper’sexplaining why she hated teaching fiction workshops. She was dismissive about my story and said it needed more plot and dialogue, and rewrote my first page in front of the workshop so as to leave about three lines intact.

Around 2007 I submitted a new draft to several magazine editors, including theAtlantic Monthly’s fiction editor, Michael Curtis, who had chosen a story of mine when I was in grad school as a finalist in the Atlantic Monthly student fiction contest. He wrote back that it was “a little dark for our readers.”

Some friends had given me detailed information about what would happen at Planned Parenthood if such a situation as my friend’s presented itself in real life. I added researched detail, and finished another iteration of the story, now titled “The Kiss Lady.”

The story never really went back in the drawer. It was always on the desk. I rewrote it again last year realizing that the added detail and complications of the convoluted pregnancy and abortive methods were muddying the real meaning that I had been trying to get across from the beginning—about miscues in a cross-cultural setting. I slimmed the story down and simplified the fertility plot, and I focused the narrative around a causal plot leading up to shocking event at the climax. Thinking of Paul Bowles, who had been my inspiration for the original cycle of stories, I re-titled the story “An Incident at the Plaza”—a reference to his story “A Distant Episode.”

I’m pleased to say that this story won top ten in the Open City trophy contest this year and will be published in Antioch Review’s fiction issue this summer, summer of 2011. That makes it seven-and-a-half years. Stories sometimes have long lives, persisting after many turns.

***

Elizabeth's personal essay "The Oracle" appears in the current issue of Mission at Tenth, the inter-arts journal of the CIIS MFA program in San Francisco. Her personal essay "Naked City" appears in Overland, an online magazine in Australia featuring current work by Hari Kunzru.These are excerpted from her memoir in progress, pieces of which have also appeared in the New York Times, Guernica and Defunct magazine.

MFA Works-in-Progress Series: Mennies & Story

2011-04-03T08:51:00.000-04:00

The MFA Works-in-Progress Series Presents
Rachel Mennies
&
Daniel Story
Monday, April 4th
4pm
Grucci Room

Rachel Mennies is a third-year MFA student in poetry. Her thesis, Cleanest of Hands Beginning, chronicles three generations of Jewish Americans as they're forced to leave Germany and take roots in Philadelphia, her home city. Inside: poems about magicians, dachshunds, and Mel Brooks (and a whole bunch of Talmudic midrash).

Daniel Story's thesis, titled "Fell," is a genre-curious collection of love stories centering on two young people—Richard and Maria—falling in love (or maybe just near love) in Chicago. Daniel was once granted military clearance by the US Air Force, for poetic reasons.

Please join us for poetry, conversation and cookies!

Jeffrey Harrison to Read, April 7th

2011-03-28T11:07:00.000-04:00

The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series presents

JEFFREY HARRISON

Thursday, April 7th

7:30 PM

121 Sparks Building

Jeffrey Harrison is the author of four full-length books of poetry, The Singing Underneath (1988), selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, Signs of Arrival (1996), Feeding the Fire(Sarabande Books, 2001), and Incomplete Knowledge, (Four Way Books, 2006). In addition, he published the chapbook An Undertaking in 2005, and in June 2006, The Waywiser Press brought out The Names of Things: New and Selected Poems in England. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as two Pushcart Prizes, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, Poets of the New Century, and in many other magazines and anthologies. He has taught at George Washington University, Phillips Academy, where he was the Roger Murray Writer-in-Residence, College of the Holy Cross, the Stonecoast MFA Program, Framingham State University, and, during the summer, at the Wesleyan Writers' Conference, the Chautauqua Institute, and The Frost Place in Franconia, NH.

To read a sampling of his poetry, please visit his website.

The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series is a project of Penn State’s M.F.A. program in English. It receives generous support from the The Mary E. Rolling Lectureship in Creative Writing, the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment, the Pennsylvania Center for the Book, the University Libraries, the Department of English, and the College of the Liberal Arts.

MFA Works-in-Progress Series: Altschul & Bascom

2011-03-25T11:25:00.000-04:00

The MFA Works-in-Progress Series Presents

Curran Altschul
&
Nick Bascom

Friday, March 25th
5pm
Grucci Room

Curran Altschul is a Michigan native who’s lived most of his life in exile in Oregon and upstate New York. Previous jobs include fundraising and wild-land firefighting, as well as usuals like food service and haunted-house operator. His thesis attempts to explore the metaphysical through the vehicle of the 1930s detective novel.

Nick Bascom was born in Kansas but grew up in Cincinnati, where his thesis--titled Take Me Back, Cincinnati--is set. He descibes his thesis as a "Tragicomic Kunstlerroman," and then quickly describe it as something else--"A coming-of-age tale with an ample supply of wiener jokes thrown in to make all the purple prose bearable"--when Toni tells me how haughty, and off-putting that is. TMBC is a rumination on masculinity, race, love, lust, duty, heritage, identity, civilization, language, marriage and more. It plays with the form of the quest-epic, following a haunted protagonist, Nicholas Icarus, as he confronts the various obstacles one particularly challenging summer presents. Will he survive a round of golf with his father and two neighbors, a widow who can't stand cloverheads in her lawn, and a 'Senior Prom for Senior Citizens?' Will he recover from a painful and embarrassing urinary tract infection in time to reconnect with his childhood crush? Will he be able to define his aesthetic and "forge out of the ruckus of shapes a just and imperishable town?" Will his unlikely hopes sink under the tremendous weight of his ego or be lifted by it?

Please join us for a reading/presentation/conversation with Curran & Nick.
Also, cookies!

2011 Toby Thompson Prize Winner

2011-03-21T18:37:00.001-04:00

Congratulations to

ANDREA ROCHAT

whose essay, "Spines"

is the winner of the 2011

Toby Thompson Prize for Literary Nonfiction

Andrea Rochat is currently in hot pursuit of her MFA at Penn State University. Besides teaching Composition and Fiction, she is spending her third and final year in the program working on her first novel, along with a collection of personal essays. In her spare time, she works on completing her first comic—a graphic essay about memory. Her book reviews have been published in Pleiades. In 2009, she won the Centre County Reads grand prize for Dashiell Hammett Writing with her short story, “How It All Adds Up.” In the rest of her spare time, Andrea likes to walk around and think.

Altoona Kudos!

2011-03-16T18:57:00.000-04:00

Our colleagues at Penn State Altoona have much to celebrate!

The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, a novel by associate professor Steve Sherrill has been optioned for a Disney/Pixar film;

Part-time English faculty member Rachael Lyon's manuscript The Normal Heart and How it Works has won the White Eagle Coffee Store Press chapbook prize;

Part-time English faculty member Anna Weber has published two new poems onwww.2river.org (and, as an extra bonus, you can hear her read them online);

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, assistant professor of English, recently published her fourth book of poetry: Where the Road Turns (Autumn House Press);

Ken Womack, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and professor of English, published his first novel: John Doe No. 2 and the Dreamland Motel (Switchgrass Books);

Erin Murphy, associate professor of English, will publish her fourth book of poems, Word Problems (Word Press) in April.

Congratulations, one and all!

MFA Reading Series, New Kid Edition

2011-03-16T11:16:00.000-04:00

This weekend the new recruits appear, bright-faced and not-yet-coffee-stained, ready to be dazzled. So let's dazzle them.

After the EGO party this Friday, come on down to the University Club redrum for a shockingly good lineup: Sarah "Plus One" Schoenholtz, Rachel "Plus Run" Bara, Andrea "Plus Fun" Rochat, and Aaron "Please Don't Give Me a Sequential Nickname" Kimmel.

MFA Reading Series!
The University Club
9:00 PM (Yes, please note nonstandard time)
Sarah Schoenholtz, Rachel Bara, Aaron Kimmel, Andrea Rochat

Faculty Kudos!

2011-03-14T13:44:00.000-04:00

Charlotte Holmes' story, "Erratics,"appears in the current issue of Epoch. "Erratics" is the title story of a collection of linked stories, a project she is just finishing. Other stories in the collection have appeared in Epoch, New Letters, The Superstition Review, and New Stories From the South: The Year's Best 2009, selected by Madison Smartt Bell.

Additionally, she was just awarded a month-long residency at The Millay Colony for the Arts, for November 2011.

Congratulations, Charlotte!

When it Rains it Pours Poems!

2011-03-13T10:52:00.000-04:00

Congratulations to Rachel Mennies, who has had poems taken by Hayden's Ferry Review, Indiana Review, and Cimarron Review, and who has also won the department's Harold F. Martin Graduate Assistant Outstanding Teaching Award!

What a month, Rachel!

2011 CALS/CCR “Family” Writing Contest Winners

2011-03-11T23:28:00.001-05:00

Congratulations to

*Grand Prize Winner, Ph.D. candidate, Michelle K. Baker, whose “Wednesdays at the Q-Tip Diner” was written for Toby Thompson's 515 class

* MFA candidate, Lucy Green, whose essay, "The Rule of Magic" was awarded Best Short Nonfiction

* MFA candidate, Jo Hsu, whose story "Ghost Money," was named Honorable Mention in the Best Short Fiction Category

Jo Hsu Swoons Over Aimee Bender

2011-03-11T23:20:00.000-05:00

Aimee Bender visited Penn State last month and gave a terrific reading. Here, MFA candidate, Jo Hsu, talks about her admiration for the writer:

***

Early in my undergraduate years, back when I hid beneath the cloak of “pre-law” and fancied that someday, I’d graduate with a shiny professional degree, I took a creative writing workshop. Writing had always been a hobby of mine. I’d entertained my third grade class with “The Adventures of Steve and His Magic Skateboard,” and I had (please don’t judge) a flourishing fanfiction account with its own modest fanbase (“OMG I love the way you wrote Legolas. I imagined him JUST LIKE THAT!!!”). But I had no inkling of what literary fiction even resembled; even as an English major, I secretly defined “serious” prose as dry, boring tomes that were grueling to read.

My professor was a recent graduate of Houston’s MFA program. She must have been horrified by my first workshop submission—a rambling account that involved too many characters, too many events, and not enough substance. She quickly assigned me a reading list, at the top of which was Aimee Bender’s “The Rememberer.”

“My lover is experiencing reverse evolution. I tell no one.” I reread the opening lines until they lost all meaning—more melody than words. I loved the cadence to them, and the confidence. Both unapologetic and open to all possibilities. It was unlike anything I’d encountered in my very limited experience—simultaneously serious and quirky, simple yet intricate and multilayered. I wept; it was the first time prose made me cry since the dogs died in A Red Fern Grows. For me, Bender’s prose exploded the potential of human imagination, coaxing us into a world of suspended disbelief where such unrealistic events conveyed painfully real emotion. It proved not only what one could achieve through words, but what an unsuspecting reader could gain from reading those words.

I spent the night dissecting her story, trying desperately to rationalize the magic of her prose. It was maddening. I wanted to know how anyone could create such well-grounded, such human desire and despair from such strangeness. I theorized that the very nature of the strangeness allowed Bender to do what she does. I decided that the oddities in her stories were what made us vulnerable to the very real, very raw emotions that pulsed beneath the surface. During the Q&A, she said something to that effect and I nearly giggled with fangirlish glee.

Aimee Bender was the first on the short list of writers to whom I attribute my sudden devotion to serious fiction. I never imagined I would have the good fortune to meet her, let alone probe her with questions in the Grucci room, pester her over Indian food, or discuss departmental politics with her over beers at the Nittany Lion Inn. I never imagined I would sit in a small auditorium and rediscover the magic of her stories as she narrated them aloud.

To be perfectly honest, I have a poor attention span for readings. In most cases, even if I would enjoy the prose on paper, I have difficulty following the storyline in spoken form. But I was once again completely captivated by Aimee’s storytelling. I loved her delivery too—enough personality and confidence to command the room without overpowering the words.

Four years after I shook and sniffled over “The Rememberer,” I still haven’t demystified the secret to Aimee’s artistry. I can see and admire the vivid and visceral heart (the “white hot center,” as Elizabeth would put it) of her stories, but I can’t see how it’s put together. But I’ve come to accept that—or perhaps embrace it. Let Aimee keep her magic mysteries… I’ll take from them the inspiration, the knowledge that such seamless, beautiful worlds are possible, and hopefully I’ll find my own way to create my own worlds, with their own form of magic.

Undergrad Alum Wins 2011 A. Poulin Jr. Prize for Poetry!

2011-03-07T17:28:00.000-05:00

Ryan Teitman (B.A. English, 2004), has been awarded the 2011 A. Poulin Jr.Prize for Poetry from BOA Editions! Jane Hirshfield chose Ryan's book, Litany for the City, from 16 finalists and will write the Foreword to the published collection, due out in March, 2012.

Huge congratulations to you, Ryan!

http://www.boaeditions.org/blog/2011/03/ryan-teitman-awarded-2011-a-poulin-jr-poetry-prize/

Denise Grollmus Puts Us All to Shame

2011-03-03T13:26:00.000-05:00

As if it weren't enough that she's been awarded a John Woods scholarship for Creative Writing to attend the Prague Summer Program in July, now she's gone and published an essay she wrote for workshop last semester in Salon!

Seriously, Denise. Let the rest of us have a chance at some glory, will you?

Geez.

PSU @ AWP

2011-02-24T14:24:00.000-05:00

A good many of us traveled to D.C. at the beginning of the month for the ~~Crazy Writers Everywhere~~ AWP Conference, and here, some members of our community share their conference highlights:

*******

I loved hearing---- from editors and publishers arrayed around the book fair---- about their productive, professional conversations with students in the 2011 book reviewing grad seminar. At booths and tables, editors praised the students' engagement, enthusiasm and courtesy. I heard of many books offered and contacts made, proving that the grad students generated a lot of goodwill. I felt proud that Penn State students, by seeking to showcase the work of others, demonstrated a generous form of literary citizenship.--Robin Becker, Professor of English

My favorite thing about AWP was just how nice everyone was: people at the book fair, the panelists I talked to, etc. The best panel I went to was the one featuring our very own Elizabeth Kadetsky and Julia Spicher Kasdorf; it was a diverse panel, but all of the panelists were well-prepared, humble, and interesting.---Emily Anderson, MFA candidate

My favorite moment occurred when I was giving a reading in an Irish Pub down the street from the conference hotel. Just as I was introducing a poem with a reference to, ummm, male virility (specifically, a "dangling preposition"), an ad for the erectile dysfunction drug Cialis was playing on the bar's jumbo TV screen.--Erin Murphy, Associate Professor of English, Penn State Altoona

One of my favorite quotes from AWP came from the panel, "Beyond Blackout and Whiteache: Poets Rewriting Race." Jake Adam York (co-editor of Copper Nickel) said you have to replicate, in the imagination of the poem, the power dynamic of what started the poem.--Sarah Blake Shoenholtz, MFA candidate

AWP Billboard moment: Making the rounds at the Book Fair with classmates from Prof. Becker's book review class: chatting with editors; soliciting review copies from publishers; exchanging knowing nods across the floor with classmates. We Came, We Panel-d, We Triumphed.--Evan McGarvey, MFA candidate

Five years." "Seven years." "Eight years." At a panel comprised of first time authors discussing the "Nitty-Gritty of Publishing," novelists, short story writers, essayists, and one poet declared how long they spent writing their first books. Almost none of them completed their books within the tidy time-frame of a two or three year MFA program. I smiled, relieved. This panel confirmed my suspicion that a thesis proves to be one thing, while a first book might be something else. --Rachel Bara, MFA candidate

I loved the chance to reconnect with my former teachers and fellow MFA alums from Penn State.--Rita Ciresi, MFA Alumna

Hope to ~~freeze~~ see you in Chicago, 2012!

Aimee Bender to read February 23

2011-02-22T13:30:00.000-05:00

The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series presents

Aimee Bender

Wednesday, February 23rd

7:30 pm

Foster Auditorium, Paterno Library

Aimee Bender is the author of four books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010) which recently won the SCIBA award for best fiction. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper's, Tin House, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, and many more places, as well as heard on PRI's This American Life and Selected Shorts. She received two Pushcart prizes, and was nominated for the TipTree award in 2005, and the Shirley Jackson short story award in 2010. Her fiction has been translated into sixteen languages.

The Red Weather Reading Series presents Malachi Black

2011-02-16T15:00:00.000-05:00

We, the undersigned, do solemnly swear that the only thing better than a reading on a Wednesday the 23rd (Aimee Bender! Don't miss it!) is a reading on a Thursday of the 24th variety. The reasoning is simple; there is no "hump" to overcome on a Thursday, a day when we are presumably already rolling downhill into the weekend. Secondarily, the number 24 is a much better sport than 23, as 23 is a "prime" number, and considers itself superior to numbers of the regular sort, or "plebes" as 23 calls them. This is unfair, as we figure all numbers are created equal.

- R.W.R.S.

In pursuit of this noble goal, the Red Weather Reading Series would like to present

award-winning poet

Malachi Black

on Thursday, February 24th at

8 p.m. in 102 Chambers Building

as he kicks off our spring tour...

About our reader:

Malachi Black’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Southwest Review, The Iowa Review, AGNI Online, Gulf Coast, Columbia, Pleiades, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. His poem “Traveling by Train” was selected by Mark Strand for inclusion in the Best New Poets 2008 anthology. The recipient of a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, he has also received recent fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The MacDowell Colony, the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he currently holds the Stanley Kunitz Endowed Fellowship. His limited edition hand-bound chapbook Echolocation is newly available from Float Press.

Okay, so maybe we're a bit insecure about this whole numerology argument, as the spring R.W.R.S. clearly kicks off the day after Aimee Bender's sure-to-be fantastic Mary E. Rolling reading, but with a strong shout out to Malachi's powerful kung-fu, superbia, poet union meetings, and with tender fluffy love of all wordstuffs in our hearts, we close with a simple gavel: is too much fantastic even possible?

Please join us for more fantastic on Thursday, February 24th, in 102 Chambers at 8 p.m., and thank you for your continuing support!

Literary Two-fer This Weekend! Don't Miss it!

2011-02-15T22:22:00.000-05:00

MFA Reading Series, Spring Edition, featuring
Curran Altchul, Daniel Story, and Nick Bascom
Friday, February 18th at 7:00 PM
The University Club

&
Community Poetry Reading with
Daniel Story, Emily Anderson, and Alyse Bensel
Saturday, February 19, at 5:00 PM
Lila Yoga Studios
(103 E. Beaver Ave., near the corner of Allen and Beaver).

MFA Kudos!

2011-02-10T14:01:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to MFA candidate, Denise Grollmus, who is among only 29 writers out of 400 to be chosen to attend the 2011 Sirenland Writer's Conference in Positano, Italy in March!

She will be working on her nonfiction novel/memoir, The Value of Ruins while in attendance, and we will try not to hate her too much because she will be in Italy and we will not.

We're just not that petty. (No really, we're not.)

Terrance Hayes to Read February 10

2011-02-06T17:59:00.001-05:00

The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series presents

TERRANCE HAYES

Thursday, February 10, 2011
7:30 pm
Foster Auditorium, Paterno Library

Terrance Hayes most recent poetry collection is the National Book Award-winning Lighthead (Penguin 2010). His other books are Wind in a Box, Muscular Music, and Hip Logic. His honors include four Best American Poetry selections, a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a professor of creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Click here to listen to a review of Lighthead from WPSU's Bookmark program,

MFA Reading Series, Friday, January 28th

2011-01-24T14:31:00.000-05:00

Spring as sprung, like a springy spring in sub-zero temperatures. How better to warm up than to surround yourself with red carpet? What's that you say? It's the joy of the written word that truly warms your heart? Well. Emily Anderson, Lucy Green, Rachel Mennies, and Lauren Tyrell are ready with all the poetry and prose you'll need to fight back the winter weather.

MFA Reading Series, Spring Edition!
Friday, January 28th at 7:30 PM!
At the University Club!
Emily Anderson, Lucy Green, Rachel Mennies, Lauren Tyrrell!

And! Mark your calendars: February 18th at 7, March 18th at 9pm (recruitment weekend), and the World-Famous MFA Reading Series Spring Variety Show April 22 at 7!

Glenn Blake to Read, January 20th

2011-01-12T10:13:00.000-05:00

The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series Presents

GLENN BLAKE

Thursday, January 20th
7:30 pm
Foster Auditorium

Glenn Blake’s first story collection, Drowned Moon, received the PEN Southwest Award for fiction. His story, "The Bottom," was made into an award-winning short film. He has served as Chair of PEN Houston. He is teaching in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins where he is the Managing Editor of The Hopkins Review. Return Fire is his second collection.

Community Kudos!

2010-12-20T15:25:00.001-05:00

Baby it's cold outside! Let's have hot toddies and celebrate ourselves, shall we?

FACULTY

Elizabeth Kadetsky's "Geography," was named a notable story in Best American Short Stories 2010, ed Richard Russo (published in 2009 in Antioch Review); "An Incident at the Plaza," was a RRofihe Trophy Top-Ten Story; her essay, "The Naked City TV Series: A Viewer Remembers, and Re-remembers," appeared in Defunct magazine and '"Black Lines and Several Circles," in Guernica magazine. She is currently enjoying a winter residency as a Djerassi Foundation Fellow. Lucky duck.

STUDENTS

Emily Anderson has three poems in the inaugural issue of Apropos Literary Journal.

Sarah Blake has two poems in Issue 8 of The Los Angeles Review and one poem in the Winter Issue of The Threepenny Review.

ALUMNI

Morris Collins has been busy. His story, "Brick," will appear in Passages North; his poems, "Available Life" and "Adrift," appeared in Nimrod's Fall/Winter issue, and he was a Finalist for Nimrod's Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Forthcoming from Saranac Review are, "Blackness in Good Augury," “On Rosh Hashanah the Angel Comes” and “Message from Whithorn." His review of American Fractal by Timothy Green, appeared in Mid-American Review's Spring issue, and they will also publish his review of Matt Bell's, How They Were Found.

Krista Eastman's essay "Wonder Spot" is due to be out this month in the Massachusetts Review, and her essay "Middle West," will appear in Cutbank in February, 2011.

Megan Friddle's poem, "Alex the Parrot" appeared in Right Hand Pointing , her poem "Free Fall" appeared in the print journal Nibble,and Gold Wake Press has published her e-Chapbook, Wind-up with five poems.

Jeffrey Morgan has new work forthcoming in Cutbank. His book, Crying Shame, is being published winter 2011 by BlazeVox Books. Check out the cover here.

Paul Kennedy Mueller has published three collections of short stories: The Pandemonium Bar & Grill,

Pretty Bad Stories, and Mostly True Tales.

Sheila Squillante's essay, "Dead Dad Day," appeared in Waccamaw Literary Journal, and was nominated for Sundress Publication's Best of the Net Anthology; Literary Mama published two of her essays last year: "All Things Edible, Random & Odd," which received their nomination for Dzanc's Best of the Web, and "Cry, Baby." He poem, "Tappan Zee," appeared in the Naugatuck River Review, "As if There Were Something Other Than This Weather," in Melusine, and "Afternoon Delight," in Redheaded Stepchild. No Tell Motel will publish five of her poems in 2011.

Katherine D. Stutzman's short story, "Flight" appears in the winter issue of the Summerset Review.

Camille Yvette-Welsch's poems," Aging" and "Ode to the Fat Woman at the Mutter Museum Who, When Buried, Turned to Soap in Winter" appeared in the 2010 issue of Indiana Review. She was also nominated by their editors for Best New Poets of 2010.

Rebecca Rasmussen on the Huffington Post

2010-12-20T09:14:00.000-05:00

MFA alum, Rebecca Rasmussen, talks about her new novel, The Bird Sisters today at the Huffington Post!

Rebecca will give a reading in our Mary E. Rolling Series this coming April 13th. Mark your calendar and plan to join us in celebrating one of our own!

A Beginner's Guide to Online Publishing

2010-12-10T12:33:00.000-05:00

-- by Rachel Mennies, MFA Candidate

I remember well the (terrifying) early moments of my decision to submit my poetry for first-time publication. New to our MFA program, to Penn State, and to the literary publishing realm, I sought advice on the topic from friends, peers, professors—and all had spirited and contradictory opinions on the subject. Many of the people I spoke with gave me the same well-meaning advice: “Look for print markets.” To these writers, some of whom had begun careers prior to the rise of online journals and literary apps, e-book readers and Web 2.0, the Internet seemed a risky place for publishing. There’s also no denying, as many indicated to me, the variance of quality out there; for every legitimate journal posting writing with discerning standards and a large submissions base, there’s another run with lackadaisical editors or poor quality control or with a readership of five.

I spent the next two years navigating a world I once found sprawling and lawless. The Internet houses many vibrant, chance-taking, high-quality, well-read markets, journals and websites that innovate even as they mirror aspects of their traditional print counterparts. I now believe that the Web, especially for a young writer looking for early publications, is an important, if not essential, home for publication. Where print can be stodgy, online journals take risks. Where print readerships largely limit themselves to subscription holders or bookstore shelves, anyone with a computer can read an online journal, and their unique hits are often degrees higher than those of print circulations. As with print, online journals appear in myriad forms and take varying approaches; below is an attempt to map one part of the landscape, a sort of Google Earth satellite view of who’s publishing online in 2010.

Even though online journals may sound new, many journals working on the Web serve as extensions of print literary magazines that have been publishing for decades. I work for AGNI, a journal out of Boston University with a storied history as a print journal. They now run an entirely separate category of work on their website, including reviews and interviews alongside their typically published poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Deciding what goes where is the editors’ task—and follows no predictable pattern, whether of quality or experimentation or form. Other journals also pursue this bifurcated structure with great success: check out Conjunctions and POETRY for variations on the theme.

Other journals, new and rapidly ascending in prestige, sustain themselves entirely online. These journals—like Narrative, DIAGRAM, Linebreak, and Coldfront, among many, many others—develop alongside advances in the larger publishing community, making them ideal markets for young writers interested in breaking through. Narrative’s got an iPad app; Linebreak hosts audio readings of all poems alongside the “printed” version on their homepage; and Coldfront, a review-and-news site for poetry, runs stories daily about the goings-on of the American poetry community. DIAGRAM, a journal of “text and image” that often publishes experimental and cross-genre forms, serves as a great indicator of the growing readership of online journals. From their website: “Brief statistic about the magazine: we get over a million hits monthly worldwide. Some countries in which we are evidently popular: the USA, the UK, Australia, and Japan. Rock on, readerships!” Compared to the thousands-an-issue subscription rate enjoyed by most print journals, a million hits is astronomical, and perhaps impossible for a print journal to sustain. There are far more online-only journals than space to example here, but if you’re looking for a database of them, Duotrope’s Digest and NewPages both maintain updated lists of online markets for publication (or, too, feel free to post your favorite e-journals in the comments of this post for others to pursue!).

Two years later, I’ve also seen compelling evidence for publishing online within our program and department. My poetry professor, Robin Becker, has contributed to the online writing world with rousing success—as this year’s Penn State Laureate, she’s been featured in YouTube readings, and her poems have re-circulated from her print collections thanks to their regular posting over at Penn State Live. As we writers turn to the Internet and social networking more and more for our creative writing news and content, online journals will only continue to grow, both in number and prestige. And Web 2.0 provides a new dimension to the publishing world: once the territory of Letters to the Editor, commentary about journal content now comes vibrantly through readers posting, Tweeting, and blogging about their favorite—and least favorite—publications. In a community often at the margins of magazine publishing, a community as terribly important to its members as it is at risk for diminishment and sacrifice by funding struggles, I can only see this increased discussion as a positive, if not imperative, moment for creative writing.

Here’s to our voices, loud and widely spread, in a contemporary and safe place for writers.

"A Fruity Bit of Slang"

2010-12-06T15:51:00.002-05:00

An Interview with Mitzi Angel,

Publisher at Faber & Faber

--by Elizabeth Kadetsky

Seized by the logic that a writer might best learn thinking outside the box from authors who were never in that box to begin with, I decided to highlight international short story collections for the readings component of the MFA fiction workshop this fall. If the box is “MFA fiction”—or, in the least, mainstream American writing—works from abroad might introduce us to other ways of coming at the short story. “Non-traditional” doesn’t have to mean experimental, went my thinking. In the US, it’s hard to pull oneself from the shadow of Carver, of Hemingway, of Richard Ford. What could be learned by examining approaches that had less to do with defying tradition than with simply operating from a different set of literary conventions and forebears?

In the workshop, we looked at five contemporary collections from all over the world. The one that most challenged our collective notions of story, plot, structure and voice was Zimbabwean author Petina Gappah’s hypnotic and wry An Elegy for Easterly, published in London in 2009. I chose this title after an essay in Granta called my attention to her fiction, which stood out to me for its discursive tone, an interior-monologue style, and narrators made unreliable by passion, emotion and outrage.

I also happened to be half a degree of separation from the acquiring editor for the book, the “fantastic” Mitzi Angel, to quote Gappah from her acknowledgments. Mitzi was introduced to me by a colleague of hers when she came to New York from London in 2008 to take a position at Faber & Faber, an affiliate of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, where she is now Publisher. Mitzi and her husband, Dom, stayed briefly in my apartment, where Dom took a “spanner” to my refrigerator to orient its door in the proper direction.

What was a “spanner”?—I meekly asked Dom, once the operation was concluded. “Is it a wrench?”

“What’s a wrench?” he said.

The workshop and I came up with a set of questions for Mitzi, which I delivered by email before Thanksgiving. She wrote back after the holiday, and here is what she said. The Britishisms in her responses below might amuse and delight the reader, as will Gappah’s Elegy….

How did this book find its way across your desk?

In a very ordinary way—through a literary agent in London.

Were you involved in the acquisition, and if so, what factors affected the decision for this collection and not another?

Yes, I acquired the book. I had published Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun—so the agent approached me with this collection, because the two writers were acquainted with one another. Also, I’d read a story of hers years earlier, published in Prospect magazine, and had written her a note. So there was a bit of background.

Did you feel that it was formally taking a chance (ie relative to say an Ian McEwan–like or Zadie Smith–like style)?

In some ways, yes. I thought there was an ebullience to her writing that made it quite distinctive. Her stories are not studied. There’s something impulsive about them, which I liked. They don’t feel weighed down—they’re fast and furious. There’s nothing solemn about them, even when they deal with death and destruction.

Do you think that new fiction (story collections in particular) in the US are influenced by an MFA mentality or aesthetic, and does that aesthetic, or a different but parallel one, influence UK publishing also?

I think it influences US publishing a little more than it does UK publishing. There’s a bigger tradition of MFA programs here in the States. It’s also true that there’s a more established short fiction tradition in the US than there is in the UK, partly because there are still magazines in this country (New Yorker, Harpers, Paris Review and more) that run short fiction and that create an appetite for the form. Plus, of course, there are so many great short story writers in this country, both dead and alive. I’m not saying it’s easy to publish short fiction in the US. But I think it’s easier than it is in the UK, on the whole.

Do you see any reasons that Elegy... would or would not appeal to an American market versus a British one, and how has the book done in the US versus the UK. Whether well or not well, why would you say that might be?

The book has done better in the UK. I think there are possibly two reasons for this:

1) There is a bigger interest in Africa in the UK—Britain’s colonial adventures in many African countries (including Zimbabwe) accounts for this. I think this gave reviewers something to talk about. Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe were constantly in the news in the UK.

2) Her stories feel more folkloric perhaps than conventionally "literary." There were many more positive reviews in the UK than there were in the US—plus she won the Guardian First Book Award over there. That’s just a theory of mine.

How was the order of stories determined, and how was the first determined?

I can’t remember exactly why or how we chose the first story. But I do think order in a collection is important. It’s sort of like a great album – each song playing off the previous one; providing contrast and somehow illuminating the other songs in the album. I think the same principle can work for a story collection. You need to vary moods and settings, that kind of thing.

How was the title chosen, was the first story (“At the Sound of the Last Post”) considered a kind of anti-elegy?

“An Elegy for Easterly” is one of the strongest stories in the collection—or perhaps the strongest—which is partly why we chose it as the title story. But yes, there were other reasons for the title, too. The idea of mourning the dead or remembering the dead is played around with in the book—sometimes in a humorous way.

Who is the perceived audience from a marketing point of view?

Anyone who likes good stories! Seriously, I don’t really go about publishing fiction with a clear idea of the “audience” for it. I never know what I’m going to acquire for my list until I come across it. And it’s usually something that’s completely new to me; something I haven’t had a conception of before encountering it. So—hopefully—it will also be new and surprising for its readers. The trick is to publish with confidence.

Was Ms. Gappah well known in England before the publication of Elegy...? What were the mechanics of her "discovery"?

She wasn’t well known, no. She’d had a story published in Prospect magazine—and a piece in Granta magazine. So that was how she came to the attention of literary agents.

What is the difference between the UK idiom (for contemporary fiction) and the American one? Do you see a difference in terms of spareness and density?

I don’t think I conceive of it as a difference between spareness and density. But I do think American writers are much more self-consciously “American” than British writers are “British”. American writers are interested in what it is to be American. That often means they’re perhaps more concerned with individual voice than the Brits are. Lorin Stein at the Paris Review said something like this; that individual voice in American fiction tends to explore the question of whether or not there is a shared American voice; whether that voice has the capacity to sum something up about the American experience.

What about re-editing for the American audience, a la Harry Potter--did that happen in the case of Ms Gappah's book (i.e., translating Britishisms)?

Yes, I think we did change spellings, for example, and used American spelling. We don’t always do this, though. Sometimes we just leave British spellings and idioms. Particularly if the book itself is British. You wouldn’t dream, for instance, of changing any of Hilary Mantel’s grammar or spelling. You’d just leave it as it is in the UK version.

How different is Zimbabwean English from British English—how does that translate over in the writing?

It is different of course—but in Petina’s book, that difference is important to maintain and to keep in the text. It’s partly what can transport the reader to Harare—being able to “hear” a dialect or a particularly fruity piece of slang.

Interview with Elizabeth Kadetsky

2010-12-02T09:18:00.000-05:00

Check out this fabulous interview in the current Superstition Review with our very own Elizabeth K.!

MFA Reading Series Variety Show!

2010-11-30T13:08:00.000-05:00

Friday, December 3
7pm
University Club

	Okay, we MFA's have had our time. We've hogged the mic, we've made you sit through arcane, obscure, obviously-autobiographical piles of words, and you clapped politely, like the audience at a Bridge Society's annual dinner. But now it's your turn. Yes, you. Have you been sitting quietly in the audience of the MFA Readings, in the warm glow of the red carpet walls, wondering when you will get your chance in front of the mic? Have you been scribbling quietly in your notebook, waiting, like Emily Dickinson, for the right time to strike? Now is your time. We still have many open slots in the Variety Show program, so sign up with one of your friendly Reading Series Coordinators (Daniel, Aaron, Sarah). Or, if reading (or singing, pantomiming, rapping, etc.) really isn't your thing, just come out and be entertained by the stunning talents of your classmates and neighbors. You all need a break from your seminar papers anyway.

Okay, we MFA's have had our time. We've hogged the mic, we've made you sit through arcane, obscure, obviously-autobiographical piles of words, and you clapped politely, like the audience at a Bridge Society's annual dinner. But now it's your turn. Yes, you.

Have you been sitting quietly in the audience of the MFA Readings, in the warm glow of the red carpet walls, wondering when you will get your chance in front of the mic? Have you been scribbling quietly in your notebook, waiting, like Emily Dickinson, for the right time to strike?

Now is your time. We still have many open slots in the Variety Show program, so sign up with one of your friendly Reading Series Coordinators (Daniel, Aaron, Sarah).

Or, if reading (or singing, pantomiming, rapping, etc.) really isn't your thing, just come out and be entertained by the stunning talents of your classmates and neighbors.

You all need a break from your seminar papers anyway.

Charles Bernstein Reading & Lecture

2010-11-27T10:57:00.000-05:00

The Institute for the Arts and Humanities

& The Department of English present

"Attack of the Difficult Poems"

An American poet, theorist, editor, and literary scholar,

Charles Bernstein

is one of the most prominent members

of the language poets (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets).

In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Poetry Reading

Thursday, December 2, 2010
7:00 pm
112 Borland Building

Lecture

Friday, December 3, 2010
4:00 pm
Grucci Room (14 & 15 Burrowes)

These events are open to the public.

For more information, please contact the Institute at (814) 865-0495 or arts-humanities@psu.edu.

Toi Derricotte Reading, December 2

2010-11-27T10:47:00.000-05:00

Toi Derricotte

Thursday, December 2, 2010

5:00 – 6:30 pm

Foster Auditorium, Paterno Library

Toi Derricotte is a poet, professor of English at University of Pittsburgh and co-founder, with Cornelius Eady, of the Cave Canem Foundation, North America’s premier “home for black poetry.” Her books of poetry are Tender (1997), Captivity (1989), Natural Birth (1983), and the Empress of Death House (1978). Her The Black Notebooks, a literary memoir, won the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including two Pushcart Prizes, the Elizabeth Kray Award for service to the field of poetry from Poets House, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Sponsored by the MFA Program; Kelly Family Professor Aldon Nielsen; Robin Becker, Liberal Arts Research Professor and Penn State Laureate, 2010-2011; Institute for Arts and Humanities, Center for Democratic Deliberation; and the Africana Research Center

Kalliope Open Mic Night to Feature MFA Alum

2010-11-18T13:10:00.000-05:00

Kalliope, Penn State's undergraduate literary magazine, invites you and your students to

Open Mic Night!

featuring

Katherine Bode-Lang

Tuesday, November 30th
7pm
Waring Study Lounge

Katherine Bode-Lang’s chapbook, Spring Melt, which won second place in the 2008 Keystone Chapbook Contest, was published in 2009 by Seven Kitchens Press and recently won the 2010 New England Poetry Club’s Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Katherine will be reading with other NEPC prize winners at Harvard in December. Her poems have appeared in Subtropics, The Mid-American Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Rattle, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others. She was an Editor’s Choice for The Mid-American Review’s James Wright Poetry Award in 2007 and 2008, and she received Academy of American Poets Prizes three times from Penn State and Hope College. Katherine holds an MFA from Penn State, where she is now the Assistant Director of The Methodology Center, a research center addressing issues in the behavioral and health sciences.

Alumni Musings: On Writing and Mothering

2010-11-18T11:59:00.000-05:00

Jenn McKee (fiction, 2001) is the the entertainment reporter for AnnArbor.com, where she covers mostly theater and film, but sometimes also books, music and general entertainment.

Her blog, An Adequate Mom, chronicles her life as a mother and writer, and just celebrated its year anniversary. The post below appeared on both her blog and on AnnArbor.com's parenting page.

***

With the kind of uncanny timing that makes you wonder if the universe is trying to tell you something, my 2-year-old daughter was conceived within days of my return from Ragdale, an artist colony in Lake Forest, Ill., in 2007.

Jenn & Lily

I’d earned a residency at Ragdale, during the competitive summer months, on the basis of a book excerpt I’d submitted with my application; a book I’d then hoped, and still hope, to see published. But becoming a mom has, for now, derailed this ambition.

My life has seemingly always been pointed toward the goal of writing and publishing a book. The first thing I remember answering to the “What do you want to be when you grow up?” question, posed by my grandfather while I (at age 4 or 5) dried dishes in his kitchen, was: “An author.” (Yes, I later claimed “Avon lady” and “veterinarian” as career goals, at a time when playing with makeup and animals held great appeal, but I eventually came full circle. Good thing, since I never came to wear makeup in day-to-day life.)

I was hardly a natural, however. After being humbled by dark-night-of-the-soul takedowns in various writing workshops in college and beyond, as well as receiving rejections from respected and not-so-respected graduate writing programs across the country, I finally earned a place in Penn State’s MFA program. Yet once I was there, I more fully realized that all this effort and focus might just come to nothing.

For writing is one of those maddening, potentially soul-killing or transcendent (sometimes both on the same day) pursuits where, at some point, you realize: “Wow, I could spend my whole life working at this, and studying with the very best people that I can, and I could still lay a big goose egg.” A pretty tough truth to face. I’d given the pursuit my absolute best shot, but by my last semester at PSU, I grew depressed and questioned whether it was time for me to just give up the ghost and figure out a new path for my life. Maybe it was time to grow up and face the music already.

Of course, that’s the precise moment when I learned that one of my stories (“Under the Influence”) was chosen by the PSU writing faculty as its nomination for the annual “Best New American Voices” anthology. That in itself was validating and wonderful, giving me just enough hope to stay with it. But then the story was actually selected for inclusion, by no less than Joyce Carol Oates, and I thought maybe I’d finally broken through.

But it’s not as though literary magazines suddenly started accepting everything I sent -- far from it. Yet my desire to write a book was still intense, so after repeatedly telling people about my experience driving an author I’d never met around the country for a book tour, unpaid, only weeks after my wedding, I got inspired to write a travel memoir about it.

I wrote "In the Driver's Seat" little by little in the mornings before heading to my part-time job. And it was with an early, completed draft that I applied to Ragdale and earned a fantastic opportunity to shrug off the daily responsibilities of life for two weeks and focus on pounding out a revision.

Yet after spending a total of nine months (no joke) writing and re-writing my book, I then spent nine months building a little person that, naturally, would turn our lives upside down.

While pregnant, though, I got busy trying to push my book out of the nest and into the world. I crafted a query letter and sent it to carefully researched agents who might be interested in it. A few days before my due date, one agent liked the sample she’d read and asked me to work up a book proposal.

Really, the agent wanted truncated summaries of each chapter that wouldn’t be too detailed but would capture the book’s voice and major events. This may not sound like a big deal, but it’s hard work -- work I wouldn’t get to for a while because of my daughter’s impending birth. But at the end of my maternity leave, I arranged for Lily to start daycare one week early so she could get acclimated with shorter-than-usual days while I labored over these summaries.

And I finished them. But the agent responded with suggestions for significantly re-working the proposal, and just then, I was going back to work and negotiating all that comes with adjusting to this completely new phase of motherhood. So I couldn’t make the revisions then, and I haven’t really found the opportunity to do it since.

Did my decision to become a mom mark a moment when, in essence, I said: “This doesn’t seem to be happening for me, even though I gave it my best shot”? Maybe. Despite years of study and effort, a future as the new Anne Tyler or Nick Hornby didn’t seem to be in the cards for me, and I certainly felt like I needed to recognize this.

Not that I’m resigned about the potential and future of my book manuscript. And certainly, if I still had the burning desire to pursue it now, I’d be using the few spare moments I get to re-work its proposal. Instead, though, I often spend those minutes posting parenting essays on my blog, which is what I’ve felt most passionate about writing over the past year.

This is partly because writing about parenting experiences provides me with important insights and perspectives I otherwise wouldn’t have -- something about the process of writing forces you to think things through more completely -- and because I want Lily to have this family record. But on the best days, seeing how many blog visitors I have feels absolutely marvelous -- like what I always thought publishing a book would feel like, albeit on a more modest scale. In this way, blogging is a slightly downgraded, but still satisfying, version of my original dream -- and maybe it will even lead me to the book I’ll write next.

Did I surrender my ambitions when deciding to be a mom? I know everyone would like me to say: “No, I’m plowing ahead, and darn it, I’ll make it happen!” But truth is always thornier and trickier than that. And one of the things that makes the decision to have a child so difficult is that you have to, by necessity, take a good, hard, long look at where you are and where it appears you’re going.

I’m not saying that when you become a parent you have to entirely surrender your dreams, but you do have to keep responding to the new realities you find yourself in. And for me, that means that right now, there’s not enough room in my life for motherhood, my job, and my book.

Of the things on that list, only one can wait.

Pencils with Wings

2010-11-18T11:03:00.000-05:00

--by Rachel Bara, MFA Candidate

On November 13th, the Community Arts Collective dropped the gray tarps that covered the “Dreams Take Flight” mural on the wall of McLanahan's Downtown Market in Calder Alley between Allen and Fraser streets in State College.

Two hikers follow a trail leading into the sky and stand roughly level with a hot-air balloon. A local fifth grader's poem painted on the curve of the balloon begins: “Dreams can fly, farther than airplanes, higher than rockets, and can be more powerful than superman.” Walk a few steps and look up. You will see a girl sitting on a cloud. She blows bubbles. One bubble grows larger than her. Inside the bubble, an eighth grader's poem bursts: “dreaming is a little like flying / it's unfurling wings of stone / realizing you're filled with helium, / made of light.”

Now, walk past the white-tailed deer, the saxophone, the pencils; all have wings. Follow the air-blown graduation caps up high over the Pattee Library, the Palmer Art Museum, and Old Main. In the contours of a water tower, you'll find MFA candidate Lucy Green's poem, “Dream Matter.” Congratulations, Lucy!

Dream matter
Not cloud vapor,
Not sleep pigment,
Not yesterday
cinders
Or tomorrow seeds;
But flesh and
feather,
Loam and leaf,
Hands, lips, wings
Vital elements.

Undergrad Alum Named Stegner Fellow

2010-11-06T16:54:00.000-04:00

Ryan Teitman (B.A. English, 2004), has won a coveted Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.

Stegner Fellowships provide a small number of poets and fiction writers with two-year residencies, a yearly stipend of $26,000, and time to write without academic obligations other than weekly workshop attendance.

After graduating from Penn State, Teitman completed an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and M.A. in English at Indiana University in 2010.

Ryan was good enough to talk to us about the the fellowship experience:

How did you go about preparing your work in advance of applying for the fellowship?

First, I gathered together what I thought were my best poems--the pieces that I was most excited about. Sometime in the fall, I met with some of the other third-years in the MFA program and we all discussed our fellowship applications to a number of places. We shared our writing samples, cover letters, and personal statements and gave each other suggestions--kind of like a workshop. These were poets and fiction writers that I trusted and respected, and who knew my work fairly well. They helped me pick which poems to include, and also which poems to lead off my writing sample with (I think the fiction writers were especially helpful in choosing what poems to put first). I'd been told by professors to start with my strongest work--it's the hook to get a reader interested. And the readers for any fellowship are sifting through piles and piles of material; you want to give a good first impression.

What was it like to find out that you had been accepted?

Surreal. I know I was fairly incoherent when Eavan Boland called me, as I tried to simultaneously process what she had said, express my utter thanks to her, and verify that the phone call was really meant for me. But most of all it was a relief; I knew I'd get to be working on my poetry for the next two years. After I got the call, I phoned my mother at home, my father at work, and my thesis director. But no one answered. I had this huge piece of news and no one to tell it to! I seriously contemplated knocking on my neighbors' doors, just to have someone to tell. Eventually, I got hold of one of my good friends, then my parents and my director called me back.

How do you spend your days as a fellow? Are you working on a particular project?

I've been working on two poetry projects simultaneously for the past few months: polishing my first manuscript to send out to first book contests, and writing new poems. My new poems are very different from the ones I was writing in my MFA program, which is exciting but also nerve wracking. Luckily, I've gotten great support and feedback from the other fellows in the workshop (workshop is our main responsibility in the program). The poets here are all smart, generous, incisive readers, along with being incredibly talented writers. They're wonderful people to work with.

The greatest gift of the Stegner Fellowship is time. I'm not the kind of writer that can work on a set schedule, but I like to get writing done every day, if I can. And because our fellowship responsibilities primarily rest with the once-a-week workshop, I can pretty much work my writing into my days wherever I like. I've been spending a lot of my free time reading and exploring San Francisco and the East Bay. I'm even contemplating working on a short story (which I haven't done since my first year of grad school) and writing some nonfiction.

Do you have any advice for poets who hope to one day have this experience?

Make sure that your writing sample is as strong as possible. That's the key thing. Send work you feel confident in, work that represents you. The poets in program here all write very differently--in style, in form, in subject matter. So be the poet that you are.

Congratulations, Ryan! We're proud to say we knew you when!

The Red Weather Reading Series presents Matt Bell

2010-11-04T11:08:00.000-04:00

The Red Weather Reading Series re-emerges from its allegorical Phoenix Capsule like a philandering ore miner extending a bouquet of lavender roses on November 11th! Please join us in welcoming our first reader of the season, Matt Bell, who's driving in from Michigan because he's sick of all the nice weather.

Thursday, November 11

7:00pm

112 Chambers

Matt Bell is the author of the fiction collection How They Were Found, published by Keyhole Press in October 2010, as well as three chapbooks, Wolf Parts (Keyhole Press), The Collectors (Caketrain Press), and How the Broken Lead the Blind (Willows Wept Press). His fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Hayden's Ferry Review, Willow Springs, Unsaid, and American Short Fiction, and has been selected for inclusion in anthologies such as Best American Mystery Stories 2010 and Best American Fantasy 2. His book reviews and critical essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, American Book Review, and The Quarterly Conversation.

He is also the editor of The Collagist and of Dzanc's Best of the Web anthology series.

Praise for How They Were Found:

"Reminscent of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Winter War in Tibet in its calm examination and unsettling embodiment of mental and physical extremes, How They Were Found is a dreamer's chronicle of the loss and partial recovery of a world given over to the wrecking ball. Fierce, unflinching, funny, How They Were Found is just the book we need right now, Matt Bell just the writer." —Laird Hunt, author of Ray of the Star

"How They Were Found offers a world with shifting rules, described with a lovely and deceptive simplicity. This guide shows you thirteen different types of wilderness, and you can spend all day exploring before you realize you are lost." —Amelia Gray, author of Museum of the Weird and AM/PM

"You're a robot if the stories in Matt Bell's debut collection don't exhilarate, frighten, and unalterably change you. His wild manipulation of form and genre makes the bulk of contemporary fiction feel bloodless and inert in comparison, but it is Bell's recurring arrival at something sturdy and true about human behavior that makes the stories in How They Were Found so rewarding and resonant." —Matthew Derby, author of Super Flat Times: Stories

Please visit Matt Bell's website, http://www.mdbell.com/, and come see us in 112 Chambers on November 11th at 7 p.m.

Robin Romm to Read November 9

2010-11-03T16:51:00.000-04:00

The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series presents

ROBIN ROMM

Tuesday, November 9

7:30pm

Foster Auditorium,

Paterno Library

Robin Romm is the author of a collection of stories, The Mother Garden, a finalist for the PEN USA prize, and a memoir, The Mercy Papers, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The UK Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Tin House, among others. She reviews books for The New York Times Book Review and teaches in the MFA program at New Mexico State University

The Art of Poetry Series

2010-10-31T15:07:00.000-04:00

featuring

SHEILA SQUILLANTE

Wednesday, November 3
12:10 pm
Palmer Museum of Art

Sheila Squillante's poems and essays have appeared in places like Phoebe, Quarterly West, Prairie Schooner, Connecticut Review, The Southeast Review, Glamour, Brevity, TYPO, 42Opus, Literary Mama, PANK and elsewhere. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and, in 2009, received a Pushcart nomination for her work. She is the associate director of the MFA Program at Penn State and a senior lecturer in English.

15 Years On: An Alum Ponders the Post- M.F.A .Writing Life

2010-10-25T16:33:00.000-04:00

Our next guest blogger, Nick Capo, graduated from Penn State's M.F.A. program in nonfiction in 1995. Today he is Associate Professor of English at Illinois College.

Doing Your Work

Fifteen years after completing my M.F.A. at Penn State, I sit most mornings at my desk on the Hilltop, the local colloquialism for Illinois College, the private liberal arts college that employs me. Forty-two years after my birth, I find my thoughts frequently turning to gratitude, freedom, and gratification.

Three unpublished book-length manuscripts behind me, I am diligently pounding away on, and playing with, a fourth manuscript that I believe might be “the one.” But for eight years now at Illinois College, I have been teaching creative writing and happily pumping out essays, columns, scholarly articles, book reviews, and speeches, some finding a published home in print, some appearing online, some delivered as public readings, and some still sitting in my revise-and-resubmit files. During those years, except for one ten-month stint while she was in Japan on a Fulbright, Beth Widmaier Capo (Associate Professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies, Ph.D. from Penn State, my wife) has occupied a neighboring office, and she has published her first book.

When I attended Penn State, the M.F.A. curriculum was a studio-academic design with courses split equally between workshops and literature. Students gained intensive practice in one genre (typically four workshops and their creative thesis) and complimentary practice in a second genre (typically one or two workshops). Almost every student was on assistantship, and teaching duties often were composition courses, not introductory creative writing or the intermediate genre courses. Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth at the local pubs and sundry apartment parties, I seem to remember. But for a nonfiction M.F.A.—I was one, of the Orwell-Dillard-Thompson sensibility—this healthy crosspollination was the perfect foundation for the career, the individualized niche, that I am carving within the United States’ gigantic higher education system. So thank you, current and former faculty (and thank you, Charlotte), for having the wisdom 1) to add the nonfiction option to the program and 2) to protect us from the confines of literary tunnel vision. I am primarily a writer of creative nonfiction, but all forms of writing fall within the boundaries of my curiosity, and I conclude that my experience as an M.F.A. student at Penn State cemented this inclusive mindset into place.

[I paused here because my phone started vibrating with congratulatory text messages and e-mails from some colleagues. The announcement that I will serve as my college’s next Associate Dean, starting after my sabbatical ends on July 1, 2011, apparently just went out over the campus listserve. I’m looking forward to the new job because it will allow me ample opportunities to write and speak all different sorts of nonfiction—some creative, a lot argumentative, some very similar to investigative reporting.]

Freedom has also occupied much of my thinking. The privilege of a tenured faculty line offers the freedom to follow your interests wherever they might lead you, and I am painfully aware of how many good scholars and writers are having trouble securing these jobs. Examining my own progression to this point, I notice—over and over again—a clear trend. Some task, course, duty, new experience, or writing project that I pursued purely out of personal interest or passion, as opposed to a clinical, calculated desire to do what conventional wisdom says a writer is supposed to do, pays off generously somewhere down the road. Working as a writing-center tutor at Penn State and participating in experimental team-taught learning-community courses, instead of always settling for the familiar (read “no new course preps”), ended up making me a dead-bang match for this college’s job ad. Subscribing to the Chronicle of Higher Education way back when Beth and I were in graduate school, because we were curious about what the rest of the academy was up to, gave us a huge advantage when we began to adopt shared-governance responsibilities as newly hired junior faculty members. My long-held interest in military history drew me into intellectual proximity to our Japanese Intercultural Exchange Program, and I now have been to Japan five times and China once within the past four years, with grant funding to return to both countries next summer. Writing a 500-word speech ultimately took me to a program in Denver for the 2008 Democratic National Convention, where I stood in Invesco Stadium while Barack Obama delivered his acceptance speech. Perhaps, if I knew them, I might understand the rest of the lyrics to the Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’” now. You cannot predict or control the future, I tell my students, but to some extent, you can make your own luck.

Finally, gratification is a comfortable companion in recent years. I was a first-generation college student, and my decision to study creative writing (as opposed to computer science or engineering) was greeted with ample dubiousness and skepticism by about—oh—ten million family members and friends. “Trust me,” I said to my parents, and later to one of my first-generation advisees now teaching in Carentan, France. “Somebody in the family needs to go first. It’ll work out.” I enjoy and continue to read speculative fiction, and perhaps my voice and vote in departmental meetings allowed another colleague to add a speculative fiction course to our offerings. It’s one of our most popular offerings, and it attracts English majors who then take nine other courses. Orwell said that there are good bad books, and, you know, he apparently was right. Do what you love and what you are best at, I tell our students; the global academy is large enough for you to find a home. I write whatever I want, and it works out often enough for me to live a wonderful life. It will work out for you, despite this abysmal economy and anemic job market, although perhaps not always according the narrative of your life’s rough draft.

If, that is, you are willing to put in the time, to spend more time doing than talking about doing, to get on with your work.

On Attending Jane Hirshfield’s Reading

2010-10-23T21:39:00.000-04:00

by Andrea Rochat, MFA Candidate

Ever since I began attending readings, I have brought a sketchbook with me. Scratch that. Every time I have brought a sketchbook to a reading, I have attended it. It’s a quibbling change to make, perhaps, but a shift in meaning made poignant on nights like the Jane Hirshfield poetry reading. I have always had an instinct to bring a piece of paper and a pencil with me to literary readings—an instinct that morphed into a compulsion that morphed into me digging into my pockets for old receipts and reaching into trashcans for a scrap of blank paper. I think I hit rock bottom the night I scribbled on the backs of some gum wrappers with a stick of eyeliner. I’ve learned though and, anymore now, I’m more likely to have my sketchbook with me than my shoes.

My mother would say I just can’t sit still, just can’t concentrate on the task at hand. Others might say it’s rude—to sit in the audience and jot down notes or (gasp!) to draw. I’ve considered this, have thought about how it might feel to be the reader, glancing at an audience between lines, seeing one person with her head down, her pencil working furiously. I’ve considered it, and tried to keep my sketchbook in my bag and my hands in my lap. But it’s not the same. It’s not as good.

When I got to the Jane Hirshfield reading, I sat towards the back of the room, opened my sketchbook , and stretched my hand across a clean white page. I love this moment before readings, when people start craning their necks to see if they recognize the author, when the heavy auditorium doors click open and closed, when the chatter is soft and thick and all around me and the white space of the blank page is like taking a deep, readying breath.

What I write and what I draw at readings depends on the experience I am having, but usually I scribble down sentences—sometimes just phrases—that the author speaks or reads that strike me, that make me feel the immediate need to hear those words again in my mind, to feel the way they feel to my wrist and my fingertips as I trace them onto the page, to feel them on my lips as I mouth them silently back to myself. Sometimes a reading makes me think of shapes or images and I try to shorthand those as best I can. Sometimes an entire hour of listening yields nothing but a page full of parallel lines, two broken by a verb and a noun. One time I finished with a drawing of the writer’s words somehow swallowing a fish.

As Barbara Kelly, the co-sponsor of the Emily Dickinson Lecture, introduced Jane Hirshfield, I looked at the poet, sitting several rows in front of me, and sketched her as I then saw her, mainly because people with long curly hair are impossibly fun to draw. As she rose and faced the audience to begin her reading, I sketched her again as I then saw her.

And then I attended. It was like this:

When I was moved by her words, I jotted them on the page, looped a speech balloon around them, and kept on listening. I was moved often. I had to write so fast that I quickly abandoned my usual artsy all-caps for a sloppy lower case, marked with abbreviations I filled in later. One speech balloon grabs for the words from her poem, “For What Binds Us”: “And when two people have loved each other/see how it is like a/scar between their bodies,/stronger, darker, and proud.” Another scribbles smally: “In a room with five people, six griefs.” Hirshfield’s writing is quiet and lush and it presses on me with its focus and detail. It yearns. “But to practice choosing,” one balloon quotes from a poem in which the speaker washes her face with cold water every morning, “To make the unwanted wanted.”

My hands were busy that night, either recording Jane’s asides and snippets of her poems, or retracing the lines of the letters in another quote. By the end of the reading, as my speech balloons were crawling back up the page, seeking the last bit of blank space like that summer I moved back home with nowhere left to go, my writing becomes sloppy because, by the end of this attendance, I have become sated with words and drunk on beauty and it is all I can do to sit back in my seat, smile, and fill the white space with happy scrawl.

To attend is not just to be present. It is to give heed to, to direct one’s mind to another place. From the Latin (ad+tendere), it is to stretch towards. This, I suppose, is why my sketchbook matters to me, and I will continue to sit in the back, if need be, trying not to look so fidgety and rude. It is my way of reaching. I will listen to the poets and the bringers of beauty and I will stretch myself out towards their words just as their words are stretching towards me. In doing so—in such attendance of each other—perhaps we two may meet.

MFA Reading Series, Part Deux!

2010-10-20T15:51:00.000-04:00

What are you doing Saturday night? Gardening? Playing a background extra in an indie film? Filing your nails? Don't! Come on out to the University Club to see some First-Year MFA's read their stunning and somewhat-avocado-scented work!

MFA Reading Series #2!
Saturday, October 23rd at 7 PM!
The University Club! (College Street near Atherton, across from the Taco Bell!)

Featuring
Nate Malenke! Denise Grollmus! Andy Marks!

Kent Haruf Reading, October 20th

2010-10-14T17:50:00.000-04:00

The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series Presents

KENT HARUF

Wednesday, October 20th
7:30 PM
Foster Auditorium, Paterno Library

Kent Haruf is the author of four novels, including Eventide, Plainsong, a finalist for the National Book Award, Where You Once Belonged and The Tie That Binds, which received The Whiting Foundation Writers’ Award. His essays have appeared in the New York Times,and in various national magazines, and his short fiction has been included in the Best American Short Stories anthology. He has also co-authored West of Last Chance, a book of prose and photography. He lives in Colorado.

Alumni Kudos!

2010-10-14T09:13:00.000-04:00

SHEILA SQUILLANTE'S essay, "All Things Edible, Random and Odd," has been nominated by Literary Mama for Dzanc Books 2011 Best of the Web Anthology.

Her essay, "Dead Dad Day," has been nominated by Waccamaw: a Journal of Contemporary Literature, for Sundress Publication's 2010 Best of the Net Anthology.

Sheila received her M.F.A. in poetry in 2002, and has worked as the associate director of Penn State's M.F.A. program since 2003.

A Day at the Dodge Poetry Festival

2010-10-14T08:24:00.000-04:00

--by Sarah Blake, MFA Candidate in Poetry

My husband and I went to my parents' house this weekend, in central New Jersey. On Saturday morning, we woke up early and hopped on a train to Newark. Soon we arrived at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.

Tents surrounded the theater. One of the biggest tents I've ever seen functioned as a book store, filled entirely with books of poetry. The rest of the tents were filled with food. We went inside the theater to buy our tickets. For the day, for students, it was only ten dollars.

We were excited. Walking around, we spotted Billy Collins and Kay Ryan, Sharon Olds and Galway Kinnell.

We stopped to get coffee and sit down with the map. Over a few blocks, there were eight venues hosting events, all within walking distance. We decided to start at the Aljira Art Gallery. It was a great choice.

The reading began with Juba Dowdell, a Newark native, known for his work with "Verse4Verse Poetry Café." What made his reading especially memorable was his friend, Maurice Chesnutt, a tap dancer. While Dowdell read, Chesnutt danced on a wooden platform beside him. The combination did wonders for the energy level in the room.

The reading continued with John McDermott and his poems that celebrated place and family. But we had really chosen this reading for the final reader.

Judy Michaels was my first poetry teacher. She visited my fifth grade English class and led us through a writing exercise that paired with our studies of the Greek myths. She continued to visit my English classes every year of middle school. And then in high school, I took an elective she offered—a two trimester course solely on poetry. I loved our anthology, our assignments, and my final project on the many books of Charles Simic. She's an incredible teacher and certainly the reason I found poetry and enjoyed it from such a young age.

At Aljira, Michaels read wonderful poems—full of sadness, hope, and humor. My favorite poem was one where Michaels imagined her mother spending time with Walt Whitman. It was so well done, delicately done. And I hardly ever laugh out loud during poems, but I couldn't help it.

We bounced around for the rest of the day and then headed home, tired and happy.

To stay up to date on the Festival and see videos, become a fan on Facebook! http://www.facebook.com/#!/DodgePoetryFest

What to Believe

2010-10-10T15:09:00.000-04:00

One of the best parts of any blog is the chance to showcase "guest" writers from time to time. Today's "guest" is hardly that, however. She is a beloved member of our MFA faculty, and a writer of powerfully quiet, gorgeous fiction that can knock the breath right out of you.

Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies, Charlotte Holmes, is the author of the short story collection, Gifts and Other Stories, and numerous publications in the Antioch Review, Carolina Quarterly, Epoch, Grand Street, New Letters, The New Yorker, Story, The Sun, and Topic. Her work has been anthologized in New Stories from the South, The Family Track and in After O'Connor: Contemporary Georgia Writers.

Today, Charlotte offers some wisdom on how to approach, survive and thrive in the MFA (or, really, any) workshop.

***

What to Believe

You read it in all the books about how to be a writer: Never let anyone tell you what to do. Yours is a unique and beautiful voice. Your observations are your own, as are the words you choose to convey them to other people. Don’t let anyone trample on your natural talents. Don’t ever forget that the writing is yours, finally. No one can take it away. Sing like a bird! Write down the bones! Throw “can’t” and “don’t” out with the bathwater, baby!

And then you take a writing workshop, and from all directions, you hear advice about what to do. Your voice isn’t unique—it sounds “a lot like McCarthy,” or “a lot like Komunyakaa,” or it’s mannered or flat to the point of boredom or it’s reminiscent of another time. The observations you’ve made remind someone of a film they saw, or a novel they read, or a poem they can quote from memory. Your observations are clichés, and the words you’ve used to convey them have syntactical problems and, when examined closely, don’t even make sense. Further, this absolutely true story you’ve dressed up as fiction is termed “unlikely” by some, “far-fetched” by others. The poem that left your desk as a profound expression of grief stands on the seminar table as an expression of rage against your father, and here are the words you’ve used to prove it. See that metaphor? Your psycho-sexual complexes are revealed. . . What’s a young writer to do?

Before you go into workshop, make a list of all your questions about the piece. Be as specific as possible. In the discussion, listen for the answers. If the questions aren’t addressed, and you still think they’re relevant, then ask your questions at the end.

Consider what you need from the workshop on this poem/story/essay. Approval? Advice? Direction? Inspiration?

Think about what you really want to communicate in your poem/story/essay, so when you listen to the discussion, you can hear if you’ve succeeded.

Go into the workshop with an open mind. Listen carefully to what the others are saying. Write down what you hear. Try to suspend judgment during this process. You don’t need to decide at this moment who’s “right” and who’s “wrong” in their observations. Just write down what’s being said.

Try to listen past the words, and ascertain what’s really being communicated. If someone speaks about your story in a way that seems harsh or hurtful, think about what they’re actually asking for. “This scene seems rushed and superficial” does not mean that you’re a slipshod writer who deserves to have her hard drive crash: It means that the scene is potentially rich enough, and interesting enough, that the reader wants more time inside it. It’s an invitation to go deeper, to explore and discover what you’ve only touched on. Try to separate the manner of expression from the validity of the comment being made.

One benefit from being in a workshop is that you’re in cahoots with a dozen (or so) other people who read. If you’ve written a poem that someone tells you is strangely similar to a poem by Jack Gilbert, whom you’ve never read, instead of feeling like a copycat, look at this as an opportunity to find a kindred spirit. Chances are you’ll find ways your poem is like his, and ways it is not.

If a reader discovers an undertow, don’t be afraid to explore it. You may not have intended to write about the rivalry you feel with your sister or the pain you still feel about your parents’ divorce, but your poem may be wiser than you are. Following these leads can help you access territory you didn’t know was there. If you shut the door, telling yourself “My poem’s not about that, how ridiculous—that’s her problem, not mine!” you’re walling yourself off from your unconscious life, which is perhaps the most valuable resource you have.

Imitation is not only a sincere form of flattery, it’s a way to learn, a helpful exercise. However, if you’re hearing that your work “sounds like” another writer, who happens to be someone you’ve been reading, then it’s time to put that writer aside for a while and take up the work of someone with a dramatically different style and voice. You may love, admire, and hold up as holy the work of a particular writer, but remember that probably what incites your admiration is that he or she did something original. Your job is not to continue plowing that writer’s field, but to harrow your own. We all have our influences, but the aim is to assimilate the greats, not imitate them.

If you hear that your work “sounds like” another writer whose work you don’t know, however, then it’s your job to discover that writer. Analyze why the comment was made. Perhaps you have a similar subject matter. Perhaps it’s a stylistic tic, or similar sentence structure, or use of metaphor. Perhaps the only similarity is that you’re both from Maine.

Always take seriously the comments about your language. If someone tells you a phrase or an idea is a cliché, trust their broader familiarity with clichés until you can prove otherwise. If someone takes the trouble to point out your many passive voice constructions, your wordiness, your repetitions, etc., then it’s your job to think about why you’ve used them. Is it for effect? Is that clear? Or were you really not thinking about how you constructed your sentences?

No two professors run their workshops the same way. Even if you are especially fond of the way in which A. runs his workshop, you can still benefit greatly from the way B. runs hers. Instead of dwelling on how you liked this or that better last semester, think about what you can take away from your current experience. Maybe A. is especially attuned to formal considerations, while B. is more focused on unearthing the forces that brought you to write the piece in the first place.

Believe it or not, you need both kinds of response to your work, because in the process of crafting your poem/story/essay, one does not exist independently from the other. Maybe C. likes a certain type of writing, which D. abhors. It’s actually quite healthy to be exposed to both these views, because guess what? You are neither C. nor D., and you’re at the beginning of your writing life. You need to read as widely as possible, find out as much about your chosen genre as possible, and be open to influences from many, many different sources (including other genres and, especially, other art forms). The last thing you need to be doing at this point in your life is jumping into a camp and nailing shut the door. Be open, but be discriminating. Above all, be thoughtful. Ask questions of the work, of your professors, of your peers. I can learn something from this is one of the best attitudes you can adopt—not only in workshop, but in life.

If you read back even a decade, you’ll find that trends and tastes are fickle. What was “cutting edge” even five years ago might now seem dated and dull. But some writing never goes out of style. Why is that? Examine those poems/stories/novels/essays and find the common thread. The best writing both speaks to its own time and is timeless. It’s why we still read Marcus Aurelius and Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton and Langston Hughes, Cavafy and Kerouac.

Remember that the goal of taking a writing workshop is to help prepare you for the time when you’re not. A workshop can help you think about the kinds of questions you need to be asking of the work you do. Far from being a homogenizing force, a workshop should be a place where you discover the ways in which your work is not like anyone else’s—and if it is like someone else’s, how you can strive to make it clearly your own, an original, valuable addition to the art that sustains us.

Jane Hirshfield Reading, October 7

2010-10-05T12:18:00.000-04:00

Announcing the 2010 Emily Dickinson Lecturer

JANE HIRSHFIELD

reading & book signing

Thursday, October 7
7:30 pm
Foster Auditorium

Paterno Library

Jane Hirshfield, is the author of six acclaimed books of poems, including After, which was named a “best book of 2006” by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times, Given Sugar, Given Salt, and The October Palace, as well as the now-classic book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. Her honors fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets.

The Emily Dickinson Lecture is made possible through the generosity
of George and Barbara Kelly