Second Call for Materials!! FOW Anthology
Dear Poet: An Anthology of Essays on the Letters Between Poets and Mentors
Dear Community of Writers:
We have received a group of excellent proposals and we are eager to see more! We’d like to have any new project ideas by April 15, and then to set a date to receive the essays. Please consider making a proposal. Everyone welcome! See below for a ideas.
Friends of Writers seeks essays, short craft memoirs, and excerpts of letters for a new anthology that will explore the central and unique teaching tool of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College: the exchange of letters between students and their faculty mentors. We are looking for edited exchanges, essays, and other writings that capture a lively, moving portrait of the program. Unlike prior anthologies, this one will be the first to include work by poetry alumni about their apprenticeship.
We are inviting poets to submit a proposal describing the way in which a set of letters between you and a faculty mentor illuminated your work, changed your process, or otherwise affected the making of a poem. We have already received a group of proposals that were wonderful. And we’d like to see more. If possible, make reference to any supporting material pertinent to sections of letters between you and a faculty member.
The anthology will comprise a collection of essays. These will include letter excerpts demonstrating how the exchange of letters and evolving drafts helped you to understand and develop yourwork as a poet. The range of topics may be capacious: from, for instance, “how my poem evolved,” with examples from exchanges as well as portions of the revised poem, to “advice from my mentor,” commenting on larger aesthetic issues and the work of the imagination. If you considered but rejected a mentor’s advice, we’d like to know about that as well. A possible essay might include selections from two or three teachers with differing views and mention of how those perspectives changed your process. Another might be how the correspondence about reading poems affected your understanding of your own poetic process.
The proposal should be between one and three pages; the finished essays between 10 and 25 pp. double-spaced, roughly 4000 to 12000 words, inclusive of quoted material.
We welcome facsimiles of annotated manuscript pages. If your example includes a published poem, we will be asking you to secure the permissions necessary to reprint, as well as permission from your prior supervisor/s to publish excerpts from the letters. As with Friends of Writers’ previous anthologies, we will ask contributors to allocate all royalties to the scholarship funds. We hope the anthology will comprise 15 to 17 pieces. However, the publishing house will make all the final decisions regarding acceptance of essays. Alums Ellen McCulloch-Lovell ’12 and Abigail Wender ’08 will serve as Managing Editors of the anthology, with editorial help from Maeve Kinkead, Joy Manesiotis, and others from the Friends of Writers community. (Look for periodic announcements about who’s joined the editorial board). We anticipate an introduction by one or more poetry faculty members, who will serve as Executive Editors.
We are confident that this anthology, like the others, will serve as an important resource to writers and teachers and that it will become a text to return to, again and again–in much the same way that you return to your seminal trove of letters. And like the other anthologies, this collection will be an important asset to potential students who are considering application to MFA Programs.
We are very excited to launch this new anthology. There is really nothing out there like it!! Please submit your project to [email protected]
With appreciation and thanks,
Ellen Bryant Voigt
Friends of Writers
