Our program will once again have a table at the AWP Conference. This year’s gathering will be held in Minneapolis. The Bookfair is open Thursday, April 9 to Saturday, April 11 from 9:00 to 5:00. We seek volunteers, in one- or two-hour shifts, to answer questions from prospective students and to talk about their experience in our MFA program.
If you’re coming to AWP and are able to donate some of your time toward staffing our table, please contact our Friends of Writers Board member Mary Jo Thompson at [email protected] by March 20 with specifics about your availability. Mary Jo will coordinate the schedule, and will be back in touch with you to confirm.
Our thanks in advance for your assistance. As one of our recent print ads stated: “Our graduates are our best advertisement.” Your many successes, and your abiding enthusiasm for our program provide impressive evidence of what the Warren Wilson MFA yields and makes possible for your lives as writers.

Public Event Schedule

10:00 AM
Ransom Fellowship Hall
JANE HAMILTON: Turning Gold into More Gold: How the Master Guides the Student

This lecture takes a look at the student/master dynamic in the stories “White Angel”, by Michael Cunningham, and Cheever’s “Goodbye, My Brother.” I aim to explore the matter of being the

student in the glare of, or with the guidance of the master. What do we hope for when we speak to an avowed masterpiece? Are we propelled by courage or idiocy or both? How do these particular stories vary in their judgment, their vision? (What exactly did Flannery O’Connor mean when she talked about “the testing point of the eye”?) I’ll also touch upon Persuasion and Gone Girl, and, not least, Harriet the Spy.

 

11:00 AM
Ransom Fellowship Hall
MARIANNE BORUCH: Charm

Which is not quite a matter of tone, not a gymnast’s trick or even a legit ambition probably, but what? Is it crucial to memorable writing? That’s the triggering question and concern of this lecture. Charm as scary dark or sudden light, charm as willed or simply wished for, or outright rejected, distained; charm as accident, a thing haunted in the side vision, a delight or semi-toxic in poems and beyond; charm as not a complete sentence. Perhaps cast also into this net will be metaphor (what is it really?), heavy-handed thuds, unforeseen turns, flying babies, distant views, choral thinking, centuries of brain-washed bedazzled snakes, the first person to write poems in English (that would be the dreaming Caedmon), an insect in an ear, a cello lesson and other mysteries. Along the way, we might put an eyeglass to poems by James Tate, Charles Simic, Kathleen Peirce, Russell Edson, Louis MacNiece and possibly others. And what about the making and remaking, process and progression having something to with charm? If there’s time and the right segue (plus the machine-gods willing), you might hear part of a recorded interview about this last idea, zeroing in on The Doors and their method (and if not, I will give you the web address for a close listen although charm–not exactly the first quality one considers when that wily, unnerving and visionary 60s band is mentioned).

Handouts provided. Meanwhile, be thinking about charm and the graceful, sometimes dysfunctional angels who dance on the head of that pin–and how such spirits aid and derail your own writing.

(Full audio for all residency lectures will be available in the MFA Store in February:  http://www.wwcmfa.org/mfa-store/)

 

Then join us at 4:30pm in Ransom Fellowship Hall for a reading featuring graduating students:

Fay Dillof

Avra Elliott

Jennifer Steinorth

Kevin Wheeler

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:

Abby Horowitz

Kimberly Kruge

Adam Jernigan

Ann Lovett

Marta Rose

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 faculty members:

Karen Brennan

Liam Callanan

James Longenbach

Robin Romm

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
DOMINIC SMITH: The Year without a Summer: On the Uses of Weather and Atmosphere in Fiction

Historically, 1816 was known as the year without a summer. A volcanic eruption in Indonesia affected the global climate and also had widespread cultural impact. It spawned the intense, chromatic sunsets captured by the young British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner and it kept Mary Wollstonecraft and her party indoors during their rainy, cold season in Switzerland. The English tourists turned to ghost stories to pass the time and, not long after, Frankenstein was born, rife with motifs of cold, wet, unyielding weather. Lord Byron also wrote his poem “Darkness” as a direct result of the unusual weather.

Weather is often taken for granted in fiction, or it’s treated as a simplistic, overly-determined extension of our characters’ moods. As our own climate changes, it’s worth re-examining the role of

weather in our storytelling.

In this lecture I hope to examine the legacy of weather as it’s been passed down from Gothic and Victorian literatures, moving beyond “the pathetic fallacy.” We will look specifically at uses of weather in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Hardy’s Tess of the D’urbervilles before moving onto contemporary examples in Rick Bass’s “The Hermit’s Story” and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. Familiarity with these texts would be useful, though not required.

 

10:45 AM
Ransom Fellowship Hall
JAMES LONGENBACH: Lyric Knowledge

Poems exist not so much to give us the news as to allow us to experience viscerally how it feels to get the news; people who read Keats’s ode “To Autumn” again and again don’t do so because they

need to be reminded that in the temperate zones of the northern hemisphere leaves begin to turn colors and fall off the trees in September. This lecture will look at poems by Stevens, Frost, Shakespeare, and Bishop; that it will also discuss passages of prose by Hemingway and Joyce suggests that what it means by lyric knowledge—the thrilling rediscovery of what we already know—is not something acquired necessarily from poems. Poems exist to foreground the event of the their language over the event they happen to narrate or describe, but any good piece of writing might, through the rigorous work of its syntax, create a temporal experience that feels infinitely repeatable on the page, asking us

to return again and again for what we already know. Another word for that experience is structure, which is the opposite of a static thing.

Handouts provided. Texts will include: Stevens’s “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters” and “The Auroras of Autumn”; Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”; Shakespeare’s 94th sonnet; Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses”; passages of prose from Hemingway’s In Our Time and Joyce’s Ulysses.

(Full audio for all residency lectures will be available in the MFA Store in February:  http://www.wwcmfa.org/mfa-store/)

 

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

Ellen Bryant Voigt

Jeremy Gavron

Alan Williamson

Megan Staffel

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