The time has come! Registration for the July 2022 Wally Camp is OPEN! If you didn’t receive an email with the link, contact [email protected]
Wally Camp begins Wednesday, July 13 with some social time, then a reading, and then porch! Classes and readings happen on Thursday and Friday, then we add workshops and bookshops on Saturday and Sunday. Chock-a-block!
Registration closes on June 3, so you have time to arrange your whole life around the conference. Workshops, readings, the porch – everything but ducks and the dance.
Of course, don’t be afraid to register sooner – just be sure to get those i’s crossed and t’s dotted.
Last year’s website is still up if you want to review what happens at a virtual Wally Conference (that can be shared publicly).
Information about and solicitations for the auction will come later in a separate email. In the meantime, start concocting those donations! We were amazed last year at the creativity and generosity alumni showed in supporting Friends of Writers scholarships through their donations.
Oh yeah, and please don’t share links with non-Wallys. We’re not being precious, we just don’t want to get Zoom bombed.
Just so you know, here are the IMPORTANT DATES:
  • June 3 – Registration CLOSES
  • June 10 – Workshop groups, classes, & reading schedule emailed to registrants and posted on Wally Camp website
  • June 13 – Workshop drafts due to group members (or as decided by groups)
  • July 6 – Class materials due (send to [email protected])
  • Wed, July 13 – Sunday, July 17 – Virtual Wally Camp! (A Zoom link will be sent two days before.)
Can’t wait to see you!
David Ruekberg
Alison Moore
Jennifer Leah Büchi
2022 Wally Camp Hosts
Warren Wilson/Goddard MFA Alumni Conference
https://sites.google.com/view/wallycamp/

“Fifteen Months and I’m Still Not Over It,” a poem by 2019 alum Nicole Chvatal, was recently featured in Husk. Read an excerpt of Chvatal’s poem below:

Fifteen Months and I’m Still Not Over It

I tuck a napkin under my chin

and wear the memory of you

like a shield against my heart,

hold a table to my chest to ward off

this lioness of grief.

Dinner alone—a banquet

if I spin it—convinced

I’m cool enough

to the touch, microwave safe

when nuked two to four minutes.

 

Read this poem in its entirety here: https://huskzine.com/issues/husk-1-1/fifteenmonthsandimstillnotoverit/

 

 

An essay by 2012 fiction alum Katie Runde was recently featured in Catapult. Read an excerpt of Runde’s essay below:

(Photo credit: Rebecca Sanabria)

Writing Your Little Stories in the Shadow of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop

By the time we moved to Iowa City seven years ago, my husband and I had lived in three cities in five years, where I’d held three different jobs, earned one MFA, and miscarried twice before our first daughter was born.

Read the rest of this essay here: https://catapult.co/dont-write-alone/stories/katie-runde-iowa-writers-workshop-iowa-city-field-of-dreams-mfa-motherhood-community

2015 poetry alum Rose Auslander was recently featured in the DMQ Review. Read an excerpt of Auslander’s poem below:

It’s Been Years Since They Crossed the Bridge

You have to cross the canal at Union. Or Third. No subway runs there & if you say where, no cab will go. If you see condos by the water, don’t go in. Hold your breath, dive back a few decades & listen for the note in the middle of the hum at the bottom. If you hear a pack of kids laughing, you’re getting close—keep your distance. Stick to the sidewalk. Slowly walk backward in time until you feel the sun too bright & the pavement too hot & you can’t bandage yourself in words….

 

Read this poem in its entirety here: https://www.dmqreview.com/auslanders22

Fiction alum Sue Mell was recently featured in the L’Esprit Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “Ordinary Details” below:

Ordinary Details

Here in Queens, 6:30 on a January morning, it’s still deep dark, streetlight glinting off the chrome and driver-side mirror of a station wagon parked across the street. Between the car and the white wrought iron fence of a neighbor’s yard a figure, in a hooded sweatshirt, passes. Even in silhouette, I can read the hands in pockets, the shoulders shrugged against the cold. His bobbing gait carries a determined, almost musical, rhythm, white spires and scrollwork seeming to unspool in rapid motion as he moves by. His outline blurs in the sheers, then disappears beyond the molding of my window frame. A moment captured in the sharpened contrast of LED; gone the soft orange halo of sodium light once so effectively portrayed in a tiny square etching made by a friend—a realist painter now long dead….

 

Read this piece in its entirety here: https://lespritliteraryreview.org/2022/04/13/ordinary-details/

2017 poetry alum Nomi Stone was recently featured in The Rumpus. Read an excerpt of “The Feeling Kept Growing” below:

The Feeling Kept Growing

Then, all the animals were Bearo & all
the boys, Gilly. A curly-horned
ram came over the hill: gently his snout
hurt into my morning. Algae at the lip
of the sea on my left, that green sear,
& fungus gloving the trees, while our kid
squawked in the pram, like he’d eaten
a happiness & wanted to roll it back
to share with the sea…

 

Read this poem in its entirety, as well as another, here: https://therumpus.net/2022/04/18/national-poetry-month-day-18-nomi-stone/

Love Poem Resisting the Neon Larvae of Headlines,” a poem by alum Shadab Zeest Hashimi, was recently featured in The Missing Slate. Read an excerpt below:

 

Love Poem Resisting the Neon Larvae of Headlines

The world, a baby tied to dynamite,
a butterfly perforated with poison
arrows, burdened with deception in bones.
We rise as emissaries to God, our
bodies blue with reason, three quarters
of the time, the rest, inked with florets…

Read this poem in its entirety here: https://themissingslate.com/uncategorized/love-poem-resisting-the-neon-larvae-of-headlines/

2004 poetry alum Mary Lou Buschi was recently featured in On the Seawall. Read an excerpt of Buschi’s poem below:

When Year After Year I Receive an Evite to a Party Where I Know No One, Not Even the Host

 

The first year I didn’t reply.

I thought about replying.

The first year I thought maybe I did know them and I should go to the party.

The second year, I RSVP-ed “Not Attending.”

But I looked hard at every name on the Evite.

I thought I recognized one name.

The second year I was sure there was no one I knew.

The host sent 3 reminders to reply.

The third year there were pictures included.

Some were group selfies. I thought I saw my ear in one.

I respond, “What a great party.”

 

Read this poem in its entirety, as well as another, here: https://www.ronslate.com/abecedarian-and-when-year-after-year-i-receive-an-evite-to-a-party-where-i-know-no-one-not-even-the-host/

 

Poetry alum and faculty member Daniel Tobin was recently featured in On the Seawall. Read an excerpt of “Hand,” a translation of Rilke, below:

Hand

after Rilke

 

Look at the little mouse

baffled and afraid

in the room, lying

for twenty heartbeats

in a hand, a person’s hand, one

held out freely, firmly,

to keep it safe.

 

Read the rest of this translation, and three others, here: https://www.ronslate.com/full-throttle-hand-we-when/

Poetry alum John Minczeski was recently featured in One Art. Read an excerpt of “In the Fifth Month of Lockdown I Plant Clematis” below:

In the Fifth Month of Lockdown I Plant Clematis

The shovel, striking a root, thunked
all the way down to my moist heart.

An acolyte, I knelt to bury the plant to its neck.
Blame me for trusting coincidence

more than fate. Hold me responsible
for rose thorns. The sloping yard hoards

the memory of past glaciers. Have I searched within
for the gravitational field that holds me here?

 

Read the rest of this poem, as well as two others, here: https://oneartpoetry.com/2022/04/10/three-poems-by-john-minczeski/