Faculty Updates Archives - Page 27 of 35

Four Way Books

The Los Angeles Review of Books profiles Four Way Books, co-founded and directed by faculty member Martha Rhodes:

One reason that Four Way is so deeply invested in their authors’ work — not just as a product to sell but as a process to nurture — is the fact that everyone involved in the core operations of the press is also a writer: its founding editor, its associate directors, even its current publicist. Rhodes, the author of four books of poems, most recently The Beds (Autumn House Press), understands intimately the struggles a poet experiences during that final stage of putting a manuscript together. She draws on her own experience to offer advice. For some authors, that means pushing them through revisions in order to see their poems in a new light; for others, it might mean rethinking the book’s organization. “It’s important,” she says, “to challenge the manuscript. Make it bigger, make it smaller. Start here, end here. Start there, end there. Sections, no sections. 80 pages? 45 pages. 60 pages, 79 pages. 52 pages. Start hot? End cold? Start hot? Stay hot…?”

While Four Way’s authors “have generally already gotten to this point by the time they submit their work,” Rhodes advises her students (and, in her own work, reminds herself) “to look for the most essential poems in the collection — the poems they feel the book cannot live without, and to start to build from there — usually twelve to fifteen pages.” Working out from that core group, she looks for poems that “make sense when put into proximity with the other poems.” …[Keep Reading]…

December 28, 2012/by friendsofwritersblog

“Greenland”

Faculty Updates

A new short story by faculty member Patrick Somerville appears in Guernica Magazine.

Greenland

I.

Up there, not far from Greenland, north is not quite north. Rob has been reading about it. He’s learned that the Earth’s magnetic pole drifts nine kilometers a year, that it needs to be found every year by the Canadian government because it won’t stay put. Spiderlike, it roams the glacial landscape; it moves because the Earth’s magnetic field is disturbed by particles coming from the sun.

Rob likes how dense this fact seems, even though it implies a sort of leak in the world. He doesn’t want to think about the leak but he likes that we know it’s there.

He is a composer, he prefers closed systems, he prefers managing what’s perfect. He has always been this way.

Rob’s father is dead...[Keep Reading]…

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

December 20, 2012/by friendsofwritersblog

An Interview with Margot Livesey

Faculty Updates

Faculty member Margot Livesey was recently interviewed for Gulf Stream Magazine:

ML: I do feel that parts of myself are scattered throughout my various books. There is always something or someone in each of my novels that I care passionately about for personal reasons so, for instance, in The Missing World when I describe a woman losing part of her memory, I was in part writing about my own dependence on memory. Spending most of my time three thousand miles away from where I grew up, I am very dependent on memory to make my life whole. (Of course this is true for many people in the States.) I do feel that my life is larger when I’m writing a novel – it’s one of the reasons I love writing – but also when I’m reading one.…[Keep Reading]…

Margot is the author of the novel The Flight of Gemma Hardy (Harper Perennial, 2012).

December 18, 2012/by friendsofwritersblog

“Between Men”

Faculty Updates

A story by faculty member C. Dale Young, from Four Way Review:

Between Men

You never know you want to live until someone tells you that you will die. For four years, Leenck had worked from home processing accounts for an investment firm. Leenck was dying. Suffice it to say, he was painfully aware now that he was dying. He had already gone to the bank and withdrawn all of his savings: at the counter waiting for this manager or that supervisor to sign this or that form, the teller had looked at him that morning as if she knew, as if she, too, knew he was dying. It was as if everyone were staring at him. When Leenck arrived at his home, he telephoned his lawyer and told him to find a house for him to rent in Santa Monica, a small house near the beach, a house where no one would notice him. And within a few days, Leenck packed some of his clothes in a duffle bag and drove to the new place. It was that simple. He had no family in the U.S. His family had written him off for dead ages ago. He had no one who would notice him missing. His co-workers didn’t even know what he looked like...[Keep Reading]…

December 12, 2012/by friendsofwritersblog

Taung Child

Faculty Updates

Faculty member Alan Shapiro‘s poem “Taung Child” is online at Poetry Daily.

Taung Child

What led you down, first mother, from the good
dark of the canopy, and then beyond it?
What scarcity or new scent drew you out
that day into the vertical-hating flatness
of the bright veldt, alone, or too far from
the fringes of the group of other mothers
following the fathers out among the herds
and solitary grazers, the child clinging to your back
when the noiseless wing flash lifted him
away into the shocked light as the others ran? …[Keep Reading]…

Alan is the author of the poetry collection Night of the Republic (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012) and the novel Broadway Baby (Algonquin, 2012).

December 3, 2012/by friendsofwritersblog

C. Dale Young at Connotation Press

Faculty Updates

Faculty member C. Dale Young‘s poem “Revelation” appears online at Connotation Press: An Online Artifact.

Revelation

Walking through the forest, I felt the eyes

tracking me. I tested it. I made turn after turn, faster

faster, too fast for any animal. Something was tracking me,

continued to match my speed and cornering.

And when I stopped to turn, the man rushed at me,

struck me in the chest with the bare side of his forearm:

backward, backward, arch and then fall, the wind

forced from my chest, the impact strong enough to turn

my body into a ballistic that felled the small pine tree.

Struggling for breath, the heart so quick in my chest it hurt, ...[Keep Reading]…

December 2, 2012/by friendsofwritersblog

Antonya Nelson in The New Yorker

Faculty Updates

Faculty member Antonya Nelson‘s short story “Literally” appears in the most recent issue of The New Yorker.

She’s always late!” the sixteen-year-old sobbed. She’d set up the ironing board and its accessories like a shrine to housewifery. Heat shimmered in the air, had already slightly compromised the plastic of the spray bottle. Only Bonita could master the pleats of Suzanne’s ghastly uniform skirt. Other girls did not care. Still others had punctual housekeepers. Or parents who ironed.

“Suse is so anal,” her brother, Danny, noted from the table, where he and his father were studying their computer screens over breakfast, sharing news items and a bowl of pineapple. “She takes three showers a day, which is more than some people take in a year. In the future, that will be illegal. Seriously, I skip showers so that our carbon footprint won’t be so terrible.” …[Keep Reading]…

Antonya is the author of the story collection Some Fun (2010, Scribner) and the novel Bound (2010, Bloomsbury USA).

November 30, 2012/by friendsofwritersblog

A. Van Jordan at ASU

Faculty Updates

Faculty member A. Van Jordan (poetry, ’98) reads at Arizona State University’s “Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference.”

http://vimeo.com/39237979

A. Van Jordan is the author of the poetry collections Quantum Lyrics (Norton, 2009) and The Cineaste, available April, 2013.

November 25, 2012/by friendsofwritersblog

The Wonder of Bookstores

Faculty Updates

Former faculty member Richard Russo “pays homage to the shop where he fell in love with reading—and to the crucial role bookstores can still play in our lives” for Parade Magazine.

The first great bookstore in my life wasn’t really a bookstore. Alvord and Smith was located on North Main Street in Gloversville, N.Y., and if memory serves, they referred to themselves as stationers. I don’t recall the place being air-conditioned, but it was always dark and cool inside, even on a sweltering summer day. In addition to a small selection of books, the store sold stationery, diaries, journals, and high-end fountain and ballpoint-pen sets, as well as drafting and art supplies. The shelves went up and up the walls, and I remember wondering what was in the cardboard boxes beyond my reach. The same things on the shelves below? Other, undreamed-of wonders? Alvord and Smith was a store for people who—though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time—had aspirations beyond life in a grungy mill town. It was never busy...[Keep Reading]…

Richard is the author of, most recently, Elsewhere: A memoir (Knopf, 2012).

November 21, 2012/by friendsofwritersblog

New Poem by Laura Kasischke

Faculty Updates

Faculty member Laura Kasischke‘s poem “A Dog, About to Pounce, Looks Back” appears online at The Paris-American.

A Dog, About to Pounce, Looks Back

This impulse to go, to stay, to rush
after it, and to turn away. This
life like the table
set for celebration
on a glacier melting a little more every day.
And candles to be lit on a cake, and
someone who has never been happier beside
someone who cannot bear
to look into the happy one’s face...[Keep Reading]…

Laura is the author of the poetry collection Space, In Chain (Copper Canyon, 2011) and The Raising: A Novel (Harper Perennial, 2011).

November 10, 2012/by friendsofwritersblog

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