Thank You for Killing My Novel

Reviewers at the NY times have admitted their mistaken reading of Warren Wilson faculty member Patrick Somerville‘s novel This Bright River.  Patrick recently wrote about his experience for Salon:

Last Sunday night I spent a good five minutes lying facedown on my couch, my head pressed into the crack between our old tan cushions, my arms pinned awkwardly under my chest, emitting a sequence of guttural moaning noises as my wife silently read Janet Maslin’s newly posted New York Times review of my novel, “This Bright River,” and then – after some gasps and one very disconcerting, empathy-laden, “Oh no” – attempted to describe the review’s contents aloud. I’d only been able to read the headline...[Keep Reading]…

You can also read the article at The Atlantic Wire.

 

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Maurice Manning Wins LMU Award

Warren Wilson faculty member Maurice Manning was recently awarded the Lee Smith Award from Lincoln Memorial University.  The prize honors Lee Smith, one of Appalachia’s best known writers, by recognizing individuals who have “worked to preserve and promote Appalachian culture.”

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A Story of Sunlight and Mystery

Warren Wilson faculty member Pablo Medina reviews Tres tristes tigres, or Three Trapped Tigers, by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, for NPR Books:

I’d left Havana when I was 12. After the initial excitement of landing in New York, I fell into a miserable nostalgia for a past that would never be again. Gone were the tropical gardens and blue skies, the labyrinth of streets and arcades, the allure of those soft, silky nights that I’d barely had the chance to experience. Over the years, 1950s Havana has been stereotyped as a sinful city, where tourists came to lose their money, drink good rum and have their sexual fantasies satisfied. But the Havana I experienced was physically beautiful — filled with sunlight and mystery. Three Trapped Tigers was the book I needed to show me that, if the past could not be recovered, it could be invoked through books...[Keep Reading]…

Pablo is the author of Cubop City Blues (2012, Grove Press).

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Interview with C. Dale Young

Warren Wilson faculty member C. Dale Young was recently interviewed at The Collagist:

What inspired you to write poems about the Pietà sculpture and Hawkman respectively?

The poem “What Is Revealed” is, for me, more about perceptions of mental and emotional stability than actually about the Pieta.  But reading about how Michelangelo chiseled his name across the sash of the sculpture, something he had never done with any of his other work, is really what prompted me to start the poem.  That behavior could be seen as either quite normal or completely mad.  As for Hawkman, I always found the fact he had wings but didn’t really use them to fly a fascinating thing...[Keep Reading]…

C. Dale is the author of Torn (2011, Four Way).

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Interview with Patrick Somerville

Warren Wilson faculty member Patrick Somerville was recently interviewed in Time Out Chicago:

Late last football season, with the Bears tanking and the Packers still undefeated, author Patrick Somerville was on a walk with his wife in their Edgewater neighborhood. The Green Bay native wore his Pack hat and, strapped to his chest, their newborn son. A passing motorist yelled, “Packers suck—you suck!”

“And I yelled back at him,” Somerville says. “I was like what the fuck am I doing, I have a baby here.”

This theme of modifying your behavior for family—and your family modifying your behavior—runs through his latest novel, This Bright River.

“Families are what we are, in one way, and they are what we don’t want to be, in another way,” says Somerville…“[Family] is where our lives are.”

…[Keep Reading]…

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Dean Bakopoulos on the NEA “Art Works” Podcast

Warren Wilson faculty member Dean Bakopoulos discusses his first novel, Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon (2006, Mariner Books), for the National Endowment for the Arts weekly podcast:

I wouldn’t think that any of my high school teachers would have thought I would be a novelist. I wrote bad poetry about girls who broke up with me, you know, this average teenage angst-ridden poetry. It was in college at the University of Michigan where I really sort of started to do this seriously and decided that this is what I wanted to do, and I sort of made that announcement to my family that I was going to be a novelist. And when they asked me what my backup plan was I didn’t really have one, which I think terrified both of my parents, but they were fairly supportive. They were skeptical but you know, I tell my students now — so many of them want to be writers — and sometimes I meet their parents or get an e-mail from their parents or they’re very worried about these kids who want to grow up and be creative writers as a career. And I tell them, you know, “This is a really freeing time in American culture because there are unemployed engineers, there are unemployed scientists, there are unemployed computer specialists. You might as well be unemployed because you tried to do what you loved and it didn’t work out rather than be unemployed from a job you never really wanted in the first place.” So I tell my students, “Go for what you think you want to do. If it doesn’t work and you don’t have a job, you’re no different, it’s no different to be an unemployed writer than it is to be an unemployed engineer.” You need a plan a plan B at that point. But if you are good and you have some talent and more importantly you have the drive, I tell my students to go for it...[Listen to the Full Interview]…

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Patrick Somerville at The Rumpus

Warren Wilson faculty member Patrick Somerville’s fiction was recently posted as part of the “Sunday Fiction” series on The Rumpus blog:

Sunday Rumpus Fiction: Haley

It was the beginning of September and I had been watching my uncle’s house for just over a month when I sensed St. Helens preparing to mourn the death of summer.  And I was reminded of a small thing I loved, something I had forgotten in my time in Oregon beside the authoritarian Pacific: In the Midwest when the leading edge of fall is near, there is a day when you’re walking and the sky looks the same and the temperature is the same and you look up and see that there’s one leaf amid a thousand on a tree that’s no longer quite the same.  It hasn’t yet turned but it bears the mark and something in you tightens up. It’s the reconnaissance scout of autumn, the test dye of the weaker sun, you’re still a good ways out but there won’t be any hiding. Which means: It’s coming, and we—the trees—we wish you the best, my friends. We’ll be back when it’s nice, go the trees, but you’re fucked for now, please accept it. And this year, that day came as I walked back up toward the overlook doing my best to identify the whispering leaves with the field guide I’d pulled from Denny’s shelf. Because I really did want to know more about their names. The feeling of ignorance my return to my hometown had stoked—that I knew nothing, really, and now it was so goddamned acute there was nothing to do but memorize—had fully fused with the dense lump of diamond-dread I’d been feeling on and off concerning the mess I’d left in Portland, and the two feelings now seemed to be working in ghastly harmony, and I did not know what to make of it. I felt as though I knew too little about the physical world, and that knowing more might help me, but that this was only the superficial shell of my problem, and that coming home had made the feeling so present that it was perhaps better to just run the other way...[Keep Reading]…

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

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Debra Allbery in the Kenyon Review

Program Director Debra Allbery’s poem “Ledger” appears in the summer, 2012 issue of the Kenyon Review:

Ledger

It is a small life.
Opening again morning’s
louvered box, compass points of dew,
mockingbird’s rote sampling
from the hemlock.

The dogs bowing and circling,
pawing the dust motes...[Keep Reading]…

Debra’s most recent collection is Fimbul-Winter (2010, Four Way).

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“Provincial Thought”

Warren Wilson faculty member Maurice Manning’s poem is up at the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Provincial Thought

We get things in our head, a sort
of wonder I suppose, a notion,
about where to stand on the hill to see
the white blur of a steeple eight
or maybe ten miles away
at the center of a country town
whose school has been consolidated,
and the little country store, where news
and gossip spread around and maybe
a local discovery was claimed
by one of the loafers there, is closed...[Keep Reading]…

Maurice is the author of The Common Man (2010, Houghton Mifflin).

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Stacey D’Erasmo Wins Lambda Foundation Award

Warren Wilson faculty member Stacey D’Erasmo has won the Lambda Literary Foundation’s 2012 Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, for her novel, A Seahorse Year (2005, Mariner Books).

The award consists of two cash prizes of $5000 to authors who have made significant contributions to LGBT literature and community.  This year’s prize recognizes Stacey and novelist Brian Leung for “creating works which incorporate multi-faceted LGBT characters and who are themselves often involved in the mentoring and teaching of a new generation of LGBT writers.”

Awards will be presented June 4, 2012 at the 24th Annual Lambda Literary Awards ceremony in New York City.

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