These are the facts. We have survived the first quarter of this year. Some people would call the time period we currently occupy ‘Spring.’ Yet the Winter cold refuses to leave us, clings and slashes with windy hooks. What have we done to deserve this? Is it the narcissist, human-centric idea that draws ire? Is it Indiana? Or is it just everything that we dumped and keep pumping into the land, ocean, and atmosphere?
But enough moping. You’ve been officially invited to the second MFA candidate reading event of this semester! Congratulations, because this is a truly rare opportunity that less than 100 out of 7.5 billion people will get to enjoy. Come dressed in your best or worst. It’s time to forget the repercussions of sapient action and inaction. Or relive them, through the words of our writers who aren’t afraid of a little cold.
Abigail Burns, Madison McCartha and Daniel Tharp will read their poetry and prose on Wednesday, March 29, 2017, at Andrews Auditorium, Geddes Hall on Notre Dame’s campus. The reading begins at 7:30 PM. It is free and open to the public.
Abigail Burns earned her BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015 where she studied English literature, creative writing, and rhetoric. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Entropy, (b)OINK zine, Microfiction Monday, and Longridge Review. She works with South Bend’s LGBTQ Center, continues Matt Pelkey’s ImagineND program and reads for The Notre Dame Review. Abby’s writing primarily focuses on how grief and loss work to shatter our sense of normality and is influenced by queer rhetorical theory and writers such as James Baldwin, Jeanette Winterson, and Toni Morrison.
Madison McCartha graduated from Beloit College in 2013. He won the White Howells Prose Prize, had flash-fiction published in Burrow Press, and poetry in Nightjar Review and The Pinch. At Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Madison served both as Asst. Editor and Design Editor for Cream City Review and became the Poetry Editor for Storm Cellar Quarterly. A Yield Fellow, he also serves as the Managing Editor for Yield Magazine. Poets who have influenced him include Larry Levis, Jorie Graham and Lucas de Lima among many others. Madison’s interests include horror films, affect theory, shamanism and a capacious poetry capable of housing a multiplicitous self.
Daniel Tharp attended Kirtland Community College for a year before moving half way across the country and acquired his Bachelors of Arts degree from Pittsburg State University. A teaching assistantship, over a hundred students, and two years later, Daniel graduated from Pittsburg State University with a Masters of Arts degree with emphasis in fiction. His thesis entitled “Home,” depicts a complex and brutal world where characters struggle not with outside forces but with themselves and what it means to be human.
A famous philosopher once said, “Abby, Madison, and Daniel are cool people and they write cool stuff. Cool as in not cold, because that’s the last thing we need, but in the aesthetic sense. Maybe kids these days use a different word instead of cool, because kids are wild and rad.” That philosopher is me. Come gather around the fire before I go all allegory of the cave.