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 

C.J. HRIBAL ~  The Reasonably Unreasonable:   The Work of Rachel Ingalls     

Most people at a certain point in their writing studies have read Flannery O’Connor’s dictum about how stories work being dependent on gestures that are “both totally right and totally unexpected” (this can apply to poetry as well). Earlier in the same essay, she talks about “a reasonable use of the unreasonable” (ditto for poetry). One can see how these two ideas might work together. As an introduction to the work of Rachel Ingalls (part of my series of lectures on under-read writers), we’ll look at perhaps her best known work, the novella Mrs. Caliban, particularly in terms of how she renders the unreasonable reasonable (the protagonist does fall in love with a six-foot-tall, green-skinned amphibian named Larry, after all—fans of the film The Shape of Water take note). We’ll look at how the fanciful, the magical, the exaggerated, the outlandish—i.e. the unreasonable—both can be made reasonable and throw the “ordinary” human emotions (love, loss, grief) into greater relief (to say nothing of how it allows her to write about gender politics, male privilege, the complexities of female friendship, and a whole host of other subjects). Mrs. Caliban will be the main text, but some of her other work, and some poems by other writers, will be discussed as well. If possible, please read Mrs. Caliban ahead of time, but handouts will be provided.

10:45 AM      

Sandra Lim – Repetition                                                   

What kind of imaginative space opens up in poems when they are fueled primarily by repetition? We will reflect on ideas about repetition and get a feel for its powers by looking at different instances and schemes of reiteration or reprise in various poems. We will look at poems and/or portions of poems by Thomas Hardy, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, Harryette Mullen, and Marilyn Chin. 

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

T. Geronimo Johnson

Martha Rhodes

Marisa Silver

Connie Voisine

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.   84 Blue Ridge Circle; Black Mountain, NC 28711.

Friday, January 3

Kaveh Akbar

Jeremy Gavron

Sally Keith

Dominic Smith

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 is being 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

 

The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College Public Schedule – January 2020

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.

The schedule is subject to change. Please check www.friendsofwriters.org for updates.

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.   84 Blue Ridge Circle; Black Mountain, NC 28711.

READINGS by FACULTY

Thursday, January 2

Lesley Nneka Arimah, Carolyn Ferrell, Vanessa Hua, Jason Schneiderman, Solmaz Sharif

Friday, January 3

Kaveh Akbar, Jeremy Gavron, Sally Keith, Dominic Smith

Saturday, January 4

C.J. Hribal, Sandra Lim, Antonya Nelson, Dan Tobin

Sunday, January 5

T Geronimo Johnson, Martha Rhodes, Marisa Silver, Connie Voisine

Monday, January 6

Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Liam Callanan, Matthew Olzmann, Lauren Groff

Wednesday, January 8

Debra Allbery, Dean Bakopoulos, Marianne Boruch, Laura van den Berg

READINGS by GRADUATING STUDENTS

Thursday, January 9

Jonathan Hadas Edwards, Erin Osborne, Robert Matthew Taylor

Friday, January 10

Sonja Johanson, Steve Lane, Hannah Markos

Saturday, January 11 ~ 4:30 PM, followed by Graduation Ceremony

Sarah Cypher, Maggie Ray, Amanda Shaw

Faculty Lectures ~ January 2020

Saturday, January 4                                    9:30 AM             

KAVEH AKBAR ~ Crushed Glass and Medusa’s Veil: Exploring the Revelatory Break                                                                                                                                                              

In his A Year with Swollen Appendices, Brian Eno talks about experiencing the crack in a blues singer’s voice or the static of a grainy film as being “the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” If we accept as American writers that our medium, the English language, is one of the deadliest colonial weapons ever invented, then its breaking becomes a political urgency. How do we undermine our language’s inherent corrosiveness, turn a violent technology against itself to speak to things—doubt, sex, identity, justice, rage—it would rather us leave unspoken? This lecture will discuss writers—including Robert Hayden, Jean Valentine, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Jos Charles—who use revelatory breaks in idiom, form, and syntax to render with clarity what is too urgent, too momentous, for mere rhetorical speech.

10:45 AM

 JEREMY GAVRON ~ James Joyce’s Refrigerator, or Thirteen Ways of Looking at Lists

List making helped conjure writing out of the primordial soup – and may be returning it there in the shape of the Buzzfeed listicle. In between, lists have crossed from ledgers, journals and refrigerator doors into literature in a whole list of ways. This lecture will take an idiosyncratic look at some, mostly contemporary, examples of lists as literary tools and forms. Texts will include Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Lara Pawson’s This is the Place to Be, and Debbie Urbanski’s “An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried” (short and available on the net), as well as probably some Lorrie Moore, Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison, and Guy Gunaratne.

Sunday, January 5                                       

9:30 AM      

C.J. HRIBAL ~  The Reasonably Unreasonable:  The Work of Rachel Ingalls              

Most people at a certain point in their writing studies have read Flannery O’Connor’s dictum about how stories work being dependent on gestures that are “both totally right and totally unexpected” (this can apply to poetry as well). Earlier in the same essay, she talks about “a reasonable use of the unreasonable” (ditto for poetry). One can see how these two ideas might work together. As an introduction to the work of Rachel Ingalls (part of my series of lectures on under-read writers), we’ll look at perhaps her best known work, the novella Mrs. Caliban, particularly in terms of how she renders the unreasonable reasonable (the protagonist does fall in love with a six-foot-tall, green-skinned amphibian named Larry, after all—fans of the film The Shape of Water take note). We’ll look at how the fanciful, the magical, the exaggerated, the outlandish—i.e. the unreasonable—both can be made reasonable and throw the “ordinary” human emotions (love, loss, grief) into greater relief (to say nothing of how it allows her to write about gender politics, male privilege, the complexities of female friendship, and a whole host of other subjects). Mrs. Caliban will be the main text, but some of her other work, and some poems by other writers, will be discussed as well. If possible, please read Mrs. Caliban ahead of time, but handouts will be provided.

10:45 AM

SANDRA LIM ~ Repetition

 What kind of imaginative space opens up in poems when they are fueled primarily by repetition? We will reflect on ideas about repetition and get a feel for its powers by looking at different instances and schemes of reiteration or reprise in various poems. We will look at poems and/or portions of poems by Thomas Hardy, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, Harryette Mullen, and Marilyn Chin.

Monday, January 6         

9:30 AM                                  

MARIANNE BORUCH ~ Silence and the Trouble Gene

  Poets, even those disguised as fiction writers, most certainly carry the trouble gene, that tiny lens and/or magnet somewhere in the body’s bewildering chain of being. (Probably the brain, or maybe lost somewhere else in the nervous system.) And as writers we lean into our microscopes or binoculars to use this gene toward our highly questionable ends.

Which is to say, this lecture orbits the crucial emptiness (hesitation, wonder, ignorance, a what the hell?) in any serious encounter with words, ideas, images, meaning. And how the trouble gene kicks in to open, solve, or make things worse. Various small true stories that make up the lecture might bring something to this (counting on analogy here), might mean bigger though I can’t say for sure. I can promise a foreign tour group’s annoyed near-seizure of a Days Inn front desk near Niagara Falls, the inadequacy of language, how cochlear implants work, flashes of life in a Trappist monastery, and a way to unpark a hopelessly hemmed-in car on a moonless very foggy night. Plus there will be time to befriend a few actual poems. How silence and trouble in life or in poetry mix is something I will never quite understand.

You come too.

En route we will look briefly at work by Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, the long-forgotten Archibald MacLeish, Whitman and Dickinson, shards from Adelia Prado, Thomas Merton, George Oppen—all winged or walking creatures.

This lecture will end in silence or in trouble. Perhaps both.

Zero prep. Handouts will serve as flying buttresses during the lecture and/or as party favors to take home.

10:45 AM        

LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH ~ The Breadth and the 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.

 Friday, January 10    

9:30 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.

10:45 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.

 Saturday, January 11          

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.

 

Welcome, graduates, and my sincerest congratulations to each of you on this hard-won degree, the happy outcome of years of devotion, study, imagination, camaraderie, collaboration, love, labor, and dancing, on and off the page. Welcome to your partners, family, and friends, especially those of you who are making your first visit to the mothership, and thank you for supporting your beloveds in individual journeys that took them away from you and into worlds you couldn’t fully enter. There is perhaps no greater act of love. 

In preparing these remarks, I took myself back to those blurry months after my own MFA graduation. I was working as a full-time temp at the Massachusetts SPCA, where each day my sole responsibility was to sit alone in a private, windowless office and hand-write personalized condolence letters to donors whose pets had recently died. I’d been hired less for my MFA than for my Palmer Method penmanship, which I’d perfected in twelve years of Catholic school. Each morning, my supervisor handed me a stack of dossiers, which included full intake histories, donation records, and poignant photos of the deceased in all their fluffiness. I’d spend my days crafting tributes to the likes of Choo-Choo O’Malley and Mr. Pickles Shanahan in my flowy script, drawing upon my newly-certified powers of metaphor and voice and empathy. 

I’m happy to tell you that very few rich animals died that summer. Most mornings, I’d get just one or two dossiers, which meant – jackpot! – some unsuspecting temp agency was paying me a halfway decent wage to sit in the windowless room and work on my novel for six hours a day. No distractions, no excuses, no choicebut to prove to myself and to my then-boyfriend and to my immigrant parents that I’d made a sound investment in myself, that this “writing thing” wasn’t a fluke or an indulgence. 

The problem was, as Lorrie Moore put it, I had time “like warts on my hands.” The novel chapters I’d workshopped to effusive praise mere weeks ago and was eager to build on now moldered before me, reeking of sentimentality and misplaced ambition. “No one will love your book more than you will,” someone had told me, in some misguided attempt at professional development, which made me feel hopeless and narcissistic and beside the point. I tried various tactics to otherwise my life, including the making of something brand-new and uncharacteristically edgy: a novella based loosely on one of our donors, which I’d entitled, “The Dead Menagerie.” I got as far as the title and gave up.

How poor I was then, in every way. My program, unlike yours, hadn’t required me to read a single book. Not a single book! Unlike you, I had no cohort to help me transition from student – a role that implied humility, fluidity, and deference – to writer, which implied authority and confidence and direction. My nine classmates had all bolted out of state, with only half-baked plans to keep in touch. Without the buzz and thrum and deadlines of the program, I felt adrift.  

It took time, but three things had to happen for the words to finally flow again: First, I read voraciously and omnivorously, reuniting with books like they were long-lost childhood friends; second, I gave up on the notion that publishing a novel would prove my value as an artist and human; and third, I found, in GrubStreet, a community of fellow writers passionate about helping each other get better. 

It took the convergence of these three things for me to re-discover what got me writing stories in the first place, back in the sixth grade: the drive not to feel important or worthy, but to play, to make-believe, to dress up, to dream, with my imaginary friends. I continue to be drawn to the infinite possibility of these friends, what Grace Paley called the “open destiny” of their lives. They make such excellent, if mercurial company. 

This persistent myth that writing is lonely – how does it endure? I may have been poor that summer, I may have longed for a community, but, in my windowless room crowded with friends getting into all sorts of trouble, tantalizing me with their dramas and half-baked ideas, I was never lonely. Though virtually every writer I know can trace our calling back to feelings of isolation or dislocation, the act of writing is less the symptom of our loneliness than its inexhaustible cure. 

The point is: I stand here supremely confident that you will NOT find yourself in the same blur I was in twenty years ago. Don’t get me wrong: there will bea blur. You will experience adriftness, nostalgia, even fear. Your hands will hover above your keyboard, unsure if you know what a poem or story even is, let alone how to write one. But, unlike I was, you are extraordinarily well-prepared to contend with this blur: the intense and multivarious work our program has demanded of you, the guidance it’s offered, and the unique and intimate relationships you’ve built with each other and with your supervisors on and off the mothership, have given you all you need, every tool you could possibly require, to bring the blur into focus. 

If you believe that, and you should, then believe this, too: with those tools, in the clarity of that focus, with that vision that will continue to sharpen and broaden over the course of your lives as writers, you must remember you are still, and will always be, at play; your investigations into the human condition can and should bring you, yes, joy. This may seem paradoxical, given the serious work that you want to do, but it is not. Making art is an inherently optimistic act, even, especially, when you are singing about the dark times – because the writing of a poem or a story is always a reaching out: to a reader, to a listener, to a future when your words will be translated, interpreted, consumed. It is a way of feeding the souls of our neighbors on this Earth. 

And if you don’t trust my confidence in you, trust author Min Jin Lee, who spoke recently about a superpower everyone in this room has: “I’m not sure you knew you had this,” she said, “but you do; you use it all the time. Perhaps you’re a parent and your teenager hurts your feelings; why do you still wait up for him at night when you’re both tired? And when your mother is cranky and needs you to take her to the doctor, but she won’t ask nicely, why do you leave work early and take her? And when your best friend calls you as you’re making dinner and she is crying, why do you stop making dinner…? It’s because you have a superpower: you know how to love when it’s difficult.” Lee went on to ask, “Do you love your writing as much as you love the people in your life for whom you move the world? Do you love your writing even when it’s painful, when it rejects you, even when it will disrupt your very difficult and busy lives? The parts of our lives that we love the most can be almost impossible to bear every single day, but we do.” 

At the end of my discussion class eight days ago – yes, it was only eight days ago – I asked you to consider the moment we are in, and what it requires of the us as writers. This is the personal, and therefore political, question I hope you’ll continue to ask yourselves in the months and years ahead as you play and as you dream, and as you love, leaving yourselves open to all possibilities, forms, voices, and modes of inquiry. Which jagged pieces of our broken world will you pick up, and what will you write upon them? Speaking for all of your former supervisors, let me say, to paraphrase a line from Deb Allbery’s poem, “Constellation,” “[We] want to see what you do with them now, the sentences you don’t send [us].”   

This ceremony is not an ending, though it has the sense of one. So does this final but instigating benediction with which I’ll leave you. It comes from Prior Walter, our guide through the ravaged world of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. He’s standing before the frozen Bethesda fountain, hoping and planning to survive his illness long enough to see the fountain turned back on next summer, and the summer after that. And maybe he does. Maybe he’s there right now. “The world only spins forward,” he is saying to us. “We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life.  The Great Work Begins.”

Thank you, graduates, and, again, congratulations.