MFA Greensboro Alum featured at the Poetry Foundation

Questions and Quaggas

by Daisy Fried
Twigs & Knucklebones, by Sarah Lindsay.Copper Canyon Press. $15.00.

Twigs & Knucklebones is a rare thing in poetry—a very good read. Fans of Sarah Lindsay's previous books, National Book Award finalist Primate Behavior (1997) and Mount Clutter (2002), will find here what they found there, only more so: freaks of nature and freakish nature, far-flung and underexplored places, things scientific and sci-fi, real things that seem invented, imaginary things that seem real. Orchids that grow underground. The introduction of starlings to America. Cities of the dead. Life on Jupiter's moon.

Lindsay's poems are as narrative as poems can get—they tell elaborate stories—but aren't at all confessional. Lindsay uses the word "I" to refer to herself or a poet-speaker in very few poems. Her voice in Twigs & Knucklebones is omniscient yet intimate, super-literate and flawlessly graceful, like a really good lecturer who knows how to entertain an audience while speaking on complex subject matters. In a sense these are "Research & Development" poems. One suspects Lindsay reads an article, for example, about a species of extinct zebra, then writes "Elegy for the Quagga." But the r&d never overwhelms insight or music. "Krakatau split with a blinding noise," writes Lindsay, of the volcanic island's 1883 explosion. "Fifteen days before, in its cage in Amsterdam,/the last known member of Equus quagga,/the southernmost subspecies of zebra, died." A little later, "Who needs to hear a quagga's voice?"

The poet does, and by the end of the poem, so does the reader—and can't. It feels like a kind of wound:

Even if, when it sank to its irreplaceable knees,

when its unique throat closed behind a sigh,

no dust rose to redden a whole year's sunsets,

no one unwittingly busy

two thousand miles away jumped at the sound,

no ashes rained on ships in the merciless sea.

Read the entire piece here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=182647

MFA Alum in the "News-Press"

Tropicalia book: Prof Baggott's 'Sweethearts' made for big screen

By Jay MacDonald
Special to news-press.com

Renaissance woman Julianna Baggott continues to defy everyone's expectations, including her own.

The engaging Florida State creative writing professor swears she didn't deliberately set out to excel in so many disciplines: short stories, poetry, children's adventures, as well as adult and women's fiction. It just sort of happened.

"I guess I'm a little buckshot; Renaissance woman sounds better," she chuckles. "I started out very strictly as a short story writer; I believed the short story is the true American form, that novelists lacked self-restraint, that poets were too ethereal and prissy, on and on. I really thought that, if anything, I would grow more narrow and kind of create one voice the older I got, into a very tight definition of myself. The complete opposite has happened."

And how. Her last three published works include her third collection of poems ("Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees"), her sixth children's novel under the pen name N.E. Bode ("The Amazing Compendium of Edward Magorium") and her fifth adult novel, a women's comedy, "My Husband's Sweethearts" (Delacorte, $22), under her new chic-lit-licious pen name, Bridget Asher.

Read the full article here:
http://www.news-press.com/article/20081214/LIFESTYLES/812140322/1013/LIFESTYLES

MFA Greensboro Alum Featured in the "Madison Messenger"

Virginia’s poet laureate returns to Chatham roots

By John Crane

December 10, 2008

About 40 Chatham Hall English students got a chance to discuss poetry with one of the greatest literary talents to come out of the small town of Chatham.

Claudia Emerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Virginia’s poet laureate, visited her alma mater this week as this year’s writer-in-residence. It was her fourth stint as writer-in-residence at the all-girls boarding school where she was once a student and later served as academic dean.

Emerson answered questions from students and gave advice on reading and writing poetry Wednesday in Chatham Hall’s Tea Room. She talked of the writing process, images and metaphor, ideas and influences on her work and how aspiring poets can cultivate their imagination.

Emerson told budding scriveners to try to write in many genres and styles to become sharper readers. In addition, attempting to write in different ways helps stave off hypercritical cynicism when reading and studying literature, she said.

“I think you can’t be sensitive, nuanced readers of a genre unless you try to write it yourselves,” Emerson, the Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry and professor of English at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, said.

Emerson is the author of several books of poetry, including “Pharaoh, Pharaoh,” “Pinion: An Elegy,” “Late Wife” and her newest collection of poetry, “Figure Studies: Poems.” Her work also has appeared in numerous literary journals. She won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2006 for “Late Wife,” an autobiographical work dealing with the break-up of her 19-year marriage and the beginning of another with her new husband.

Read the full article here:

http://www.godanriver.com/gdr/news/local/danville_news/article/virginias_poet_laureate_returns_to_chatham_roots/7937/

MFA Greensboro Alum Featured on "The Writer's Almanac" with Garrison Keillor

Great Depression Story

by Claudia Emerson

Sometimes the season changed in the telling,
sometimes the state, but it was always during

the Depression, and he was alone in the boxcar,
the train stalled beneath a sky wider

than any he'd seen so far, the fields of grass
wider than the sky. He'd been curious

to see if things were as bad somewhere else
as they were at home. They were—and worse,

he said, places with no trees, no water.
He hadn't eaten all day, all week, his hunger

hard-fixed, doubled, gleaming as the rails. A lone
house broke the sharp horizon, the train dreaming

beneath him, so he climbed down, walked out,
the grass parting at his knees. The windows

were open, curtainless, and the screendoor,
unlatched, moved to open, too, when he knocked.

He could see in all the way through to the kitchen—
and he smelled before he saw the lidded

pot on the stove, the steam escaping. Her clothes
moved on the line for all reply, the sheets,

a slip, one dress, washed thin, worn to translucence;
through it he could see what he mistook for fields

of roses until a crow flew in with the wind—
sudden, fleeting seam. By the time he got back to the train,

he'd guessed already what he'd taken—pot
and all—a hen, an old one that had quit

laying, he was sure or she wouldn't have killed it.
The train began to move then, her house falling

away from him. The story ended with the meat
not quite done, but, believe him, he ate it

all, white and dark, back, breast, legs, and thighs,
strewing the still-warm bones behind him for miles.

"Great Depression Story" by Claudia Emerson, from Figure Studies. © Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Reprinted with permission

Read the entire article here:
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2008/12/08

Listen to Garrison Keillor read the poem here:
http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media/player/almanac/2008/12/08_wa

Download the podcast here:
http://download.publicradio.org/podcast/almanac/2008/12/08_wa_64.mp3

MFA Greensboro Alum at Largehearted Boy

Book Notes - Keith Lee Morris ("The Dart League King")

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that is in some way relevant to their recently published books.

In The Dart League King, Keith Lee Morris creates an impressive vision of small-town life through . Smartly written and darkly suspenseful, the novel has me anticipating reading more from Keith Lee Morris.

Brock Clarke wrote of the book:

"Keith Morris is one of my favorite fiction writers and The Dart League King is his best book yet. In his Idaho you can see the rest of America, in his Idahoans the rest of us Americans: funny, grave, profane, tender, violent, full of longing for something and someone we don't really deserve and will do almost anything to get anyway. I am in awe of this novel, this novelist."

In his own words, here is Keith Lee Morris's Book Notes essay for his novel, The Dart League King:

The Dart League King deals with five characters hanging around a small-town Idaho bar on the night of the league dart championship (there’s also sex and drugs and violence for those of you so inclined, plus a healthy dose of mystery and an examination of fate, a look at how the smallest actions, those you might not even see if you’re not watching closely enough, can have the greatest significance). I’m going to give each of the characters a few representative musical selections, throw in a song for a few selected minor characters, and toss in a few general choices that might have something to do with the book in some way.

Read the entire piece here:
http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2008/12/book_notes_keit.html

MFA Greensboro Alum Reviewed at "Bookslut"

December 2008
Drew Nellins
fiction

The Dart League King by Keith Lee Morris

The novels that receive the most respectful receptions are usually those which, first by their bulk and second by their subject matter, insist upon serious treatment. I’ve been reading one such book lately, the second of seven volumes comprising the monumental Remembrance of Things Past, which, in its entirety, serves as the standard for literary ambition gone unchecked. Though I feel I should say (mostly to myself, repeatedly) that I’m enjoying the book, it hasn’t been easy going. I have now accepted that when I start to doze I must set the book on the nightstand mid-paragraph and turn out the light.

And so I recently found myself rationalizing an intermediate novel, one that I might pick up as a diversion from this (albeit lovely) monster. Lustfully eyeing a stack of fresh literary arrivals, I instinctively gravitated toward the book which appeared to be least Proustian in its scope and found myself holding Keith Lee Morris’s new novel, The Dart League King, with its simple cover art and a title which to my ear suggested -- wrongly, it turns out -- a welcomed absence of Big Ideas.

The novel’s opening lines establish the tone: “Tonight was Thursday, and Thursday night meant dart league, and Russell Harmon was the Dart League King. For that reason, and for others, Thursday night was Russell’s favorite time of the week.”

If some books practically don signs announcing their cultural significance, another category contains stories so wonderfully written and fun to read that their insights seem to exist almost by accident. This is just that sort of book, as gripping as it is well-crafted and wise.

Read the review in its entirety here:

http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2008_12_013800.php

Interview with MFA Greensboro Alum

Interview with Steve Almond
by Dave Jarecki

Steve Almond is the author of two story collections, My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow, the non-fiction book Candyfreak, the novel Which Brings Me to You, co-written with Julianna Baggott, and (Not that You Asked), a collection of “Rants, Exploits and Obsessions” released in 2007. He and his family live outside of Boston. Keep track of Steve and read some of his work on his site.

(DJ): You end your recent Boston Globe piece on David Foster Wallace ( “A Moralist of Hope”, published 9/21/08) with the following:

“We have lost one of our most powerful imaginations, a man whose works provided us a means of rescue.”

To turn this inward, do you see your work in any way providing a means of rescue? Reading your fiction and non-fiction, you’re obviously OK with exposing yourself and putting yourself out there. Within this, readers have the chance to laugh at you, with you, and at themselves. There’s a sense of rescue to that, and I’m wondering if you feel the same.

(SA): “Rescue” is probably a little lofty in my case, but that’s the basic idea. Foster Wallace – like Vonnegut before him – was a guy who was openly concerned with the fate of the species, and the terrible moral decisions we make in the day-to-day. His work was full of complex ideas, and lots of sly irony, but it was also driven by a single idea, not at all ironic, which is that humans have a duty to take care of one another.

I’m not interested in writing – or art more broadly – that doesn’t have that kind of compassion at its center. I’m not saying I want to be preached at, but I want the author to have a Christ-like mercy for the people he or she is writing about.

Read the interview in its entirety here:

http://davejarecki.com/blog/2008/12/steve-almond/

MFA Greensboro Alum Featured in "BU Today"

Inspired by Winehouse

BU staffer Kerri French tapped for poetry anthology; reading tonight

By Caleb Daniloff

Earning a paycheck writing poetry these days is about as easy as finding a career in glassblowing, but the long odds aren't slowing the burgeoning matriculations in creative writing programs or the proliferation of online poetry journals. And sometimes the effort pays off, in recognition.

BU staffer Kerri French, a North Carolina native whose day job is College of Arts and Sciences philosophy department coordinator, recently received career-making recognition: inclusion in 2008 Best New Poets: 50 Poems from Emerging Writers, an annual anthology edited this year by celebrated poet Mark Strand. French, who has also published in a handful of small literary magazines and has broadcast her poems on Sirius Radio, made her way to Boston in 2006 with an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina–Greensboro, trading her rural southern upbringing for city life in the Northeast. She started teaching part-time this semester in the CAS Writing Program, and her latest project, for DIAGRAM magazine, involves penning a series of poems on the turbulent life and times of British pop singer and tabloid regular Amy Winehouse. BU Today asked French about Winehouse as artistic muse and the pursuit of poetry in the Internet age.

Read the full interview and listen to Kerri read here:
http://www.bu.edu/today/node/7923

MFA Greensboro Alum at "Night Train"

Get a Load of This

by Blythe Winslow

I tell my wife Marta to Get a load of this, because it's what she needs. The load I'm speaking of is a load of babies brought by the Baby Man selling babies out of a truck that says Baby Emporium on the side. White van, old script, Baby Man with his steadfast blue uniform and embroidered nametag (here, this time, "Seth").

Read the entire story here:
http://www.nighttrainmagazine.com/contents/winslow_fb.php