Warren Wilson faculty members Tom Lux and Stuart Dischell, and alumni Jamaal May, enjoying their fellow Wallies’ company at the AWP conference in Chicago.
Photo courtesy Guy Shahar
From faculty member Debra Spark’s residency lecture, “New Wave Fabulism”:
If one’s source of wonder as a child, or perhaps even as an adult, comes from childhood narratives, then there may be a way to combine those narratives into the fiction you’re writing now. If, like me, you aren’t drawn to such narratives, what is your source of wonder? Can you locate it? Not on a map, but haul it up out of your subconscious and incorporate its pleasures into your own fiction? I ask myself this sort of question and then get annoyed […] But why not? Why not remember what it was that so charmed you about stories as a child and incorporate that delight into your fiction.
Debra is the author of The Pretty Girl: Novella and Stories
From faculty member Stacey D’Erasmo’s residency lecture, “Love Among the Ruins”:
Like electricity, ideas travel. Sparks fly, unpredictably, ignite previously solid structures and we are changed. Perhaps the most inspiring aspect of these tropological exchanges in modern fiction is the abundant evidence they offer to the effect that categories, whether of marketing or of identity, are so obviously permeable. We look at one another, we read one another, and something happens on both sides. We connect. We long to be like, to be similes. We can’t help it and in fact, it may be that there is no other way to get there, to whatever that place is […] It is an odd sort of falling in love. Writer to writer, book to book, metaphor to metaphor. It happens both with and without us, but the profundity of its effect is undeniable.
Stacey is the author of The Sky Below
The 2012 Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry is open through March 31. The contest is open to any poet writing in English who has not already published a book-length collection. The 2012 contest will be judged by poet D.A Powell.
From Charles Baxter’s essay, “Talking Forks: Fiction and the Inner Life of Objects,” from his book, Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction
“During the time I worked on this essay, I tried to explain its subject to my wife and son, at dinner. My son, who was fifteen, let it be known that he did not understand what I was talking about and when he did understand it, he didn’t like it and thought I had gone off the deep end. ‘The inner life of objects?’ he’d ask. ‘Is that like…uh, talking forks?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes, that is what it’s like. Those odd moments when things seem to say something.’ ‘What odd moments?’ he’d ask.
Outside the window is an apple tree. It is August as I write these sentences. For the last few days a squirrel has been foraging in the tree, and sometimes it descends low enough on one of the branches in front of my study window to take a good look at me. It can stare at me for two minutes without moving. Then it goes back to its business, as I do mine.
We do not spray the tree, and the apples growing there are mostly green or wormy. During the time that I have been writing this essay, the apples have been falling to the ground in the backyard. Every now and then, writing a sentence, I have heard the sound of an apple hitting the earth. Before the sound of that impact, there is a breath, a swish, as the fruit drops through the branches and leaves. It is not a sigh but sounds like one. The sound has nothing to do with my current moods, but I listen for it, and I have been counting the number of apples that have fallen during the last ten pages of this essay. There have been eighteen.”
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