Faculty member Maurice Manning published an op-ed in the Lexington Herald-Leader opposing the proposed defunding of the Kentucky Arts Council:

Defunding the arts suppresses culture, democracy, economy

The first thing Philistines do in setting up shop is to get rid of the artists and intellectuals.

The suppression of culture — and the people of that culture — is easier to carry out when those who could challenge authority with creativity and intelligence are purged.

Eliminating the artists and the educated was a priority, of course, for the Nazis. Many artists fled Europe during the Nazi era and found refuge in America, by which our nation has been enriched. An artist who fled Hitler’s Germany and arrived in Kentucky was the pioneering and visionary printer, Victor Hammer.

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Note: The push to save Kentucky Arts funding was successful.

A short story by faculty member C. Dale Young appears at the Asian American Literary Review:

There were many things Alejandro Castillo did not know. For a start, he did not know his given name or the people who were his parents. In this, he was one who embraced mystery not because he had that special talent but because he had no choice. When Father Guillermo Rojas found him on the streets of that small town in Spain, the boy that became Alejandro Castillo could not even speak Spanish. He was dirty and wearing clothes that were filthy and torn. He spoke what people then believed was gibberish. Despite this, the boy had smart eyes, intelligent eyes, and a persistence in his demeanor. Father Guillermo Rojas took in the boy and raised him as his own child. Castillo, because the boy was sitting in front of the old mayor’s dilapidated house that the locals in their mean-spiritedness called “the castle,” and Alejandro, because Father Rojas had been reading a history of Pope Alexander VI. The boy looked like a gypsy, a gypsy who had been abandoned by gypsies. But Alejandro Castillo was, as Father Guillermo Rojas deduced, a clever child. He learned Spanish easily and spoke properly within a year. By the age of six, one would never have known Spanish wasn’t the boy’s original language.

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You’ve said, “I use story and the word ‘I’ as strategies toward getting the poems to a place of what I hope is interesting uncertainty.” I very much like that way of thinking about the utility of an ‘I.’

I don’t want my poems to be me walking through the museum of the world and simply reacting in pretty language. “I” is a means to an end, a strategy for immediacy, a force or an energy. There’s a sense of productive irony and a performativity to the speaker. So for example, she might be very self-pitying, but hopefully there’s ironic distance and the poet uses the speaker to reveal this—it’s the Frank O’Hara thing where there’s emotion and the parody of emotion going on at the same time.

I use my own life, however fictionally, however obliquely. Because I’m spending a lot of time writing and teaching and reading, that’s one of the things I think about and so excuse me, it gets into my poems. I have my kid and my kid gets into my poems. I think about the election and the election gets into my poems. The poem really is this field for anything to get in. I’m very interested in poems that have mixed feelings and seem to be wanting to do conflicting things and somehow make a virtue of it.

Read the rest of the interview here: http://www.divedapper.com/interview/daisy-fried/.

A story by faculty member Caitlin Horrocks appears at failbetter.com:

“Did you see the story on the news?” my old conservatory roommate asked. She was still piecing things together, weddings and lessons and part-time orchestra gigs. For years after I left New York, she asked if I still played at all, if I missed it yet. Eventually she stopped asking. Once my ex-husband conducted a concert she was playing in. “He had giant sweat stains under his arms by the end of the first movement,” she said, trying to tell me what she thought I’d want to hear. I knew I could trust her, with what to say to him and what not to. She wouldn’t mention all the weight I’d put on; she’d tell him I was happy in Ypsilanti. Mostly I am.

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Friends of Writers congratulates faculty member A. Van Jordan on winning the 2015 Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.