A story by faculty member Karen Brennan appears at New World Writing:

Home is Where the Heart Is

Mary Beth

Strictly speak­ing, as a licensed prac­ti­cal nurse (LPN), it is not my job to man­age the table décor, but I do it because I’m good at it.  Each res­i­dent gets a rose they are wel­come to pass on to their valentine-du-jour.   Though that’s kind of a sick joke, when you think about it.

Myself in a red sweater cov­ered with pink and laven­der hearts, myself in red fas­ci­na­tor designed by moi, fea­tur­ing life-sized and very real­is­tic red hum­ming­bird.  Real enough to devour, said my hus­band, who is a smart a___.  (To Whom It May Concern in My Creative Writing Class:  A “fas­ci­na­tor” is a kind of hat. )

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An essay about art forgery and plagiarism by faculty member Dominic Smith appears at Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s Work in Progress:

Forgeries and Figments

Every fake should tell a story. Maybe it’s the blue chalk marks on the back of the frame, partially removed by hand, that suggest previous auction sales. Or maybe it’s the insect frass on the picture itself, evoking decades of neglect in an attic, since flies are drawn to the sugars in the varnish. A careful collector might run an ultraviolet light over the depiction, looking for signs of oxidation—the delicate blue-white fluorescence that is a by-product of age—so in order to deceive collectors, forgers will sometimes remove the varnish from an old, worthless painting and apply it with a spray gun to the new creation.

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Faculty members Christopher Castellani and Peter Turchi spoke about their recent books (Castellani’s The Art of Perspective and Turchi’s A Muse and a Maze) and discussed mystery and other craft elements at Brooklyn Rail:

Turchi: The Art of Perspective is a wonderful book, full of good advice and smart close reading. It made me want to immediately read (or re-read) the books and stories you discuss. It’s also surprising. The back cover claims the book is about “every fiction writer’s most urgent issue: point of view;” in fact, you discuss something broader and possibly even more important: perspective as an element of overall “narrative strategy” (a term I will begin using tomorrow). Obviously, there’s plenty to be written about the handling of various points of view, some of which you touch on here. What led you to focus on this other, larger sense of perspective?

Castellani: Such a generous response means a great deal coming from you, Pete. Thank you. I’m sure that, like me, you’ve been in many a fiction workshop in which the consensus solution to a manuscript’s problems was simply to switch it from one point of view to another. The problem is that we hardly ever talk at great length about why the story would work better with that switch, or the more nuanced implications it would have on the entire enterprise. This makes the advice arbitrary and the eventual revision incomplete, much to the writer’s bewilderment. In most cases, the writer didn’t have a comprehensive rationale for having chosen the POV in the first place; it was not a means to an end, but to a beginning; the way he got into the story, but not a way through and out. I wanted to look at point of view as a cog in the machine of what I called the narrative strategy, not as the machine itself. I hoped this would help us all make better drafting and revision decisions…

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A poem by faculty member Monica Youn appears at The Awl:

Of course Slightly was the first to get his word in. “Wendy lady,” he said rapidly, “for you we
built this house.”
“Oh, say you’re pleased,” cried Nibs.
“Lovely, darling house,” Wendy said, and they were the very words they had hoped she would
say.
“And we are your children,” cried the twins.
Then all went on their knees, and holding out their arms cried, “O Wendy lady, be our
mother.”
“Ought I?” Wendy said, all shining. “Of course, it’s frightfully fascinating, but you see I am
only a little girl. I have no real experience.”

Peter and Wendy (J.M. Barrie, 1911)

 

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