Apply now for the Post-Graduate Semester!

L-R: Post-graduate student Lara Tupper (fiction, 2001)
with current students Margaret Draft, Emilie Beck, and Sarah Halper

“I became braver and more honest, packet by packet. Guided by my supervisor, I walked through doors I’d previously avoided in my memoir draft. My post-graduate term reinvigorated my need for writing community and my appreciation for the Program as a whole.”

Lara Tupper, post-graduate student in nonfiction
January-June 2014 semester

Graduates of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College now have an opportunity to return for a supervised semester toward a project in poetry, fiction, or nonfiction. 

Applicants must have received the MFA degree at least one year prior to application. Appropriate projects might include the completion of a book-length manuscript, new work that represents a radical departure in one’s prior aesthetic, the undertaking of a new form, or the exploration of another genre (poetry, fiction, or non-fiction).

Candidates should apply by September 15 for the January semester, or March 15 for the July semester. The application should be submitted through the Submittable link on our website at http://www.wwcmfa.org/alumni/post-graduate-semester/ and will require:

• application form
• a processing fee of $75
• a writing sample (10 pages of poetry, or 25 pages of prose, in the proposed genre);
• a personal essay describing the project, its goals and challenges, as well as how the student hopes to use faculty resources to address them in the creative and analytical work;
• a short analytical essay (now familiar to the applicant as an “annotation”) focusing on an issue of craft pertinent to his/her own work;
• one recommendation from a former Program supervisor.

No transcript is necessary.  Applications will be reviewed by the Director and the faculty members of the Admissions Team for the relevant semester.  Full information is available at http://www.wwcmfa.org/alumni/post-graduate-semester/.

Public Event Schedule
10:00 AM
Ransom Fellowship Hall
Daisy Fried: “…ice/Is also great/And would suffice”*: On Flatness
Last July, I lectured on “Heat”: the uses of urgent, angry and upset tones in (mostly) poetry. This July, my subject is flatness, by which I mean dispassion, non- or anti-heroic tones, coolness, even coldness. To allege flatness in a workshop is generally to level a criticism, but when is flatness an engine rather than an error? What’s exciting about lack of excitement? What are the ethical and expressive ramifications of flatness? How is it achieved? Candidates for discussion include Roy Fisher, Karen Solie, Thylias Moss, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Claudia Rankine, Joy Katz, Jennifer Moxley, Rae Armantrout, Louise Gluck and others. Handouts will be provided.
*Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice”

 

11:00 AM
Ransom Fellowship Hall
Robert Boswell: Take Me to the River: Stories that Invent and Manipulate Rituals
No reading is required for the lecture; however, ambitious students may wish to read the following: “Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time,” Peter Taylor; “The Wide Net,” Eudora Welty; “Naked Ladies,” Antonya Nelson; “Royal Beatings,” Alice Munro; “Talk Show,” Charles Baxter; “The Behavior of the Hawkweeds,” Andrea Barrett; “Graveyard Day,” Bobbie Ann Mason; “Barn Burning,” William Faulkner; “In the Gloaming,” Alice Elliott Dark; “Access to the Children,” William Trevor; and “The Day the Pig Fell in the Well” and “The Swimmer,” John Cheever. I’m still writing the lecture and I may not refer to all of these but they are in the mix.

 

Then join us at 4:30pm in Ransom Fellowship Hall for a reading featuring graduating students:
Rose Auslander
Cynthia Gunadi
Sarah Strong
Heather Muller
The Graduation Ceremony will follow these readings.
For more information, including a full schedule of public events, please visit the program website at http://wwcmfa.org/.

Public Event Schedule

Join us at 8:15pm in Ransom Fellowship Hall for a reading featuring graduating students:
Nathaniel Krause
Cynthia Quiñones
Sumita Mukherji
Rachele Ryan
Karen Smyte
For more information, including a full schedule of public events, please visit the program website at http://wwcmfa.org/.

Public Event Schedule
9:30 AM
Gladfelter Cannon Lounge
Maurice Manning: Hear Lies Andrew Baker: An Epitome on Figures of Speech
As the title of this lecture implies, I will offer a survey of figures of speech, how they indeed come to us through speech (through the ear first, as Frost advises), and how they work to enrich and enliven our writing. The lecture will look at portions of poems by Emily Dickinson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Hayden, Philip Larkin, and Edward Thomas.

10:45 AM
Gladfelter Cannon Lounge
Lauren Groff: Islands
“We are like islands in the sea,” William James wrote, “separate on the surface but connected in the deep.” Solitude breeds loneliness; human communication rose to salve, if not solve, our essential loneliness. During this lecture, we will think our way through issues of morality and connection through texts likely to include Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, Elizabeth Bishop’s “Crusoe in England,” Derek Walcott’s Omeros, Anton Chekov’s Sakhalin Island and Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island.

Then join us at 8:15pm in Gladfelter, Cannon Lounge for a reading featuring faculty members:
Charles Baxter
Stephen Dobyns
Debra Spark
Ellen Bryant Voigt
For more information, including a full schedule of public events, please visit the program website at http://wwcmfa.org/.

Public Event Schedule

9:30 AM
Ransom Fellowship Hall
James Longenbach: The Construction of Voice
Let’s say you want to write a sentence that by its fourth or fifth syllable makes its readers feel instantly engaged with an interlocutor, as if the sentence were not written but spoken. We often refer to the “voice” or the “speaker” of any piece of writing, but of course these are metaphors: if we feel strongly the illusion of a speaking voice it is because diction, rhythm, and syntax have been manipulated strategically to create that illusion. This lecture will examine the precise ways in which the illusion of spokenness is constructed almost instantly and then sustained over time in John Donne’s “The Canonization” and D. H. Lawrence’s “Pomegranate”; moving away from these primary examples, the lecture will also look at sentences by Robert Browning, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Louise Gluck, John Ashbery, and Frank Bidart; in addition, it will examine prose passages by D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce.

 

10:45 AM
Ransom Fellowship Hall
Charles Baxter: The Poet’s Story and the Dramatic Image
In trying to think about how dramatic images can carry the weight of a story’s emotions, particularly the most intense ones, I find myself going beyond what T. S. Eliot called “the objective correlative” and into the realm of the image that can stop time altogether for the sake of an almost mythic intensity. Such images can bear the weight of a powerful emotion more steadily than discursive language can. These are images that do not easily give up their meanings but somehow seem “right” within a narrative. I will probably use Janet Kauffman’s story “The Easter We Lived in Detroit” and Wright Morris’s story “A Fight Between a White Boy and a Black Boy in the Dusk of a Fall Afternoon in Omaha, Nebraska,” but students interested in this problem may want to hunt up Elizabeth Bishop’s stories and Timothy Findley’s novel The Wars. Other good examples of what I’m getting at are Sherwood Anderson’s “The Corn Planting,” Yasunari Kawabata’s story “The Sparrow’s Matchmaking” and, for poets, Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Eros Tyrannos.”

 

Then join us at 8:15pm in Ransom Fellowship Hall for a reading featuring faculty members:

Robert Boswell
Rodney Jones
Sarah Stone
Maurice Manning

For more information, including a full schedule of public events, please visit the program website at http://wwcmfa.org/.