Applications Open Soon for the Levis Prizes

levisCalling all GodWallies: This year, the Program will be awarding TWO Levis Prizes*, one in poetry and one in fiction, to alumni completing first books. Each winner will receive $4,000.

• Eligibility: Warren Wilson MFA graduates who have not yet published a full-length collection in the selected genre (150+ pages/1500+ copies for fiction, 48+ pages/500+ copies for poetry).

• Submissions: 40 pages fiction or 20 pages poetry plus brief project proposal. Via Submittable, with $25 entry fee.

• Applications open 8/1-11/1 2015. Full guidelines will be posted with the application August 1. Judges will be announced with the winning manuscripts.

• Questions? Email [email protected].

* The Levis Prizes are named in honor of award-winning poet and beloved MFA Program for Writers faculty member Larry Levis (1946-1996). He was cherished for both his incisive mind and the care and attention he gave his students.

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Lia Greenwell Awarded the 2015-16 Joan Beebe Fellowship

Congratulations to Lia Greenwell (poetry, ’13), who will be the 2015-16 Joan Beebe Fellow at Warren Wilson College.LG Crop

The recipient of scholarships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Lia Greenwell has recently contributed poems to Painted Bride Quarterly, Witness, and Poecology. Originally from the Midwest, she currently lives in New York City, where she has worked as a Writing Mentor with the organization Girls Write Now.

Instituted in 1997, the Beebe is one-year teaching fellowship at WWC, open only to alumni of the MFA Program for Writers. The Beebe Fellow teaches five courses in the undergraduate creative writing program, supervises the group of undergraduates who attend the January MFA residency, assists with the undergraduate literary magazine, and generally takes part in the life of the College. Application guidelines are posted on the program website and on the Friends of Writers blog each September for the next academic year’s fellowship.

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Margaree interviews Brian

UnknownRecently, poetry Alum Margaree Little (’12) interviewed poetry alum Brian Blanchfield (’99) for the MFA Program for Writers Website.

Your second book of poems, A Several World, received the 2014 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and was longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award. But you’re currently focusing on prose, and a book of essays, Onesheets, forthcoming from Nightboat Books. Could you talk about Onesheets? 

So “onesheets” are single-subject essays that take no recourse in authoritative sources— I think through the topic at hand and report on what it is I know or estimate or remember or misremember about it. And about each subject I begin with some notion that there’s some hot territory in it for me, some dicey personal territory. So even if I may not quite know what that is, I trust that the process, in these 2,000-word essays, (3,000 tops), I arrive at this rather naked place and report from there. Some of them very much need a loincloth.

The subjects are all over the place—miscellany is part of the project and hopefully part of the joy of it—they’re about foot washing, Br’er Rabbit, the locus amoenus in the pastoral tradition, tumbleweed, house sitting, the Leave in billiards. But yes—I’m the single source of the essays, which feels like it connects with the oldest traditions of essaying, a kind of radical empiricism that’s not about getting it right, and that performs thinking on the spot.

 

Read the rest of the interview at the Program Website.

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Congratulations to the Class of 2014!

Friends of Writers and the MFA Program would like to congratulate students who graduated at the winter 2014 residency this January:

Graduating class of January 2014

Class of January 2014
photo credit: Alissa Whelan

Jan Bender (poetry)

Luke Brekke (poetry)

Torrey Crim (fiction)

Cheney Crow (poetry)

Andrea Donderi  (fiction)

Kaisa Edy  (poetry)

Susan Okie  (poetry)

Daye Phillippo  (poetry)

Laura Thomas  (fiction)

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Fiction Grads: Submit to the Levis!

The deadline for submitting a manuscript for the Levis Stipend is approaching!
The Larry Levis Post-Graduate Stipend is an award given to support an MFA Program graduate who is completing his/her first book. The Levis Stipend alternates between awards for poetry and for fiction, and the 2014 award will be made to a fiction writer in the amount of $10,000. Submissions are being accepted between August 15 and October 15. The current judge, a nationally-recognized fiction writer, will be announced at the time the award is made in January, 2014.
Guidelines can be found on the Friends of Writers website:
http://www.wwcmfa.org/alumni/fellowship-opportunities/larry-levis-scholarship
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Finish that Novel NOW!

The deadline for submitting a manuscript for the Levis Stipend is approaching!
The Larry Levis Post-Graduate Stipend is an award given to support an MFA Program graduate who is completing his/her first book. The Levis Stipend alternates between awards for poetry and for fiction, and the 2014 award will be made to a fiction writer in the amount of $10,000. Submissions are being accepted between August 15 and October 15. The current judge, a nationally-recognized fiction writer, will be announced at the time the award is made in January, 2014.
Guidelines can be found on the Friends of Writers website:
http://www.wwcmfa.org/alumni/fellowship-opportunities/larry-levis-scholarship
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Alumna Judith Whelchel Celebrates Amy Grimm

Alumna Judith Whelchel (fiction, ’13) celebrates Amy Grimm’s fifteen years of service on the program’s website:

Amy Grimm—I heard her voice before I met her.

My house was quiet, a rare moment.  My young son was sitting on the floor occupied and content with his thumb, my daughters outside. I was nervous to make the phone call, but needed to know if I had been accepted. There was a decision to make about a job.

I did everything in my application to present myself as artistic and sophisticated. Complex, if a little modish. Did I sell my soul to the devil and neglect to mention the scope of my family—four children? Absolutely.

As it happened, the moment I introduced myself to Amy, my son commenced his earsplitting bawl, so pitched and blaring I lost her voice and so abandoned ship, running with the phone to the room at the top of the stairs, closing the door.  I could hear the girls returning to the house; and, while this eased my anxiety around my son sticking a slobbery finger into an electric socket, their presence only escalated the moment as they launched into full-bellied, piercing shrieks over their brother’s tears.  This was the horrid game the girls enjoyed when their brother cried, their shrill and deafening howls delighting and distracting him, making him laugh.  The game, however, amounted to the most horrible sounds ever made in the history of the world.

So much for sophisticated.

“You have children?” Amy asked.  Every Wally knows Amy’s voice, a sweet generosity tinged with playfulness.

Read more

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Congratulations to the Class of 2013!

Friends of Writers and the MFA Program would like to congratulate students who graduated at the summer 2013 residency this July.

Student Toast July 2013

Students toast the MFA graduates of July 2013.

Lindsay Ahl (poetry)

Ronald Alexander (fiction)

Tommye Blount (poetry)

Alexandra Carter (poetry)

Brandi Gentry (poetry)

Lia Greenwell (poetry)

Elisabeth Hamilton (fiction)

Sean Patrick Hill (poetry)

Patricia Grace King (fiction)

Marit MacArthur (poetry)

Carrie Mar (poetry)

Nathan McClain (poetry)

Adrienne Perry (fiction)

Garrett Simmons (fiction)

Victor Valcik (fiction)

Steve Weed (fiction)

Judith Whelchel (fiction)

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Deadline Tomorrow

From the organizers of the 2013 MFA Program Alumni Conference:

What you can do at the God Wally Alum (Post MFA) Conference this July 28-August 3:

Take a class in sequencing poems in a collection and/or on geographies and culture, isolation, relocation and the effects thereof and/or landscape and the willing suspension of disbelief and/or more; learn how a stupid computer program recognizes poetry; inhabit the roles of characters in the reading of a Shakespeare play; explore the connection between improv theater games and writer; participate in a caucus on discipline; churn out pages of your latest work in progress while the scent of eucalyptus wafts through your open window to emerge from your immersion for dinner and camaraderie; soak up readings from some of the best writers on the planet; outbid your new pals on the funkiest objet d’art that you never knew faculty member so-and-so crafts in his spare time; develop your interpretive dance skills; reconnect with God Wally alums from graduation year 400 B.C. to 2013; amid the golden hills daydream for hours and call it pre-write; immediately increase your blog audience by a factor of x; exchange literary witticisms (“this is like Virginia Wolfe meets Brett Easton Ellis” or “this is what might result of TS Elliot challenging Elizabeth Bishop at arm wrestling”) over manuscript workshops just like in the old days; bring your books for your fellow writers who can’t wait to hold signed copies in their hot little hands; beef up your resume; pump up your reading list; take some extra time to explore the magnificent San Francisco Bay area, stopping out at John Muir Woods or driving throat-in-heart Highway One or perhaps catch a glimpse of Ferlinghetti at City Lights…

What you can’t do: imagine for one second you’re at home making breakfast for the family; languish in morning traffic on the 405; squirm through the “three truths and a lie” icebreaker at your company’s Q1 offsite meeting; haul home swag to dump in the landfill; kick yourself in the booty for not coming to the conference years past, because you’re here now.  Where are you?  St. Mary’s in Moraga, CA, [http://www.stmarys-ca.edu]: which boasts one of the beautiful campuses in the country. This is July 28 through August 3 (short stay available). This is you replenishing and revitalizing you.

Join us. April 30 is the deadline to register without a late fee and make your preferences known. Go on line now and do it. We’re waiting for you. Yes, you!

[http://www.wwcmfa.org/alumni/conference-information/]

Peg Alford and Cass Pursell on behalf of the God Wally Post-MFA Alum Conference

Your friendly organizers, 2013

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Bathanti Named NC Poet Laureate

Joseph Bathanti (poetry, ’91) was recently named North Carolina’s Poet Laureate by Governor Bev Perdue.

Joseph Bathanti is an award-winning poet and novelist with a robust commitment to social causes. He first came to North Carolina to work in the VISTA program and has taught writing workshops in prisons for 35 years,” Perdue said. “As North Carolina’s new Poet Laureate he plans to work with veterans to share their stories through poetry — a valuable and generous project.

Joseph is the author of Land of Amnesia (2009, Press 53) and This Metal(2012, Press 53).

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