Post-MFA Conference Announcement

From Peter Klank (fiction, ’85), 2012 Post-MFA Conference coordinator:

Hi everyone,

As I hope you’ve all seen, we’ve got a fantastic group coming to the conference this year, with several more signed up since I sent out the list. However, we really hope to get a few more attendees (we’re at 33 right now), so I’m happy to announce that the Conference Committee has voted to waive the $100 late fee for this year. In addition, the drop-dead deadline of June 23 has been extended to (postmarked) Friday, June 29.

You know you’ve wanted to come; take the plunge. Where else are you going to get the kind of time, focus, and attention to your work that you’ll get here? We’ve got people signed up for Fiction and Poetry Workshops and Manuscript Review (longer poetry collections) and Fiction Roundtable (longer fiction works). Or just hang out with a bunch of writers, a bunch of Wallys, as a matter of fact.

Click here for more information about the conference.

If you think you’ll be signing up, it would be great if you’d drop me a line at [email protected].

Really, are you seriously still sitting on the fence?

Good writing; see you in August.

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Entryways

The Summer 2012 MFA residency is almost here!  We’ll be posting public reading and lecture schedules soon.  In the meantime here’s Program Director Debra Allbery’s opening remarks from last January, which may just inspire you to revisit that lonely piece which has been languishing in your ‘drafts’ folder, waiting for your kind attention:

Entryways

This talk begins with a stairway in Florence, in the Laurentian library which Giulio d’Medici commissioned Michelangelo to build in 1525.  He worked on the library’s vestibule and reading room for about ten years before he left for Rome.  Although Michelangelo himself wasn’t involved the stairway’s actual construction, it was built according to his specific written instructions and a clay model he’d made.  It was a marvel both in its reintroduction of architectural elements from the past, as well as in its originality and innovation. Giorgio Vasari, who not only chronicled the lives of the artists of the time but was one of those who built the stairway, wrote, “He made such strange breaks in the design of the steps and he departed in so many details and so widely from normal practice that everyone was astonished” (680).

Read more

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Post-MFA Conference Reminder

The 2012 Post-MFA Conference is only a few months away.  Remember, registration closes June 16th.

The Conference will surprise you. But the only way to know that is to come. Each year is different, and that’s the beauty of the thing. A conference is not a residency without faculty and it’s not a reunion. It’s a small summer oasis filled with peers who will amaze and encourage you, with laughter, with as much or as little work as you’d like. But the very best part of the conferences is meeting Wallys who were in the program at different times over many years – creating a lovely confusion of dates and faces. At last summer’s conference the attendees raised $900 earmarked for scholarships for recent graduates. But there are opportunities for everyone. So come. You’ll be happy. You’ll be surprised.”  –Nancy Koerbel

For more information, visit the Conference Info page at Friends of Writers.

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Faculty Lectures Online

Spring Cleaning! Audio Upgrade!

We are delighted to announce that the first of many sets to come of our wonderful archival lectures have been cleaned, audio-upgraded, and digitized.  Ten terrific poetry lectures and classes delivered between 1989 and 2000, including ones by Heather McHugh and Larry Levis, are now available for download and sale. For a short time we are offering the first set at a special, celebratory low price.  Catalog copy describes each lecture, enabling you to have a good idea of what you are buying. Each lecture is introduced by Ellen Bryant Voigt and all monies raised go to the MFA scholarship funds.  For further details please see the FoW web page!

Click here to go to the FoW store

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Faculty Lectures, Instantly!

Stay tuned for the debut of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers’ Store, featuring downloadable faculty lectures.  The first group of lectures will be offered at a celebratory discounted price, and all store purchases benefit Friends of Writers’ MFA scholarship funds.

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WW Faculty Awarded Guggenheim Fellowships

Congratulations to MFA program faculty members C. Dale Young and Pablo Medina, who are among the 181 artists, scholars, and scientists who have just been awarded 2012 Guggenheim Fellowships.

Click here for a full list of recipients.

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A Kite in the Wind

A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft is a finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Award for books on writing.

ForeWord Reviews‘ Book of the Year Awards were established to bring increased attention to librarians and booksellers of the literary and graphic achievements of independent publishers and their authors. ForeWord is the only review trade journal devoted exclusively to books from independent houses.

 

 

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Warren Wilson Announces 2012 Joan Beebe Fellow

Warren Wilson College is delighted to announce the selection of Matthew Olzmann (MFA Poetry, 2009) as the 2012-13 recipient of the Joan Beebe Graduate Teaching Fellowship.  Established in 1997, and named for a former Warren Wilson dean, the post-graduate fellowship allows our alumni the opportunity to teach for a year in the College’s undergraduate creative writing program.  Watch for an upcoming feature story about Matt on the main Friends of Writers website.  We’ll post a link here when that story goes up.

Matthew Olzmann’s first book of poems, Mezzanines, was selected for the 2011 Kundiman Prize and will be published by Alice James Books in April, 2013.  His poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review and elsewhere.  He’s received fellowships and scholarships from the Kresge Arts Foundation, The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop.  This past fall, he was the Poet-in-residence for the University of Michigan’s Lloyd Hall Scholars Program.

Matthew Olzmann

 

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On Influence, Literary Friendship, and Changing Your Life

The Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers’ 35th anniversary gala on June 29, 2011 began with a series of three conversations between pairs of veteran faculty and longtime friends.  What follows is the full text of the first of those conversations between Robert Boswell and Tony Hoagland; both frequent faculty members over the past couple of decades.

Boz:   I’ll go first, because I have a question about influence, and I think that’s a good place to start…  Every now and then I’ll read a poem in a magazine and I’ll think that poem’s been influenced by you, so I thought I would have you talk about what that feels like—But first, I thought I’d just credit you for the way I’ve been influenced by you. Some very specific examples:   I remember once—right after graduate school, I think it was in Yuma—you read one of my stories, and you said, “Fathers. We’ll be writing about them for the rest of our lives.”  And that terrified me so much that I didn’t put a father in a story for the next three years. There were a lot of orphans.

And then there was another time— I had a brand-new used sports car, and I drove over to pick you up, and you walked out into the driveway, and you said,  “Dat ist not a car, dat ist a penis.”  So I got rid of that car—

Tony: —It wasn’t that fast.

Continue to full text

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