The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College is delighted to announce the faculty for its summer 2017 semester:

Debra Allbery (Director)

Andrea Barrett

Robert Boswell

Karen Brennan

Liam Callanan

Christopher Castellani

Stephen Dobyns

Daisy Fried

Brooks Haxton

David Haynes

Jeremy Gavron

Rodney Jones

Sally Keith

James Longenbach

Maurice Manning

Heather McHugh

Ana Menéndez

Matthew Olzmann

Hanna Pylväinen

Robin Romm

Alan Shapiro

Dominic Smith

Debra Spark

Sarah Stone

Peter Turchi

Laura van den Berg

Ellen Bryant Voigt

C. Dale Young

Visit  THE MFA STORE to find the latest batch, as well as 20-years of outstanding presentations from current and past faculty members.

And visit our YOUTUBE channel to watch preview clips of some of our recent lectures.

The following remarks were given by Daniel Tobin (poetry, ’90), Poetry Faculty, MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, on January 12, 2017.

Graduation Remarks, Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, January 12, 2017

What better way to begin my first foray into an unfamiliar genre—in this case the venerable custom of offering graduation remarks—than with the familiar welcome to fellow faculty, to the college’s administration and staff, and especially to this residency’s graduates, their families and friends. We join together today in our own admittedly quirky but beloved ritual, our own eccentric and ebullient take on tradition, to celebrate the achievement of our newest graduates, an accomplishment that to my mind at least is neither an arrival nor a departure, but something more like an indelible, essential way-marker or station along a pilgrimage, though the route ahead isn’t entirely known—an understatement–and the way here was anything but singular. Rather, each of us found our passage to this unassuming magic mountain through the clearings and bewilderments of our own lives, and though it may have felt like it at times, none of us made it this far by themselves.

I say “none of us” now with some conviction since I, too, am a graduate of the program, and I’ve been doubly honored over the years to teach here with many of my own esteemed teachers, fellow writers, friends—all scarily brilliant people. That deep and extensive sense of community makes me want to revise the word “familiar” I used above to “familial,” especially since this program does nothing if not seek to dislodge “the familiar” from its moorings in the received idea, the received poetic image, the received narrative plot, and to help us to encounter the world again, to borrow from Wallace Stevens, in a manner “at once more truly and more strange.” “Familial” is also truer to the experience of community one encounters in the program, and after one leaves the program. And it is truer to the kind of support given by partners, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, and friends without whom their beloveds might not have been able to embark on their individual artistic paths as short story writers, novelists, poets, much less make their way to standing here today.

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Public Event Schedule

Join us for faculty lectures in Canon Lounge in Gladfelter:

Friday, January 6 -9:30 AM

C. J. HRIBAL: The Intimate Distance of Bohumil Hrabal 

Novels and stories narrated in the first person are essentially monologues, but what happens when this is taken to an extreme? Bohumil Hrabal likes to call his writing style “palavering,” or as the critic James Wood calls it, “anecdote without end.” His narratives move forward through narrators who, once they’re wound up, just keep talking and talking and talking, spilling all their (and other people’s) secrets, like the singer in Sonny Boy Williams’ “Don’t Start Me to Talkin’” (“Don’t start me to talkin’, I’ll tell everything I know”). This lecture will serve as an introduction to Hrabal’s work, with attention paid to what we can learn from this highly idiosyncratic style. Texts discussed will include: Closely Watched Trains, I Served the King of England, and Too Loud a Solitude. Other texts referred to will include The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, and his story collection, The Death of Mr. Baltisberger (among others). Handouts will be provided, but reading one of the above is recommended.

Friday, January 6 -10:45 AM

ELEANOR WILNER: Disguise and Discovery: The Masks of Art

The talk will explore opposing uses of the mask in the world of doing vs. the world of making; in the latter, the role of the mask of art in the imaginative opening of identity to plurality, and of self to other. Handouts will be provided.

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Join us at 8:15 p.m. in Canon Lounge in Gladfelter for a reading featuring faculty members:

Martha Rhodes
Kevin McIlvoy
Connie Voisine
Laura van den Berg

For more information, including a full schedule of public events, please visit the program website at http://www.wwcmfa.org/public-schedule-for-mfa-winter-residency-is-here/.