Colleen Abel on Writing Lessons

Alumna and current Joan Beebe Teaching Fellow at Warren Wilson College, Colleen Abel (poetry, ’04), discussing her approach to teaching poetry at a service-oriented institution is featured in the blog series “Writing Lessons” at Ploughshares: 

colleenabelRecently, poet and scholar Seth Abramson released a list on The Huffington Post called “The Top 200 Advocates for American Poetry.” The list included writers, teachers, publishers, founders of listservs and writing centers, and celebrity Friends of Poetry like Bill Murray and Patti Smith. Abramson didn’t define what he meant by advocacy, but I imagine he meant things like word-spreading, cheerleading, and trying to make poetry reach a wider audience—which most of us agree that poetry needs.

On the same day that Abramson published his list, I was participating in orientation activities at the school where I’ll be teaching this fall, Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC. As I’ve heard a dozen times over the course of orientation, WWC is the only school in the country with an integrated work/service/learning program. In other words, students here spend 15 hours a week on a work crew. They are the college’s janitors, cooks, constructions workers, landscapers, foresters. On top of the work crew—and, of course, their studies—students have many, many hours of required service volunteering in the community, taking service classes, and attending issues workshops. (The other day my son tumbled through an intricate Asheville playground built in five days by WWC students).

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Jamaal May on Giving a Not Terrible Reading

Alumni Jamaal May (poetry, ’11) is featured on the Poets & Writers blog discussing how to give a not terrible reading:

jamaal_may-494x394Writers frequently ask me how to get more readings. I’ve said for years I don’t know why people give me money and sit still to hear me recite poems. But now that this bizarre phenomenon has occurred more than 600 times in the last nine years (three funded by P&W), I have to admit I do know why I get so many readings, and only part of it is luck. The truth is people like to hear me read. So the better question to ask is “How can I give better readings of my work?” Below are my top five tips.

Use Your Everyday Inflection

It’s remarkable to watch a poet charismatically engage an audience with banter then slip into a monotone drone when the poem starts. I suspect part of the reason for the “monotone drone” or the equally disheartening “poet voice” is a fear of performing. Writers tell me they don’t want to perform or be seen as performative. I would argue that an overly dry, disengaged reading is in fact a performance. No one speaks that way. Conversely, our daily conversations are full of varied inflection and shifts in tone. Rather than try to perform a poem, practice reading it in your own voice as if you’re telling those lines to a friend.

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Margaree Little Wins Rona Jaffe Award

Alumna Margaree Little (poetry, ’12) is a recipient of a 2013 Writers’ Award from The Rona Jaffe Foundation:

“In recognition of the special contributions women writers make to our culture and society, The Rona Jaffe Foundation is giving its nineteenth annual Writers’ Awards under a program that identifies and supports women writers of exceptional talent. The emphasis is on those in the early stages of their writing careers. This unique program offers grants to writers of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry to make writing time available and provide assistance for such specific purposes as child care, research and related travel costs.

Six emerging women writers have been singled out for excellence by the Foundation and will receive awards of $30,000 each.”

Molly is the seventh alumna of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College to receive this honor since the Writers’ Awards were established in 1995.  Previous recipients include  Karen Whalley (poetry, ’00) and  Constance Merritt (poetry, ’00) in 2001, Adrian Blevins (poetry, ’02) in 2002, Joanne Dominique Dwyer (poetry, ’09) in 2008,  Heidy Steidlmayer (poetry, ’00)  in 2009, and Laura Newbern (poetry, ’94) in 2010.

In addition, five Warren Wilson MFA faculty have been honored with this award:  Mary Szybist in 1996, Lan Samantha Chang in 1998, Gabrielle Calvocoressi in 2002, Dana Levin in 2004, and Jennifer Grotz in 2007.

MargareeLittle-webMargaree Little received her B.A. from Brown University in 2009 and her M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College in 2012. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, New England Review, The Missouri Review, and American Poetry Review. She was a Peter Taylor Fellow at The Kenyon ReviewWriters Workshop in 2013. She teaches writing at Pima Community College and tutors at Pima County Public Library in Tucson. In 2010, while working for a humanitarian aid organization on the U.S.-Mexico border, she found the remains of an unidentified man; her first collection of poems, Rest, came out of this experience and attempts to explore it from a variety of perspectives. Her nominator writes, “Margaree’s insistence on honoring this one specific death speaks to her great soul, but so does the lyric intensity, deft craft, and encompassing reach with which she contemplates this lost life—the fact and unknowns of it, its presence and what is missing—as an emblem.” Ms. Little is also beginning work on a second collection. “I plan to write a series of poems exploring the relationship between two sisters and other aspects of childhood, as well as the landscape—the woods and coastline of southern Rhode Island—in which these experiences were shaped.” Her Writer’s Award will allow her to take a one-year leave from her work at the library to devote more time to her poems. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.

On Friday, September 20, 2013 at 7 p.m.,  the winners will read in New York University’s Creative Writing Program Reading Series at the Vernon Writers House (58 West 10th Street).

Read more about the 2013 Award Winners online. 

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Alumni John Gribble on the Japan Writer’s Conference

Alumni John Gribble (poetry, ’98) was recently featured in the The Japan Times discussing the Japan Writer”s Conference:

Organizer of annual writers’ workshop helps others find artistic way

Poet John Gribble aims to spend a part of each day doing something creative

by Kris Kosaka

John Gribble gives a part of every day to creating. Whether it’s pinpointing the perfect word for a poem or plucking out a ditty on a guitar, his life and livelihood in some way proves creative. As a poet and teacher, Gribble has spent the last 20 years in Japan organizing others to find their artistic way.

An active member of the Tokyo Writer’s Workshop, Gribble took over as organizer in 2009. He also currently organizes the Japan Writer’s Conference.

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“Exotica” by Rose McLarney

A new poem by Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10) appears online in Mudlark:

Exotica

You don’t want the story about the soft clutch
of monkey’s toes, how monkeys swung

languorous from limbs, showering down fruit.
But rather, the one about how 

the blue-eyed Abando boy’s body hung 
after he was lynched for robbing our house,

for robbing any place ever left empty. 
You are not as interested in fruit—

hearing how it was heavy and pendulous
through the forest, a forest hung 

with bunches of bananas, zapotes that fell
erupting orange custard among rambutans—

as in the way thieves ripped jewelry from women’s
ears, hooks pulled through the lobes, so they hung 

with rubies of blood. You listen more closely 
when I tell of how I clung

to the reins when a drunk whipped my horse
into a frenzy and out, swimming, to sea, 

than of the tame iguana I hung
in a bird cage, fine wire formed into a palace.  

Even though I fed him on hibiscus, 
and could describe so many lush, red flowers,

folding from the mouth.
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New Work by Gabriel Blackwell

“An Excerpt by Madeline E.”, by alumni Gabriel Blackwell (fiction, ’09),  appears online at The Collapsar:

[EXT. Redwoods (DAY)]

…

There comes a point in our lives when we are most often and most emphatically ourselves on those days when we like to think we are not ourselves.

(Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage)

…

Since Carlotta (like Judy) is a brunette, but Judy-as-Madeleine does not change her hair color when she goes into her trance as Carlotta, the woman whom Scottie follows at the start is Judy-as-Madeleine[-as-Carlotta] (brunette-as-blonde[-as-brunette]). Where Gavin hints that Madeleine is the reincarnation of a dead woman, Scottie first sees Judy, after the murder, as the resurrected form of what he (rightly) perceives as another dead woman, Madeleine. And one reason why Judy-as-Madeleine-as-Judy-as-Madeleine does not look quite right is because what Scottie really wants to see is Judy-as-Madeleine-as-Judy-as-Madeleine[-as-Carlotta].

(Wendy Doniger, The Woman Who Pretended to be Who She Was)

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New Work by Kimberly Jean Smith

“Lucette,” fiction by Kimberly Jean Smith (fiction, ’12), appears online at Flyaway:

“One of the most difficult things to do is to paint darkness, 

which nonetheless has light in it.”

–Vincent van Gogh

Three days before her father delivered Lucette to Madame Macard’s, the Dutch man arrived in Arles. This meant everything unfolded exactly as destiny would have it, or so said the little-yellow-house-girls, who believed the number three held extraordinary significance. The Madame’s girls spent hours behind its yellow walls, forecasting futures and deciphering dreams–Lucette’s more than anyone’s. Blindness, they thought, gave her second sight. By now she knew nothing turned out as anyone could think it.

The morning of her departure, for example, she remembered pressing her cheek against Mama’s and then the baby’s cry. A close sweet odor of breast milk clung to her mother, damp like earth. When there was nothing left to do but leave, she kissed the baby’s toes and slid her hand along the table where she’d sliced onions for their soup.

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“Public House” by Michael Collins

A new poem by alumni Michael Collins (poetry, ’03) appears online at Mobius:

A diplomat slumps over warm Riesling,
lamenting the sad limitations of tact

and smiles to outwit fear, cajole all factions
to concur in a better world; a priest consoles

that such kingdoms are within us
if we can find the eyes to see them.

A child on his father’s shoulders,
arms outstretched, playing at being

an airplane, glides quickly, mirage-like
across the open doorway. The diplomat

straightens the crease in his fine necktie,
stares at the now-empty space, a few feet

of concrete in streetlight, and then night.
He almost declares a million children

no different than that boy will starve,
fall to disease this year, or be orphaned

for no crime other than being born
in the wrong country. He doesn’t add

Ask them about kingdoms of heaven.
His thoughts are conquered anyway,

as a louder argument down the bar
draws all conversations under its banner:

A well-suited man, calm as the night
is vague, reminds a wasted kid with dreads,

with whom he’s conversing for reasons
beyond understanding, that he has the privilege

of drinking, denouncing things, because our soldiers
defend us from threats, even those yet unseen.

His colleague seems in a constant state
of disbelieving his ears, keeps screaming,

What don’t you get; we’re killing people!
The nationalist looks at him like a kid

who’s just said the sun orbits the earth,
but the bartender halts the proceedings,

blending up a pitcher of margaritas
that no one seems to have ordered,

glancing knowingly at the old man
in the corner, wearing an ancient coat,

stroking his giant beard, staring, listening,
as if memorizing the entire night.

The priest smiles shyly, already giving away
that he’ll tell a joke, grabs his friend’s shoulder,

says, See, you just never know when
all of a sudden you’ll witness a miracle.

But the mind of the sullen statesman
has already painted the unjust world

in several coats of its most hopeless shades,
bypassing his friend’s blithe kindness,

as if he already knows the sweet nuisance
of phantoms’ drinks will fade like lilies,

knows the truculent pacifist will launch
the salvo he’s been engineering

throughout the barman’s clever armistice:
What if your kids were off in some country

shooting people, being captured? Tortured!
As if he knows the young man’s adversary

will tell him, as if it were obvious,
Well, they’re not my children. Thank God.

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New Fiction by Corey Campbell

New work by Corey Campbell (fiction, ’12), “A Handful of Pennies and One Rouge Dime,” appears online at Pithead Chapel: 

Near the Chrysler Building. A dark bedroom in a pre-war apartment, long heavy curtains pulling down, and a skinny strip of light underneath. It makes Janelle lonely to lay belly down on the bed, cheek to the sheet, wrists tied behind her with a silver birthday ribbon. She wishes Sanderson hadn’t gotten so into tying her up.

The dumpling delivery guy is at the door, forty minutes late. Voice like a balding minor league umpire. “Happy Panda,” he calls.

Sanderson grunts in response, pulling on worn jeans and walking barefoot across the carpet, mint green like an old lady’s gum. He steals a twenty from Janelle’s bag and leaves her there on the bed, where they’d stripped all but that bottom sheet. She stares at the pastel walls with her one good eye. He left the door open. Sun barrels through the kitchen window so the hallway leading to the bedroom is an overexposed white tunnel. Through it Sanderson emerges again, parking the Chinese food sack on the dresser, knocking over a glass perfume bottle and raining down chopsticks. Warm salty smells engulf the room, where broccoli is king.

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New Work by Kathryn Schwille

New work by alumni Kathryn Schwille (fiction, ’99) titled “FM 104” appears in the latest issue of the online journal Memorious.

FM 104

Coyotes, weasels, green flies, crows. The animals heard it first. Along
the weedy edge of Texas Route 20, a turkey buzzard quit the possum she’d
lucked into and took cover in a stand of pines. The wild pig under
Beeman Bennett’s oak trees snorted twice and froze. To us, it came from
out of nowhere: two blasts and the roar of a crashing train that rumbled
far too long. Our windows rattled, our floorboards quivered, our
breakfasts trembled on their tables. We thought terror, we thought
bombs, we thought of our loved ones. A few of us thought to scream.

Read the rest online.  

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