The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
Public Schedule – July 2018
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The public is welcome to attend the morning lectures and evening readings in fiction and poetry offered during the Master of Fine Arts Program summer residency. Events last approximately one hour. Admission is free. The schedule is subject to change.
For more information, call the MFA Office: (828) 771-3715
Readings will begin at 8:15 PM in Gladfelter, Canon Lounge, unless indicated otherwise.
READINGS by FACULTY
Wednesday, July 4 ~ 8:00 PM
Kaveh Akbar, Sonya Chung, Sally Ball, Angela Flournoy, Karen Brennan
Thursday, July 5
Charles Baxter, Brooks Haxton, Maud Casey, Sally Keith, Christopher Castellani, Sandra Lim
Friday, July 6
Rodney Jones, Lan Samantha Chang, Heather McHugh, Kevin McIlvoy, C. Dale Young, Joan Silber
Saturday, July 7
Michael Parker, Daisy Fried, Robin Romm, Maurice Manning, Peter Turchi, Alan Shapiro
Sunday, July 8
David Haynes, Debra Allbery, David Shields, Matthew Olzmann, Debra Spark
Monday, July 9 ~ no readings
READINGS by GRADUATING STUDENTS
Tuesday, July 10
Lesley Howard, Becky Fink, Paige Patterson Duff, Daniel Jenkins, Gerry Stanek
Wednesday, July 11
Chetna Chopra, Victoria Korth, Jonathan Geltner, Tariq Luthun, Michael Goetzman
Thursday, July 12 ~ in Ransom Fellowship Hall, behind the chapel
Andrew Kane, Shannon Castleton, Marc Morgenstern, Claire McGoff, Lane Osborne, Olivia Olson
Friday, July 13 ~ 4:30 PM, Kittredge Theater, followed by Graduation Ceremony
William Burnside, Andres Reconco, Leah Nieboer, Anika Streitfeld, Megan Pinto
Faculty Lectures – July 2018
All lectures will be in Gladfelter, Canon Lounge, unless indicated otherwise.
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.
Friday, July 6 MATTHEW OLZMANN: Imaginary Lives
9:30 AM
This lecture will consider the various types of “imagined” moments that occur inside a poem or story. We’ll look at instances where the speaker worries about what hasn’t happened, envisions something they hope will happen, or speculates about something that might have happened. Imagined scenes, dreams, impossible guesses, and hypothetical events. We’ll examine a few different strategies used to move in and out to these situations. Ultimately, I’m interested in how a type of emotional context is generated by these moments, but other side effects might become evident, and if so, we’ll examine those as well. No required reading. Handouts will be provided. Possible examples could include work from Philip Levine, Nicole Sealey, Juliet Kono, and Lorrie Moore. Other possible poets up for discussion: maybe every poet ever.
Friday, July 6 PETER TURCHI: Don’t Stand So Close to Me
10:45 AM (Or Him, or Her)
One of the most common choices of point of view, often referred to as “close third person,” essentially tells a story through the thoughts, experiences, and understanding of a single character. Another is what I’ll call ”sincere first person,” in which the reader is never meant to doubt or question the narrator, but is meant to accept the narrator’s version and interpretation of events. These approaches can work, but they’re often used by default. In this lecture, we’ll consider the opportunities created by establishing distance between the story and its first person narrator or point of view character, complicating the narrative surface, making the reader’s experience more dynamic. We’ll acknowledge that this makes the writer’s job more difficult, and that it might be worth doing anyway.
Saturday, July 7 CHRISTOPHER CASTELLANI: Inventing the Real
9:30 AM
Though it seems like a recent phenomenon, the genre of “alt-history”—in which writers fictionalize the lives of real people and/or depict alternate versions of actual events—has roots centuries-deep. This lecture will offer a brief survey of the history of alt-history, but its primary goal is to explore the imaginative space the genre offers contemporary fiction writers and poets in this so-called “post-truth” era.
Saturday, July 7 SANDRA LIM: Creating and Marking Presence
10:45 AM
This lecture will consider a few of the ways that striking interior landscapes and the effects of presence are conjured and expressed in poems and in works of fiction. We will also consult some visual artworks that may help us to talk about things like subjectivity, presence, and ardor in texts. Artists discussed may include Rainer Maria Rilke, George Oppen, John Ashbery, Sigrid Nunez, Rachel Cusk, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg.
Sunday, July 8 MAURICE MANNING: This Land is Your Land
11:00 AM Tangled Up in Blue: Tramps, Troubadors, and the Language of Poetry
For this lecture I plan to look briefly at the 11th century troubadours, who composed poems to be accompanied by music. These early poems were written for the ear, rather than the page. My thesis is such a tradition has continued in poetry ever since and may be worth closer study. No advance reading is necessary. Handouts will be provided. Singing will probably be a feature of this lecture.
Thursday, July 12 ROBIN ROMM: Tributaries
9:30 AM
Sometimes, what is most intriguing or elegant about a story is the way it avoids and sidesteps our expectations. Recently, I was struck by the way several of my favorite novels avoid what, in less imaginative books or scripts, would be considered the “main crisis”—a death, abuse, a crime, choosing instead to focus on a tangent, a vector that connects to this central crisis, but goes in its own direction. What happens when writers allow this kind of omission? What happens when they draw us in but never really give us what they promise? Can it actually be more satisfying? More affecting? More in line with our lived experience of crisis and grief, which is never straightforward, always filled with bizarre lessons, mysterious revelations? Texts will likely include Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin, Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin, and My Name is Lucy Barton, by Elizabeth Strout, among others.
Thursday, July 12 KAVEH AKBAR: Sell Your Cleverness and Buy
10:45 AM Bewilderment: On the Poetics of Wonder
This lecture tracks a certain strand of poetics through human history, a poetics built upon bewilderment and awe—what G.K. Chesterton calls the ”vertigo of the infinite.” Much of our species’ richest poetry orbits this nucleus of wonder—wonder at being, at nature, at grief, love, memory, desire, loss, etc. From the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna to American visionary Marianne Moore, from Christopher Marlowe to Phyllis Wheatley, from Sappho to Szymborska, Rumi to Ross Gay, we will examine the human project of astonishment through its poetic record, wondering and wandering together through four millennia of ecstatic and bewildered verse.
Friday, July 14 ALAN SHAPIRO: Poetry and Friendship
9:30 AM Ransom Fellowship Hall
This is a lecture on poetry (and the literary arts in general) as embodied intimacy, a form of connection and belonging that may be drenched in contemporary culture but whose roots reach back to our human beginnings (both as individuals and as a species).
Friday, July 14 CHARLES BAXTER: Wonderlands
10:45 AM, Ransom Fellowship Hall
In certain stories, plays, and novels, an x factor occurs so that a metaphorical door closes, whether in the mind or in the physical universe, and subsequently reality becomes destabilized and nightmarish—becomes a “Wonderland.” Both reader and character have trouble distinguishing what is ‘real’ from what mysterious x factor is disrupting the mental or physical landscape. The landscape itself becomes subjectivized and seems to reflect a dire psychological state or condition. It is as if the landscape itself is gazing back at the viewer or character. Wonderlands reflect unstable political climates and can be deployed for political purposes, particularly for minority groups. I haven’t settled on final texts, but I might end up discussing Macbeth, Dostoevsky’s The Double, Daphne Du Maurier’s “Don’t Look Now,” and Jordan Peele’s film Get Out.
