Information and the links to register and pay are here: http://friendsofwriters.org/the-2019-alumni-conference/
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An excerpt from “If You Go to Bed Hungry” by Angela Narciso Torres (poetry ’09), published by Poetry.
If You Go to Bed Hungry
If you go to bed hungry, your soul will get up and steal cold rice from the pot.
Stop playing with fire before the moon rises or you’ll pee in your sleep.
Sweeping the floor after dark sweeps wealth and good fortune out the door.
Fork dropped: a gentleman will visit. Spoon: a bashful lady.
Bathing after you’ve cooked over a hot stove makes the veins swell.
For safe passage to the guest who leaves mid-meal: turn your plate.
An excerpt from “My Early Twenties” by Lesley Howard (fiction ’18), published by Narrative.
My Early Twenties
End of April, New York, my friend Liza picked me up for my Hardee’s morning shift, an act of deep love because I had to clock in at four thirty in the a.m. I said something about a best friend being better than a lover, and she squinted at me like it was a November afternoon when the sun slants in at that awful angle and the glare is blinding, regardless of sunglasses.
“You’re prickly,” she said. “Fight with David last night?”
We hadn’t fought but we hadn’t done anything else either. Liza reached for her ever-present coffee mug; it wasn’t there and she muttered, “Damn, where’d my mug go?” and turned around to ask her four-year-old daughter, nickname of Pixie, to ask if she had Mommy’s cup and that was all that was said about my mood, but she is a psychic, seriously, her own storefront and some A-list Broadway clients she’s protective of. And although she never says anything about what she can’t help but know, I go around knowing she knows and usually it’s not a problem because we are old friends, from Pixie’s age on, the kind of friend that’s essentially family. All to explain that we didn’t say anything, but I got out at the Hardee’s feeling like I’d already worked my shift and was dredged in butter and dusted in flour.
An excerpt from “Apple Thieves” by Beverley Bie Brahic (poetry ’06), published by The New Yorker.
Apple Thieves
In his dishevelled garden my neighbor
Has fourteen varieties of apples,
Fourteen trees his wife put in as seedlings
Because, being sick, she wanted something
Different to do (different from being sick).
In winter she ordered catalogues, pored
Over subtleties of mouthfeel and touch:
Tart and sweet and crisp; waxy, smooth,
And rough. Spring planted an orchard,
Spring projected summers
Of green and yellow-streaked, orange, red,
Rusty, round, wormholed, lopsided;
Nothing supermarket flawless, nothing imperishable.
Gardens grow backward and forward
In the mind; in the driest season, flowers.
An excerpt from “The Creative Drive” by Catherine Barnett (poetry ’02), published by the Academy of American Poets poem-a-day feature.
The Creative Drive
A recent study found that poems increased
the sale price of a home by close to $9,000.
The years, however, have not been kind to poems.
The Northeast has lost millions of poems,
reducing the canopy. Just a few days ago,
high winds knocked a poem onto a power line
a few blocks from my house.
I had not expected to lose so many at once.
[…continue reading “The Creative Drive” at the Academy of American Poets.]
An excerpt from “Omne Trium Perfectum,” creative nonfiction by Candace Walsh (fiction ’19) published by K’in Literary Journal.
Omne Trium Perfectum
The Rule of Three
Jeanine saw four in the lower parking lot. Steve saw two on a hike in the woods. Sam saw two near his dorm. After Sam and before Steve, safe in my rental car, I saw one cross the road.
Most bears are born in January, the month of our MFA winter residency, and are out and about in July when we return in the summer—thick on the ground because they are hungry.
He ambled on all fours, sine curves rolling through his spine and rump. His paws knew the smooth dark road that sank into the hill between groves, knew the up-and-down land. The campus buildings were built into slopes, so you could enter a first, second, or third floor from the ground.
As I sank my foot on the brake, the bear stopped and swiveled his neck. His dog-like snout tilted up. A wow bloomed through my chest. Terror did not taint the wow, because in that millisecond my reptile brain knew I was protected by a metal shell.
I held his gaze for a dark infinity. Capture, said my brain. Shoot. But my phone-fumbling hand released him from our trance. Boulder-still to blur, he ran into the trees behind the faculty dorms. We took that path back and forth from early morning to after midnight. The alleged safer way, the road, is where I found the bear. There is no safe way, only stories we tell to make us brave.
I believed he was a man-child of bear, with paws that hit the ground soft like petals.
[…continue reading “Omne Trium Perfectum” at K’in Literary Journal.]
An excerpt from “All the Chinese Food in the World” by Sue Mell (fiction ’16) published by Cleaver Magazine.
All the Chinese Food in the World
I’m always sad when the gig ends. Three grueling weeks with a showroom crew I only see each spring and fall, preparing for the home textile market. I’ll especially miss the Flower Marys—a jubilant self-named group of gay men who fashion stunning floral arrangements. Peggy, Mary, Louise. Men whose real names I never learned or have long since forgotten. Over time, a musician among them will marry the showroom designer. Others vanish into illness, addiction. The displays shrink, the crew downsize with budget cuts. But this warm spring evening, in the early aughts, it’s all still in place, and I’ve got one night left in New York, where old friends, commercial photographers soon to be forced from the city by hostile buyout, have graciously lent me their tiny West Village apartment while they’re out of town.
Bags packed, rooms tidied, I’m caught in familiar disjunction between east and west coast. “Pick up,” I say, over-ordering Chinese from the place on Bethune, though it’s blocks away.
At Bleecker, a yellow cab slows; the driver stares rolling past. Exhaust trailed by a faint scent of honeysuckle. Violet dusk dissolves the thin wedge of playground ahead, memory slip-sliding into overlay as I cross the street—this neighborhood the stomping ground of my early adulthood. I was forged here, but it’s no longer my home.
[…continue reading “All the Chinese Food in the World” at Cleaver Magazine.]
An excerpt the craft essay “Joke-Telling in Lorrie Moore’s ‘You’re Ugly, Too” by Kate Kaplan (fiction ’18), published by CRAFT.
Joke-Telling in Lorrie Moore’s “You’re Ugly, Too”
People tell jokes to attract attention or deflect it, to express a point of view, to connect, to offend, or in the hope of shared laughter. Some people (disclosure: me) tell jokes to themselves, rehearsing for an audience or attempting to keep problems at bay. Other people are so scared of blowing a punchline that they never tell jokes. There are even people who don’t like hearing jokes. They’re afraid that they won’t get it; or that the joke teller will screw up, embarrassing both of them; or that the joke will be offensive, leading to an unwelcome understanding of who the teller really is.
In other words, joke-telling is a short, risky interaction between people and sometimes part of an emotionally laden internal process. Sounds like the raw material of fiction. A joke can do many things in a story or novel: build character, advance the plot, engage a reader’s emotions, echo themes, mask exposition so it doesn’t feel like exposition. Here we’ll look at two of these uses—character and plot—in Lorrie Moore’s “You’re Ugly, Too.”
[…continue reading “Joke-Telling in Lorrie Moore’s ‘You’re Ugly, Too'” at CRAFT]
“Nowhere is the spirit of what the program means to working writers more evident than at the annual alumni conference. I remember being stunned to learn that, upon graduation, alums gather and hold a residency, complete with classes, lectures, panels, readings, and yes, even the dance. Whereas most MFA programs send graduates into the world without so much as a walking stick, we get a yearly opportunity to revisit what made our MFA program amazing.” – Ross White
We’ve announced the dates, and here are the prices:FULL STAY, first meal Sunday July 21, last meal breakfast July 28: $792.00
Three squares in the general college dining room, private room in a suite sharing bathroom with three others, linens. Glass of wine, time and locale to be determined (we can’t have them in the general-population dining room). Facilities. Free parking on campus, although I’m told there’s free street parking closer to the dorm. Classes, panels, caucuses, readings like you can’t imagine. And oh yeah, a dance.
SHORT STAY, first meal dinner July 24, last meal breakfast July 28 $515.00
Ditto.
COMMUTER, lunch and dinner beginning dinner July 21 and ending dinner July 27: $372.00
Lunch, dinner, facilities, attendance at all classes, readings, dance, etc.
“The Conference will surprise you. But the only way to know that is to come. Each year is different, and that’s the beauty of the thing. A conference is not a residency without faculty and it’s not a reunion. It’s a small summer oasis filled with peers who will amaze and encourage you, with laughter, with as much or as little work as you’d like. But the very best part of the conferences is meeting Wallys who were in the program at different times over many years – creating a lovely confusion of dates and faces…So come. You’ll be happy. You’ll be surprised.” –Nancy Koerbel
We will have scholarships, but we won’t know how many or how much for each until we have until the fund’s next financial report in April. At that time we will open applications, and ask that you only apply if you’ll be unable to attend the conference otherwise, and that you not apply if you’ve received a scholarship for any of the last three conferences. We trust you at your word if you apply and literally draw names out of a hat. I even vary the hats, from year to year, when I’m involved. The scholarship application window may be relatively short this year (a short window?), so please watch the blog, the FB page, and the listserv on a frequent basis in the next month or so. Scholarships are awarded only for Full-stay, on-campus attendees. Once the scholarship recipients have been drawn, registration will be opened. Continue watching for that, too, as rooms could fill up.
“I die a little bit inside every year that I can’t go. I think I’ve been to [five or six] of them. Each time it is a revelation, a tremendous gift of time to work and a community in which to celebrate that gift. It maintains the very best of the residencies at Warren Wilson and jettisons all the rest. It revitalizes and inspires every time. I can’t remember a single moment at an alumni conference when I did not feel like the luckiest person on the planet.” –Michael Jarmer
REGISTRATION IS NOT YET OPEN. DO NOT SEND ANY CHECKS! (You can see this is serious, as I have used up one of my 2019 exclamation points.) In fact, this year we may be taking only electronic payments after the infamous 2017 loss of checks in the Great Hole of the Nashua NH USPS Mail Processing Facility.
More soon, and always feel free to ask me any questions,
Peter KlankFiction ’85
An excerpt from “Balancing Act” by Peter Schireson (poetry ’17), published by Hoot Review.
Balancing Act
Smokey the Bear is well paid
for appearing in TV commercials,
but he’s required to wear pants—
a punishing embarrassment for a bear.
[…continue reading “Balancing Act” at Hoot Review.]