Interview with Robert Boswell

An interview with Faculty member Robert Boswell on, among other topics, his new book, Tumbledown, appears online on the TIn House blog:

Robert Boswell is a patient man. The facts surrounding this interview support this claim.

Our conversation began in Telluride, where he and his wife, the writer Antonya Nelson, have a home. This was a year ago and I should mention that our weekend together began with me flying into the wrong airport some 90 miles north of where he was waiting to pick me up. He stoically stayed up until a shuttle service dropped me off at his home around 1:00am. We spent the next few hours catching up and talking about Alice Munro.

Over the course of the ensuing weekend we must have watched 100 hours of baseball. That might be an exaggeration but it was the playoffs and I don’t think we missed an at-bat. It makes sense that Boswell would love our nation’s pastime; a four-hour, one-run pitching duel is the perfect requiescence for a man who often writes over fifty drafts of a novel. The same sort of patience that goes into his writing can be seen when you are heading home from the bar after the game and you encounter an enormous bear foraging in a nearby trashcan. “We should probably walk a bit faster,” he said.” “But not too fast. Now getting back to Wise Blood.”

And so a year has passed and the baseball playoffs are about to start again (without Boswell’s beloved Astros) and the bears of Telluride are hoping for another autumn book recommendation. The season has brought with it a bit of a relief, for after ten years we have finally gotten another Robert Boswell novel to immerse ourselves in.

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New Essay by Dominic Smith

A new essay by faculty member Dominic Smith is available online at The Millions. The essay, titled “Letter of the Law: On J.D. Salinger, Unpublished Works and US Copyright,” discusses, among other topics, faculty member David Shields’ new biography of J.D. Salinger:

1.
In the acknowledgments for Salinger, the new biography that accompanies the documentary about the reclusive lion of 20th-century literature, the authors state: “Most biographies include photographs of and letters to and from the biographical subject, but as in the case of someone as secretive as Salinger, photographs of Salinger and letters from him were extremely difficult to come by.”

David Shields and Shane Salerno are not the first Salinger biographers to be hampered by the author’s shadow life. In fact, current U.S. copyright law is bolstered by a former biographer’s clash with Salinger over access to the author’s unpublished letters. In the 1980s, Ian Hamilton excerpted from a slew of Salinger letters that had been donated to the archives of Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Texas at Austin. The letters were quoted extensively in a draft that went out to reviewers and that was planned for publication by Random House. When Salinger’s agent, Dorothy Olding, passed along an uncorrected proof to the author in late 1986, he formally registered his copyright in the letters and told his lawyer to object to the publication of the book until all contents from the unpublished letters had been removed. Hamilton acquiesced and revised many of the letter excerpts into close paraphrases. For example, “like a dead rat…grey and nude…applauding madly” became “resembling a lifeless rodent…ancient and unclothed…claps her hands in appreciation.” The artfulness of such paraphrases aside, they didn’t appease Salinger and he sued Random House for copyright violation, breach of contract (Hamilton had signed copyright forms at the archives in question), and unfair competition (it was sometimes ambiguous as to whether the words were Salinger’s or Hamilton’s; why would consumers buy actual books of Salinger letters?)

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Interview with Wilton Barnhardt

An interview with faculty Wilton Barnhardt appears online at Book Keeping:

What was the inspiration for your book, Lookaway, Lookaway?

Half a century of a Southern upbringing. I did my best to decamp from North Carolina, from eighteen to forty, and it was not my intention to come back here to live, but I returned in order to teach at a new MFA in Creative Writing program at NC State University, a university in which three generations of Barnhardts had taught or studied. I suppose that got me to thinking about belonging to a place, which got me to thinking further that maybe I did belong to the South, after all, despite much earlier noise about being a Citizen of the World.

Who are your favorite authors?

Anyone 19th Century (Henry James, Tolstoy, Balzac, Flaubert, et al). John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Willa Cather. Among current writers, Valerie Martin, Alice Munro, William Trevor, Allison Lurie, John LeCarre, William Boyd, the crime fiction of Ernest Gaines, the historical fiction of Hilary Mantel, and too many poets to list…

How and why did you start working on this book?

I declared I would write ONE and only one Southern novel, and always imagined I would write it near the end of my life (with all my accumulated wisdom about the South), but I was struggling to finish a Western book that was set in the Time of the Padres. I was teaching at Caltech and luxuriated in Huntington Library privileges… each afternoon, after class, I walked over to the great library and called up all sorts of arcane Spanish histories and prospector’s journals—you name it. But when I moved back down South in 2002, I couldn’t do that kind of homework and those materials aren’t anywhere but out West, so I asked myself, “What can you write that you can research right here in North Carolina?” And so the Southern Novel moved to the front of the line.

 

 

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New Fiction by Kevin McIlvoy

A new story, “Ladies Room” by faculty Kevin McIlvoy appears online at The Huffington Post:

Mc-McIlvoy

Len had spent eleven years cleaning the Mens rooms and the Ladies rooms in Mr. Prudowsky’s three Asheville bars. Fine, private places. Marvelous venues for live music. Uncanny acoustics. A lucky job. But time to retire.

As he knew they would, the three ghosts appeared again in the Ladies Room of The Pea Vine at 4:30 AM, the middle of his shift. It was May 7, his ninetieth birthday. Len’s checklist of tasks more or less done, he listened in.

They didn’t know he was there in their afterlife as they rehearsed the same song, the one song. Between takes they talked about their husbands because, after all, they were not done with them.
They did not talk about Len. He knew he did not qualify. He was neither man nor woman to them. He had been a kind of motherfather to the band they had formed that called itself “Lula Town” after Millie’s favorite Charley Patton song “Mind Reader’s Blues.” Millie, Dee, and Felice were musicians then, forty-some years ago, but they were in the nest and not yet flying.

He and his students had been music to each other: that flawed music with sweetness – and love – arriving in its flaws. His best students always outgrew him. Len was surprised how he missed them, missed their jarring phrasing, their improbable leaps to falsetto or gravelly inarticulateness or full-octave skid.

“Let’s find the head,” said Felice to Dee. Felice, who was the lead vocal and on rhythm guitar, had a thing about hating a stumbling start to a song.

Half an hour earlier, Millie had been the first to wind the spring of the talk about their husbands’ crying. “He would blubber over some lake or river he remembered,” she said.
And now she added, “Raisins. Raisins a special way in his oatmeal would make him cry. Or an untied shoe.

“Or steam on the window. You know: over the sink or in a store front.”

Millie had no grip on the dobrojo’s neck, so it simply hung, too high, on its strap. She should lower that. Len had told her many times.

Millie said, “You hear that?”

“Yep,” said Dee.

Felice tightened the seat of the microphone. She asked, “Rain?”

There was no mike on Millie or on Dee. Millie’s wooden stool was under the metal frame of a john door, and she had strung a wooden cowbell up. She liked to make a calucking sound with it for no good reason. Whenever she did, Dee hit the start button on the DryHands
machine behind them. Millie said, “If he saw somebody tear up. Well. It’s like somebody wet
and gooey would make him — you know: wet and gooey.”

Dee said, “Yep. It’s like a crybabyman doesn’t see it coming — and next thing happens is his noseholes are wet and he’s dribbling like mine –

” – mine mightcould fight the bawling – and not too good — or he might hide himself and lose it on the stairs or somewhere in the house, and you could hear him –

“–he’d make that garbage-disposal sound in his throat and try to turn it off, really try – and mine said, ‘Shit Dee, shit, I’m sorry’ if he was crying –

” – and he’d go right on with it and make a leaky, gummy mess of himself and not pull it together and -”

“They keep things,” Millie said.

“–and – yes they do. Mine did.”

 

Continue reading at The Huffington Post.

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“At the Fairmont” by Peter Orner

Faculty member Peter Orner’s story, “At the Fairmont,” appears on Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading:

After the war they met in San Francisco. She waited for him at a hotel on Nob Hill for five days before she got word that his ship had arrived. It is those five days she thinks of now, not the reunion itself. She thinks of the park across the street from a cathedral and the hours she spent sitting with her hands in her lap. It was April and cool and she sat there coatless, not waiting, her mind drained, enjoying it, the days away from the children who’d remained in Chicago with her mother. Men, older men, spoke to her and she didn’t discourage them. They talked about the weather. It was nice to talk about something and not care a lick about it. She can’t remember another time in her life, even during blizzards, when she ever had much to say about the weather, and yet there she was on a bench, in the chill wind, goosebumps on her bare arms, cheerfully saying things like, “Who would have imagined it would be so cold in California and here I am with no coat. My girlfriend Gloria warned me, but I didn’t believe her!” Words flung out her mouth like tiny birds in every direction, that’s how good it felt just to say whatever nonsense came into her head. Because the words themselves meant nothing. It was only the thrill of talking to strangers, men, old men in tweed and scarves, in an unfamiliar place.

Continue reading online at Electric Literature.

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New Book by Adria Bernardi

A new book of essays by faculty member Adria Bernardi, Dead Meander, is forthcoming from Kore Press.

An excerpt from the essay, “Alba: Fragments for an Elegy:”

“To split ourselves further. I turn so readily to say this in another tongue. Strappare. Spaccare. Staccare.

Which is to say, To tear, To split, To detach, in the original, common tongue, although both sides now need a dictionary to say it.

I have told myself, First, before I write an elegy, the research. There is the question of your name.

Already one year has passed.

Alba means white. Also bright, light. Dawn. A type of flower. A type of song or a poem.

This morning, on waking, I move like a sleepwalker, going through the morning motions. The water boils and the whistle cries. I walk over to the stove, turn off the heat.

Then, as I reach to the canister for a teabag to put into the cup, I hear your voice, sing-song, say, Du thé?

I look for another word, a single word, that means rejoining, reunion, reassembly.

I look for this word, even though I was never separated by the sea. Still, it seems someone is always missing.

There is a black and white photograph. It is eighteen inches long, ten inches high.

There are three separate groupings.

A husband, a wife, and a girl with straight bangs and an enormous bow that is tilted just off to the side of her head.

A husband, a wife, and a baby boy with tremendous cheeks.

A husband, a wife.

At first glance, the elements seem unified. But why the distance between the groups? Why the separate sittings? Why the mist between them? I look again. The sizes of the heads vary too greatly. The bodies are in different scale, three photographs have been pieced together.”

More information about the book can be found on the Kore Press website.

 

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New Interview With Maurice Manning

A new interview with faculty member Maurice Manning, titled “The Kentucky Stage,” appears online at the Poetry Foundation:

maurice-manning

The Kentucky Stage

Maurice Manning on the South, Spoon River, and why he’s not a fan of Facebook.

By John McIntyre

Maurice Manning speaks slowly. He’s intent on clarity. If it’s possible to be searching and precise at the same time, he is. Manning lives on 20 acres of farmland in Kentucky. He keeps a picture of the great bluegrass musician Roscoe Holcomb on his refrigerator, and often finds himself working through poems while doing farm chores or walking in the woods near his house. None of that will seem a surprise to readers familiar with his work.

Since Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, for which he earned a Yale Younger Poets nod in 2001, Manning has homed in on the lives of men and women in rural Kentucky. His next effort was A Companion for Owls, a collection that imagined a commonplace book by the legendary Daniel Boone, in verse. Bucolics was a series of takes on the pastoral poem: 78 untitled, unpunctuated poems, all addressed to “Boss.” He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize on the strength of 2010’s The Common Man, a collection that reached back to his childhood. His new collection, The Gone and the Going Away, faces a Kentucky in flux with a brave face and a healthy dose of humor. The Poetry Foundation recently spoke with Manning by telephone, after one of his standard days of teaching and farm chores. A condensed version of that conversation follows.

You were on a panel of writers recently discussing the question “What is Southern?” What’s your perspective?

That was an interesting conversation. People on the panel had widely different perspectives. My thought was, we still have people who have a long time living in the same place, and who live in a region that they have real roots in, family history, and they know that their grandparents lived here, and their great-grandparents lived over here, and that sort of thing. At least that’s my experience of Kentucky. And a sense that the past matters, I would say, is still detectable around here.

Continue reading at the Poetry Foundation website. 

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Debra Allbery at Poetry Daily

MFA Program Director and faculty member Debra Allbery’s poem “Ballad of the Walking Woman” is today’s featured poem at Poetry Daily.

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Roving warp of remember,
raveled weft of forget,
this burden I’ve carried, the burden
I set at the roadside each nightfall

that’s left to me. Cleft from me.
Waking, I’ll sing it behind me,
what’s left of me.  Walking, I’ll sing it
away into nothing.  Into nothing …[Keep Reading]…

Debra Allbery is the author of the poetry collection Fimbul-Winter (2010, Four Way Books).

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Interview with James Longenbach

A recent audio interview with faculty member James Longenbach is now available online at New Books Network:

james-longenbach-448

James Longenbach‘s The Virtues of Poetry (2013, Graywolf Press) is not interested in the vices or failures found in some poems, so his concerns are not necessarily moral ones, but instead, as the title of the book suggests, he is interested in understanding what makes a particular poem (and poet for that matter) flourish, and therefore what makes a reader flourish. And it is this relationship – the one between reader and poem – that James Longenbach’s book honors through his ingenuity of reading poetry through the framework of virtues, such as boldness, compression, dilation, excess, restraint, and shyness to name just a few he identifies, and he unearths these virtues by focusing on a poem’s prosody and diction and syntax and even the poet’s life – apprehended through letters – as well. The Virtues of Poetry is a joyous book of criticism, written by a poet and critic who does not seek to reprimand poems – which is usually the result of someone mired in taste – but to identify why certain poems can be considered achievements and also to celebrate the paradoxical nature of poetry itself – that poems, no matter when they are written, embody the impulse to clarify the world, while also wrestling with the world’s unsettling mysteries. During our chat, we discuss how poetry found him, the creative similarities between writing poetry and prose, and of course, the virtues of poetry and so much more…

Listen at New Books Network

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How I Met My Wife

“How I Met My Wife,” an essay by faculty member Robert Boswell first delivered as an MFA residency lecture, now appears online at Tin House.

A few years ago, in an introductory fiction workshop, my students and I witnessed a young man make relentless awkward attempts to get to know a young woman in the class. He was passionate and clumsy and his efforts were wholly transparent. When the time came for him to turn in his story, he submitted a piece about a young man much like himself who is hopelessly in love with a young woman much like the young woman in the class, and the two characters are in a creative writing workshop together. One night the male character shows up tipsy at the young woman’s house to ask if she will stroll with him in the warm night air and hold his hand, but the door is opened by her boyfriend, who answers for her with a punch to the jaw, sending the character flying and leaving a scrape on his chin—much like the scrape on the chin of the young man in my workshop.

Undaunted, the character retreats to his dorm to write a story about yet another character who is much like the first character who is much like the author, with the idea that a female character who is much like the first female character who is much like the girl in the workshop will read the story and understand that this literary version of himself represents his real self and that he is in love with her.

In the final scene, the girl suddenly understands—during workshop, no less—that the boy is in love with her, and she is powerfully moved by this knowledge. Everyone in the real workshop knows that the real girl would have to be blind and deaf and witless not to understand that this boy was in love with her, but this public declaration—this tender, ridiculous, marginally grammatical, potentially humiliating public declaration—nonetheless moves us.

…[Keep Reading]…

Robert is the author of Tumbledown: A Novel (2013, Graywolf).

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