The MFA Program’s own Reed Turchi Fellow speaks with Frank Stasio of North Carolina Public Radio about starting his own business as a sophomore at UNC:
Listen to the full interview at WUNC.org
Another photo from office manager and webmaster Alissa Whelan:
Warren Wilson faculty member Alix Ohlin talks about her new novel, Inside
Read more about the book at RandomHouse.com
From Kevin McIlvoy‘s January 2012 residency lecture, “The One Reader”:
“The prose poet has the compulsion to commit errors, not avoid them–it is the marvelous wreck, the experience of the auto salvage yard, the trace of the path and not the path.”
Full recordings of faculty lectures are available for purchase on the MFA Program website.
Thanks to Alissa Whelan for these shots of the spring campus!
Alumna Erin Stalcup’s AWP conference panel presentation is now available at Structure & Surprise, the supplementary blog for the craft book Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns:
It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize,” which I hear as an argument for surprise in all art. I’m particularly interested in surprise at the endings of short stories—when I recognize what I didn’t see coming. The stories I love, I can’t look away from—I want to lose my breath, I want the floor to drop away, I want to be blown away—and often this happens at the very end, sometimes the last line. John Gardner said that every ending should be both surprising and inevitable, so I’m curious how to make that work when the ending is heavy on the surprise part. I’d argue that sheer reversal in an ending results in unsatisfying surprise. The classic stories that end in a switch are fun to read, but you can only read them once: Guy de Maupassant wrote “The Necklace” in 1884, and O. Henry wrote “The Gift of the Magi” in 1905, and most people probably know those plots by heart, but the surprise of reversal is the only purpose of the story, which ruins future readings. Interestingly, both stories were first published in newspapers, a forum that asks for a single reading, then disposal. Those stories offer pleasure, they fulfill a human craving for reversal that’s possibly left over from myths and fairy tales—but they aren’t the most satisfying stories I know, and I don’t want to write stories like them. That kind of surprise feels old fashioned, historical...[Keep Reading]…
Erin’s fiction has appeared in PANK, The Kenyon Review, and The Sun, among others. She’s currently a PhD candidate at the University of North Texas, where she’s finishing her first collection,Gravity & Other Stories.
Sara Slaughter (poetry ’11) recently interviewed Warren Wilson faculty member Antonya Nelson for Room 220, “a virtual clearing house for news about New Orleans books and literature.”
Antonya Nelson is always the first to admit that she’s not good with plot. Her latest novel, Bound, begins with a car crash, and centers around characters who live in the same time and place as the serial killer known as BTK (Bind, Torture, and Kill). The action slowly escalates, but never quite reaches a climax. The drama in Bound stems from Nelson’s subtle exploration of what we believe we know about our loved ones, our friends, ourselves, and the world around us. She asks readers to interrogate our notions of love, friendship, fidelity, and family as forces capable of creating bonds between individuals...[Keep Reading]…
From faculty member Dominic Smith‘s’ 2009 residency lecture, “Varieties of Movement: Plot and Beyond in Fiction”:
I prefer to use the term plot dynamic rather plot type to convey the notion that plot is best understood as a fluent tendency, a unifying force, rather than an absolute category. Like light it can be more than one thing at once, container and type as well as force and energy.
Dominic is the author of Bright and Distant Shores: A Novel
A recent story by faculty member Alix Ohlin:
Demi’s Last Night Out
The party is in the Hollywood Hills, at someone’s house that looks familiar, or maybe all these houses look alike to me at this point. We’re outside by the pool and the air smells of citronella and night-blooming jasmine. I’m drinking a Red Bull and watching a couple of girls in sundresses leap into the shimmering water, the thin fabric revealing their underwear, both of them shrieking loudly to make sure everybody pays attention.
They are lovely, those girls.
The music is so loud it pulses inside my chest, as if it’s replacing my heart, which would be fine with me. Two guys come up and start dancing. They look exactly the same, androgynous and pretty, with floppy hair. It’s a look I like, feel strong against, and we all three sway together.
When the music pauses I order one of them to get me another Red Bull. He nods and bows; he likes being ordered around.
“Chivalry is not dead,” he says.
“Good to know,” I say. …[Keep Reading at Salon.com]…
Alix’s new novel, Inside
From faculty member Judy Doenges’ 2009 residency lecture, “We Are the One: The First-Person Plural in Fiction”:
I happen to think that any point of view in fiction is political in some sense. At least in the sense that it sets up what amounts to a kind of intellectual, aesthetic and even social contract among characters, reader, and author. Point of view is a kind of meta-relationship that exists off the page in some sense. Reader and character meet as equals. [ …] I don’t think contemporary fiction writers can or should speak for a nation, a city, or a generation. Doing so would be presumptuous, perhaps detrimental to the work. […] The we is finally who each of us is in relation to the fictional character that teaches us, guides us and inspires us. So go our real lives in which we try to bond with the like and the not so like minded, the non-fiction characters who also inform who we are. It’s that chosen we that gives us power. Our truly political we is still elusive, which is a very good thing.
Judy is the author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World
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