Charles Baxter Wins Rea Award

Charles Baxter, Warren Wilson faculty member since 1987, has won the 2012 Rea Award for the Short Story.  The $30,000 award recognizes a living American or Canadian writer whose work has made a ” significant contribution to the discipline of the short story form.”

Prize judges praised Baxter’s “original mind and ironic wit” and his “acute feeling for the landscape of marriage, childhood, and art.”

The award website has not yet updated its list of winners, but you can read the press release at the Washington Post.

Baxter is the author of Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (Vintage Contemporaries) (2012, Vintage) and Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction (2008, Graywolf).

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How To Be a Writer

Warren Wilson faculty member Michael Martone on subjects other than craft.  For instance, the author photo:

If you’re indoors, and you’re a writer, you might have your likeness captured next to a window or before a bookcase; if you’re outdoors, and you’re a writer, you might get that shot snapped before a tree, a field, a bench, a brick wall—anything that says “natural” or “real.” Barn doors are appreciated, as are horses. Nothing says “I’m published!” like a horse…

Read much more at Hunger Mountain.

Michael is the author of Four for a Quarter: Fictions (2011, Fiction Editions)

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Alix Ohlin’s “Book Notes”

Warren Wilson faculty member Alix Ohlin takes a new look at her debut short story collection, Babylon, for the music blog Largehearted Boy’s Book Notes series.  The series features authors discussing music playlists that are in some way relevant to their recently published books.

I wrote the seventeen stories in my book Babylon  over a period of ten years. Looking back at the music I listened to during that decade is nostalgic and at times embarrassing, sort of like surveying pictures of your old haircuts. I am also somewhat appalled to discover, in glancing at the acknowledgments section of the book, that the only lyrics for which the publisher had to get permission are from the theme song to the ‘80s TV show “The Facts of Life.” Kind of sad, really.

“The Facts of Life” notwithstanding, here are some songs, older and newer, that are dear to me and that I think fit the mood of the book...[Keep Reading]…

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This Bright River

The trailer for Warren Wilson faculty member Patrick Somerville‘s new novel, This Bright River, available June 26th from Reagan Arthur Books:

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/41118824 w=400&h=225]

This Bright River – Wayfarin’ from Patrick Somerville on Vimeo.

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Reading with Joan Aleshire

Warren Wilson faculty member Joan Aleshire will read from her new book, Happily (2012, Four Way Books) this evening at 6:30pm at the NYU Bookstore (726 Broadway, New York).  This is a free event.  Visit the store’s website for more information.

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Debra Spark on Kinship

Warren Wilson faculty member Debra Spark’s new post at The Arty Semite, “Do My Characters Need to Be Jewish?”:

Should I show my husband my work? My sister? My mother? Students sometimes ask me this. Go ahead, I say. Just don’t be too eager to listen to your family members’ opinions about your fiction. Parents and siblings bring too much non-literary baggage to their reading, so they’re not the ones to turn to for clearheaded advice. Which is a shame, I’ll be frank, because my mother thinks I’m a genius.

My siblings are kind (though not uniformly) about my work. There are a few comments, over the years, that hurt at the time, that pain me less in retrospect. Here’s one that just interested me. My mother read a few stories of mine (in draft) and then asked, “Why do all your characters have to be Jewish?”…[Keep Reading]…

Debra is the author of The Pretty Girl: Novella and Stories (Four Way, 2012).

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Writing Advice from Pete Turchi

Former Warren Wilson MFA Program Director Peter Turchi talks about writing advice with alumni Jeremy L.C. Jones (fiction, 2001):

What is the worst piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?

Turchi:   ”Give up,” followed closely by “pick one kind of writing.” The woman who ran the graduate program I attended was a font of terrible advice (many other people there were quite helpful). I didn’t know that her suggestion that I pick one genre (at the time I was a journalist, was working to write fiction, had written poems and a play, and had just started my first screenplay) was bad advice in general, but I knew it made no sense for me, as I enjoyed–and still enjoy–all kinds of writing...[Keep Reading]…

Pete is the author of Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (Trinity Press, 2007).

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New Poem by Heather McHugh

Read Warren Wilson faculty member Heather McHugh’s “transliteration of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 23” at The Chronicle online:

AS AUTHORS CAN’T PERFECT ONE AGENT

so e-agents can’t perfect an author.
His art (howbeit swapped shut) is his fire—
a high truth, gloom-free writ, or some centerpiece—
whose hint (torn watchband) reawakens hugenesses…[Keep Reading]…

Heather is the author of the poetry collection Upgraded to Serious, available May 15 from Copper Canyon Press.

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New Poems by C. Dale Young

Warren Wilson faculty member (and recently-named Guggenheim Fellow) C. Dale Young has two new poems in the current issue of The Collagist: “The Ninth Metal,” and “What is Revealed.”

The Ninth Metal

C. Dale Young

Who could fault a child for wanting to fly?
Exhibit 1: comic books. They are crammed with
heroes that fly: Green Lantern, Iron Man and,
of course, the ubiquitous Superman. I’m not crazy.
And I am not that naïve. Men aren’t supposed to fly...[Keep Reading]…

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An Interview with Kevin McIlvoy

MFA program faculty member Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy was recently interviewed at The Collagist:

For almost thirty years I’ve found myself writing a story and, later, its non-identical twin. Even after recognizing this pattern in my writing habits, I have not consciously set out to find that second story, though I have placed myself in readiness for it.  I am a sing-thinker mostly – and sometimes a think-singer.  I go where sound leads me: where it spills and where it pours. After I have written a story, I will sometimes hear the sonic aspect of it as “pouring” or “spilling.” I have a great love of Delta blues music; when I hear Blind Willie Johnson, for instance, I feel I am hearing song through which gospel music pours and the blues-cry spills; when I hear Charley Patton, I feel his pouring is the arriving train-sound and his spilling is the departing train-sound.

I hope it’s not too presumptuous of me to bring them up – I’m only saying that I try my best to learn from singer-storytellers.  After I wrote “When will we speak of Jesus,” which in its very title sounds to me like the narrator might be singing a form of gospel song, I could hear that at the next moment in his life this narrator might be singing as if he was a force of nature (as in kudzu, and as in a kind of horizon-to-horizon cloud-tide called “altocumulus undulatus asperatus”)...[Keep Reading]…

Mc is the author of The Complete History of New Mexico: Stories (2004, Graywolf Press).

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