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Visiting Author Laird Hunt Reading

Nov 18th, 2013 by

Laird Hunt Head Shot

We are very happy to announce that visiting author Laird Hunt will be reading from his most recent work at the Eck Center Auditorium on November 20th, 2013 at 7:30 pm. The reading is free and open to the public.

Laird Hunt Kind One Cover
Hunt’s most recently published novel, Kind One, has been lauded for its ability to “consign existential dread into the service of narratives that read the way blindfolded roller-coaster rides might feel” (Shelf Awareness). The novel follows the decay of an antebellum, slaveholding family over multiple generations, painting a microcosmic portrait of the violence and pain caused during that historic period of American life while also displaying its effects on later generations.

Hunt is the award-winning author of a book of short stories, mock parables and histories, The Paris Stories (2000), originally from Smokeproof Press, though now re-released by Marick Press, and five novels from Coffee House Press: The Impossibly (2001), Indiana, Indiana (2003), The Exquisite (2006) Ray of the Star (2009) and Kind One (2012), which was a finalist for both the 2013 Pen/Faulkner award and the 2013 Pen USA Literary Award in Fiction and the winner of a 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction. His writings, reviews and translations have appeared in the United States and abroad in, among other places, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Bomb, Bookforum, Grand Street, The Believer, Fence, Conjunctions, Brick, Mentor, Inculte, and Zoum Zoum. Currently on faculty in the University of Denver’s Creative Writing Program, where he edits the Denver Quarterly, he has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, and was in residence at Marfa (Lannan Foundation) this past summer.

Hope to see you there,
Dev ’15

 

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MFA Student Reading Series 2013, Part Deux

Nov 6th, 2013 by

FINAL NOV 13TH MARI LEO EMILY JPEGGet out your chisel and hammer and mark this date, time, and place in your stone calendar:

November 13th, 7:30 p.m.
O’Rourke’s Public House

We’ve got three fabulous fabulators (read fiction writers) reading from their freshest work:

Mari Christmas, a voice to be reckoned with

Leo Costigan, the literary combination of Raymond Carver and Bruce Springstein  

Emily Grecki, who spins yarns like no one’s business

  

Come for the fiction. Stay for the friends, the fried foods, or the foamy beverages.

 

See You There,
Dev ’15

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Catching up with Kon

Nov 5th, 2013 by

This weekend we caNotre Dame Alum Blog Desmond Kon Pixught up with ND MFA alum Desmond Kon (2009) as part of our alumni interview series.  Kon filled us in on his new book, recent whereabouts, and tons of other new happenings in his life.  Read on for more.

1. What sparked your interest in writing?
Many small moments. This is not an exact science, but I remember my mother placing Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath in front of me. I was six or seven, and I really liked its cover. My dad once gave me the best gift ever – he allowed me to pick out comics from a catalogue – that led to my subsequent obsession with X-Men, New Mutants, Batman, Wonder Woman, Teen Titans, Alpha Flight. At junior college, I started reading lots of fashion and lifestyle magazines like Details, Esquire, National Geographic, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Newsweek, Time. I always mention Ray Gun, which had the most radical design aesthetic ever. Totally jaw-dropping awesomeness.

So it made a lot of sense to major in journalism as an undergraduate. My other major was sociology.Throughout secondary school and university, I wrote and illustrated a great deal, working in different editorial capacities. I guess I was lucky to know my passions and obsessions, what I’d be willing to commit time and energy to. I was writing poetry and fiction right through. Time and distance from the writing has allowed it to gain polish. I’m happy about that because of all the genres, my heart ultimately lies with poetry. As Baudelaire said, “Always be a poet, even in prose.”

2. What current projects are you working on right now?
My new book is just going to press, to make it in time for the Singapore Writers Festival in November this year. It’s titled The Arbitrary Sign, published by Red Wheelbarrow Books, thanks to the wonderful work of Chris Mooney-Singh, Savinder KauThe Arbitrary Sign Frontr and Marc Nair. The book received a grant from the National Arts Council, so we’re thrilled about that. This book is a playful stab at the quintessential alphabet book, asking questions about meaning through the gaze of the continental philosopher. It tries to elevate the age-old format into something more esoteric – the connoisseur’s poetic aperitif, if you may. My nephews and nieces would balk at its premise.

I have another book scheduled to be published late this year. It’s titled I Didn’t Know Mani Was A Conceptualist. It’s by Math Paper Press, the wonderful brainchild of Kenny Leck who runs this awesome bookstore BooksActually. They produce beautiful books, and I can’t wait to see what they come up with.

I have a collection set to come out next year, titled Sanctus Sanctus Dirgha Sanctus. It tears apart the sestina, and through its design, launches the complexity and compression of the line to crash headlong into the blank space of the ineffable.

3. What is the most exciting thing that has happened since receiving your MFA?
Lots of good has happened all around, so much so it’s hard to pin down one thing. Well, something totally awesome and exciting just made my day. I just got word from the National Arts Council that I’ve been awarded the Writer-in-the-Gardens Residency at Gardens By The Bay. I’m totally indebted to the fabulous team at the Arts Council. The Gardens By The Bay is such an amazing world-class attraction, it was named World Building of the Year in 2012. It also hosted Prince William and Duchess Kate when they visited Singapore last year. People rave about the Supertree Grove and Flower Dome and Cloud Forest. It’s really an honor to be able to immerse in it fully – the residency will run for six months, and I’ll be working on a novella written as a series of diary entries.

I’ll be doing several public talks at The Gardens By The Bay. At least one session will focus on Ecopoetics, followed by a writing workshop. Participants will be encouraged to write for an upcoming anthology, Never Never Lalaland: Ecotopia Strangeness, to be published by Squircle Line Press. Never Never Lalaland is the anthology for the green advocate or environmental conservationist. Here is an Ecopoetics that laments, confesses, lilts, dreams, historicizes and fictionalizes. What would an eco-utopia look like? How does one dream of something paradisiacal, yet allow it its foreignness and alienation? What alternative world would such a poem conjure, one already open and willing to be made strange?

4. Yes, you founded Squircle Line Press. Tell us a bit more about this endeavor.
We’re a boutique press, which means we really pay attention to the finer details of putting a book together. We’re big on aesthetics, and do so in order to make your book look its stellar best. We’re excellent with providing editorial consultancy to individual clients aOne Word Front SLPnd corporate entities alike, offering copyediting and design services for a wide variety of books. To view some projects we’ve been happily involved in, please wander here. We’re putting together several anthologies, with an open deadline till enough good work has arrived to make for a solid line-up. We’re in no rush – we just want to make beautiful books. We’ve created our own Reading Room, where visitors will find a list of journals, books, and resources we adore. Here it is. This is some reflection of the sort of work we like, and it is a considerable range from the more traditional fare to the wildly experimental.

Forrest Gander Second Ballad BroadsideThis year, we’ve focused a lot on our Broadside Series, which can be found here. There are some truly amazing writers on our list, and they’ve got a string of accolades to fill their already impressive credentials. We’re really proud of this Series, and so thrilled that such esteemed writers have come onboard. These are the fifty lucky breaks an artist needs, to quote the actor Walter Matthau.

5. Where are you now, and what does a typical day in the life look like?
I bought and paid off a place in Singapore, so I guess this is my base. I grew up here, and having travelled abroad, have come to love it even more. Its efficiency is splendid for the working writer. There’s always something to eat around the corner, so you don’t need to worry about prepping a weekend trip to the supermarket to stock up. The necessities like banking, utilities, cable, phone services can be done in a jiffy. Teaching is always gratifying, and the youth of the students I meet is wonderfully energizing. Students possess an untouched wisdom prophetic of the critical genius to come of their generation. I like being a witness to that generative process. I read a lot in between things, and always have a book in my bag. It’s Gaston-Paul Effa’s Ma now. I write in bursts, and work on several book projects at once, all of which seem to be coming to a head at this time. The paid work of editing and design, of course, invariably are a priority, and I become the willing and shameless slave, at the beck and call of my client.

6. Who or what influences your writing the most?
My moods influence my writing the most. So I’ve learnt to attend to my moods. To just write whenever I can or must, and then find where the narratives all fit in a larger, more coherent whole. I also work well from an Archimedean point, and that can come from a scene in a movie or a trope that spirals out into its own trajectory. Or a nice poster I walk past in a mall. Or a nice quote I see in a hallmark card. Everything is a text, as the Derrideans say. Everything is a spectacle. So I read everything I can get my hands on. Even pamphlets left in my mailbox. It helps me be real since most writers get heady in the rarefied world of ideas and literature.

7. I noticed you’ve lived a number of different places throughout your life.  Are you a big traveler?  How does “place” influence your writing, or does it?
I’m fortunate to have parents who believed that travel would open our eyes to the world around us. I’m always thankful for that. My parents took us to Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Philippines in the 1970s, and we saw Japan, Europe and America in the 1980s. My work as a journalist had me covering stories in Australia, France and Spain, while my postgraduate studies found me at Harvard in Cambridge, and Notre Dame in South Bend. That immersion in American culture was mind-blowing, and it was such an incredible time of personal growth for me. I can’t be more thankful for the hospitality, and made awesome friends during that time. Recent years have brought me to the Czech Republic, Indonesia, Korea and Switzerland. I’ve also been exploring more of Malaysia where my grandmother lived out her years – I took a road trip and saw Malacca, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and Kelantan. I mentioned it in an essay forthcoming in the 2014 anthology Altogether Elsewhere, edited by the lovely Pooja Makhijani.

“Of all possible subjects,” Auden said, “travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.” Then there’s John Berryman who said, “We must travel in the direction of our fear.” In my poetry, the mere naming of places creates a presence very different from, say, a person or an object. This naming adds the particular to the space of a poem. For me, the brevity of most poems is more than compensated for the vastness of metaphor a word or phrase within a line might afford. When a place is read as allegorical or metaphorical, there is no end to where the reader might go, or be led into. With place names, how do we contain or encapsulate the richness of history and tradition and culture? That tropic behavior that transcends limits – the boundary of meaning – is what interests me. Of course, I’m always aware of and worry about potentially Orientalizing any culture, which now seems unnecessary given my processing of how I appropriate the notion of place. I think subconsciously this method – to the madness, really – comes from having lived in Singapore, where different cultures mesh, like a plate of rojak, as we say it here. We pride ourselves on this heterogeneity actually, and that people get along despite coming from different countries. We’re a country of immigrants – from when we began until now, when it seems as evident as before. Travel allows me to encounter the new and unknowable “Other” – it reminds me not to take subjectivity for granted, even as I’m constantly jostling within a place of alterity.

8. What advice would you give to current MFA students?
“Never hope more than you work,” as Rita Mae Brown said. Write as much as you can during these two or three precious years, even what seems like doggerel. Keep a vastly open mind when you enter the workshop environment. The workshop shouldn’t be a place to validate your ideas, but rather a place of great learning and exploration. There’s always room for revision and rewriting and rereading and reinvention. Every participant in the workshop is vital to the process, each immediately becoming your reader, ideal or otherwise.

Even though I might have been clueless of it at the time, each of my professors gave me such insight into their own worldview as professional creative writers themselves. The importance of their lessons became evident very quickly after I completed the MFA. Joyelle McSweeney opened my mind to hybrid work, her own fabulous books testament to how writing doesn’t limit itself to stock genres. Then I had Orlando Menes, who took me back to traditional forms, and had me appreciate the sestina and sonnet and ghazal all over again. Those, as well as the important work of translation. With John Wilkinson, it was amazing discourse over the relevance of the lyric today, even as he gave me a long reading list that included Frank O’Hara and John Wiener, two of my favorite writers today. And Cornelius Eady got me thinking about the “event” poem – always difficult to write – and what it means to be comfortable writing through a postcolonial lens. He was my mentor, and his advice has stayed with me. He said: “Do whatever it takes.”

9. What do you feel is the biggest challenge/struggle of being a writer?
Keeping the writing going when the day job leaves you exhausted by day’s end. And getting a book published. Or rather, getting the book you envisioned yourself writing published. I’ve had to learn hard to juggle my work life and the writing life. The upside is I teach what I love. I’ve managed to create and teach new courses, all of which excite me. These include classes in poetry and fiction, children’s writing, literary theory, global and postcolonial literature, and book publishing. And then there’s the editing and design. Just being able to have my life revolve around the literary arts is a real blessing. I’ve cited this anecdote numerous times but I do so here again. Cate Marvin mentioned to me once that she decided a long time ago to go where her poetry takes her. That mantra has stayed with me, and I try to live by it, to steer through to the course. And stay true to the cause, so to speak.

10. Writing alone or in public places?
Both. I’m most productive in my room, and my MacBook is my best friend. That and a set of big-ass headphones that block out all other sound so the music is crystal clear with a deep bass.  It’s come to a point where I sometimes find myself muttering to myself at an eatery or in a queue. I must look positively insane. I get a lot of crazy energy in the middle of the night when I’m awakened in mid-sleep. It would be easier to return to slumber but I’ve disciplined myself to haul my ass out of bed and write down these bursts of language while they’re still fresh.

11. What do you do in your spare time?
Here’s something from Nadine Gordimer: “Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.” I’m only just beginning to really understand what this means, and boy have I half a lifetime’s worth of trauma and neuroses to unpack, with no end in sight. I’d like to say that I have a life – that would be chic – but I really don’t. I’m a through and through geek, replete with the thick black nerd spectacles.  My philosophy is any energy I’m expending on something could be energy I’m using to formulate a storyline or rewrite a poem or put together the chapters of my next book. It has become a deep commitment that I attend to the language in my head, at all hours of the day, as much as I can. I think it’s a kind of service, not in some grandstanding way but in a real nod to the self. That this is what I hope will obsess me for the rest of my life, and cull me the happiness I’ve desired all along. I really can’t imagine being more useful to society in any other way.

KON’t get enough?  Check out Desmond’s website here and keep an eye out for his forthcoming book, The Arbitrary Sign.

Cheers!
Julia ’15

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Orlando Menes Poetry Reading

Oct 30th, 2013 by

Fetish coverWe’re thrilled to announce our very own Orlando Menes, Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame and Associate Professor, will be reading from his most recent collection of poems, Fetish, at the University of Notre Dame on Wednesday, November 6th, 2013, at the Hammes Campus Bookstore.  The reading will begin at 7:30 p.m.

Fetish delves into the hybrid sacred, diaspora and exile, and the relationship between the cross-cultural imaginations.  The poems sew together memories of darkness and light, pleasures and perils and stories of dislocation and loss, following a world patched together by a family over five generations from Miami to Cuba, Panama to Bolivia and Peru.  The scents of exile and emigration provide refuge throughout, resulting in an intensely woven tapestry of Menes’ Americas.

Menes is the author of three books of poems, Rumba atop the Stones (Peepal Tree, 2001), Furia (Milkweed, 2005), and Fetish which won the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in Fall 2013.  His writing has been published in several prominent anthologies and literary magazines, including Ploughshares, Harvard Review, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Hudson Review, Shenandoah, Callaloo, Indiana Review, River Styx, Epoch, Spoon River Poetry Review, New Letters, Crab Orchard Review, and Green Mountains Review.  Menes has published several translations of poetry in Spanish, including My Heart Flooded with Water: Selected Poems by Alfonsina Storni (Latin American Literary Review Press, 2009).  He also earned a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Prior to the reading, Letras Latinas, the literary program within Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, is hosting a reception at 6:00 p.m. in the East Lounge on the second floor of McKenna Hall. The reception and reading are free and open to the public.

See You There,
Dev ’15

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What’s Shaking, Shannon?

Oct 16th, 2013 by

As part of our ongoing alumni interview series, Dev Varma ’15 interviews Shannon Doyne ’00 about her Notre Dame education, her various educational projects, and the writing life. Check out all the insight Shannon has to offer:

sdoyneSo let’s start with the basics. Where are you living now, and what do you do for a living?
I live in Northeastern Pennsylvania in a house that has been in my family for four generations. The town is Pringle, population: 509. It is very close to Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, just west of the Pocono Mountain resort area. I am a contributor to The New York Times’ Learning Network blog and a consultant for an after-school mentoring program I co-founded two years ago. It’s called Learning Works.

What’s a normal day in the life of Shannon Doyne?
Working mostly from home is a luxury, something I realize when asked to contemplate what a normal day is for me. Because my schedule now allows me to work well in advance, barring an emergency or breaking news, I can find time every day for writing that isn’t for work, to go to meetings, visit the Learning Works sessions and handle various program-related matters, and even do some extremely cool volunteer work that wouldn’t be possible if I worked a nine-to-five job or if I had clients that needed very fast turn-arounds. Some days, I cut out to read for the Radio Home Visitor, a reading service for the blind and homebound at WRKC Radio King’s College, where my husband David and I have not just one but two radio shows. We play music—everyone asks if it’s talk radio. Heavens, no. What would we talk about for three hours? I also help lead a Zen meditation group at a women’s shelter. And I’m prone to a lunchtime run or a mid-morning yoga class, none of which I could do if I worked in an office.  On the other hand, I’m also prone to working until midnight when I take these breaks. Believe it or not, that’s pretty normal for me.

How did you get involved with the NY Times Learning Network?
I got very lucky. In 2008, I was only freelancing for about a year and a half, working with clients and contacts I had known since my days working at McGraw-Hill and trying to meet more people in the industry, both people who worked for publishing companies and other freelance writers. One such person was writing lessons for The Learning Network at the time. She told me about the urgent need to find someone to write the weekly English/Language Arts lessons, and quickly put in me in touch with her editors. First, I had to submit a writing sample. I was given two or three hours to write a complete lesson that was tied to a Times article, then take the two editors suggestions and revise it in perhaps another hour. We all liked the process and they liked my writing, so we began. Over the years, I’ve taken on more duties for The Learning Network, and have had experiences I never expected, like learning HTML in order to produce posts and traveling to The Times’ printing plant in Queens to speak to teachers about the blog and how to use all of its features in their classrooms. Though I can do all of my work from home, my boss and I like to manufacture reasons to meet at the office in Manhattan. It is the best work relationship I’ve ever had and the writing, editing and producing I do is quite satisfying. And that the blog is free—not subject to the Times’ limit on how many pages one can view without a subscription, I do feel it’s a service we are providing to teachers and students, regardless of where they live and the role The New York Times otherwise plays in their daily life.

Was working with at-risk youth populations always a passion of yours? How did that passion develop in you?
My passion for this work has roots in my own childhood and adolescence. My parents divorced when I was very young and my grandparents, who lived right next door, were very much involved in raising me, which they did with very clear expectations. It’s not that I lived in the fear of disappointing them, but knowing that I could disappoint them made me want to work hard at school, be nice, and help people if I could. As a result, I was a very happy kid. But then I’d go to school and I saw that other kids didn’t have that. Some did. I’d say the majority did not. Just watching the way kids who caused trouble and didn’t care about learning–I’m sure I didn’t have the words for it at the time, but the loneliness, confusion and even despair those kids were projecting made me want to avoid them, which of course echoed everything I was told at home about staying away from bad kids. Teachers were frustrated with them. And there we all were, slowly, maybe even subconsciously, giving up on kids—little kids who were born into a reality they did not choose. Not that I could articulate that, either. I just knew it didn’t seem fair.

All these years, this has stayed with me. For a few years after Notre Dame, I taught creative writing at an arts magnet junior and senior high school in a district with a very high dropout rate, low standardized test scores, frequent instances of police being called in because of fighting. The students at my school, however, had that extra class period each day for them to pursue their dream and their craft: writing, dance, acting, music, visual arts. Our students were happy and they did well, not just in their magnet area but in all their classes. Many got scholarships, too. I think that for some kids, it is hard to see adults as the resource they could be. They just can’t relate. But sometimes, an art teacher or an acting coach can slip through the resistance to authority figures and be the mentor and support a kid needs.

sdoyne puckdrop

That’s what I had in mind for Learning Works. College students are the mentors for the middle school students. It’s great because the mentors are adults, but young enough and in “student mode” themselves, so the kids see themselves on that same path, just not as far. The other youth program I helped start, The Magnolia Project, is for high school girls and also relies on volunteer mentors and guest speakers. The best is when a very professional woman, say, a State Representative or someone with a heavy-duty job, comes in wearing business attire, and proceeds to tell the girls her story of the many struggles and heartbreaks she’s had along her journey, and how she overcame them. They realize that they have been clinging to myths about other people’s lives and just whom they can learn from. Then they start to unlearn all kinds of things that do not serve them, which is kind of like discovering Walt Whitman, punk rock, foreign films and art all on the same day—you get to figure out who you really are. And it’s just crazy-rewarding, how it feels to play a role in being there to help.

How do you feel the creative process and your work with organizations like the Learning Works Program connect? Are there approaches you picked up at ND that you’ve found helpful for your current work?
You probably know people who say, “Well, I just got through that hot yoga class, so the rest of my day is going to be a breeze,” or “This can’t be harder than running a marathon, and I’ve done that, so…” Sometimes I think about the two years I spent at Notre Dame the same way. You learn that you can complete a massive project, even if along the way, you throw out a ton of stuff, you find a new voice, so you therefore hate what you thought was the first half of the thing. You go on. You develop a degree of discernment that will tell you when you are just writing the same poem (or story) over and over again, and when you are truly exploring the same theme from another angle. I also think I found where that line is for me between caring as much as I possibly could about something I’d written and becoming personally involved with it. I remember in workshops in college, I wanted praise for my writing. Me on the page and me sitting there waiting for you to gush over it were one and the same. But at Notre Dame, I saw quickly that the thing to workshop should be the piece you don’t feel confident about, the one you know isn’t working but you aren’t sure why. In my work life since then, this has helped me to fight the urge to gloss over things that didn’t feel right and instead, get advice about them, rather than wasting time talking about all the great things that were happening that don’t need anything but applause by that point. Come to think of it, that applies to much more than just work.

And no question about it, being in a program that’s a fragment of a meteor in the cosmos of the campus is a lot like working in a small office, which I learned when I worked for a nonprofit organization. There are friends and there are the people who will help you grow and evolve, but are these the same people?  Typical workshop flare-ups and the factions that result can be found in every conference room in every office building in the world, so don’t let anyone tell you an M.F.A. is never going to get you anywhere, office politics-wise. All kidding aside, if you are, say, running a program meant to help kids, you will be evaluated on how the kids were before and after the program, not on how you triumphed over your co-workers who had other ideas about what to call the program and what kinds of snacks and volunteers you’d include. In much the same way, your thesis and everything you’ll write about that will be the thing itself. What matters about where you wrote it and with whom is how you used those resources, the things no one may ever know, but the fruits of which are in that work.

And obviously, being given the gift of two years to obsess over words has its legacy in every word I write to this day. I love nothing more.

Are you working on any creative projects right now?
Yes, I continue to write. Right around the time I was finishing my M.F.A., I was convinced those were all my poems. So I set about writing fiction, probably because I had never taken even one fiction workshop, not even a one-day thing, and wanted a new way to drive myself crazy. The first story I ever wrote got published and even won a prize (The Mississippi Prize for Fiction), perhaps because it had no dialogue. I suffered for years trying to write how my characters really would speak, but it all ended up reminding me of when I used to make my Barbie dolls fight. It didn’t stop me, though. I have enough stories to fill a collection and not one but two aborted novels, one of which I co-wrote with a friend. The characters are Huey Lewis and the News. With glee and much profanity, we painted poor Huey right into a corner. But the poems keep coming, too. Essays, too, sometimes. Someday, I hope to make good on some or all of this.

What are you reading right now? Would you recommend it to others?
I’m in deep with Stephen Dixon’s His Wife Leaves Him. I’ve been reading him since I was in my early twenties and there have been times I feared I’d only read his books over and over the rest of my life. I always have some nonfiction going, too, and I’ve been on a kick for some time, reading books and memoirs about the golden days of punk rock. Right now, I’m reading Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad. I figure, at age 39, indulging in my nostalgia is soon going to have a bitter aftertaste following the sweetness. But also, I’m trying to keep alive in my memory what pre-Internet life was like, and reading about bands writing letters to one another and making ‘zines and flyers for their shows is right in line with this mission.

What advice do you have for a first year MFA-er wondering about what the future holds after the degree? 
I think first year M.F.A. students should relax. Even if you are reading this, thinking, “I’m relaxed,” maybe relax even more. Your work will benefit. (Notice, I said relax, not slack. Definitely do not do that.) My sister is a jazz musician and we talk sometimes about the wisdom in playing like you slightly don’t care. In playing a solo, when she isn’t interested in 100% perfection, she goes for broke. And it’s better. So don’t worry if you write something and everyone says, “This doesn’t sound like you.” I say, good. Use this time to mess with the idea of who you are in your writing. Don’t think your thesis is this perfect thing that is waiting for you at the top of the mountain and you just have to stay the course so the pages will practically write themselves. Surprise yourself.

I remember staying up very late at Notre Dame. That old sit-com Newhart came on at 2:30am and its closing credits meant “go to bed.” I got to read and write and teach and drive to the frozen beaches of Lake Michigan and stare at crows in parking lots. And this was my life. I cherished it because I knew it was fleeting. Yet, I don’t envy you first-year students because I also remember the anxiety and worry, too. Did I belong there and did I even want to? Could I write a thesis and if so, was that all I had to say? Did I need workshop and professors to keep me writing? Was I where I should be? So if you feel any of this, please know you aren’t the first. Don’t let the negative things steal your energy, experimentation and output. You’ll look back one day and see how extraordinary this time in your life was.
-Dev Varma ’15

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Rachel Blau DuPlessis Poetry Reading

Oct 2nd, 2013 by

duplessis-209x300

 

We are excited to announce that Rachel Blau DuPlessis will be reading from her most recent collection of poems Surge: Drafts 96-114 on October 9th, 2013 at 7:30PM in McKenna Hall 100-104.

DuPlessis (PhD, Columbia University) is known as a poet and essayist, and as a critic and scholar with a special interest in modern and contemporary poetry.  From 1986 until 2012, she has been engaged in a long poem project, collected in several book-length installments from Wesleyan University Press and Salt Publishing. The newest book, Surge: Drafts 96-114, was published by Salt in 2013, bringing this 26-year long poem to a temporary fold. Books belonging to this project are Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan, 2001); DRAFTS. Drafts 39-57, Pledge with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis (Salt Publishing, 2004): Torques: Drafts 58-76 (Salt Publishing, 2007) and Pitch: Drafts 77-95 (Salt Publishing, 2010). The Collage Poems of Drafts appeared in 2011 from Salt Publishing.

 

9781844719440frcvr.indd

Surge “exemplifies a tertium quid, transcending poetic schools and critical binaries with its fusions of intellection and emotion, with its reassessments of Dante, Eliot, Duchamp, with its witty genre experimentation, with its strands of eco-poetics, feminist analysis, conceptual torques, and unstinting poetic commitment. The book contains a contemporary mirror of The Waste Land, a striking political-emotional reflection on divided cities, an investigation of gender in a work of poet’s theater, a ballad on science and reality, an index, a canzone and—over all—a scintillating texture of meditation in which the analytic lyric is intensified by the refractions of gloss.”

The reading is free and open to the public.

Cheers!
Julia ’15

 

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Teeing up with Tom

Sep 30th, 2013 by

As part of our alumni interview installment, we chatted with Notre Dame alum, Tom Coyne (1999) about his latest projects, golf, advice for students, and other exciting news in his life.  Here’s what he had to say.

Coyneireland11-1024x682Briefly describe your most recent project.
I have a few new projects in the works.  I recently placed an essay on writing, “How to Write a Bad Book,” in Notre Dame Magazine, which was a real the dream teethrill since it’s a magazine I’ve been reading for any number of years now.  Notre Dame is fortunate to have a community magazine that is still publishing essays and thoughtful content on a large scale, and in a handsome magazine.  I’m also working on a new project for Sports Illustrated called “The Dream Tee.”   I basically got tired of tracking down all my own golf dreams (or perhaps I’ve run out of them), so I wanted to do a story where I’m making someone else’s dream happen.  I’m asking for submissions from readers for their dream foursome — if you could golf with any three people, who would it be? — and I’m writing a feature about the experience of arranging and playing the foursome for an SI issue in June.  And I’ve started a new golf book with Simon & Schuster.  We are still very much in the planning stage, and we are going back and forth between a few ideas that might be a good follow-up to A Course Called Ireland.  Book will be out in 2015, fingers crossed.

 

I notice you write a lot about golf.  Is there a background story behind how that inspired your work?  What other influences inspire your writing? 
I didn’t set out to be a golf writer–if that’s what I consider myself.  It was sort of an accident that grew out of workshop.  I spent most of my time in the MFA at ND writing fiction that I thought sounded important or impressive, trying to win the approval of my peers with stuff that sounded smart and vague and foreign enough to fit in the New Yorker.  It was all crap.  It wasn’t until I started writing about things closer to me–things I really cared about, and knew something about, that I found some confidence and a voice.  I started writing a short story about a caddy, since I had grown up caddying.  The story grew into another, which grew into chapters, which turned into a novel that I submitted as my thesis.  That thesis, A Gentleman’s Game, was my first book and was made into a movie.  Offers came in to write for golf magazines, and to do another golf title.  So I was a golf writer, without really planning to be one.  But fiction is my love and my training, and if I’ve had any success in writing about golf, I believe it comes from the fact that I approach it as a writer who cares about craft, and not a golfer who cares about where the ball goes.  But golf has been very good to me.  Golfers buy books.  Or at least people buy books for them as gifts.  Father’s Day keeps the lights on.

 

How did you decide you wanted to become a writer?
I loved to write from a very young age.  I hate it when people start with that, because it makes me wonder if I started early enough, or if I’m some pretender among child writing prodigies.  But I did write stories when I was a kid — I’d take words out of the dictionary and try to fit them into a story.  The stories made no sense, but I remember reading them to family or to the class and loving the approval that came from that.  So I was an approval-seeker from a young age, and since I had more success with my writing than my peers, it seemed the best way to keep the approval coming.  I never really considered writing as a career until later in college, when I was publishing stuff in various campus outlets.  Again, more approval, and I started to think that maybe I could actually do this forever.  I went to graduate school as the first step in figuring out if that was possible.  The encouragement I got there suggested that it was.  Then I gave myself a year to peddle the novel I had written and see if I could make it.  We sold it pretty quickly, and suddenly I was a writer.  So I guess I didn’t really want to be a writer until I was, when I finally felt safe to want the writing life.

 

What advice would you give to writers at the MFA level who are interested in pursuing a career in writing?
Get handy with that laptop of yours.  It seems to me that more writers are breaking into the book world via blogs and readership that they have built online.  This is a world that I know little to nothing about, but as publishers become more reluctant to take a chance on new writers (it’s hard to sell a book without being able to guarantee some sort of sales numbers behind it nowadays), then the internet allows you to build a readership so that you aren’t such a risk to very risk-averse publishers.  The first thing an agent might ask you is if you have a blog, and how many followers you have.  It kind of sucks, but it’s also a tool that writers didn’t have fifteen years ago–the chance to build their own readership without the help of a publisher.  So I would get my stuff up everywhere and anywhere online, and rehab houses for your day job.  Get some exercise in your day gig so that you are eager to write after the whistle blows–exhausted body can make for a very loose and interesting mind.  People who want to get into writing and take copy-editing jobs — I can’t imagine how they write after reading someone else’s stuff all day.

 

Who helped or developed your style throughout your writing career?
Valerie Sayers.  She pointed it out to me when I was writing sentimental slop — my Achilles in grad school — and encouraged me when I had found something that sounded genuine.  I read her books — such lovely sentences — and I wanted to write those sentences.  I never did, but writers like Valerie (and Tim O’Brien, Walker Percy, Raymond Carver) made me really fall in love with sentences, and really pay attention to my own.  I started to write with my goal being to write one good sentence, no matter what kind of mess surrounded that sentence.  And that changed a lot of things for me.

 

Did you have a favorite memory of your time in ND’s MFA program?
I  loved it when we had our end of semester class at Valerie’s house.  We would drink wine and talk about books, and I really enjoyed getting a sort of behind the scenes look at a working writer’s life.  The crowded bookshelves, the dog with a cool name, the filmmaker husband wondering what we were up to downstairs.  The bookstore basketball tournament was also a fond memory.  We would field a team of MFAs — rather, we would sacrifice ourselves in the name of fun and athletic pursuit.  Our team was called “Tell Em Willy Sent Ya,” as an homage to our fearless leader O’Rourke.  We never won a game.  I don’t think we actually scored a point, but it was a lot of laughs.  We had a good deal of esprit de corps in the program.  It was a nice time.

 

What is your life like currently, or since receiving your MFA?course_called_ireland-pb
My life is currently a blend of teaching, writing, and trips to the drugstore for diapers.  We have two little ones and I’m on the tenure-track at St. Joseph’s University here in Philadelphia, so the empty days of nothing to do but write are a distant memory.  It’s not a bad thing.  I find that I’m actually a lot more disciplined and productive now, because I have to be.  If I have two hours to write, I write for two hours, versus the twelve hours to write that I used to have, when I would find excuses to fill so many free hours with errands and chores and golf.  We had a baby this past summer, but I also sold three stories and a book — not sure how that happened, but it did.  I just kind of try to do the next thing that’s in front of me.  I write every day, but that writing isn’t always of the creative sort.  My working schedule is more project-based now.  When I’m working on something, my work gets a lot of attention.  When I have downtime or I’m developing an idea, I spend more time with my family or focusing on my work at school.  I still spend a good amount of time promoting my books — A Course Called Ireland is being re-released this spring, so I’m writing a new introduction for that, and I still get invited to golf tournaments and conferences to sign books, so old work still keeps me busy.  But my focus is on the next book and trying to follow up ACCI.  My editor at S&S is very supportive and patient.  It’s a good situation, but if anyone has any ideas for a great nonfiction golf book, please send them my way.

 

What does your creative writing process look like?
I used to not be able to write in crowded or noisy places.  I don’t know what has changed, but those are my favorite places now.  Perhaps because I feel like I can hide in a crowded coffee shop.  I have an office at home and an office at school, but people come looking for me in both, so if I have time to write, I head to our corner coffee shop and work for a few hours.  And I don’t even drink coffee, which most writers would find strange I’m sure.  I used to write very early and very late in the day.  Those days are gone.  With little kids, I’m a zombie in the morning and after 9pm.  So I write when I can — the hours aren’t my choosing anymore.  And that’s perfectly fine.  I used to waste a lot of time and energy trying to find an ideal setting, schedule, circumstance for a writing session, and hold myself to it out of some act of artistic honor or something.  Now I write when my kids aren’t crying.  And that’s plenty of time.

 

Have you had any life changing moments lately?
This is an easy one.  Caroline Grace Coyne, born June 27, 2013.  Children are the greatest blessing for any number of reasons, not least of which is the perspective they give you on your life.

 

You can take a look at Tom’s book, A Course Called Ireland here.  And for even more Tom news check out his awesome blog: http://www.tomcoyne.com/

 

Cheers!
Julia ’15

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Daniel Tobin Reading

Sep 16th, 2013 by

Visiting author, Daniel Tobin will be reading from his most recent collection of poems, Belated Heavens, September 18th, 2013, at the Hammes Campus Bookstore.  The reading will begin at 7:30 p.m.

Belated Heavens

Belated Heavens weaves an assortment of iconographies, from Babylonian gods, paparazzi, and the extinction of endangered species, to the exploration of the lost world.  His poems paint a startling contrast from prehistory to modern Manhattan, Neanderthals “cowering in caves” to a man snoring in Penn Station as if he’s “swallowed an espresso machine”.

 

Daniel TobinTobin is the author of five books of poems, Where the World is Made (University Press of New England, 1999), Double Life (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), The Narrows (Four Way Books, 2008), and Belated Heavens (Four Way Books, 2010), which won a Massachusetts Book Award.  His writing has been published nationally and internationally, and has earned a number of honors and awards, including the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Greensboro Review Prize, and the Robert Frost Fellowship. He has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

 

The reading is free and open to the public.

-Dev Varma

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What’s the Buzz on Buzzie?

May 13th, 2013 by

Welcome back to our series of interviews with Alumni!author photo DAoust

This edition features our dear Renee D’Aoust (’06) (with special appearance by her dachshund Tootsie). Renee came to visit us in February 2013 and read from her memoir Body of a Dancer and shared some of her life and advice with our grad students, but now she’s sharing her knowledge with everyone in this lovely interview!

Read on!

 

Why did you want to become a writer?

I consciously became a writer because I had been a dancer. As a dancer, I experienced the ephemeral retreating experience of live performance and the spiraling decay of the human body. As such, I wanted to create something bound and physical that would last. I wanted to create a lasting gift, something written and made with glue, which could be held in your hands.

I unconsciously became a writer because my mom was a writer, and in my family we were all, all of us, always writing, always reading, always editing. We left notes for each other. We left notes for our dog. And now, we still edit everything—dinner, poems, conversation, e-mails, the garden, and essays. So the process of writing, of reading, of editing is very much in my family legacy.

 

Who influenced you and helped your development and how?

My mom. She said, “Butt in chair. Pen in hand. Write.” She was my greatest champion.

 

What advice do you offer aspiring writers?

Oh dear, forgive me; I have a lot of advice. My husband calls them, “Buzzy’s Helpful Tips.” (Buzzy is my nickname.) Here goes:

It’s your choice to be a writer, so don’t complain. (I’ve recently read that Margaret Atwood says this, too.) Don’t be a jerk. Be professional. Send thank you notes. Practice humility. Practice gratitude.

Buy books from independent bookstores. Buy books from independent presses. Subscribe to literary journals. Always give books as gifts.

Eat a lot of dark chocolate.

ReneeandTootsieHikingRescue a dog and go on lots of walks. (You’ll need these walks after sitting so long and after eating all the chocolate needed to write a book. You’ll need the fur therapy and companionship a dog offers).

What my mom taught me: “You wouldn’t be late to a job where someone else hired you. Don’t be late to your page.”

Don’t take yourself or your process too seriously. On the other hand, do take everything very seriously. Words matter. Stories matter. You matter.

Do good work. Carry on. Be generous.

 

Choose one, two, or three of your books and discuss how the idea originated for the finished book.

photo credit: Frank Dina

photo credit: Frank Dina

Body of a Dancer, published by Etruscan Press, started out as a poem (written back in 1997).

I wrote Body of a Dancer because I wanted to record the voices and stories of anonymous, accomplished, unknown dancers, including myself.

 

If your book was film optioned, which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

God willing! I’d love Body of a Dancer to be film optioned. Fingers crossed. I don’t care who appears, just to get it optioned, then made into a script, and then made into a movie… I mean, zowie.

 

How long did it take to complete your first draft of your manuscript?

A long time. A very long time.

 

Discuss genre, where does your writing fit, or not?

If my writing reaches one person, my writing fits.

 

Thanks very much to Renee (and Tootsie) for granting us this interview, and for you, dear reader, for stopping by. For more on Renee, trot on over to her website and definitely toot on down to Etruscan Press and buy her book! Perhaps most importantly, check out little Tootsie’s blog, Bicontinental Dachshund for updates on Tootsie’s global adventures!

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How’s it goin’, Marcela?

Apr 30th, 2013 by

In our second installment of our interview series catching up with Notre Dame Creative Writing Program alums,  Marcela Sulak (’92) gives us the skinny on her inspirations, advice for young writers, and her latest projects. Let’s see what she had to say!

 

Why did you want to become a writer? Briefly describe how you became one.

I grew up on a rice farm five miles outside of a town of about 250 (it was not incorporated). I started out as a playwright at age 9 or 10, creating funny westerns which my cousins and I acted out in the summers, using an abandoned two-story barn as the stage. I was not the eldest cousin, so I had to write plays that were seductive to my older two cousins to get them to play. But mostly, I read like mad. My father and my uncles, with whom he farmed rice, were tireless story tellers. My maternal grandfather, marcela-sidea cotton farmer, was, too. They were bilingual. I grew up with Czech stories and conversations flying over my head at all times. This situation, in a sense, paralleled the sense I had reading books, which depicted such exotic things as snow, sky scrapers, leaves changing color: there was an entire world that had nothing to do with the one I inhabited. That the world I inhabited was, in a sense, formless and young. It didn’t have its own stories yet. I started to make the stories, eventually. Though at first, of course, I simply wrote about myself in the most embarrassing way.

 

Who influenced you and helped your development and how?

Mrs. Winkler, in fifth grade, who introduced me to my first “real poet,” Mickey Huffstutler. Mrs. Huffstutler took me seriously; gave me a workbook in prosody, sent my work to outside readers who came back with true but dispiriting advice: frame narratives; show don’t tell, etc.

Later the Notre Dame faculty–particularly John Matthias, Sonia Gernes and Jacqueline Brogan, were of immense help when I did the MFA.

At the University of Texas, where I did my Ph.D. in literature, I studied and workshopped with Tom Cable, Khaled Mattawa, and David Wevil, who were incredibly helpful and influential, as well as colleagues who were in the Michener Program: Steve Gehrke, Carrie Fountain, Phil Pardi, and so forth.

 

What advice do you offer aspiring writers?

READ. Widely and in genres and styles that are not instinctively appealing to you.

 

Choose one, two, or three of your books and discuss how the idea originated for the finished book.

Immigrant began as a history of fruits andImmigrant Cover vegetables in iambic pentameter. Specifically, I planned to write sonnets out of my system (Black Lawrence Press, 2010)

A Ladies’ Guide to Hebrew (circulating; every poem in it is published), originally titled “The Mistress’s Manual of Politeness and Etiquette,” or “The Kept and the Unkempt,” uses 19th century manuals of politeness and etiquette (in which rulers and the ruled were often divided by language and culture) to contextualize “difficult women” poised between two cultures and languages: La Malinche, Jezebel, Esther. It also looks at daily life in the Middle East.

 

Discuss genre, where does your writing fit, or not?

I work with poetry, and lately, creative nonfiction. The two blend powerfully. I’ve also been experimenting with the prose poem.

 

If your book was film optioned, which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Immigrant: Carmen Miranda ?

A Ladies’ Guide to Hebrew. (Let me get back to you)

 

How long did it take to complete your first draft of your manuscript.

Immigrant took two years to create a first draft, and another two years to create the final draft.

A Ladies’ Guide to Hebrew about 3 years total (first draft a year).

 

Give a one sentence synopsis of your book?

Immigrant: A brief history of human relationships with the earth and one another through the history of fruits and vegetables.

Ladies’ Guide to Hebrew–women straddling linguistic, cultural, religious and social divides throughout history, particularly in the Middle East.

 

Discuss your latest enterprise?

I have just signed a book contract to edit, with Jacqueline Kolosov-Wenthe, Family Resemblances: A Field Guide to Hybrid Literatures. This project grew out of my own experimentation with hybrids such as documentary poetry and lyrical essay, as well as my own research on hybrid literature and self-described hyphenated Americans.

 

Mystery 10th question! What’s on your bedside table/what are you reading?

me.avoda strBooks on my bedside table at present include tens of books I am currently
reviewing for inclusion in The Field Guide to Hybrid Literatures, called Family Resemblances,” which I am co-editing with Jacqueline Kolosov Wenthe. Those are most of my reading these days. Before I sleep, I am currently reading Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem, the biography, Daisy Fried’s Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, and G. Matthew Jenkin’s Poetic Obligation. Ethics in Experimental American Poetry after 1945. I read simultaneously, depending on what I’m thinking about during the day, so I’m halfway through each of them. I’m translating the Israeli Poet Orit Gidali, and am on her second book, Smichut, which I render as “Construction State.”

 

Wow, such an interesting and open approach to both reading and writing! It’s no wonder Marcela has had such success. Her book, Immigrant, is purchasable here and selections from Ladies’ Guide to Hebrew are ready for your perusal here and here.  For more information about Marcela, her forthcoming work, translations, and more, take a look at her website.

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