Vol. 6 No. 1
August 2004
The Louisville Review: Staff Change
Life
of a Writer
Previous Newsletters
Presidential
Election November 2:
Get your absentee ballot now!
Because the presidential election takes place during the fall residency,
MFA faculty and students need to vote by absentee ballot before they leave
home.
Following is advice on how to obtain an absentee ballot, courtesy of the
League of Women Voters web site: "Procedures for obtaining absentee
ballots are different for every state. Write to the election office in
the community of your primary residence either in a letter or by filling
out an application form. The letter should include your name, address
as registered, ward or precinct if you know it, address to which you want
the absentee ballot sent, the party ballot sought (if election is a primary),
and your signature."
Local students and faculty may vote before the day's residency activities
begin or over the lunch hour, or they may prefer to avoid a time crunch
and vote by absentee ballot. (top)
Book(s) in Common
for October 2004 Residency
The MFA Book-in-Commons for October 2004's MFA residency are Nancy Willard's
book for children A Visit to William Blake's Inn: Poems for Innocent
and Experienced Travelers (Harcourt Children's Books 1981) and the
illustrated version of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience
(Oxford).
A Visit to William Blake's Inn was the first book to be awarded
the Newbery Medal. Willard is the author of many other children's books
including The Nightgown of the Sullen Moon (1987), The High
Rise Glorious Skittle Skat Roarious Sky Pie Angel Food Cake (1999),
and The Mouse, the Cat, and Grandmother Hat (2003). Also, she is
the author of two adult novels, Things Invisible to See and Sister
Water, and twelve books of poetry, including Swimming Lessons:
New and Selected Poems. Willard was raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan,
and educated at the University of Michigan and Stanford University. She
teaches at Vassar College and lives in Poughkeepsie, New York.
By also reading Blake's book, students can see something of how an
older classic influences contemporary writing. As always, with the MFA
Book in Common, all students and faculty are asked to read both books
in common before arriving at Spalding in October. Students should bring
copies of their books to the first Friday night of the residency for the
opening plenary discussion. (top)
Residency to Attend
Performance
at Actors Theatre of Louisville
As part of the program's emphasis on the interrelatedness of the arts,
MFA students and faculty will attend a matinee performance of Tennessee
Williams's masterpiece The Glass Menagerie on Sunday, October 31,
at Louisville's acclaimed Actors Theatre. When it premiered in 1944,
The Glass Menagerie broke ground in defying the naturalistic stage
conventions of the day, instead making innovative use of lighting, music,
and screen projections to portray the interior lives of its characters.
Williams himself was influenced by writers who worked in playwriting (Anton
Chekhov) as well as the novel form (D. H. Lawrence) and poetry (Hart Crane). (top)
Letters
of Recommendation
Students seeking letters of recommendation or wishing to refer prospective
employers to MFA faculty or leaders for telephone endorsements should
ask those persons most directly familiar with their work to supply such
letters or to serve as references. A student's thesis advisor, who has
also attended the student's graduating lecture and thesis discussion,
is the most appropriate person to ask for a recommendation. Other faculty
who have served as mentors would also be in a position to offer meaningful
supportive statements. Sometimes students may have felt special rapport
with a recent workshop faculty leader and wish to ask that person for
a recommendation that would include statements not only about the quality
of writing but also about oral communication skills in a group situation.
Usually endorsements from people with whom you have not worked directly
can only seem pro forma to prospective employers and do not carry
the appropriate authority.
Whenever a student asks for a recommendation, it should be a request directly
to the faculty member, not to the MFA office. The student should help
the faculty member to write convincingly by offering a description of
the job and how the student himself or herself feels that the educational
experience with the recommender has prepared the student for the particular
position.
Giving a faculty member plenty of lead-time and including information
about when the recommendation is due and the exact address and title of
the person to whom it is to be directed also facilitates matters.
It is always courteous to inform and thank recommenders when a position
has been secured. And it is encouraging to other MFA alumni to send in
a notice of new employment to Life of a Writer section of the MFA newsletter
On Extended Wings. We all want to hear of your successes. (top)
Good-bye
and Hello
This past June, Jan Mattingly-Weintraub (MFA 10/03) resigned her
position as editorial assistant with The Louisville Review to spend
more time with her family and her writing. We are sad to see her go; she
was a wonderful help to us and an expert in the day-to-day running of
our publishing affairs, but we wish all good things for both her family
and her fiction!
After a candidate search to find a qualified person to fill that vacant
position, we are pleased to announce that The Louisville Review Corp.
has hired Liz Nethery, a current MFA student in creative nonfiction,
as our new editorial assistant. Liz brings valuable desktop, public relations,
and marketing experience to our magazine. We are pleased to have her join
us! (top)
Spoken
Word Programs Air Featuring
Vaswani, Orr, and Dean
The Spoken Word, a public radio series featuring talks and performances
about literature, the arts, and culture, recorded Spalding MFA faculty
members Debra Kang Dean, Elaine Neil Orr, and Neela Vaswani
during our Celebration of Recently Published Books, which took place during
the May 2004 residency. In June 2004, Dean's reading from her new book
of poems, Precipitates (BOA), and Vaswani's reading from her new
book of short stories, Where the Long Grass Bends (Sarabande),
were featured on the broadcast, which is aired on over 40 radio stations
across the Southeast. The Spoken Word had previously recorded and
aired a program featuring Orr, when she read from her newly published
memoir Gods of Noonday: A White Girl's African Life at the Georgia
Center for the Book at the DeKalb Public Library in Decatur in January
2004. If The Spoken Word is not carried on your local NPR station,
archived programs can be found at http://www.radiosouth.net (top)
New
Thesis Fee
The MFA Office was recently notified that as of September 1, 2004, Spalding
University will begin charging a student fee of $100 for the processing,
binding, cataloguing, and shelving in the Spalding library of each thesis
from a graduating student.
This payment should be made by check or money order payable to Spalding
University and should accompany your thesis when you submit it to the
MFA Office before coming to your final (5th) residency. It is extremely
important that you make payment at this time because no student will receive
a diploma without remitting this fee.
If this new fee provides an extreme hardship to you, please contact Kathleen
Driskell, Associate Program Director, immediately at kdriskell@spalding.edu (top)
Life of a Writer
Andrew Beahrs's first novel, Strange Saint, was accepted for publication by Toby Press. A revised version of his ECE, "Making History: Establishing Authority in Period Fiction," has been accepted by The Writer's Chronicle.
Mark Brown has a poem forthcoming in Bloom magazine (www.bloommagazine.org).
Amy Clark's short story, "In the Big Picture," was published in the Spring 2004 issue of Sou‘wester. Her poems "Arc" and "Calla Lily" are forthcoming in The Cream City Review.
Amy Watkins Copeland has two poems forthcoming in the The MacGuffin, expected to be published in the Fall 2004 issue.
Daniel DiStasio won second place in the Key West Literary Guild's Short Story Contest for "Skye Key."
Three of Sandra Falconer's poems have been accepted by The Oncologist, an international health care journal. She was recently a guest lecturer at Johns Hopkins University for a group of writers who wanted information on publishing.
Thea Gavin's poem, "An Idea Burst," was recently published in The Formalist (Vol. 15, Issue 1, 2004).
Lucrecia Guerrero recently returned from a three- week residency at Fundación Valparaíso, an artist retreat in Spain, where she worked on her novel, Tree of Sighs. On September 3, she is the featured fiction reader at the Gist Street Reading Series in Pittsburgh.
Cyn Kitchen read from her fiction at the annual Railroad Days Festival in Galesburg, Illinois. The reading was organized by the editors of Night Train magazine which featured Galesburg in their March 2004 issue.
Richard Newman has three monster sonnets forthcoming in The Melic Review and two poems forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review.
Jonathan Weinert's review of Sad Little Breathing Machine, by Matthea Harvey (Graywolf Press), will appear in the Fall 2004 issue of Harvard Review.
Colleen Wells had a short piece published in the Sacred Mundane section of the July/August issue of Orion Magazine. (top)
Susan Campbell Bartoletti has been invited to speak at the Children's Literature New England summer institute, held at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, August 1-7. This year's conference theme is "The World Is All Grown Strange." Susan is to participate on a panel at the Baltimore Book Festival, September 17-18. She has also been invited to serve on the Pennsylvania Center for the Book council.
Julie Brickman published a review of Seth Kantner's novel Ordinary Wolves in the Books Section of the San Diego Union-Tribune on Sunday, May 16. The novel won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize and was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers selection.
"Internal Exile," a poem from Richard Cecil's forthcoming Twenty-First Century Blues, was featured on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac on July 5.
In Louisville, Kathleen Driskell read at the InKY series at the Rudyard Kipling and at a celebration to launch the new literary magazine Arable at The Jazz Factory. She led a Kentucky Humanities Council's book club discussion of Elaine Neil Orr's Gods of Noonday: A White African Girl's Life for the Filson Historical Club. She also appeared as a guest on State of Affairs, a call-in show broadcast by WFPL 89.3 FM (Louisville's NPR station). Her essay, "Dirty Mouths," is forthcoming in Life Writing by Kentucky Feminists.
Upcoming appearances by Kirby Gann for his novel, Barbarian Parade (Hill Street Press), will be October 8-10 at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, Tennessee and December 2-4 at the First Books Festival at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Campus. Student attendance is welcome.
A lecture Richard Goodman gave at Spalding University, "Searching for the Exact Word," will be published in the AWP Writer's Chronicle in September. It will also appear in the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus, from Oxford University Press, due out in October. His essay on Laurence Wylie, "Homage to Village in the Vaucluse," will be published in the French Review next year.
Roy Hoffman's Mobile Register nonfiction story, "Old Friends, Young Hearts," (9/28/03), about five women in their 80s who have remained best friends since first grade in Point Clear, Alabama, received the Mobile Press Club award on June 21 for best feature of the year. His Register profile, "Kathryn and the Tin Man," (11/16/03), about Selma, Alabama storyteller Kathryn Tucker Windham and her next door neighbor, tin artist Charlie Lucas, received the Alabama Press Association award on July 24 for best feature. An excerpt from his forthcoming novel, Chicken Dreaming Corn, (September, University. of Georgia Press) was selected for the anthology, Climbing Mt. Cheaha: Emerging Alabama Writers, (Livingston U. Press).
Silas House's Pushcart-nominated story "Coal Smoke" appears in New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, which has just been published by Algonquin Books. The story originally appeared in The Louisville Review. House was recently featured with Terry Kay as two of the South's best writers in Creative Loafing.
Karen Mann received the top fiction scholarship to the Indiana University Writers Conference. She read her story "Teleporation" at the conference, and the story was nominated for Best New American Voices.
Sena Jeter Naslund has received the author's award in fiction from the Southeastern Library Association. She gave presentations about her civil rights novel Four Spirits at the New England University Creative Writing Conference, Portland, Maine on June 4, and for the YMCA of central Kentucky, in Lexington, June 24. On June 26, she gave the commencement address for Spalding University. She has written an essay for an anthology by women writers, University of Alabama Press, on spirituality.
Molly Peacock spent June in Ireland where she interviewed Eavan Boland for Here on Earth with Jean Feraca on Wisconsin Public Radio. Two Spalding students, Amy Clark and Richard Newman, called in to speak about Boland's work. In between Bloomsday festivities in Dublin, Molly got a lot of poetry written. She has a piece forthcoming in New York Magazine the Family Issue: "The Children's Canon: cultural and horticultural places to take your kids in New York."
Jeanie Thompson has eight new poems from her manuscript, "Headlong Into Blueappearing," in Thicket, a new online journal (www.thicket.com) An essay on poetry and spirituality called "Where the Spirit Moved Me" has been accepted for a collection of essays by Southern women writers forthcoming from The University of Alabama Press.
Luke Wallin gave an Earth Day public lecture on "Ecology in Short Stories" at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth library. On May 2, he and one other singer and storyteller put on a musical show, all backed by the Pat Patrick Band from Nashville, Tennessee, at the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum in Atlanta. His piece, "Sharing Sacred Ground," was included in Far From Home: Father/Daughter Travel Adventure Stories (Creative Nonfiction, Seal Press) edited by Wendy Knight, published on Father's Day. He gave a reading from Far From Home with Wendy Knight at Books on the Square in Providence, Rhode Island, on June 20. He and five other musical acts shared a sound stage at an outdoor benefit for the Matapoisett Public Library in Matapoisett, Massachusetts, on July 13.
Katy Yocom recently spent ten days at Hopscotch House, a retreat
for women artists sponsored by the Kentucky Foundation for Women, working
on a revision of her novel. She was amazed at the productivity engendered
by peace, solitude, and the lack of an Internet connection. (Hopscotch
House is available to women who live in Kentucky and to women who are
in the MFA Program.)
Sam Zalutsky's short film, "Stefan's Silver Bell," airs this summer
on New York's WNET Channel 13's Reel New York program of independent film.
For more information, click here
He recently completed a treatment for a screenplay about Lizzie Borden
for Gigantic Pictures in NYC. He is teaching directing at the New York
Film Academy and will be teaching a seven-week intensive semester on film
and filmmaking this September and October at the Instituto Tecnologico
de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Queretaro Campus, in Queretaro, Mexico. (top)
Roy Burkhead's ECE, "The Short Stories and Lyrics of Two
Contemporary Writers: Steve Earle & Rosanne Cash," appears as
two parts in the Autumn 2004 and Spring 2005 issues of Chapter &
Verse: A Journal of Popular Music and Literature Studies. The journal
is published through the School of Music at University of Leeds, United
Kingdom. He teaches a five-week writing workshop at Carroll Community
College in Westminster, Maryland this summer, as well as the fall.
Susan Christerson Brown's profile of a World War II veteran, "Once
a Soldier. . ." is forthcoming in the Journal of Kentucky Studies.
She also has a small item in the August issue of Spirituality &
Health.
Anne Marie Fowler has been commissioned to write entries for the Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Literature, both the Asian-American and Hispanic-American volumes, to be published by Facts on File, Inc. Specific entries for the Asian-American volumes: Agha Shahid Ali, Denise Chong and her novel The Concubine's Children, and Indira Ganesan and her two novels Inheritance and The Journey. Entries for the Hispanic-American volumes: Miguel Algarin and his book of poetry On Call, Tato Laviera, and Virgil Suarez.
Erin Keane has poems forthcoming in Riven, Snake Nation Review, Floating Holiday, Drought Street Mural, and Churches, Banks and Bars. She was a featured reader at the Appalachian Writers Association annual conference in Williamsburg, Kentucky, on July 11 and in the River Styx Hungry Young Poets Series in St. Louis on July 19. She appeared as a guest lecturer for the Kentucky Governor's School for the Arts creative writing program on July 5.
Maryann Lesert's play, "The Music In The Mess," received a staged reading by The Pleiades Theatre Company on July 12 at the Rudyard Kipling in Old Louisville.
Cate McGowan has been hired at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida for an English lectureship position. Her book, Everything's Lighter in Water, is forthcoming at the end of the year/early 2005 from Thunderegg Press.
Linda Busby Parker received a Tennessee Williams Scholar in fiction award from the Sewanee Writer's Conference, July 13-25 at the University of the South. She will serve as featured author at the annual Spalding Heritage Weekend reunion, September 24-26. Her award-winning novel, Seven Laurels, will serve as Book in Common for reunion participants. Linda reads from her novel at a free event on Saturday, September 25, at 3 p.m. in the ELC Lectorium. A discussion and book signing will follow.
Diana Raab received first place in the 2004 CNW/FFWA Writing Competition
Award (Nonfiction-unpublished) for "Chapter 1: New York, 1964," of her
memoir/biography, Regina's Closet. She was also accepted into The
NYS Writers Institute for a two-week workshop this July with Phillip Lopate,
the editor of the classic book, The Art of the Personal Essay.
During June, Tammy Ramsey gave two poetry readings, one at InKY
series in Louisville and one at Max's Loudon Square Buffet in Lexington.
The reading at Max's was part of a month-long project she did with Con/temp,
a Lexington arts group. More information on the project can be found at
click
here
In June, Joe Schmidt gave a reading of his poetry at Bowery Poetry Club in New York City.
Pam Steele has two poems forthcoming in Churches, Banks and Bars. She recently won the Jim Wayne Miller Poetry Prize for the Kentucky Writers' Coalition Chapbook Contest.
Jane Stuppin, a director of her county's Literary Art Guild, has been involved in preparing a Book Fair, scheduled for Saturday, September l8, at Court House Square in Santa Rosa. The Guild has a line-up of authors including: Diane Johnson, Chitra Deva Kanuni, and Karen Joy Fowler (Jane Austen Book Club). A variety of vendors will be featuring rare, first editions, literary fiction, popular fiction; small press, big press. The Book Fair is dedicated to Charles Schulz this year, and a special panel will discuss Charles Shulz's cartoons. Santa Rosa is the home of the Charles Schulz museum. Local writers to be celebrated: Jean Hegland, Jonah Raskin, and Jane Stuppin to name only a few. Jane scheduled to read some poems from her recently published book Perfect Pitch at 10:30 a.m.
Stephanie Stuve-Bodeen's picture book Babu's Song has been named to the 2004-05 West Virginia Children's Book Award Master List, as well as the Pennsylvania Young Reader's Award Master List.
Kathleen Thompson's short story, "Living Like the Lilies" is forthcoming (late October) in an anthology by Livingston Press, Climbing Mt. Cheaha: Emerging Alabama Writers. Her review of Sue Walker's latest book of poetry It's Good Weather for Fudge Conversing with Carson McCullers (NewSouth Books, 2003) can be read at www.booksonreview.com
Susan Treitz has been recently promoted to Editor of Kentucky Homes and Gardens. The magazine debuted November/December 2003 and publishes articles about historic, traditional, and contemporary homes and gardens around Kentucky. Subscriptions are available. (top)
Reminders and Notes
October 2004 Graduation to be November 6
The October 2004 graduation is to be at 5 p.m. on Saturday, November 6,
(place to be announced). The graduation is followed by a champagne toast.
The farewell dinner will again be at the Brown Hotel. All graduates are
invited and may bring guests. The cost is $40 per guest. Reservation information
was mailed the week of July 26. Please return it to Katy or email Katy
at kyocom@spalding.edu with questions or reservations.
Faculty Advisory Committee (FAC) Members for May 2004 Semester
• Kirby Gann, Fiction
• Richard Cecil, Poetry
• Roy Hoffman, Creative Nonfiction
• Ellie Bryant, Writing for Children
• Charles Gaines, Sreenwriting and Playwriting
Both students and faculty are invited to make suggestions to the FAC for
exploration by the Program Director and larger faculty. However, students
and faculty should directly and immediately consult the Program Director
about any issues concerning specific individuals' performance in
the program.
Faculty/Guest Books in Common for October 2004
Students read the book in their area of concentration in preparation for
a discussion with the author at the October 2004 residency.
Fiction: Mary Waters's The Laws of Evening
Poetry: Molly Peacock's Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems
Creative Nonfiction: Richard Goodman's French Dirt: The Story
of a Garden in the South of France
Writing for Children: Ellie Bryant's The Black Bonnet
Screenwriting: Helena Kriel's screenplay adaptation of Ahab's
Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund
Playwriting: The dramatic stage version of Four Spirits
by Sena Jeter Naslund. (Both scripts will be sent to playwriting/screenwriting
students in a few weeks.)
Financial Aid: For help with financial aid questions, call Kristan
Adams at (800) 896-8941 ext. 2359 or (502) 585-9911, ext. 2359 or email
kadams@spalding.edu. Students may enter or update their FAFSA information
online at www.fafsa.ed.gov
MFA Scholarship Fund: Donations to the MFA in Writing Scholarship Fund may be made “in honor of” or “in memory of” a friend or loved one or organization. To make a donation, contact Theresa Raidy in the Advancement Office. Email: traidy@spalding.edu. Phone: (800) 896-8941, ext. 2601 or (502) 585-9911, ext. 2601.
Online information: MFA in Writing forms, deadlines, and other student and faculty information are available online at http://www.spalding.edu/mfaforms. Newsletters are at http://www.spalding.edu/mfanewsletter. For convenience, bookmark these two pages. Both web addresses are case sensitive. The MFA Office is happy to mail programs forms or the newsletter, if requested. Email Katy Yocom at kyocom@spalding.edu,.
Sena Jeter Naslund, Program DirectorKaren Mann,, Administrative Director
Kathleen Driskell, Associate Program Director
Katy Yocom, Assistant to the Directors
Liz Nethery, Newsletter Editor
Email Life of a Writer information to Liz Nethery at lifeofawriter@hotmail.com