The Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers’ 35^th 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.

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