MFA Residency Public Lecture and Reading Schedule -Friday, July 6th

Here is the schedule for tomorrow, Friday, July 6th

All lectures will be in Gladfelter, Canon Lounge, unless indicated otherwise.
For more information, call the MFA Office at Warren Wilson College: (828) 771-3715.
The schedule is subject to change. Please check www.friendsofwriters.org for updates.

Friday, July 6      MATTHEW OLZMANN: Imaginary Lives
9:30 AM
This lecture will consider the various types of “imagined” moments that occur inside a poem or story. We’ll
look at instances where the speaker worries about what hasn’t happened, envisions something they hope will
happen, or speculates about something that might have happened. Imagined scenes, dreams, impossible
guesses, and hypothetical events. We’ll examine a few different strategies used to move in and out to these
situations. Ultimately, I’m interested in how a type of emotional context is generated by these moments, but
other side effects might become evident, and if so, we’ll examine those as well. No required reading. Handouts
will be provided. Possible examples could include work from Philip Levine, Nicole Sealey, Juliet Kono, and
Lorrie Moore. Other possible poets up for discussion: maybe every poet ever.

Friday, July 6      PETER TURCHI: Don’t Stand So Close to Me (Or Him, or Her)
10:45 AM
One of the most common choices of point of view, often referred to as “close third person,” essentially tells a
story through the thoughts, experiences, and understanding of a single character. Another is what I’ll call
”sincere first person,” in which the reader is never meant to doubt or question the narrator, but is meant to accept
the narrator’s version and interpretation of events. These approaches can work, but they’re often used by default.
In this lecture, we’ll consider the opportunities created by establishing distance between the story and its first
person narrator or point of view character, complicating the narrative surface, making the reader’s experience
more dynamic. We’ll acknowledge that this makes the writer’s job more difficult, and that it might be worth
doing anyway.

 

READINGS by FACULTY

Friday, July 6 ~ 8:00 PM
Rodney Jones, Lan Samantha Chang, Heather McHugh, Kevin McIlvoy, C. Dale Young, Joan Silber