The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College is pleased to announce its faculty for the summer 2020 semester:

Kaveh Akbar

Debra Allbery (Director)

Sally Ball 

Robert Boswell

Karen Brennan

Jamel Brinkley

Christopher Castellani

Sonya Chung 

Angela Flournoy

Brooks Haxton 

David Haynes

Caitlin Horrocks

Amaud Jamaul Johnson

Christine Kitano

Dana Levin

Maurice Manning

Alix Ohlin

Matthew Olzmann

Peter Orner

Joan Silber

Debra Spark

Peter Turchi

Alan Williamson

Find the MFA PROGAM FOR WRITERS AT WARREN WILSON COLLEGE booth at 1541.

Graduates and current students of the MFA Program for Writers planning to attend this year’s AWP Conference in San Antonio, Texas are encouraged to volunteer at the program’s table in the Bookfair.  The Bookfair will be open daily Thursday, March 5 to Saturday, March 7 from 9:00 to 5:00. We seek volunteers for one- or two-hour shifts to answer prospective students’ questions and to talk about how this program and its community have informed and sustained your writing lives.

Interested alumni and students should contact Eric Cruz ([email protected]) and Laura Van Prooyen ([email protected]) with specifics about availability by Feb.12.  Eric and Laura will work together to coordinate the schedule and will be back in touch with you to confirm as the conference nears.

Our thanks in advance for your assistance!

As the writer asked to speak at your graduation, I took the assignment very seriously. I analyzed the form of the “graduation address” before I attempted it. I annotated a couple of famous graduation speeches (those of David Foster Wallace, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mindy Kaling, to name a few), and developed a working definition of its structure, rhetorical purpose, etc. I submitted a few drafts to myself, and, as it is with all writing, I will likely never really feel finished. 

Class of 2020, I’ll be honest, I had hoped that having 2019 in the can would begin an upswing, a reevaluation of priorities, but as we all know, the news is not good. Let’s all think about 2020 as a year of sharp vision, of developing clarities, and actions towards the future we want and need. One of you graduates prefaced your reading by calling it an initiation, a ceremony, a ritual. That’s right—by being here we acknowledge a culture and practice older than written language itself. For that, we are lucky.

And congratulations! I must express how humbled I am to be before you as a fellow teacher, writer, and, also, to be with your beautiful families, families made, born, discovered, discovered here and all of whom are so lovingly present for your graduation in body and/or spirit. While we are at it let all of us writers express gratitude to our families. These are the beloveds who will look at you staring off into space and tenderly remind themselves that yes, this is our working. They will put you onto some task, eventually, such as dishes, bill paying, the managing of toaster oven fires, but they understand that whilst you doodle on a pad or reread a thousand-page novel, that you are working. The Program for Writers wishes to acknowledge our families with this ceremony as well. We thank you in advance for putting up with the serious leisure involved with creative production. We see how that represents your support and respect. How lucky we all are for the likes of our beloveds. 

Graduates, your achievements amaze and astound us already! What great readings you’ve given, what thoughtful classes you’ve taught, and, those thesis interviews! How seriously you’ve loved and shared as writers. Know that this continues—it’s the first consolation of graduation. The encouragement and connection you graduates provide for each other (at conferences, in other cities, online) is sustaining and at a scale truly unique in the world of creative writing programs. You have this gorgeous future, among others, to look forward to. Wallies abound and we are a fierce, smart and wily crew. We become another kind of beloved to each other, and let us be thankful for that, too. 

I believe that as readers, which we all are, we enter into another writer’s works as if entering a friendship. I don’t think we’d be here if we didn’t feel this way. As with friends, our writers’ books sustain us, wound us, please and frustrate. My current beloved writer is the poet Gwendolyn Brooks (thank you bookshop for reading her with me). She writes in her poem, “The Explorer” a crucial message about why people like us wish to make things like books. It’s a lesser known poem of hers, and also an ars poetica, a poem about the role of a poet or the job a poem should do. I’ll read the first stanza for you, because it is beloved to me: 

The Explorer

Somehow to find a still spot in the noise

Was the frayed inner want, the winding, the frayed hope

Whose tatters he kept hunting through the din.

A satin peace somewhere.

A room of wily hush somewhere within.”

“To find a still spot in the noise” might describe the search we’ve been practicing during our time at The Program for Writers and I mean this in the most communal way. The search for hope is complicated. It might be what we are doing as writers, rebuilding our frayed world, says Brooks. You might say “Connie, I am not hopeful” or  “Connie, that is corny,” or you might say “Gwendolyn Brooks, show don’t tell.” (I know we don’t say that here)! Hang on, Brooks will not let you down. She gives us two ways at hope in this stanza. First, it’s “a satin peace somewhere.” That “still spot,” that peace, is satin in her poem, a luxurious, shining, fancy fabric, satin, which is also rare and occasional, like a graduation. Second, in one of my favorite lines, Brooks offers another possibility for an end to our search, “A room of wily hush somewhere within.” Think about that word wily, how much it changes our idea of the hush. “Wily” is sly, trying to work an advantage, any angle, with some furtiveness, some concealing. After all, Warner Brothers did name a coyote Wile E. That “room of wily hush within” is what the explorer is seeking. And since I call this poem an ars poetica, it could be said it’s what we are seeking too, as writers. 

In the spirit of the ars poetica, I’ll point out that Brooks’s stanza is its own room. It’s been mentioned many times this residency that the word stanza means room in Italian, and so it goes. Each stanza in a poem might be the room in which you find a satin peace; any paragraph might contain that wily hush. You might find yourself in a room in where Toni Morrison’s Milkman is fighting to walk on a crowded street, struggling, growing, realizing that all the people were going in the direction he was coming from, or in Ben Jonson’s room where he mourns his boy who’s died too young, saying “Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say, “Here doth lie/Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry,” or you might find your peace in a room where Roberto Bolaño’s soft hearted Detective Juan de Dios Martínez weeps in his car for all the victims known and unknown, or this room, right here, where I have found some satin in your poem, your poem, your story, and your story. 

Allow me to expand this figure of the room and what goes on there. Likely when Gwendolyn Brooks wrote “Somehow to find a still spot in the noise,” she was in the same room as, talking back to T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” where he wrote: “the still point of the turning world.” Or maybe she was commiserating with the Wordsworth of “The World is Too Much With Us” which he wrote to complain about noise, also known as the industrial revolution. And maybe Robert Boswell is right, that Bolaño’s 2666 (that thousand-page novel everyone should reread) is in deep conversation with Homer’s Iliad, a 15,693-line poem, and certainly I am in conversation with Robert Boswell about this matter still. I am in conversation with Gwendolyn Brooks right now, and at any residency at The Program for Writers, all day and all night, we are conversing, commiserating and talking back to writers living and dead, the writer sitting right beside us, writers living in places we have not yet seen but can imagine, thanks to their beautiful words, our wily rooms of survival. 

One expectation of this form of the “graduation address” is that the speaker offers some practical advice. I respectfully decline that element. Or rather, I’d rather call on Toni Morrison, who delivered such an address at Wellesley College in 2004. She much more eloquently suggests that writers create stories, of course, and that the story can alter or create the person,  

“You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human without wealth. What it feels like to be human without domination over others, without reckless arrogance, without fear of others unlike you, without rotating, rehearsing and reinventing the hatreds you learned in the sandbox. And although you don’t have complete control over the narrative—no author does, I can tell you—you could nevertheless create it.” 

And so, this is my thought now, that the boundaries between what we write and who we are start to blur, and perhaps every poem or story that seemed to be a lesson in craft also becomes a part of our thinking of how to live: with attention, precision, understanding, and compassion. 

So what are we doing, writers? Are we historians? We do think about history, don’t we? We write whole novels set in other times, but we are not historians, not really. Are we philosophers? I don’t think so, but we question knowledge, reality, existence, right? We are not politicians, though many of us engage with themes of justice and injustice. So, what is our job? I have a quick anecdote about a moment which illuminated something for me about what writers do, about our “job.” 

When we lived in Northern Ireland, my daughter was in the fourth grade and had to write a report on a famous person. The only American on the list, Harriet Tubman, was assigned to the only American in the class, because, turns out our famous people aren’t their famous people once you remove entertainers from the list. She and I took out books from the library, googled, and talked about Tubman’s escape from slavery, her bravery guiding dozens of other slaves to the north, her work as a nurse, a commander and spy during the Civil War, and her later activism for women’s suffrage. FYI, as a parent who is a writer, my rough policy is that Alma writes what she will write and I enter only when invited. 

But what had she written? I saw the paper when it was returned to her (an A) and noticed that she had spent most of her allotted pages describing two things. The first part was a very long description of when a slave owner threw a heavy metal weight and hit Tubman on the head, causing a traumatic brain injury, the effects of which affected her whole life. My daughter wrote mostly about the wound, describing the blood, where it went, what it looked like, and Tubman’s fall to the ground. In other words, this nine-year-old felt and understood that part of Tubman’s story and wanted her readers (21 fourth graders and a teacher in a small room in Northern Ireland) to feel it ,too. I am not sure that, as Shelley claimed, “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” But we might well be its sensualists. We are as open as we can be to the textures, sounds and sights, the swells and storms, the smells and bells, the connections where we find them. By the way, the other information included in the report (which got an A, did I say that?) was that Tubman did not know her own birthday, something that had been unimaginable to a child of mine.

I will finish with a quote from a talk delivered by Mahmoud Dawish, perhaps the major poet of the 20thcentury Arab world. He was born in 1941 in Palestine and died from complications of heart surgery in Houston in 2008. Though he wrote in Arabic, he also read Hebrew, French, and English and has been translated into at least 20 languages and counting. A secular person, he wrote with his feet on the ground and his poems are loving, controversial at times, and often enact the struggle to sustain ourselves in this suffering and hope called the World. 

“Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.” 

Go on, find and make peace, oh wily Graduates, teachers, writers, all us, Beloveds.

Graduates and current students of the MFA Program for Writers planning to attend this year’s AWP Conference in San Antonio, Texas are encouraged to volunteer at the program’s table in the Bookfair.  The Bookfair will be open daily Thursday, March 5 to Saturday, March 7 from 9:00 to 5:00. We seek volunteers for one- or two-hour shifts to answer prospective students’ questions and to talk about how this program and its community have informed and sustained your writing lives.

Interested alumni and students should contact Eric Cruz ([email protected]) and Laura Van Prooyen ([email protected]) with specifics about availability by Feb.12.  Eric and Laura will work together to coordinate the schedule and will be back in touch with you to confirm as the conference nears.

Our thanks in advance for your assistance!

Sarah Cypher

Jonathan Hadas Edwards

Sonja Johanson  

Steven  Lane

Hannah Markos

Erin Osborne

Margaret Ray

Amanda Shaw

Robert Matthew Taylor

All lectures will be in the Region Room of Blue Ridge Center at Blue Ridge Assembly; 84 Blue Ridge Circle; Black Mountain, NC 28711.

9:30 AM

 MATTHEW OLZMANN ~ What You Know of the World Is Wrong: Some Thoughts on the Nature of Surprise

In “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Robert Frost famously wrote, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Since then, generations of poets have quoted this in order to celebrate the necessity of surprise.  This lecture plans on doing that exact same thing. After quickly accomplishing that, we will hopefully ask, “But what exactly is surprise, how does it actually it work, and why is it even important? What does it actually do?” We’ll be thinking about surprise from two directions: 1) how it’s created, and 2) how it might then shape a reader’s experience of the work at hand.  This could change between now and the time when I actually finish writing the lecture, but at this point, I think we’ll be looking at poems by Rainer Maria Rilke and Lucille Clifton. I’m also thinking of short stories by Tania James and Denis Johnson. There will be a number of other readings as well. No reading required beforehand.

10:45 AM                                    

DEAN BAKOPOULOS: The Reason Life is So Strange: Some Thoughts on Options 

In this lecture, I’ll explain the all the reasons that life is so strange (h/t to William Maxwell’s “The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice.”) After that, we’ll examine the energy that options, or a lack of them, can bring to dramatic narratives and confessional poems. You don’t need to read anything ahead of time, but we’ll likely look at excerpts from the novels Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, The Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, Salvage The Bones by Jesmyn Ward, and Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, as well as poems by Danez Smith, Paige Lewis, Louise Gluck, and Agha Shahid Ali. You don’t need to read all these texts ahead of time, because some of this is subject to change. Let’s keep our options open.

Saturday’s Reading will begin at 4:30PM in the Region Room of Blue Ridge Center at Blue Ridge Assembly, followed immediately by the graduation ceremony.     

READINGS BY GRADUATING STUDENTS

Sarah Cypher

Maggie Ray

Amanda Shaw

The public is welcome to attend the morning lectures and evening readings in fiction and poetry offered during the Master of Fine Arts Program winter residency.  Events last approximately one hour. Admission is free. The schedule is subject to change. PLEASE NOTE: The winter residency will be held at Blue Ridge Assembly in Black Mountain, NC, not on the Warren Wilson College campus. 

For more information, call the MFA Office: (828) 771-3715

All lectures will be in the Region Room of Blue Ridge Center at Blue Ridge Assembly; 84 Blue Ridge Circle; Black Mountain, NC 28711.

9:00 AM

LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH ~ The Breadth and Purpose of Speculative Fiction

Speculative fiction has often gotten the short end of the stick in serious literary study even as well-respected works of fiction—both contemporary and classic—teem with characters and scenarios that are ostensibly out of this world. This lecture considers the full breadth of speculative literature (it is more than spaceships and dragons—not that there’s anything wrong with that) and posits a distinct and important literary purpose speculative fiction fulfills that realistic fiction does not.

10:15 AM                                                         

JASON SCHNEIDERMAN ~ How a Sonnet Turns: From a Fold to a Helix            

Most of us are taught to think of the sonnet as having a two-part structure, built around a turn, or in Italian, the volta. The introduction of the divided self enacted through the sonnet is often seen as the beginning of our own modern period, and coincides with the first English language poems composed for the spoken voice. And yet that folding motion at the turn is only part of the story. In considering sonnets from a variety of time periods, I will argue that the sonnet’s motion doesn’t turn just once, but rather forms a spiral that carries the reader through. Picking up from Nabokov’s idea of the Pushkin sonnet as a spinning top, I will trace multiple craft concerns through the sonnets, including syntax, lineation, sound, and rhythm. The sonnet’s compression has made it a perfect vehicle for exploring internal conflict, and this lecture will open up onto ways that the sonnet might usefully rethink the turn as a spiraling, rather than hinging, motion. No prior reading required. 

11:30 AM

LAUREN GROFF ~ The Anxiety of the Influence of The Anxiety of Influence

The literary critic Harold Bloom (RIP, 2019) was most famous for his 1973 book Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, in which he argues that artists struggle Oedipally against their precursors; he goes on to frame his argument with a lot of Freudian jargon. This lecture (not unironically) will take a look at the assumptions underlying Bloom’s theory, will draw on the examples of writers like Anne Carson and Mat Johnson to offer an alternative vision of an artist’s attitude to her precursors. 

Readings will begin at 8:15 PM in the Region Room of Blue Ridge Center at Blue Ridge Assembly.           

READINGS BY GRADUATING STUDENTS

Sonja Johanson

Steve Lane

Hannah Markos

The public is welcome to attend the morning lectures and evening readings in fiction and poetry offered during the Master of Fine Arts Program winter residency.  Events last approximately one hour. Admission is free. The schedule is subject to change. PLEASE NOTE: The winter residency will be held at Blue Ridge Assembly in Black Mountain, NC, not on the Warren Wilson College campus. 

For more information, call the MFA Office: (828) 771-3715

Readings will begin at 8:15 PM in the Region Room of Blue Ridge Center at Blue Ridge Assembly.           

Readings by Graduating Students

Jonathan Hadas Edwards

Erin Osborne

Robert Matthew Taylor

The public is welcome to attend the morning lectures and evening readings in fiction and poetry offered during the Master of Fine Arts Program winter residency.  Events last approximately one hour. Admission is free. The schedule is subject to change. PLEASE NOTE: The winter residency will be held at Blue Ridge Assembly in Black Mountain, NC, not on the Warren Wilson College campus. 

For more information, call the MFA Office: (828) 771-3715

Readings will begin at 8:15 PM in the Region Room of Blue Ridge Center at Blue Ridge Assembly.           

Debra Allbery

Dean Bakopoulos

Marianne Boruch

Laura van den Berg

The public is welcome to attend the morning lectures and evening readings in fiction and poetry offered during the Master of Fine Arts Program winter residency.  Events last approximately one hour. Admission is free. The schedule is subject to change. PLEASE NOTE: The winter residency will be held at Blue Ridge Assembly in Black Mountain, NC, not on the Warren Wilson College campus. 

For more information, call the MFA Office: (828) 771-3715