yesterday with jim shepard

The creative writing program hosts a number of visiting writers through the Edelstein-Keller fund, and fiction writer Jim Shepard was our first.

Images: (top: department head Ray Gonzalez; bottom: Professor Charles Baxter)

As events intern in the office, it fell upon me to drive Shepard to his interview at MPR--my first visit to the swanky St Paul offices. I sat in the green room, leaning into the old Sony radio, listening to the interview on Midmorning. He was sandwiched between a nurse practitioner at the Children's Hospital talking about H1N1 and a university doctor who does regular medical commentary, which, no doubt, returned to H1N1.


His day was completely packed: on Monday, he had manuscript conferences and dinner with second and third year fiction MFAs along with the creative writing faculty at former-director Julie Schumacher's house, and today, after the interview, he had lunch with MFAs along with more manuscript conferences, visits to thesis seminars, an interview with dislocate, and, of course, his reading and Q&A and reception, where he signed my copy: For Molly, in honor of her dogs and her love of non-fiction--All best, Jim Shepard. Given my ridiculous level of gullibility, I decided his note of my non-fiction love was tongue-in-cheek and not that he forgot I was the only poetry MFA to attend all events. (After all, I never mentioned that I do prose writing as well. Best to keep it simple.) The dogs, of course, is in reference to my car's console, which collapsed when he elbowed it, as one of the dogs destroyed it in an anxious leap from one end of the car to another one summer long ago. I didn't point out the hamster-chewed spot he was covering as we drove around. Or the stain from the hot wings from the M.Ed party I attended one winter so many years ago.


Right now, I'm reading his National Book Award-nominated Like You'd Understand, Anyway, which is incredibly research-heavy, setting stories in the Chernobyl disaster, on planes with geologists in Alaska, amongst Roman battles, and as I read, I'm sussing out the essentials of the stories and wondering how imperative it is, this wonderful research and dramatic backdrop, to the story itself: if the characters were redressed and placed in a contemporary setting, as some of these stories are (in a teenager's home, on the football field), would the poignancy be lost?

Side note: As a kindness, please ask permission before you use any photos of mine. Thanks!

what is found there

It is not for lack of topics or lack of movement and thought that this blog has so many gaping moments of quiet. It is from sheer exhaustion, from pulling myself along by inches, from one day to the next. Today's was no exception--starting with chauffeuring visiting writer Jim Shepard to his MPR interview and ending with handing out ziploc baggies to graduate students so they could take the leftover hors d'oeuvres home. (Hey, we haven't been paid since the beginning of June.)

I do want to show pictures I took from tonight's reading, want to share some thoughts about teaching freshmen writing, want to transcribe my notes from Trish's first two memoir classes, but tonight, before I stumble up to bed, confused at just how those stairs got to be so steep anyway, I want to share this: I have a little collective, a collection of four other women poets, and I am grateful for them. Tonight, we took a look at my haphazard chapbook draft and despite the clear indications of my eyelids that I am, indeed, very very tired, I also feel this strange sense of energy and purpose and excitement at sitting down and shuffling and clipping and tidying and generating and slicing and injecting. The work of revising terrifies me, mostly because I don't want to destroy a good thing or conflate a bad, but I'm gaining confidence, and with these four voices behind me, I feel almost brave, almost ready to polish and push this thing out into the world. A knock from the nest, so to speak.

While at Bread Loaf, I eased myself into Dickinson studies by reading The Poet and the Murderer, which is deceptive with its Dickinson cover and double billing in the title, but I learned more on how to counterfeit rare documents and coins and the rejection of Mormonism by said murderer than anything else.

Despite this, I culled two quotes to keep in mind as I read that brick that is her collected poems over the next few weeks, the second being particularly significant as I am studying Bishop later in the semester:

[Dickinson's nephew Ned] lived next door to hear at the Evergreens, and Dickinson, who never had children of her own, adored him. The feeling seems to have been reciprocated. Ned frequently ran across from the Evergreens to visit his brilliant, eccentric aunt. On one occasion he left his rubber boots behind. Dickinson sent them back on a silver tray, their tops stuffed with flowers.

- Simon Worrall, The Poet and the Murderer, pg. 6

[Harvard scholar Thomas] Johnson's edition also plucked a shy girl from Massachusetts out of her self-chosen seclusion and turned her into the It girl of modern American Poetry. "I like, or at least I admire, her a great deal more now," the poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell in 1956, "probably because of that good new edition, really. I spent another stretch absorbed in that, and think... that she's about the best we have."

- pg. 25

mfa launch party

(Ray Gonzalez, current department head)

(Julie Shumacher, previous department head)

(Josh + Colleen, managing editor and editor-in-chief of dislocate)
(Colleen is also a member of the == collective)

second Colleen, also ==

At a space deeply ensconced in F. Scott Fitzgerald mythology, the MFAs of the 2009-2010 school year gathered for a bit of schmoozing. There was a bit of bobbing up-and-down as we introduced ourselves to the group, explaining our roles within this institution, and I tried to remember if I'd had caviar before this night.

Our first week is behind us and I'm still a bit worn at the edges, a weekend spent away with family and friends and a return to rigor, to three fully formed days on campus a week. Tomorrow: a four hour block of time as the creative writing office intern, a meeting with fellow MFAers to discuss the possibility of a joint critical essay which could take us to NYC, and an evening course on the memoir with Trish Hampl.

first day, squinty eyes

I have that through-a-blender feeling of a long day well spent: I can tell my internship is going to be an actual learning experience for me, my class went smoothly despite the boring-the-snot-out-of-you aspect of syllabus day, and I had forgotten how nice it is to be in the company of my peers in thesis seminar (and out for a beer at the eclectically decorated Kitty Kat Club after).

The way our seminar, as run by poet and essayist Ray Gonzalez, works is this: third years bring in those bricks that are their manuscripts, and second years bring in collections of five poems at a time to be looked at. The result is a bit of terror on behalf of those second years, who somehow have to cobble together a draft that won't be entirely shameful in 365 days.

Ray, lover of lists, brought in some thoughts on manuscripts, professing his own view of the manuscript as a single poem made up of a collection of poems. We spoke of how the act of reading an entire book of poems can result in a satisfactory feeling, but when asked to select one or two gems to include, say, in a course packet for a poetry workshop, we might be at a loss. Carolyn Forche, who was my mentor a number of years ago, advised me to--read three books of poetry a week; every season study a new poet thoroughly; and read a book of poems in a single sitting. I haven't been faithful to this formula; perhaps this is the semester to make an attempt.

But instead of seasonal poets, I will have monthly poets--I am taking an independent study with Michael Dennis Browne where I will study the canonical American poets Emily Dickinson, Edna St Vincent Millay, and Elizabeth Bishop. We have our first meeting on Thursday where we will construct some sort of game plan that will allow my acquisition of credits for said literary exploration.

bon-fire

(Shawn, who actually knows how to use Photoshop, spliced the above version)

(photoshop diptych tutorial)

L to R: Ryan, Bart, Colleen C, Amanda, Colleen M, Garrett, Meryl, Shawn

This weekend, Ryan and I were blessed with a series of guests--Saturday evening, full of friends from various aspects in life, and Sunday was dedicated to some of my favorite MFA people: Amanda (who is recently featured in Lit and will soon be in New Orleans Review) (and her boyfriend Will would be with us, but he is Ph.D'ing at Cornell), Colleen C (our fearless dislocate leader) and her boyfriend Bart (who is working on a lit Ph.D and is also poetry MFA), Colleen M (whose work has been featured in dear camera, among other places) and her boyfriend Garrett (who is soon to be speaking in Austin on the Politics of Naming, which sounds incredibly interesting), and Meryl (whose poetry inspired by the work of Virginia Woolf has inspired my own focus on canonical writers and her blog inspired me to start this one) and her husband Shawn (who is hugely talented and I will be selfishly taking advantage of said talent).

Amanda, Colleen C, Colleen M, Meryl, and I make up a loose collective within in the program. Last spring, we did a bit of collective reading, and this autumn, we'll work on chapbook manuscripts.


(The evening before, I allowed my husband and my friend's husband to lighter-fluid a book I'd been using to futz with, found-text-wise, as these two charming men, one a bit tipsy and the other equally giddy, were seeking something compelling to toss into our bonfire--and I took a few photographs, which somehow allowed this fahrenheit 451'ing of a biography on one of my favorite poets--this Plath biography, I must add, I picked up a library book sale for a few pennies and discovered I owned a duplicate, but still. Burning books? Then: I kept thinking of the beauty of altered books.)

It's strangely beautiful.

orientation irk

This week has been so all-out flattening, I've forgotten what components of my life have been neglected. I come home, and if the rage at some particular point raised in orientation or frustration at the rush hour (part of being a college student generally means wonky schedule, which generally means the bonus of zippy traffic experiences, but orientation brings us firmly in the parameters of real-world scheduling, which is misery, particularly for someone like me)--if these burbling emotions have not dissipated, I stomp around a bit, and then Ryan settles me down with some ridiculous movie, or I read a book of poems whose clarity or language cheers me (Here, Bullet was tonight's reading, and though it is not flawless, there are points of buoyancy and it was enough to remove me from the funk--I also recently finished Old Heart by Stanley Plumly, which I adored).

Orientation for composition courses is nearly over, not without the requisite drama and doldrums.

But, I am amused at one of my fiction peers' characterizations of our sessions. I mentioned how the MFAs seemed to be the misfits in the back of the classroom, our arms firmly crossed, New Yorkers surreptitiously paged through. Being comp, the sneered-at division of language and humanities, known as a torture device for some MFAs (just to clarify: I requested comp--no lie), there is a motley mix of graduate instructors, ranging from the die-hard Writing Studies Ph.Ds, to American Studies grad students, to Lit grad students, to us (MFAs). My friend, whose swing-messing metaphor remains a vehicle for describing poor writing a year later, pointed out that the Writing Studies people loved talking in terms of rhetoric and Aristotle and ethos, the American Studies and Lit people loved applying their gender and socio-economic and post-colonial lenses, and the MFAs loved picking at the language and form.

Ah, predictability and your sweet little boxes you fit us into.