January 2016 MFA Public Schedule - Warren Wilson College

The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College Public Schedule – January 2016 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. For more information, call the MFA Office: (828) 771-3715. Readings will begin at 8:15 PM in Ransom Fellowship Hall behind the Chapel, unless indicated otherwise.

READINGS by FACULTY Sunday, January 3—8:00 PM —Gladfelter, Canon Lounge Maud Casey, Dana Levin, Stacey D’Erasmo, Sandra Lim, Kirstin Valdez Quade Monday, January 4 Martha Rhodes, Dean Bakopoulos, Daniel Tobin, Laura van den Berg Tuesday, January 5 A. Van Jordan, Jeremy Gavron, Connie Voisine, Michael Parker Wednesday, January 6 Heather McHugh, Nina McConigley, Alan Williamson, Peter Orner Thursday, January 7 Liam Callanan, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Robin Romm, Ellen Bryant Voigt Friday, January 8—no readings Saturday, January 9—Gladfelter, Canon Lounge Debra Allbery, Karen Brennan, James Longenbach, C.J. Hribal

READINGS by GRADUATING STUDENTS Sunday, January 10—Gladfelter, Canon Lounge Lara Egger, Chantal Aida Gordon, Kate Murr Monday, January 11 Susan Mell, Kim Hamilton, Jennifer Stern, David Mills Tuesday January 12—4:30 PM, followed by Graduation Ceremony Amelia Boulware, Joe Capista, Eric Rampson, Ashley Nissler

The schedule of lectures by Warren Wilson MFA faculty follows  Page 1 of 4

Faculty Lectures – January 2016 The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College All lectures will be in Ransom Fellowship Hall behind the Chapel unless indicated otherwise. For more information, call the MFA Office at Warren Wilson College: (828) 771-3715. The schedule is subject to change.

Tuesday, January 5 9:30 AM

MAUD CASEY: Unmaking: Mystery in Fiction

There’s a lot that needs making in fiction but creating space for mystery in fiction requires a certain amount of unmaking. Un, that handy little prefix, is, as firefighters say about really big fires, fully involved. The good news is that un doesn’t merely undo a word and turn it into its opposite; un is a release from, a freeing, a bringing out of, all of which are effects of mystery and part of its purpose. If mystery, the genre, is about finding the answers, mystery, that elusive yet essential element of fiction, is about finding the questions. In Chekhov’s famous letter to a friend, he wrote, “You are right to demand that an artist take conscious stock of what he is doing, but you confuse two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.” This lecture will consider a few of the ways mystery, that essential literary quality, is conjured in fiction. We will look closely at several works of fiction, most likely James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” Jane Bowles’ “Camp Cataract,” and Henry James’ Turn of the Screw. No advance reading required. Handouts will be provided.


JAMES LONGENBACH: Image, Figure, Sound

Brain and cognitive scientists debate the nature of mental images, but as one scientist has recently remarked, everyone agrees that nobody has ever found a picture in the brain and that, even if one did, the brain would have to contain a little flashlight so we could see it. Poems and novels are made of words: why have we become accustomed to saying that poems contain images or are constructed out of images? Like what we call a voice (which I discussed in the July 2015 residency), what we call an image is a second-order craft element, one that is constructed out of the more primary linguistic materials of diction, metaphor, rhythm, and syntax. This lecture will examine that construction, exploring how our vocabulary of the image is itself highly metaphorical, a way of using visual language to account for a linguistic effect; you can’t learn about images by looking at images. No prior reading necessary; writers to be discussed include Shakespeare, Blake, Pound, Williams, Crane, Susan Howe, C. D. Wright.

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Wednesday, January 6 9:30 AM

C.J. HRIBAL: Eva Figes and Narrative Lyricism

I’m a sucker for prose that almost aims to be sung. Not that I do it myself, but I appreciate it in other people’s work. Sometimes this occurs in particular moments within a longer work, sometimes it almost seems as if it’s the entire work itself. In talking about “prose that aims for poetry,” I’d like to look at the work of Eva Figes, case study #132 of “authors you might not know about, but you’ll likely be delighted once you do.” Discussion will focus on two of her novellas, Light and Waking. Handouts will be provided, but reading at least one of these novellas before the residency is recommended.

Wednesday, January 6 10:45 AM

DANA LEVIN: Who is Who: Pronouns, Gender, and Merging Selves

The poetry of trans poet Stacey Waite is the spark for an investigation of the history of the third-person singular pronoun, and the use of “they” as a singular pronoun, in English. Along the way, there will be forays into: the sexism embedded in grammar rules; the multiple nature of self; the case of twins conjoined at the head; the mystic properties of naming, and the relationship between body and identity; the search for an epicene, or bisexual, pronoun; and, ultimately, how Waite gets around English’s pronounial either/or (he or she) through a trick of syntax. We might also look at an Ashbery poem.

Thursday, January 7 9:30 AM

STACEY D’ERASMO: After the World Ends: Writers and Artists Respond to Crisis

Images of a post-apocalyptic world permeate the culture these days. We seem to be expecting the world to end in fire, in ice, in plague, or in drought in the near future. But what has happened in the work of various writers and artists when their worlds did, in fact, end? What might we learn from them? Handouts will be provided.

Monday, January 11 9:30 AM

DANIEL TOBIN: The Odeon

Talk about whether poetry matters carries little of real value unless it eventually turns to questions of intention for the art. I mean intention beyond public recognition and prevailing trends, the readiness of the audience, and critical receptivity. I mean poetry’s relation to some vision of reality and the degree to which the poet pursues that connection, however fitfully, adversely, but intentionally in the work. This lecture will explore poems that embody Seamus Heaney’s idea that poetry optimally reflects “an impulse toward transcendence.” To that end, we will consider the idea of "the Odeon," from the Greek Oideion, which literally means "the singing place," as an imaginative space that ideally affirms the poet as a singer of deep registers beyond circumstance and status and state. The three poems examined will be Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Boy Breaking Glass,” Brigit Pegeen Kelley’s “Song,” and Ellen Bryant Voigt’s “Song and Story.”

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Monday, January 11 10:45 AM

LAURA VAN DEN BERG: What's So Great about Normal? On Unconventional Interiors in Fiction

In workshops, questions about the representation of emotion often arise—Can we know more about what a character is feeling in this scene? Would they really feel x at a time like this? Such questions are often fruitful, nudging the writer toward a richer investigation of their characters' interior lives, but what about characters who seek to operate outside emotional norms? This lecture/class will explore unconventional interior landscapes in fiction—such as coldness, disorientation, indifference— while also considering works that appear to be fueled by different, non-emotive energy sources entirely (the grim, gothic code of the fairytale that governs Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, for example). Authors discussed might include Angela Carter, Lydia Davis, J. M. Coetzee, Yoko Tawada, Amelia Gray, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Clarice Lispector.


HEATHER McHUGH: Reader Readiness: A Quick Course in Currents and Capacitance

Drawn to the streamings of art and nature, drawn precisely to the power of surprise and immediacy in those purviews, a reader may take himself for the reliable narrator of his own literary engagements-- the one whose vantage and acuities he can assume to be trustworthy or fixed. But in fact, over time, readerly capacitance itself changes, and its own effects can take us by surprise. Even as we imagine ourselves to be discovering the endless inside the artistic moment, the artistic engagement may discover to us the perishabilities inside our own tenacities--and the utility of our own self-successions. With luck, examples will leaven these expoundings (and intuition keep up with tuition). To that end, I'll haul out a couple of poems by writers who, despite my fancy education, I was unable properly to appreciate when I was younger.


DEAN BAKOPOULOS: We Never Close: A Heartbroken Manifesto Against Tidiness, Resolution, and Brevity

In this lecture, we will look at work fueled by heartbreak so surreal it cannot follow the tidy or predictable forms of traditional stories and poems. Instead, the work rambles, digresses, glosses over the important, elevates the mundane, forces a form, and then kicks the form apart. We will look at texts that refuse to end, or refuse to find a center, or refuse to take a shape. We will focus on stories like Lorrie Moore’s “Paper Losses” and “Debarking” (from the collection Bark), James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” and Eudora Welty’s "No Place for You, My Love." I’ll also use excerpts from novels: Jennifer Tseng’s novel “Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness” and Kiese Laymon’s “Long Division.” And poems! Notably, the book-length poem “Gabriel” by Edward Hirsch, and David Clewell’s poem “We Never Close.”

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