Wally MFA Alumni Reading Series Survey — From the LA Group

The newly formed SoCal Wally MFA Alumni chapter, based in Greater Los Angeles, is launching a reading series for local alums and current students. To benefit from community wisdom and experience, Dinah Berland (poetry, ’95) and her cohorts would appreciate hearing from other Wally alums who run similar reading series elsewhere who might be willing to share their experiences, as follows:
  • How often are your readings held?
  • How many readers are invited?
  • By what rationale are they selected (e.g., to feature those with new books or publications, to give voice to emerging writers, to achieve gender/ethnic diversity, or by using some random means for fairness)?
  • Do you also attempt to contact Wally alums who may be passing through town?
  • How long does each reading last, and how many writers are featured each time?
  • Are readings held in a public venue (such as a library or art gallery) or a private home; or if in various locations, which has been most successful and why?
  • Are poets and fictioners featured together or at separate events?
  • Are refreshments served?
  • Any other advice you might offer for establishing a successful reading series, besides making full use of social media, word of mouth, and institutional contacts?
Please send your responses to Dinah:  [email protected]
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“Economy and Endings” by Christina Ward-Niven (fiction, ’18)

An excerpt from the essay, “Economy and Endings in Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women,”  Christina Ward-Niven (fiction, ’18), published at Fiction Writers’ Review:

Economy and Endings in Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women

As a writer, I spend considerable time revising toward compression. I cut, I condense, I push my reluctant self to get rid of unnecessary modifiers and wordy exposition. My goal is to transform each (often-sprawling) first draft into something tighter, more energized, more powerful.

Similarly, I focus ample revision attention on endings. As a reader, I love a strong, surprising short-story ending—final lines that are often, paradoxically, a kind of opening-out. I strive for that kind of closure in my own stories.

Lucia Berlin’s stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women serve as a model in both of these arenas. Each piece features a remarkable combination of compression and intensity. How is she able to pack so much—a distinct voice, vivid details, understated but palpable emotion—into such short, deceptively simple-seeming stories? A close examination of economy and endings in this collection reveals several craft choices made by the author that consistently bolster efficiency and surprise.

One way Berlin is economic is in her characterization. She is somehow able to evoke full, distinct characters with minimal words. An example is the dentist grandfather in “Dr. H. A. Moynihan.” The first-person narrator of this story is remembering a summer during her childhood when she was required to work in her grandfather’s dental office. Over the course of the 7.5-page story, the author gives us a thorough picture of “Grandpa”—both as a physical being and a personality. One tool she uses is direct, straightforward reporting; the narrator acknowledges the complex mixed emotions she has about Grandpa (so true-to-life, these forever-complicated feelings about family), along with conveying how her mother feels about him, and there’s a matter-of-factness to the tone.

[…continue reading here]

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“If Only I Didn’t Love You” by Susan Jo Russell (poetry, ’17)

An excerpt from the poem, “If Only I Didn’t Love You,” by Susan Jo Russell (poetry, ’17), published at Mass Poetry:

If Only I Didn’t Love You

I knew where to dig
to reach the well of wet sand
where the sand crab, barrel-shaped, sandy pale,

burrowed down fast
while I dug faster, with both hands, the sand falling in
and falling in. It was ancient,

shy, eating
the world from underneath.
Those hard tickling claws,

too alien to hold for long,
scrabbled on my palm—
when I, sad, had to let it go, […continue reading here]

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Two Poems by Shadab Zeest Hashmi (poetry, ’09)

An excerpt from “The Theft of Eid” by Shadab Zeest Hashmi (poetry, ’09), one of two poems published at Tuck Magazine:

The Theft of Eid

(for Marilyn Hacker)

The theft of Eid did not happen on Eid or on the eve of Eid when I asked the children to switch on the party lights before evening prayer on the patio by the calla lilies under the darkening purple damask sky nor did it happen the day before I bought dried dates & sweetened condensed milk for Eid pudding but it happened five thousand four hundred and seventy five days ago when the towers fell on us and everyone but us was given a burial while we were left burning and were called names and made to pay for bombs that crack the fields that had fed us their wheat in childhood made to watch the earth shudder before the camera made to watch the orphaning of millions in real time & the shredded pleas of mothers & the cavernous eyes of fathers made to watch the agony of last looks at loved ones and lost cities and the desperate rafts to unknown lands passports sewn into plastic bags lips shivering around the name of the same bullet passing through past and future

[…continue reading here]

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“Domestic” by Jennifer Givhan (poetry, ’15)

An excerpt from the poem “Domestic” by Jennifer Givhan (poetry, ’15), published at The Adroit Journal:

Domestic

18

When the boy I loved enough to sponge the reddened kelp bed

of my uterus had a baby with another girl           I pointed blame

like darts into my throat until            I emptied again               I

was working as domestic help blocks from where his baby’s

mama lived in a trailer with her mama          me pretending the

kids I watched were mine though they called me names for

Mexican & fat & they missed their white mother     I was

instructed to lock from the house if she came round with her

boyfriend      I mean I was that lonely & scrubbing toilets felt

like home   […continue reading here]

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“Scandal” by Leslie Blanco (fiction, ’07)

An excerpt from “Scandal” by Leslie Blanco (fiction, ’07), published at TransAtlantic Panorama:

Scandal

When I was eight, the nuns told me to pray for my enemies. Knees against wooden kneeler, I prayed for Julio Gonzalez, the Puerto Rican boy who taunted me about my tip-toe walk and my pot belly. Three years later, all my fat gone, Julio snapped the back of my training bra like a slingshot against my shoulder blades. Another year, and he put his arm around me in the back of the school bus.

I liked it.

It was a sin to like it.

That arm around the shoulders – the gesture, the implication – opened an ineludible door. Or maybe, the lid to the treasure chest we all find secreted in the attic, or buried out back, the hinge well oiled, silently opening to the touch.

The nuns were still there. Dressed all in black like the black-lipstick Punks at the public high school. Like beatniks. Like bouncers. When I was thirteen, they called my father in because they’d seen a boy put his arm around my waist.

“Your waist, Evelina, your waist!” my father yelled that night.

I wasn’t allowed to go to the dance party.

So I rebelled. I went out with Eldrian Ocampo, the eighteen-year-old cousin of a Filipino classmate. Parachute pants. Hairspray. Forty neon spaghetti bracelets on each wrist. Yes. The certified, vinyl-scratching DJ of a back-spinning, moon-walking, boombox-carrying crew of break-dancers. Catholic break-dancers, it’s true. But as rebellions go, it satisfied.

I thought of Eldrian today for the first time in years, here in my high school room, and the room of college summers, where Flashdance posters and torn up toe shoes have been busy collecting dust. Keep-sake boxes stuffed with photographs and love letters are scattered across the floor, open among the trash bags and the cardboard box designated for things I cannot part with.

The other boyfriends are still here: The First Writer of Notes, The Under-Confident Gazer from Behind the Pillars of the Cafeteria, The Earnest Jock, The Frog Dissection Partner, The Verbal Abuser, The Only Other Cuban. […continue reading here]

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Five Poems by Ian Randall Wilson (poetry, ’02)

An excerpt from “The Ice Age,” by Ian Randall Wilson (poetry, ’02), one of five poems published at Peacock Journal:

The Ice Age  

Someone is nervous somewhere
with all the shouting
and the helicopters passing over.
A part of everyday is missing people.
The common mill about
in consequence of loss.
To watch the news is to see
the enemy inside all of us.
A dog barks.  A woman cries.
The crows stand the power
line, croaking for peace.
Peace and a little moment
in the woods near the river break
where the bank is green.
The vegetation maintains
its own counsel
unlike the clamorous winds.
Chen Zao once predicted this, saying,
Do not listen to the man
who loves his own voice. […continue reading here]

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Three Poems by Lara Egger (poetry, ’16)

An excerpt from the poem “S.O.S.” by Lara Egger (poetry, ’16), one of three poems published at Jet Fuel:

S.O.S.

Sometimes the heart needs a parachute;
sometimes a life jacket.
This man’s is black and blue.
Despite the heartburn, we volunteer
to walk through Calamity’s revolving door.
Ask the blind baseball team,
the headless orchestra–
do you really need all five senses?
To hear a dog dreaming
is to understand the anguish of clouds.
To lie to oneself is inevitable.
Raise your hand if you’re willing
to break the bad news
to the music-box ballerina.  […continue reading here]

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“Darning” by Beverley Bie Brahic (poetry, ’06)

An excerpt from the story “Darning” by Beverley Bie Brahic (poetry, ’06), published at Poetry Daily:

 

 

Darning

Roaming the library stacks makes me uneasy. Too many books I haven’t read. The flesh is sad? Alas. But I’ve read all the books? Not even close. Getting my bearings in the third (literature) floor’s musty pulp-and-paper-smelling undergrowth, I file down a narrow path between stacks to tip a few more books from the shelf.

My husband’s sabbatical at a California university has stretched into years. I miss the street corner stink of piss, the damp zinc and glitter of life in Paris. I miss the newsstands. I miss the bookshops. The campus bookstore has been taken over by sportswear with the university logo; books relegated to the caves and eaves. In Paris, the flâneur is forever being lured into small shops still in business because French law restricts discounting and free shipping (no help, unfortunately, for Paris’s English bookshops, like the much-regretted Village Voice, which must still compete with the online trade).

But the campus dweller life allows me to indulge an old fantasy: plugging the holes in my education. Sure, this feels like one of those math problems in which the student is asked to calculate how long it will take to fill a bathtub that is simultaneously draining at a different rate. Still I persist. A card swipe gets me into the university’s Babelian library, its hushed reading rooms with rows of shiny new books (English spines one way, French the other) and the ferny canyon-like stacks. I can audit classes—heaven in my theology will be reading Dante’s Inferno / Calvino’s Cosmicomics in the dauntingly articulate company of students toting laptops on skateboards. I’ve screwed my courage to the sticking point for ‘Philosophy and Literature’, with readings from Aristotle to Lydia Davis’s radically short story (‘It has been so long since she used a metaphor!’): a course so rife with the stuff of thought that when I scrolled through the online catalogue recently and saw it was being offered again with what looked like a fresh slate of readings I messaged the teaching team—a Proust scholar and a historian of late modern philosophy—to beg permission to repeat. ‘The good news,’ my friend the philosopher shot back with characteristic Californian generosity, ‘is that you are most welcome … the bad news is that the syllabus will be exactly the same. Even the jokes.’  […continue reading here]

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“On Blood and Water” by Laura Maher 9poetry, ’14)

An excerpt from the essay, “On Blood and Water,” by Laura Maher (poetry, ’14) published at The Common:

On Blood and Water

When people speak of my city’s river, they say: declined. What they mean is: dry. Only modern cities can survive on the promise of water. Early people settled just east of the river, on the then-fertile floodplain that offered easy access to water, mud, fish, grasses, all the necessary components to forge a life in the desert. In the summer, I imagine cool breezes.

Tucson lies in a valley between four mountain ranges, so each range becomes a landmark. A trained eye can decipher a way through the desert using these mountains alone, though this eye will also see the lines of cottonwood trees, will find where water runs silently underground—the Santa Cruz River (translation: “Holy Cross”) long buried under a bed of pummeled stone, sand, bits of mica.

In this valley, a trained ear can distinguish predator calls: a wolf from a coyote, for instance.

The news is a gray wolf has been spotted at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, the first found in Arizona in seventy years. She is alone, but scientists are hoping she is pregnant. What they can be sure of is that it seems miraculous, this appearance of her after so long. It is long work to replace what was erased once before. […continue reading here]

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