MFA Residency Public Lecture and Reading Schedule -Thursday, July 12th

UPDATE:  Please note tomorrow’s 9:30 am lecture with Robin Romm, Acts of Mercy: Aversion in Fiction, and Kaveh Akbar’s 10:45 AM lecture, Sell Your Cleverness and Buy bewilderment: On the Poetics of Wonder,have been moved from Fellowship Hall to NAB 110.

Here is the schedule for tomorrow, Thursday, July 12th

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.

 

Thursday, July 12                 ROBIN ROMM: Acts of Mercy: Aversion in Fiction
9:30 AM   Ransom Fellowship Hall
Sometimes, what is most intriguing or elegant about a story is the way it avoids and sidesteps our expectations.
Recently, I was struck by the way several of my favorite novels avoid what, in less imaginative books or scripts,
would be considered the “main crisis”—a death, abuse, a crime, choosing instead to focus on a tangent, a vector
that connects to this central crisis, but goes in its own direction. What happens when writers allow this kind of
omission? What happens when they draw us in but never really give us what they promise? Can it actually be
more satisfying? More affecting? More in line with our lived experience of crisis and grief, which is never
straightforward, always filled with bizarre lessons, mysterious revelations? Texts will likely include Blackwater
Lightship by Colm Toibin and My Name is Lucy Barton, by Elizabeth Strout, among others.

Thursday, July 12                 KAVEH AKBAR: Sell Your Cleverness and Buy Bewilderment: On the Poetics of Wonder
10:45 AM   Ransom Fellowship Hall 
This lecture tracks a certain strand of poetics through human history, a poetics built upon bewilderment and
awe—what G.K. Chesterton calls the ”vertigo of the infinite.” Much of our species’ richest poetry orbits this
nucleus of wonder—wonder at being, at nature, at grief, love, memory, desire, loss, etc. From the Sumerian
priestess Enheduanna to American visionary Marianne Moore, from Christopher Marlowe to Phyllis Wheatley,
from Sappho to Szymborska, Rumi to Ross Gay, we will examine the human project of astonishment through its
poetic record, wondering and wandering together through four millennia of ecstatic and bewildered verse.

 

READINGS by GRADUATING STUDENTS

Thursday, July 12 ~ in Ransom Fellowship Hall, behind the chapel
Andrew Kane, Shannon Castleton, Marc Morgenstern, Claire McGoff, Lane Osborne, Olivia Olson