Mary Szybist at Poetry Daily

Faculty member Mary Szybist’s poem “Conversion Figure” is today’s featured poem at Poetry Daily.

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I spent a long time falling
toward your slender, tremulous face—

a long time slipping through stars
as they shattered, through sticky clouds
with no confetti in them.

I fell toward earth’s stony colors
until they brightened, until I could see
the green and white stripes of party umbrellas
propped on your daisied lawn.

From above, you looked small
as an afterthought, something lightly brushed in.
Beside you, blush-pink plates
served up their pillowy cupcakes, and your rosy hems
swirled round your dark head—   …[Keep Reading]…

Mary is the author of Incarnadine: Poems (2013, Graywolf Press).  Szybist cover

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“Male Writers, Female Readers”

“Reader, You Married Him: Male Writers, Female Readers, and the Marriage Plot,” an essay by faculty member Alix Ohlin, appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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IN ANTOINE WIERTZ’S 1853 painting The Reader of Novels, a naked woman lies on her back, comfortably secluded in her boudoir, holding a copy of The Three Musketeers to her face. The sheets beneath her are in slight disarray. She looks like she’s having a good time. The painting, reproduced in Belinda Jack’s lively, engaging history The Woman Reader, shows a figure crouching in the shadows next to the woman, pushing yet another book onto her bed. If you look closely, you can just make out that the figure has horns; it’s the devil.

Wiertz was hardly a major painter, but his image of the female reader — sexualized, autonomous, perhaps in league with Satan — says a lot about historical anxieties regarding that figure. As Jack points out, representations of women reading are historically more numerous and more fraught than those of men. The female reader is associated with a dizzying myriad of contradictory qualities, from piety and maternal virtue to frivolity and eros. And nowhere is her role more contested than when it comes to the novel — a disquiet that continues even today.

Read more

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“How to Write Yourself Into Existence”

“How to Write Yourself Into Existence,” a piece by faculty member David Shields, appears online at The New York Times.

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There appear to be three distinct phases that most new technologies undergo. At first, the computer was so big and expensive that only national governments had the resources to build and operate one. Only the military and a handful of universities had multiroom-size computers. A little later, large corporations with substantial research budgets, like I.B.M., developed computers. The computer made its way into midsize businesses and schools. Not until the late ’70s and early ’80s did the computer shrink enough in size and price to be widely available to individuals. (Roughly the same pattern has played out with access to mass communication, access to high-quality printing, Humvees, G.P.S., the Web, hand-held wireless communications, etc. )

The individual has now risen to the level of a mini-government or mini-corporation. Via YouTube and Twitter, each of us is our own mini-network...[Keep Reading]…

David is the author of How Literature Saved My Life (2013, Knopf).

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Christopher Castellani Featured in Publisher’s Weekly

Faculty member Christopher Castellani speaks with Publisher’s Weekly about his novels and his work as director of Boston’s Grub Street center for creative writing.

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Over the past decade, Christopher Castellani—artistic director of Grub Street in Boston, one of the country’s largest literary centers—has written a trio of novels about an Italian immigrant family, the Grassos, a family much like his own. Beginning with his first novel, A Kiss for Maddalena (Algonquin, 2003), winner of a Massachusetts Book Award and a Top Ten BookSense pick; then The Saint of Lost Things (Algonquin, 2005), long-listed for the IMPAC/Dublin Award; and now All This Talk of Love, set for release in February by Algonquin, he has traced the lives of Antonio and Maddalena Grasso, from their roots in a small village in Italy to Delaware. At the same time, he has been working on Grub Street, changing it to keep pace with the shifts roiling the publishing world.

Castellani’s books, which can each be read as stand-alones, cover three generations of the Grasso clan and are mostly told from the viewpoint of the son, Frankie. Castellani, like Frankie, was the only one of his nearly 100 Delaware relatives to move more than two hours from home. It’s not that the books are autobiographical per se, but they have the ring of truth. “There are elements that are real,” said Castellani. “[There are] snippets of conversations and themes that come from personal experience. Sometimes I can’t remember what is real and what isn’t.” …[Keep Reading]…

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“All My Pretty Hates”

“All My Pretty Hates: Reconsidering Charles Baudelaire,” an essay and winter residency lecture by faculty member Daisy Fried, appears online at Poetry.

I’m writing this in Paris, so, from my many poetic aversions (“all my pretty hates,” to quote Dorothy Parker): Charles Baudelaire, oozing with decay, pestilence, and death. Baudelaire, tireless invoker of  muses, classical figures, goddesses, personifications: O Nature!…Cybele!… 
Sisyphe … O muse de mon coeur! Baudelaire, who makes an old perfume bottle an invocation of the soul wherein

A thousand thoughts were sleeping, deathly chrysalids,
trembling gently in the heavy darkness,
which now unfold their wings and take flight,
tinged with azure, glazed with pink, shot with gold*
— From The Phial

Anyone ever counted how many times “azure” shows up in Les Fleurs du Mal?

When she had sucked all the marrow from my bones
And I languidly turned to her
To give back an amorous kiss, I saw no more.
She seemed a gluey wine-skin full of pus.
             — The Vampire’s Metamorphosis

I’m not one to criticize poems about blowjobs but Really, Charles? My fourteen-year-old self might have been impressed. Ew, gross. Then again, shouldn’t one be aware of not reading through one’s fourteen-year-old eyes? After all, he and Poe invented poetic goth. It’s not Baudelaire’s fault his modern-day followers are goofballs. And not their fault I’m a boring middle-aged American...[Keep Reading]…

You can see clips of other Warren Wilson MFA lectures at Youtube.com/FriendsofWriters, or purchase recordings at the Audio Store.

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“What Haunts Us”

Faculty member Peter Orner‘s piece, “Writing About What Haunts Us” appears online at The New York Times.

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I’ve been trying to lie about this story for years. As a fiction writer, I feel an almost righteous obligation to the untruth. Fabrication is my livelihood, and so telling something straight, for me, is the mark of failure. Yet in many attempts over the years I’ve not been able to make out of this tiny — but weirdly soul-defining — episode in my life anything more than a plain recounting of the facts, as best as I can remember them. Dressing them up into fiction, in this case, wrecked what is essentially a long overdue confession.

Here’s the nonfiction version.

I watched my father in the front hall putting on his new, lambskin leather gloves. It was a sort of private ceremony. This was in early November, 1982, in Highland Park, Ill., a town north of Chicago along Lake Michigan. My father had just returned from a business trip to Paris. He’d bought the gloves at a place called Hermès, a mythical wonderland of a store. He pulled one on slowly, then the other, and held them up in the mirror to see how his hands looked in such gloves.

A week later, I stole them...[Keep Reading]…

Peter is the author of the novel Love and Shame and Love (Back Bay Books, 2012).

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Interview with Steven Schwartz

“Speaking Briefly on Long Subjects,” an interview with faculty member Steven Schwartz, appears online at Fiction Writers’ Review:

Little Raw Souls is a story collection, which tips the balance of your body of work ever so slightly in the direction of short fiction (three titles) over novels (two). Can you talk about your relationship with each form?

Generally speaking novels are beasts; short stories strokable creatures. I didn’t write a novel until I was in my forties. Stories were my first love that I left for bigger ambitions and when those bigger ambitions—the third and fourth novels—didn’t pan out I returned contritely to the form and fell in love all over again. I used to believe I needed to save everything for a novel. Such a good line or situation! Surely I can have some character say or do that in a novel! But I slowly came to understand what I probably knew all along: there are simply subjects better suited to the short story. Read more

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Jim Shepard on Epiphanies

Faculty member Jim Shepard discusses Flannery O’Connor and the sometimes fleeting nature of epiphanies in The Atlantic.

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Now, O’Connor really believes that we can flood, momentarily, with the kind of grace that epiphany is supposed to represent. But I think she also believes that we’re essentially sinners. She’s saying: Don’t think for a moment that because you’ve had a brief instant of illumination, and you suddenly see yourself with clarity, that you’re not going to transgress two days down the road.

I find this idea enormously useful in my own work. My characters are all about gaining an understanding of the right thing to do—and avoiding it anyway. That sense that we can be in some ways geniuses of our own self-destruction runs, in some ways, counter to the more traditional notion of the epiphany—which tells us that stories are all about providing information to characters who badly need it...[Read the Full Article]…

 

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“The Fog Town School of Thought”

Faculty member Maurice Manning’s poem “The Fog Town School of Thought” appears in the most recent issue of Orion Magazine.

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They should have taught us birds and trees
in school, they should have taught us beauty
and weaving bees and had a class
on listening and standing alone—
the children should have studied light
reflected from a spider web,
we should have learned the branches of streams
spread out like fingers or the veins
of a leaf—we should have learned the sky
is the tallest steeple, we should have known
a hill is a voice inside the sky— …[Keep Reading]…

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A Year in Reading: Patrick Somerville

Faculty member Patrick Somerville takes a look back at 2012 for The Millions:

My wife and I welcomed a son into the world in November of 2011, which spelled a bit of an adjustment to my reading habits this year and — if I’m being honest — a bit of an amplification to my TV-watching. I had less total private hours, and for the first time in my life I therefore found myself planning what I would read — sometimes months in advance — instead of naturally drifting from book to book, tracing the threads of this or that conversation with a friend, recalling a review, or happening upon something entirely unexpected.

There is romance and intellectual gratification to such wandering; my 2012 way is a little sad and a lot less sexy, but I have also found that time restrictions this year have made me read with more care, and with more appreciation for writers who sacrifice so much of their personal lives and creative vitality just to make something.

Which is to say that I read books with added admiration in 2012, and I read with renewed marvel at how many different tones, and emotions, and forms, and kinds of stories are possible with text and language as a foundation. Here is a little something about three that I liked a lot...[Keep Reading]…

Patrick is the author of This Bright River: A Novel (2012, Reagan Arthur Books).

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