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.  Updates will be posted on this site.

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

Readings will begin at 8:15 PM in Canon Lounge, Gladfelter, at Warren Wilson College, 701 Warren Wilson Road, Swannanoa, unless otherwise indicated. 

READINGS by FACULTY 

Wednesday, July 3 

Adrienne Celt, Caitlin Horrocks, Allegra Hyde, Airea D. Matthews, Peter Orner 

Thursday, July 4 

Sally Ball, Brooks Haxton, Nina McConigley, Debra Spark, Alan Williamson 

Friday, July 5 

Karen Brennan, David Haynes, Kevin McIlvoy, Pablo Medina, Alan Shapiro 

Saturday, July 6 

Robert Boswell, Christopher Castellani, T. Geronimo Johnson, Rodney Jones, Christine Kitano 

Sunday, July 7 

Debra Allbery, Charles Baxter, Daisy Fried, Matthew Olzmann, Peter Turchi 

READINGS by GRADUATING STUDENTS 

Tuesday, July 9 

Nicole Chvatal, Kristin McGuire, Gay Parks Rainville, Jeremy Scheuer 

Wednesday, July 10 

Charles Douthat, Rita Marks, Joseph Nieves, Cynthia Sylvester 

Thursday, July 11 

Evie Bromiley, Lynnette Curtis, Perry Janes, Alex McWalters 

Friday, July 12 ~ 4:30 PM, followed by Graduation Ceremony 

Annabella Johnson, Joshua E. Lopez, Madison Mainwaring, Cynthia Oka, Idrissa Simmonds 

Faculty Lectures – July 2019 

All lectures will be in Canon Lounge, Gladfelter or Upper Fellowship Hall, as noted, on the WWC campus. 

For more information, call the MFA Office at Warren Wilson College: (828) 771-3715. 

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

Thursday, July 4 CHRISTINE KITANO ~ Alienation, Estrangement, 

11:00 AM Displacement: Examining the Relationship Between 

Literature and Place, or, “It’s the land, stupid” 

We take for granted a relationship between a writer and their environment; whether it be Frank O’Hara’s Manhattan, Gwendolyn Brooks’s Bronzeville, Philip Levine’s Detroit, John Steinbeck’s California, or William Faulkner’s veiled Oxford, Mississippi, we assume a writer is indelibly shaped by the landscape that surrounds them. This relationship between place and literature is never uncomplicated—and is often one of alienation, estrangement, or displacement. This lecture will explore strategies and techniques for navigating the tension between writing and place, especially for writers who feel a lack of ownership over the spaces they inhabit and write about. 

Friday, July 5 ALAN SHAPIRO: Mark Twain and the Ambiguities 

9:30 AM of Expertise 

As teachers and writers, we often talk about the creative process in contradictory ways: on the one hand we celebrate the importance of craft, which is to say, of knowing what we’re up to when we write; on the other hand, we say that at our best we write by instinct, intuition, hunch, we try not to know too completely why we do what we do. We advocate for expertise and we distrust it. In this lecture we’ll look at Life on the Mississippi to see what Mark Twain’s description of his training to pilot a steamboat can tell us about these inherent and inescapable tensions between will and inspiration, calculation and intuition when it comes to writing poems and stories. 

Friday, July 5 T. GERONIMO JOHNSON ~ Scene It Again? 

10:45 AM 

We’ll explore dramatic scenes as a narrative tool for demonstrating character transformation that readers can “witness.” We’ll look at a range of scenes from implied to full, the use of scenic overlays, and ways to achieve the scenic in brief. This is a toolkit for revision. Texts discussed will include Joshua Ferris’s “The Dinner Party” and Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Pet Dog.” 

Saturday, July 6 NINA McCONIGLEY ~ The Sound of Silence: 

9:30 a.m. Writing Silences 

We are all storytellers. We tell stories every day on social media and email and in our writing – in our poems and stories. But sometimes the story is in what is unsaid. In silence, in the absence of sound, in white space and with what is unspoken, there is meaning. 

Silent treatment, a moment of silence, a vow of silence: silence comes in many forms. Is to be silent to fail or neglect to communicate? As writers, there are so many silences we experience. There are so many ways in which silences occur. Audre Lorde famously said, “Your silence will not protect you.” And conversely, Susan Sontag said, “Silence represents everything that could be said.” So which is it? – a presence or absence? Page 3 of 4 

As writers, we have many questions that pair with silence: what will happen if I am not silent? If I write this? What are the voices we employ? What is left unsaid by characters? We will look at breaking our own silences. And the silences that happen unintentionally – from silencing of a person based on race or gender to not writing certain things. 

Sunday, July 7 PABLO MEDINA ~ The Chinese Written Character as 

9:30 AM a Medium for Poetry Reconsidered 

The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry by Ernest Fenollosa, edited by Ezra Pound, caused a sensation in poetry circles when it was first published in 1919. Though Fenollosa’s theories on the pictorial nature of written Chinese were eventually disproven, the essay had a remarkable influence on poets in the Anglophone world for decades to come. Arguably, it led T.S. Eliot to call Pound “the inventor of Chinese poetry in English.” Is the essay read at all today? Has its influence waned or its ideas still current? This talk will explore these questions and attempt to evaluate the relevance of Fenollosa’s–and Pound’s–poetics in the twenty-first century. 

Sunday, July 7 ROBERT BOSWELL ~ Reinventing Revision: How 

10:45 AM How Changing the Way You Think about Revision 

May Breathe Life into Comatose Work 

This lecture will focus on pragmatic strategies for reviving failed stories by offering revision as something like a life-support system. I’ll refer to numerous published pieces, but no advance reading is required. 

Thursday, July 11 AIREA D. MATTHEWS ~ Sense Age of Sight: 

9:30 AM Fellowship Hall Visual Rhetoric and the Social Turn 

We are inundated by visual culture. Through the prolific deployment of memes, selfies, graphic design, Twitter, and identity marketing, there seems very little of our lives that isn’t in some way impacted by our current sense age of sight. This lecture will explore the ways in which visual culture and argumentation (rhetoric) collaborate in creative work to thread the logical, emotional and political spheres of subjectivity. We will examine work by Guillaume Apollinaire, John Cayley, Marjorie Perloff, Eileen Myles, Evie Shockley, Douglas Kearney, Vanessa Angelica Villareal and Jonah Mixon-Webster. 

Thursday, July 11 PETER TURCHI ~ Don’t Stand So Close to Him, 

10:45 AM Fellowship Hall or Her, or Them, Either 

This companion to last summer’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” will address the advantages of shifting narrative distance in third person narratives. No advance reading is required. 

Friday, July 12 CHARLES BAXTER ~ On the Plausibility of Dreams 

9:30 AM Fellowship Hall 

While we’re dreaming, we almost never think that the dream is implausible. Similarly, while we’re reading or watching a movie, particularly if we’re engrossed, we’re likely to ignore problems of plausibility, particularly if the novel we’re reading (or the film we’re watching) embodies a wish or a fear. I’m raising a question about plausibility in stories, at least in certain cases, when the overall mood of the story removes or finesses our demands for believability, and what we want instead is to be swept away by the story. Truth, in such cases, gives way to astonishment and longing. Page 4 of 4 

Friday, July 12 MATTHEW OLZMANN ~ Direct Address and the 

10:45 AM Fellowship Hall Illusion of Audience 

This talk will look at epistles, apostrophes, and other moments where a speaker or narrator pretends to be talking to someone other than the reader. We’ll consider how we shape—to varying degrees—an identity for the addressee, and how and where is the reader positioned in this type of excepted “conversation.” How much information about the addressee does the reader actually need, and what happens when the reader and addressee need different types of information? We might look at a combination of work by the following writers: Patrick Rosal, Horace, Lucille Clifton, Kenneth Koch, Alice Walker, Jonathan Miles, Kim Addonizio, Yusef Komunyakaa, Joe Wenderoth and others. Or we might look at writing by totally different people. No reading necessary beforehand. 

Good afternoon, graduates, and welcome to their beloved spouses, partners, children, parents, poet pals, and friends. As much as all the writers in the room, you, the dear friends and loved ones of our students, make this unique, weird, program possible. If you’re here today, you have done one of the most difficult and loving acts you can do for someone: you’ve supported them as they pursued a passion that you may not fully understand. Thank you for that.

Several years ago, at a fairly dull conference in some forgettable city, I was seated with some of my writing pals, sipping drinks in a hotel bar. There was one other man in the bar, dressed in casual business wear, and he kept looking at our table. He could hear us erupting with laughter, and he could see we had the good-natured, affectionate slouches of old friends gathered after a long day.

He wasn’t dreadfully drunk, but he was on his way there, when he pulled up a chair at our table and said, “So, this some kind of work thing? What do y’all do?”

I finally confessed: “We’re writers,” I said. “We write books.”

“Huh,” he said. “Well, I hate writing…not much of a reader either.”

We greeted this with silence, with hopes the man might leave us alone, so we might go back to those riveting jokes we tell each other that nobody else understands—I’m gonna rewrite that poem in spondees, hahahaha, or what would free indirect speech even look like in first person, lol.

But this particular party crasher, a salesman by trade, regrouped, grinned again, and said:

“Well, what about hobbies?” he said. “What do you guys do for fun?”

Another awkward silence at the table.

“Uh,” we said. “Read and write?”

“Oh for Pete’s Sake,” the man said, and went off in search of a livelier crowd.

Most writers don’t have a lot of hobbies. We have engaging distractions or occasional obsessions that feed our work, but no real hobbies. Sometimes, when small-talking strangers ask me about my hobbies, I lie.

I like hiking, I say, though I don’t admit I mainly like hiking because I enjoy walking around thinking about whatever it is I’m trying to write. I do like dancing, though in truth I only like to dance when I’m surrounded by other writers.

You get the idea.

In the weeks ahead, some well-meaning people will tell you that now that you have an MFA, they can’t wait for you to win the Pulitzer or land on the bestseller list.

These are things people usually say because they love you and think you are capable of anything.

But it is a curious question that people seem to ask emerging writers of all ages when they leave a writing program.

“What’s next?”

If someone you know comes back from a golf weekend in Lake Tahoe, you don’t ask them, upon their return, if they’re joining the PGA next week. When a friend returns from Cancun and shows you vacation photos, you don’t ask her if she plans to become a professional parasailer.

We just understand that these people spend time and resources and energy doing something they love, without expectation.

But artists who invest in themselves as artists are almost always asked, “What’s next? What will you do with that?”

The truth is you have no idea what’s next. At Warren Wilson, you made the brave and probably inconvenient decision to dedicate yourself wholly to your art for no reason other than you love to do it.

Or, maybe, it was more than love; maybe, as I talked about in my opening lecture this year, it was survival. In fact, if you really want to shut down the “what next” questions about your writing career, when someone says “So what can you do with thatdegree?” just say, “Baby, I can come alive.”

For the past few years, we’ve seen you come alive as you’ve put this creative work on the proverbial front burner. But the truth is, we all have times in our life where what we love to do is not on the front burner. It’s not even on the back burner. It’s not even in the kitchen with you and the kitchen you’re in is not even a cool kitchen. It has crappy light and a low ceiling and busted fridge and your credit card will be maxed out. I have no doubt in my mind that all of you will be in this kitchen sometime in the years ahead, with nothing on the burners.

And when that happens, I hope you will remember that you can love this life even when you can’t live it seven days a week. You can love this life even when there’s no mentor waiting at the other end of your outbox every three weeks.

Why? Because all the work you’ve done these past few years will never disappear. The manuscripts you’ve written will evolve and take new shapes and the books you’ve read and re-read will evolve and offer you new meanings and your way of being in the world will constantly evolve as this happens. That will never end.

This evolution will happen in your most secret, interior places; this will happen in your darkest, strangest times, BECAUSE what you’ve done in the past few years is an incredible and revolutionary accomplishment in our current world: you’ve transformed and celebrated and respected your inner life.

If there were any doubt that you could call yourself a writer before this program, let it leave you today. You have survived the nerdiest, most intense, hardest working creative writing program on Earth. And you’ve given us so much–your struggles in the program and the concerns you’ve raised have also helped us grow. We, as a community of writers, we, as your mentors, have benefitted not just from your triumphs but also from your moments of uncertainty, anger, and struggle. I believe that we have benefitted from seeing the real you, your true self. As I like to say to my students, you can’t hide in a packet.

One of the most pernicious and insidious elements of contemporary American culture is that it has the ability to constantly give you new reasons to hate yourself. To hate who you are or how you look or what you lack or where you’re from or how you feel and what you say.

But right now, in this moment, I hope that you love yourself. Love yourself for enduring the struggles and challenges. Love yourself for considering yourself worthy to study literature and to create your own. Love yourself for surrounding yourself with the people who build you up and not the ones who tear you down. Love yourself for your radical creativity.

Family and friends, we return these writers to you today as changed beings.

Is this hyperbolic?

I don’t think so. They’ve changed. They don’t love you any less, but they do love themselves more. And by loving themselves more they will also love you more wholly and expansively in the years ahead and in doing so love the world more and transform it.

Graduates, I truly hope you leave here today loving yourself more than you did two or three or four years ago. You may occasionally doubt the work, or hate the slow pace of your “career,” or struggle with systems intractable and ignorant.

But when those feelings of self-loathing or panic or doubt creep in, I want you to remember this moment, this day, when you love yourself because you were true to your calling.

I mean it. I invite you, come back to this very moment. Forget everything else. Focus on the love you now have for yourself, right here, in this space, among your people. Focus on the love you have for literature, and the ways it saves you, and for others on that same journey. Focus on my unkempt beard, if you must. But do whatever you need to do to remember this moment of self-love and creative power and tap into it daily.

This feeling, these mountains, this community of writers, right now is all real and it’s here in front of you, but later, you can visit it within yourself whenever you want. It’s not going anywhere.

But you are.

May the world welcome your new self with an open heart.

Saturday, January 12th     

Readings and lectures are held in the Region Room of Blue Ridge Center at Blue Ridge Assembly. 84 Blue Ridge Circle; Black Mountain, NC 

Faculty Lectures        

9:30 AM

JANE HAMILTON ~ In Praise of No Big Idea

Many writers seem to feel a pressure to write topically, to take up the mantle of activism in fiction as we try, among other things, to figure out where we are, how we got here, and how to channel outrage into action. Is the coming-of-age novel, then, irrelevant, and that old matter of what it means to be human an antiquated question?  Does every identity group have a different truth, a different answer?  I’m going to consider Jane Gardam’s work, especially her coming-of-age novels, Bilgewater, The Flight of the Maidens, A Long Way from Verona, to try to get at how she writes about matters that were topical to her time without seeming to be topical.  (Has she in fact written “timeless classics”, or is the Brit born in 1928 going to soon disappear from our lists?)  Intercalated into her sentences is a secret mirth.  How does she lace subject-verb-object with joy?  To use Thomas McGuane’s phrase, Can it be said that she has found a language for the real?

 10:45 AM 

MAURICE MANNING – 17 o’clock: Reading and Writing Beyond the Self

This lecture will emphasize the value of reading and writing beyond one’s personal experience and beyond one’s identity in order to dramatize events, situations, and observations that have a broader appeal. Of course, the writer’s identity and experience cannot truly be separated from the writing, but I’d like to explore the possibilities of a literary self, a creature who may be distinct from the person of the writer.  The literary self, to mangle a line from Marianne Moore, dines on imaginary toads while reposing in an imaginary garden.  No advance reading is required.

READINGS by GRADUATING STUDENTS

followed by Graduation Ceremony

4:30 PM

Lillian Huang Cummins

Alyson Dutemple

Angel Nafis

Hieu Minh Nguyen

Rachel Wolff

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 Assemblyin Black Mountain, NC, not on the Warren Wilson College campus.

For more information, call the MFA Office: (828) 771-371

Thursday, January 10th     

8:15 PM

Readings and lectures are held in the Region Room of Blue Ridge Center at Blue Ridge Assembly. 84 Blue Ridge Circle; Black Mountain, NC 

READINGS by GRADUATING STUDENTS

Lily Chiu-Watson

Cecille Marcato

Hannah Torres Peet

Sea Stachura

Candace Walsh 

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 Assemblyin Black Mountain, NC, not on the Warren Wilson College campus.

For more information, call the MFA Office: (828) 771-371

Monday, January 7th     

Readings and lectures are held in the Region Room of Blue Ridge Center at Blue Ridge Assembly. 84 Blue Ridge Circle; Black Mountain, NC 

Faculty Lectures        

11:00 AM                   

C.J. HRIBAL ~ You Want It Darker: Grappling with the Dark in Poetry and Fiction

Writers are “supposed” to write likeable characters with narrative arcs that bend towards, if not justice, at least redemption. But what if things instead bend sinister, descend into the dark, and possibly stay there? How does one write poetry or fiction that engages with the calamitous, the violent, the pessimistic, the tragic, while avoiding the gratuitous? Apocalyptic work seems fitting for these perilous political times. But there is darkness in the everyday as well: dark and violent acts are committed by or visited upon people, particularly the marginalized, and mayhem seems like a plausible response to the outrage. How can writers explore this darkness responsibly? A meditation on grappling with the dark in poetry and fiction. No required reading, handouts provided.

Faculty Readings 8:15 PM

Dean Bakopoulos

Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Maurice Manning

A tribute to Tony Hoagland

Kevin McIlvoy, Antonya Nelson, 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 is being held at Blue Ridge Assemblyin Black Mountain, NC, not on the Warren Wilson College campus.

For more information, call the MFA Office: (828) 771-371