Tonight we celebrate the achievements of the class of 2018.   Thank you to the families and friends and partners who have helped the graduates reach this moment. We know there have been many sacrifices and we’re grateful for your belief in their work and your support of your graduate at moments of doubt and fear and tiredness.

There was much tiredness.

What I’d like to say to you is that it’s not over. This part is over, yes, but this is only the beginning. As you enter the free world, that is, a world free of packet deadlines, annotations, three week increments of productivity, you’ll take us with you. You’ll remember the words of faculty and peers and you’ll take with you our encouragement and the ongoing assistance of the friends you’ve made in this program. All of this is necessary because it’s not easy out there. Read more

Public Lectures: Thursday, January 11
In Canon Lounge, Gladfelter

Thursday, January 11                                CHRISTINE KITANO:  Where the Persona Poem
9:30 AM                                                         Meets Research: Aesthetic and Historical Demands                                                           

In this lecture, we’ll consider how to balance both historical and aesthetic demands when writing persona poems, particularly when those personae are historically marginalized speakers. Such poems fuse both the personal and political. How does the poet utilize historical research to shape such a voice? How does the poet balance the necessities of presenting the historical contexts with creating a dramatic arc? How does the poet, in the span of a brief lyric or narrative sequence, create a full and responsive voice? Reference points will include Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Beyond Heart Mountain, and notes from Carl Dennis’s Poetry as Persuasion. Handouts will be provided.

 Thursday, January 11                                LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH:  The Outcast as Central
10:45 AM                                                      Character: How Characters Who Break the Rules Become a Prism into Your World  

In this lecture we will explore the power of the outcast to fully render your world, whether that world is realistic or fantastic (but especially fantastic). The term “outcast” as deployed here can take many forms, from characters excluded for minor social flubs to characters fighting to bring down entire systems. The character’s goal isn’t the point, but the manner in which they move through their world to accomplish it. Most likely texts: “Somebody’s Baby” by Diane Cook. Borne by Jeff VanderMeer, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker, and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.

Public Readings by Graduating Students

Thursday, January 11—Fellowship Hall, behind Ransom Chapel, 8:15 p.m.
Kate Kaplan, Robin Rosen Chang, Kate Lister Campbell, Shannon Winston

Public Readings: Tuesday, January 9
In Canon Lounge, Gladfelter, 8:15 p.m.

David Haynes, Debra Allbery, Dominic Smith, Matthew Olzmann

Public Lectures: Saturday, January 6
In Canon Lounge, Gladfelter

Saturday, January 6                         NINA McCONIGLEY:  New Territories: Migration
9:30 AM                                                         and Exile                                 

The poet Amit Majmudar says this, “You’ve come of age in the age of migrations./ The board tilts, and the bodies roll west./ Fanaticism’s come back into fashion,/ come back with a vengeance./ In this new country, there’s no gravitas,/ no grace…” This lecture will be about the literature (focusing on fiction with some other genres thrown in) of migration and exile. From the Book of Exodus to Ovid’s Poetry of Exile, writers have long examined what it means to leave one’s country, to migrate to the unknown. We’ll look at how these migrations shape characters into new territories and internal spaces. What does migration and exile mean to us as writers? Any journey that has a geographical and social repositioning asks our characters to reconsider themselves, to examine not only the self, but the other.

We’ll likely look at Moshid Hamin (Exit West), Tayeb Salih (Season of Migration to the North), Agha Shahid Ali (The Country Without a Post Office), W. G. Sebald (Austerlitz), Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony), Solmaz Sharif (Look), Vladimir Nabokov (Speak, Memory), and Kiran Desai (The Inheritance of Loss).

Saturday, January 6                         MARIANNE BORUCH: Orienteering and Trial
10:45 AM                                                      Balloons                   

This lecture is a pinball machine, a set of shelves, a seed bed, a hoarded basement’s languid mess. Which is to say, it is a five-part invention (Audio, Embarrassment, Spellcheck, Wild Blue Yonder, Shirt) taking on a number of subjects: the beloved particulars of image, rhyme and other kinship sounds, metaphor, lineation, on to various sorts of transformation yet to be named exactly. And anecdotes about hairstyles, airplanes, 8^th grade, dark-eyed Juncos, public swimming pools, etc. Plus why we write at all. Eventual reference will be made to the work and continuing presence of Joseph Conrad, Emily Dickinson, Larry Levis, John Clare, Laura Jensen, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. The aim also is to introduce a rather addictive form of literary architecture —I call it the “wee essay”—which is a DIY lyric device of attention crossed by bewilderment that with any luck carries a faint rhetorical aftersound, just enough to bother you and perhaps show what can be managed with fewer words than might be good for you.

Handouts will be provided. No experience necessary but curiosity would be grand.

Public Readings: Saturday, January 6
In Canon Lounge, Gladfelter, 8:15 p.m.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Robert Boswell
Connie Voisine
Antonya Nelson

Public Readings: Thursday, January 4
In Canon Lounge, Gladfelter, 8:15 p.m.

Michael Parker
Martha Rhodes
Marisa Silver
Daniel Tobin