The internet is a mysterious virtual reality. Back in high school, I loved playing online games, and browsing in social media. I am always curious about who they are behind masks, which could be the roles in the game, or the funny, shocking or evocative languages posted online with a pseudonym. At the same time, I also want to protect myself from exposure to strangers online, and feel that distance is necessary. Hacking is the perfect solution for this – you can uncover other people’s secrets, smirk at their embarrassing stories with a mask that conceals your identity. Furthermore, if you are skillful enough, you can ask the hacked to name a planet after you, buy 1000 cupcakes, build octopus-shaped mansion, or whatever you desire, in exchange of guarding their deep dark secrets. Actually, don’t do that, but I hope you enjoy my quirky language. My computer was hacked before, and I was as frantic as this cat, so I will absolutely despise you if you follow that *perfect* solution.

The implication of hackers is not only limited to faceless gangs that steal personal information online. It can be anything disruptive. In Aase Berg’s book Hackers, the word hackers takes on multiple meanings. In nature, hackers are parasites that wreck the core of life. The term “hacker” is also metaphorical for the men who preyed on a women’s body in the patriarchy society. It is a poignant criticism for the gender inequality that rewards unproductive and lazy men and exploits the women’s labor. Goransson, the translator of Hackers, choose foreignization over domestication of the text in the translation process, and his translation will allow you to experience how linguist elements create a compelling message in poetry.

Here is the bio of both the poet and the translator:

Swedish poet Aase Berg began her artistic trajectory as a member of the radical organization, the Surrealist Group of Stockholm. Her first book, Hos rådjur (With Deer), was published in Sweden in 1996. Since then she has published Mörk materia (Dark Matter), Forsla fett (Transfer Fat), Uppland (Uppland) and Loss (Loss). Her first book to appear in English, Remainland: Selected Poems, was published by Action Books in 2004. She is considered one of the most influential and unique poets in Sweden, earning her translations into English and various European languages as well.

Poet and translator Johannes Göransson emigrated with his family from Skåne, Sweden to the United States at age 13. He earned a BA from the University of Minnesota, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his PhD from the University of Georgia.

He is the author of several books, including Haute Surveillance (2013), Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate (2011), and Dear Ra (A Story in Flinches) (2008). He has translated Aase Berg’s Dark Matter (2012), Transfer Fat (2012), and Remainland: Selected Poems of Aase Berg (2005) as well as Henry Parland’s Ideals Clearance (2007).

Göransson’s critical and creative work explores genre, aesthetics, and the limits of the autonomous text. He has written on subjects ranging from gurlesque poetry to Sylvia Plath to translation theory. In an interview with 3AM Magazine, Göransson noted that when he writes, he starts from a “micro-level,” adding, “I have a sensation or sentence in mind and then I try to exhaust everything using that kernel (and with everything I primarily mean myself, but also our entire culture, it’s a futile idea no doubt).” Less than “innovative” poetry, he noted, “I’m far more interested in the degraded and anachronistic, the trashy and the melancholic. Even ‘the poetic.’”

With his wife, poet Joyelle McSweeney, Göransson coedits Action Books, and with John Woods he publishes the online journal Action, Yes. He is an assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame.

Johannes Göransson will read on October 4, 2017 in the Hammes Campus Bookstore at 7:30 p.m. Come and bring your friends 🙂

I will be there.

Lavinia

Here is Mr. Frog again! This time, he is not a misfit in our world, because we, humans, are not that friendly to animals after all, and like to impose judgments on these creatures who have a penchant for relishing insects. As a kid, I got overly excited when I spotted all kinds of animals including frogs. I was particularly interested in how they croak, and imitated them in front of younger children, who were scared of my ingenious voicing. As an adult, even though I am not intimate with frogs, I still have a knack for catching them. When I was working on a farm with my friends on a service trip in New Orleans, I caught a frog in my hand, and the girl standing near me was in awe of my skill. I was secretly proud of myself and at the same time afraid that the frog would bite my pinkie off for revenge of its capture. I know frogs have slimy skins and some people regard it as ugly, but you might discover some interesting facts about them by observing through a magnifying glass (Mr. Frog actually toys with mini-cameras to take unsolicited photos of his sleeping brother, with saliva dripping off his nose.). The ways we interact with and understand our surroundings change as angles of our perception shift. If you are curious to see how poetry explores diverse perceptions of the world through different lenses constructed by disoriented language and rich imagery, come to hear Pugh’s poetry reading of her newest book, Perception.

Pugh’s poems, many of which are written in fragments of delicate imagery, urge us to pause and look at our surroundings closely. Her languages in the end stop lines describe objects in microscopic views, as if observed from an aperture or a lens. Her poetry also asserts that perception is quantifiable and measurable, and it carries risk when we (as readers and viewers) selectively store mental images with our limited perception. When these appear on the page through the medium of language, the raw impression that the world leaves on us diminishes. Her poems are multifaceted and they defamiliarize the world we live in from a fresh angle created in her idiosyncratic language.

Here is the bio of this cool poet:

Christina Pugh is the author of four full-length books of poems: Perception(Four Way Books, forthcoming 2017); Grains of the Voice (Northwestern University Press, 2013); Restoration (TriQuarterly Books, 2008); and Rotary (Word Press, 2004); and the chapbook Gardening at Dusk (Wells College Press, 2002). Her poems have appeared in journals such as the Atlantic Monthly, Poetry magazine, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and in anthologies such as Poetry 180 (2003).

Pugh earned a PhD in comparative literature from Harvard University, where she was awarded a Whiting Foundation dissertation fellowship. She continues to publish criticism as well as poetry, with scholarly interests centering on the poetics of ekphrasis, poetic form and meter, the lyric poem as a genre, and manuscript scholarship treating the work of Emily Dickinson. Her articles have appeared in the Emily Dickinson Journal, Literary Imagination, and The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry Post-1945 (2013), among others. Her book reviews have appeared in Poetry magazine, Verse, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review. 

Pugh has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Word Press First Book Prize (for Rotary), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, an individual artist fellowship in poetry from the Illinois Arts Council, the Associated Writing Programs’ Intro Journals Award, and the Grolier Poetry Prize. She has been granted residencies at the Bogliasco Foundation, Ragdale, Ucross, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. At the University of Illinois at Chicago, Pugh received a faculty fellowship from the Institute for the Humanities, a Graduate Mentoring Award for outstanding mentoring of graduate students, a Teaching Recognition Program award, and a Dean’s Award for Faculty Research in the Humanities.

Pugh is consulting editor for Poetry and a professor in the Program for Writers (the PhD program in creative writing) at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Christina Pugh will read on September 27, 2017 in the Hammes Campus Bookstore at 7:30 p.m. Come and bring your friends 🙂

I’ll be there.

Lavinia

In a summer poetry seminar I attended, I inadvertently found out that one of rooms in the poetry cottages is haunted when I was having lunch with peer poets. One poet joked that the ghost might touch the occupants tenderly at night.  I have only seen the exterior of the poetry cottage while my peers and I said farewell to visiting poets, but have never been inside. When I go back to visit, I will try to search for the ghost in that room in the cottage, and be thrilled to encounter the apparition. I know you are probably less weird, but if you are still curious about how ghosts interact with humans, you might find the answer in Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia translated by Daniel Borzutzky.

Valdviva is set in Pincochet’s reign in Chile and focuses on the violence inflicted on Chilean citizens. In Borzutzky’s translation of these poems, readers can hear the dead’s voices to the living. Although their words are filled with the trauma and horror they endured, tenderness and intimacy with their beloved family and friends surface between the lines.  In Ghigliotto’s poems, the dead are not sad spirits that lament their fate. Instead, they celebrate their past, and they connect with the living in dreams.

Imagine that a huge frog sits next to you on a train. How will you react? Will you politely ask Mr. Frog to show you his snacks of dead insects? Probably not. I will give him a friendly smile and scream secretly in my heart. If you have ever traveled to a foreign country and board a train, you’ll probably stand out like a frog and find others gawking at you like a misfit and a weird creature. When you arrive in that new country, you will assimilate, and be less of a weirdo. You probably want to ask yourself, “Who am I and where do I belong?” If you are curious about how to approach this big question, come to hear Hedeen’s translation of “The Night Badly Written” by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez.

Nunez’s The Night Badly Written explores transnational consciousness, and challenges the concept of border. In Hedeen’s translations of these poems, the traveler meditates his relationship with strangers in their native land and questions what messages they conveyed to him through imagery of natural landscape. The speakers in Nunez’s poems found themselves alienated from the land that they were previously intimate with and their identity destabilize in reconciliation of multiple cultures they encounter.

Here are the bios of these two cool translators:

Daniel Borzutzky is the author of The Performance of Becoming Human, recipient of the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry. His other books include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (Nightboat, 2015), Memories of my Overdevelopment (Kenning Editions, 2015); and The Book of Interfering Bodies (Nightboat, 2011). He has translated poetry collections from Spanish, including Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia (Coimpress, 2016); Raúl Zurita’s The Country of Planks (Action Books, 2015) and Song for his Disappeared Love (Action Books, 2010); and Jaime Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl (Action Books, 2008). He lives in Chicago.

Katherine Hedeen is Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College. She is the poetry translation editor for The Kenyon Review, an editor at Cubanabooks, co-editor of Arc Publications Latin American Poetry in Translation Series, and an associate editor of Earthwork’s Latin American Poetry. Among her latest publications are tasks (co im press, 2016), a recent poetry collection by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez and the night badly written (action books, 2017), an anthology of Rodríguez Núñez’s latest work. Other book-length translations include collections by Rodolfo Alfonso, Juan Bañuelos, Juan Calzadilla, Marco Antonio Campos, Luis García Montero, Juan Gelman, Fayad Jamís, Hugo Mujica, José Emilio Pacheco, and Ida Vitale.

Daniel Borzutzky and Katherine Hedeen will read on September 20, 2017 in the Hammes Campus Bookstore at 7:30 p.m. Come and bring your friends1

– Lavinia

I’ve grown suspicious of framing any sort of disagreement as war. Hyperbole and metaphors are nothing new to the poet and Internet lurker. But equating events to armed conflict that aims to or finds it acceptable to extinguish lives is often an act of excessive force. Like war and its weapons become spectacle for worship, onlookers grow to glorify the carnage and destruction, develop an obsession towards victory and satisfying violent desires. The abuse of war makes me ask questions about people and questioning people is exhausting. I suppose some of this is an age thing combined with an insecurity thing, this grand desire to cull any outward manifestation of primitivity or immaturity. A losing battle.

Fights I can accept. Struggles I can accept, along with survival. Perhaps only because I feel like those words apply to what I’ve been feeling, even as I deny, flagellate, and argue with myself if those terms are justified. If I have earned the right to use those words. If I have earned the right to feel those things. If I have earned the right to take others on a guilt trip, throw up my arms and say ‘I am who I am.’ Feelings are a hell of a thing. They oscillate between ceaseless motivation and paralyzed introspection. That is the beat of creative writing. Do you want to see the hearts? Then come listen to the writers who have survived a two year struggle, ready to move on to the next fight.

Second year students of the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame will be reading five-minute selections from their final theses on Sunday April 30th, 2017 at 3:00 PM in the Eck Center Auditorium. The reading is free and open to the public.

Zachary Anderson hails from Cheyenne, Wyoming. He received BA degrees in English and French from the University of Wyoming, and an MA in literature, writing a thesis on race and Beat Generation masculinities. His poetry projects are anxiety-ridden explorations of gender performance, late capitalism, constructions of wilderness, the rural, and the Gothic.

Kelsey Castaneda received her BA from Georgetown College, where she was Student Editor of the Georgetown Review. She studied Creative Writing in Prague, Shakespeare and Ovid at Oxford, and taught English in Slovakia through the Fulbright Program. Her other interests include hiking, shopping, music festivals, and rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Taeyin ChoGlueck is a third culture kid birthed by North America and South Korea. She is the co-founder of Stage for Change, a non-profit group that puts unheard voices that question identity on the stage. She is the playwright of The Pink Pope, which features a female God dealing with a Purgatory full of misogynists and women building a new church.

Thomson Guster is the recipient of the 2010-2011 Kelly Writers House Junior Fellows Prize. His writing has appeared in Strange Attractors: Investigations into Non-Humanoid Extraterrestrial Sexuality and Bedfellows. Recent work includesTHE CLONE SAGA, an adaptation of Spider-Man that explores the empty paranoia of identity; HEAT MAP #10, ‘a zine of fictional music writing; and Op, poems that attempt self-expression under deep cover.

Luis Lopez-Maldonado is a Xican@ poeta, choreographer and educator. He earned a BA in Creative Writing and Dance from the University of California Riverside, and an MA in Dance from Florida State University. His poetry has been seen in Foglifter, Public Pool, and Spillway, among many others. He is the founder of the men’s writing workshop in the St. Joseph County Juvenile Justice Center and co-founder and editor at The Brillantina Project.

Chris Muravez finished his BFA in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada College. He is a ten-year veteran of the U.S. Army and the Army National Guard. His poems have been featured in Emerge Literary Journal, The Mochila Review, Santa Clara Review, and South 85 Journal. He has also worked on the Sierra Nevada Review as an editor. His poetry explores the damage of war on both the society and the individual. He kills time by blocking out the sun.

Bailey Pittenger received her BA and MA in English at Wake Forest University. She served as managing editor of Re:Visions and The Bend, was awarded the Kaneb Center Graduate Student Teaching Award, and received a Katharine Bakeless Nason Scholarship for her fiction. Her prose was published recently in Cosmonauts Avenue, Gigantic Sequins, Entropy, and elsewhere. She will be attending the University of Denver for her PhD in English.

Tania Sarfraz grew up in Lahore, Pakistan. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology from Brown University in 2014. She won the Weston Senior Prize for her short fiction collection, Betrayal & Other Stories. She is a writer of short prose that meanders, then finds its way, or remains lost. Sometimes she eats mangoes and hotdogs on skateboards.

Sarah Snider graduated from Yeshiva University with a BA in English Literature and minors in History and Women’s Studies. She has worked in nonprofit jobs including disaster relief, community outreach, feminist advocacy, and Holocaust survivor outreach. Her writing covers issues surrounding gender, family, religion, and culture, but attempts to do so with a desperate insertion of humor and in a pleasantly fragmented fashion.

It’s the end and the beginning, the beginning of an end and the end of a beginning. Come witness on Sunday. Ask questions and be suspicious. Let your heart beat.

-Moon

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.

I don’t know how to swim.

My early childhood at the local indoor pool instilled a fear of the burning sensation when water fills my nostrils. Even to this day I feel I must pinch my nose if I were to submerge my head below a surface. As a result, one of my fantastic fears is to discover a loved one drowning in the depths, yet being unable to aid them just because of an unpleasant formative experience. It would be as if I wasn’t able to eat a can of beans to defeat bean aliens threatening my family or refused to caress a beetle to save my friends from bug aliens.

Yet much like heights, bodies of water remain enchanting. There is no need for a siren to call me, I just look down at them, into them. I feel like I should be there, regardless of the consequences. I need to be there.

This is my problem.

Now, how about a reading event?

Hilary Plum and Zach Savich will read Wednesday, March 22, 2017, at Hammes Campus Bookstore on Notre Dame. The reading begins at 7:00 PM. It is free and open to the public.

Hilary Plum is the author of the work of nonfiction Watchfires (Rescue Press, 2016) and the novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets (FC2, 2013). Recent prose and criticism has appeared in Full Stop, Bookforum, the Seneca Review, Poetry Northwest, the Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. With Zach Savich she edits Rescue Press’s Open Series. She lives, teaches, and edits in Philadelphia.

Zach Savich‘s fifth collection of poetry, The Orchard Green and Every Color, was published by Omnidawn in 2016, and Diving Makes the Water Deep, his memoir of cancer, teaching, and poetic friendship, was published in 2016 by Rescue Press. His work has received the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Colorado Prize for Poetry, the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Open Award, and other honors. His poems, essays, and book reviews have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, A Public Space, Mid-American Review, VOLT, jubilat, Best New Poets, and The New Census. He teaches in the BFA Program for Creative Writing at the University of the Arts, in Philadelphia, and co-edits Rescue Press’s Open Prose Series.

They write like water. Formless thoughts attempt to establish themselves as something solid, like the concept of a river, a lake, or an ocean. Then they dissipate, as it is their nature, leaving a rippling impression, and reform themselves as another wave. An amorphous dance that is unlike and like what has been said before, reaching for a conclusion but unable to stop the current. Not until the pen (or keyboard) is dropped, the ‘death of the author.’ Perhaps that is why I am drawn to the deep. My heart and mind sense a flow that is the same but greater than their own, and manifest their desire to reunite against rationality. How little of it I possess now, eroded by the times. Keep or throw?

-Moon

How often do you write? That’s a question I would rather not answer. How do you write? Now that’s something I can tackle.

I look for things that sound odd. Listen for stuff that looks weird. The other day when I was in the airport the PA system was looking for a McKenna Reed, asking them to come to the water fixture to meet their father. Two things struck me-

1. Why not just call it a water fountain? Is it against airport law to call a fountain a fountain? Were they trying to impress their supervisor or coworkers?
2. I wished I was McKenna Reed because it’s been awhile since I’ve seen my own father.

Thus the announcement made it into my little black book, along with the time I had spread olive oil on a pan in the shape of the USA and some ruminations on the inescapable solitude our human lives made while sitting in a mostly inconsequential lecture.

That was just part one. I’m putting you to sleep, aren’t I? Perhaps this man from Bangor can do you better.

Gregory Howard will read Wednesday, March 8, 2017, at Hammes Campus Bookstore on Notre Dame. The reading begins at 7:00 PM. It is free and open to the public.

Gregory Howard teaches creative writing, contemporary literature, and film studies at the University of Maine. His first novel Hospice was published by FC2 in June 2015. His fiction and essays have appeared in Web Conjunctions, Harp & Altar, and Tarpaulin Sky, among other journals. Hospice follows the odd and lovely but also frightening life of Lucy, everyday neighborhoods become wonderlands where ordinary houses reveal strange inmates living together in monastic seclusion, wayward children resort to blackmail to get what they want, and hospitals seem to appear and disappear to avoid being found. Replete with the sense that something strange is about to happen at any moment, Hospice blurs the borders between the mundane and miraculous, evoking the intensity of the secret world of childhood and the distressing and absurd search for a place to call home.

In his essay The Object is Always Magic: Narrative as Collection, Howard shares his perspective on creating stories. Collecting miscellaneous oddities including a rusty saw and glass eyeballs has prepared him for the life of a writer. The mess he made created fragments and juxtapositions of objects, which are where stories are born. The collection of junk is fleshed out into literature through precision in language that surprises, strangeness that comes out of what is habit. All this is possible through the difficult act of what Howard calls paying attention.

So come on down to Hammes on the 8th of March to experience the story-making magic that hides behind every detail and fragment. If enough people show, I’ll even post part two of my experiences in writing. Maybe.

-Moon

Step right up for your favorite time of the year, excluding bedtime and time to rock. That’s right, it’s time to get up close and personal with the metaphorically hottest writers in America (or at least Indiana). These word wielders will be reading work that’s too fresh and steamy for the general public (at least for now). Have you ever wanted to be where it all happens? Well, this is going to be the center of the creative writing universe (at least for 2 hours).

Thomson Guster, Erik-John Fuhrer, Ingabirano Nintunze, and Grace Polleys will read their poetry and prose on Wednesday, March 1, 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.

Thomson Guster’s recent work includes THE CLONE SAGA, a distorted adaptation of the oft-derided Spider-Man storyline of the same name that explores the empty paranoia of identity, the portability of content across genres and platforms, and the limits of fan fiction; HEAT MAP #10, ‘a zine of fictional music writing composed by blind evolutionary logic that amplifies mere snags in the infostream into waveforms that threaten to crash their mode; Op, a series of poems that explore the possibilities for self-expression under deep cover; and Crunch Time, a collection of fight scenes that experiment with duration, intensity, choreography, and the limits of the visual in a textual medium.

Erik-John Fuhrer is currently a PhD student in English and a presidential fellow at Notre Dame. His work has previously appeared in The Long Island Quarterly, First Literary Review East, The Fib Review, The Shotglass Journal, and the Oxonian Review, where he was a finalist for their Third Annual Poetry Competition. Erik’s interests lie in literary boundary crossings, manifested most recently in representations of the nonhuman and transgressions between human and nonhuman subjects in modernist literature. He is inspired by hybrid forms of literary expression that elide genre boundaries as well as by quiet, lyric poetry that often achieves the same transgressions more subtly.

Ingabirano Nintunze received a B.A. in English Literature and Telecommunication from Texas A&M University. She has won the Gordone Award for undergraduate poetry and the UWC Writing Award for her short story, “A Midday Train Through Russia.” Gabi has worked as a production assistant on several professional video projects, performed as a theatre actress in Austin, Texas, and when she’s not writing words, she likes writing music to go along with them. Her writing explores urban and suburban magic, belief systems, genuine representations and romantic tragedy. She likes her protagonists average and her fantasy in excess.

Grace Polleys studied English and music at the University of Denver. Her recent work embodies the spontaneous nature of jazz as well as its chordal complexity and demands the reader’s focus to be as strong as the performer. Grace’s poetry refuses ego or narrative, and the stories it does tell are distorted and heavily coded, recalling the struggles of constructing AI that can produce creative writing and the inherent, haunting strangeness of the product.

So come one, come all. Bring an open mind and an open mouth to drink up the creative juices, and open really really wide, because there’s going to be barrels of it. Feel prose and poetry, fact and fiction, and restraint and release all get messed up in an original brew. This is the past, present, and future that you will witness before anyone else does, if you stop by at Andrews Auditorium on the 1st of March. Believe in me and my hype.

The idea of the Renaissance man has captured my imagination since the first time I heard of it, flitting in and out of my mind every now and then during idle moments. Removes a malignant tumor in the morning and completes an oil painting of the patient by lunch. Cooks a authentic Italian pizza made with homegrown ingredients and wins every game of Scrabble. Speaks English, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, German, Chinese, Algebra and Dog. Blessed with super writing and super reading! Able to leap over tall buildings in a single bound!

I’m getting there. I can jump higher than my house. If you seek the company of a polymath, just give me a decade or two. Feeling impatient? Check out our next reading.

Michael Collins will read Wednesday, February 22, 2017, at Hammes Campus Bookstore on Notre Dame. The reading begins at 7:00 PM. It is free and open to the public.

Michael Collins is the author of ten works of fiction. His work has been translated into seventeen languages. His novel The Keepers of Truth was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the IMPAC Award. Other novels have won The Irish Novel of the Year, The Pacific Northwest Bookseller’s Award, along with the Prix Littéraire Lucien Barrière. His short fiction has won the Pushcart Award for Best Fiction, and he is the recipient of numerous New York Times Notable Book of the Year Awards. Collins is also an ultra-runner. As captain of the Irish National 100k Team, he earned a bronze medal at the 2010 World Masters 100k Championships in Gibraltar. Notable wins include The Everest Marathon, The North Pole Marathon, The Antarctic Marathon and the Sahara Marathon. Collins was educated at The University of Notre Dame and Oxford University and holds a doctorate degree.

He’s a man that not only runs over mountains, fields of ice and snow, and dunes of sand, but miles of them with record-setting speed. With that same spirit he’s written book after book to a reception of rewards and accolades. How does he do it? What links his running and writing? Can he beat you at Scrabble? Find out on February 22.

-Moon