MFA Greensboro Alum Jack Riggs Picked for a Duluth Reads

DFAL Selects Book for Duluth Reads Activities

The Duluth Fine Arts League has selected “When the Finch Rises” by southern writer Jack Riggs for
this year’s Duluth Reads activity. DFAL encourages residents to engage
in the shared experience of simultaneously reading the same book and
attending related events. 

His first book tells the story of two 12-year-old boys Raybert
Williams and Palmer Conroy coming in age in the late 1960s against the
background of the civil rights movement. Riggs' hometown of Lexington,
NC, inspired the North Carolina mill town of Ellenton that serves as the
setting for the book. “When the Finch Rises” is sometimes compared to
“A Separate Peace” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

After “Finch” was published by Ballantine Books in 2003, Riggs was
named Georgia Author of the Year-First Novel. The American Library
Association recognized the book as a “Top Ten First Novel," and it is
included on the Georgia Center for Books 2010 list of “25 Books All
Georgians Should Read.”

Read the full article here: http://duluth.patch.com/articles/dfal-selects-book-for-duluth-reads

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Julianna Baggott Interviewed by Sandra Gulland

Purely Julianna Baggott: an interview with an amazing author
     by Sandra Gulland
I've mentioned before on this blog (here and here) that I'm a fan of author Julianna Baggott (also known as  Bridget Asher and N.E. Bode).

I loved her novel The Province Cure for the Brokenhearted and read her blog — Baggott • Asher • Bode —  regularly.

She a Writer Wonderwoman! She has published sixteen books in the last decade. (Imagine that.) Her latest novel, Pure, has just come out and is set to rocket.

She's be walking the red carpet for this one: a Fox 2000 film is already under way. 

What comes through in everything Julianna writes is heart. Big time. 

And so, a few questions: 

Julianna, you're on tour now. Forgive such a nuts & bolts question, but: How do you pack? How do you cope?

I pack badly, messily. I forget things like shoes and have to buy
them on the road.  I sometimes like to talk to people on planes, other
times I shut down. I'm terrible at sleeping in hotels. I don't like
germs.

I DO like people in bookstores, very much. They're my kind of people.
(But I'm not doing a huge traditional bookstore tour right now...)

Read the full interview here: http://www.sandragulland.com/writinglife/purely-julianna-baggott-an-interview-with-an-amazing-author/

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alums Lynne Barrett and Kat Meads Read at Little River Inn

Lynne Barrett & Kat Meads

Acclaimed authors Kat Meads and Lynne Barrett will discuss their work and read from their newest books at Little River Inn's Abalone Room, in an event cosponsored by the Inn, the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, and Gallery Bookshop.
Read the full press release here: http://www.gallerybookshop.com/event/223-lynne-barrett-kat-meads-little-river-inn

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Julianna Baggott Talks about Turning a Short Story into a Novel

Julianna Baggott on Turning a Short Story into a Novel

First of all, I should confess that when I started out, I believed in the short story as the Great American Form, and that novelists were writers who simply lacked self-restraint. I believed you should be able to get everything you needed from writer to reader in 25 pages or fewer. I was a real believer, completely devout.

But a few things happened. I had a collection of stories–most of which had been published in literary magazines–that I couldn’t get published. Now, I’d been warned this might happen. In fact, Andre Dubus (the author of Broken Vessels) explained that if you keep publishing short stories, agents will come knocking . . . but they’ll only want one thing: a novel. Dubus seemed to want us young writers not to give in (or that’s how I remember it).

Read the full article here: http://dailyfig.figment.com/2012/02/03/julianna-baggott-on-turning-a-short-story-into-a-novel/

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

 

 

MFA Greensboro Alum Claudia Emerson Headlines Literary Festival

Pulitzer Prize Winner Claudia Emerson Headlines John Tyler Community College Literary Festival

CHESTER and MIDLOTHIAN, Va. – Poetry, creative writing, theatre, speeches and more will be celebrated during John Tyler Community College’s 17th Annual Literary Festival, February 21-29, 2012. The festival will feature Claudia Emerson who won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Late Wife: Poems. Emerson is a professor of English and is Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at the University of Mary Washington. In addition to participating in a reading and book signing event that will be open to the community, Emerson will lead writing workshops designed specifically for John Tyler students.

Read the Full article here: http://www.jtcc.edu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=873

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Julianna Baggott Featured in the NZ Herald for 'Pure'

Fiction Addiction: Is Pure the New Twilight?
The publishers of Pure are evidently hoping it will become the next Twilight. The post-apocalyptic young adult novel hasn't yet been released in America, and already the movie rights have been sold, and Twilight producer Karen Rosenfelt has been hired to take it to the big screen.

Pure, by American writer Julianna Baggott, certainly has similar elements to its bloodsucking predecessor. It's a dark yet hopeful tale about a group of good-looking but scarred teenagers who band together to fight off evil in a world of shadows (and fall in love in the process), though it has a good helping of political conspiracy that lends the plot more depth.

It's set in America in a nuclear winter of the near future, about a decade after "The Detonations" laid the world to waste. An elite community was given advance warning of the attacks (blamed on an unnamed enemy state) and allocated refuge in the Dome - an enclosed climate-controlled city impervious to radiation, where they can live until the Earth recovers enough to be repopulated.

Read the full article here: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10783140

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Rhett Iseman Trull Wins Dorothy Prize

Dorothy Prizes Awarded for 2011

See the full list of recipients here: http://199.192.241.7/dorothyprizes/2011awards.htm

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Jillian Weise Wins Isabella Gardner Poetry Award

Jillian Weise Wins the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award
Rochester, NY—Jillian Weise has been awarded the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for her new collection, The Book of Goodbyes. Her book will be published by BOA Editions in fall 2013. This award is given biennially to a poet with a new book of exceptional merit. Manuscripts are solicited and there is no formal submission process for this award.

Poet, actress, and associate editor of Poetry magazine, Isabella Gardner (1915-1981) published five celebrated collections of poetry and was the first recipient of the New York State Walt Whitman Citation of Merit for Poetry. She championed the work of young and gifted poets, helping many of them find publication. This award carries an honorarium of $1000 and is sponsored by the Gardner Charitable Trust. Poets Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Michael Blumenthal (both former recipients of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award) assisted in judging the award with the final selection being made by BOA Publisher Peter Conners.

Read the full article here: http://www.boaeditions.org/blog/2012/02/jillian-weise-wins-the-isabella-gardner-poetry-award/

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Robert Morgan Featured in Connotation Press

"Valley Wind" by Robert Morgan

I reckon everybody knows
the pleasing breeze that tends to flow
up slopes on sunny summer days,
as air that’s warmed by solar blaze
reflected lifts up valley sides
and stirs the leaves on towering heights,
a manic rise, a thrill of breath
to soothe the sweltering aftermath
of steady glare. Then as the sun
goes down the wind reverses run,
depresses slow then gathers speed
to sink from peak to valley bed,
the highs now balanced by the sloughs,
chill air from summit altitudes
and stratosphere pushed down
to cool the dew on bottom ground,

Read the rest of the feature here: http://connotationpress.com/a-poetry-congeries-with-john-hoppenthaler/1246-robert-morgan-poetry

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

I reckon everybody knows

the pleasing breeze that tends to flow

up slopes on sunny summer days,

as air that’s warmed by solar blaze

reflected lifts up valley sides

and stirs the leaves on towering heights,

a manic rise, a thrill of breath

to soothe the sweltering aftermath

of steady glare. Then as the sun

goes down the wind reverses run,

depresses slow then gathers speed

to sink from peak to valley bed,

the highs now balanced by the sloughs,

chill air from summit altitudes

and stratosphere pushed down

to cool the dew on bottom ground,

promoting sleep in house and den,

Read more about ConnotationPress.com | Robert Morgan - Poetry by connotationpress.com

I reckon everybody knows

the pleasing breeze that tends to flow

up slopes on sunny summer days,

as air that’s warmed by solar blaze

reflected lifts up valley sides

and stirs the leaves on towering heights,

a manic rise, a thrill of breath

to soothe the sweltering aftermath

of steady glare. Then as the sun

goes down the wind reverses run,

depresses slow then gathers speed

to sink from peak to valley bed,

the highs now balanced by the sloughs,

chill air from summit altitudes

and stratosphere pushed down

to cool the dew on bottom ground,

promoting sleep in house and den,

Read more about ConnotationPress.com | Robert Morgan - Poetry by connotationpress.com

Valley Wind

 

I reckon everybody knows

the pleasing breeze that tends to flow

up slopes on sunny summer days,

as air that’s warmed by solar blaze

reflected lifts up valley sides

and stirs the leaves on towering heights,

a manic rise, a thrill of breath

to soothe the sweltering aftermath

of steady glare. Then as the sun

goes down the wind reverses run,

Read more about ConnotationPress.com | Robert Morgan - Poetry by connotationpress.com

Valley Wind

 

I reckon everybody knows

the pleasing breeze that tends to flow

up slopes on sunny summer days,

as air that’s warmed by solar blaze

reflected lifts up valley sides

and stirs the leaves on towering heights,

a manic rise, a thrill of breath

to soothe the sweltering aftermath

of steady glare. Then as the sun

goes down the wind reverses run,

Read more about ConnotationPress.com | Robert Morgan - Poetry by connotationpress.com

MFA Greensboro Alum Julianna Baggott Interviews Fellow Alum Michael Gills

1/2 Dozen for Michael Gills
     by Julianna Baggott

Here is a 1/2 Dozen
with my dear friend (from way back)
Michael Gills.
His story collection THE DEATH OF BONNIE AND CLYDE and his novel GO LOVE came out this past year.
(GO LOVE is a triumphant novel that I read early on. Truly wonderful. Click here to read a Q and A with Gills in Psychology Today -- in take a look at his process.)
I adore Gills and his brilliant writerly soul!

HERE GOES:

Current obsessions—literary or otherwise.

I
play guitar and sing in a band that is currently working up a cover of
Gregg Allman's cover of Sleepy John Estes' "Floating Bridge," this
killer blues song from the 30's about a near death experience in muddy
water. Allman's version appeared on Youtube just after his own near
death from liver failure and subsequent transplant. That edge comes
through--his voice shakes, and I believe. Now, I'm rehearsing the song,
and it's under my skin, that eerie bridge, the tremolo, what seeps
between.

Writing Tip #2.

Get
up at 4:30 a.m., turn on your machine, and go. Your inner-censor is
turned off then and you can knock out a chunk before the sun even
rises--hard to fuck up a day like that. Revise by the hard light of
day. In bed by 8:30 p.m. Do it all again.

Read the full interview here: http://bridgetasher.blogspot.com/2012/01/12-dozen-for-michael-gills_30.html

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Faculty Emeritus Fred Chappell Participates in a Collaborative Novel about Asheville

Malaprop's Celebrates 30 Years with Collaborative Novel
     by Mark Shultz
To commemorate the 30th anniversary of Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, N.C., co-owner (with Emoke B'Racz) Linda Barrett Knopp and her husband Brian Lee Knopp enlisted 10 western North Carolina writers to write a chapter each for a collaborative serial novel set in Malaprop’s hometown. The result, Naked Came the Leaf Peeper, is an R-rated comic romp through Asheville and environs involving an assassin, a detective, and a bunch of mysterious deaths linked to a land deal gone bad.

“Brian started the book out as a PG affair,” Linda Barrett Knopp told PW, “but it quickly turned R-rated. The authors told us this was the most fun writing they’d had in years. I’ve read it probably a dozen times and I still laugh out loud.”

 

The rules were simple: each author wrote a chapter, had only two weeks to complete it, and none were told who had written the previous chapters (“Though the authors had a vague, unconfirmed idea of who was working on the project,” said Linda Barrett). Brian Lee, who wrote Malaprop’s bestselling book of 2010 and 2011, Mayhem in Mayberry: Misadventures of a P.I. in Southern Appalachia (Cosmic Pigbite Press) wrote the first chapter, and Linda Barrett wrote the penultimate chapter and serves as editor. The other ten authors, in chapter order, are John P. McAfee, Susan Reinhardt, Vicki Lane, Tommy Hays, Wayne Caldwell, Fred Chappell, Alan Gratz, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, Gene Cheek, and Tony Earley, with an afterward by Charles F. Price. As the book is intended as a fundraiser, everyone involved worked for free, including the local artist who provides the cover art.

Read the full article here: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/50176-malaprop-s-celebrates-30-years-with-collaborative-novel.html

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Steve Almond Interviewed by Kugelmass about Humor in Writing

Kugelmass talks with Steve Almond
In this space, Kugelmass asks funny writers about writing funny. As you will see, there is nothing remotely funny about this process. If you want a pleasant chuckle, purchase an issue. If you want to learn something, well read on.

To call Steve Almond a humor writer would be to call Tito Puente a drummer or Rollie Fingers a mustache-grower. He is the author of ten books of fiction and non-fiction. His latest, God Bless America: Stories is due out in October. Touch his words on this page and you will become more talented.

Almond on writing and when it happens to be funny

My general goal is to aim for a painful truth and use the mighty shield of humor to avoid getting too seriously hurt. But I try not to consciously adopt a style or tone (i.e. “I will now try to be funny”) because that never works. It’s more a matter of pursuing the material.

Almond on who and what is funny

For me, most humor comes from tragedy -- the simultaneous confession and forgiveness of unbearable truths. In other words: the forgiveness is the joke. So basically, any time we’re dealing with transgressive feelings. Shame. Rage. Lust. The inherent moral absurdity of our current political climate is a great example. The insatiable greed and hypocrisy, the mind-bending rationalizations -- it’s all so incredibly sad. But Stewart and Colbert make their nut by converting that stuff into laughs. I also laugh (most people do, I think) when the velocity of truth exceeds normal standards.
 
Read the full interview here: http://firewheel-editions.org/kugelmass/interviews/issue2/almond.shtml

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Kelly Link Featured in The Year of Magical Reading

The Year of Magical Reading: Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link
     by Ted Gioia
Someone ought to write a history of literary misdirection—the story of the stories that avoid telling stories, the tales that set out towards a goal and never quite get there.  We think of this as a postmodern conceit, but its roots can be traced in Tristam Shandy, Don Quixote, perhaps even back to Apuleius's The Golden Ass.  At an extreme, such narratives end right wherethey begins—FinnegansWake is the classic example—and remind me of thoselong distance runners whocircle round and round onthe same route, never going
anywhere except back to thestarting line.  Readers oftengripe at these roundaboutstories, yet even a closedloop can offer an enticingjourney if the landmarks and milestones are sufficiently compelling.

Kelly Link has made her reputation on precisely this kind of narrative.   She knows an endless number of ways to prevent her stories from reaching a destination.   In "Lull," the final tale in her 2006 collection, Magic for Beginners, she interrupts the narrative with a story within a story—then a few pages later, starts up another story within that story.   One might think that these would serve as sufficient obstacles to achieving narrative closure—but Link, emulating the famous aviator Wrong Way Corrigan, goes a step further, presenting the chronology of the central story in reverse (akin to Martin Amis's Time's Arrow), an approach that ensures that readers can only end up back at the beginning. 
Read the full article here: http://conceptualfiction.com/magic_for_beginners.html

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Julianna Baggott Reviewed, 'Pure'

Pure by Julianna Baggott--Book Review
     by sfx
When it comes to raising the dramatic stakes and getting the sort of cathartic kick that reminds you your life is actually pretty good, you can’t beat a good dystopia. Pure offers two for the price of one.

On the one hand, we have the survivors of an apparent nuclear holocaust, scraping for food in the wreckage of civilisation and literally carrying the past around with them: when the bombs hit, you see, they left people fused to whatever they were carrying, or standing beside. Teenage protagonist Pressia, for example, has a plastic doll’s head in place of a hand. She got off lightly – we meet others who live with much grimmer consequences. (Two words: mothers, children. Yeah.)

On the other hand, there are the privileged few who reached shelter just before the blasts, and now live within the confines of the Dome. “Confines” being the operative word; although protected from the extremes of life outside, the Dome’s children are channelled relentlessly towards repopulating the world (girls) or fighting off the ragged few outside who’ve inconveniently failed to clear the way for them by dying (boys).

Read the full review here: http://www.sfx.co.uk/2012/01/27/pure-by-julianna-baggott-book-review/

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Matt O'Donnell Featured in the Bowdoin Daily Sun

From the Fishouse: The Poetic Pursuits of Bowdoin Magazine's Matt O'Donnell
Bowdoin Magazine Associate Editor Matt O’Donnell is a renaissance man. In addition to his journalistic duties chronicling the life of the College and its alumni for the magazine, the Bowdoin Daily Sun, and the College’s ever increasing social media effort, and leading Bowdoin Outing Club groups up and down mountains hither and yon, he is at work as editor of From the Fishouse, an online audio literary journal.

O’Donnell founded the non-profit From the Fishouse with poet Camille T. Dungy, a professor at San Francisco State University, to promote the oral tradition of poetry. Fishouse takes its name — and spelling — from the writing cabin of the late Maine writer, Lawrence Sargent Hall ’36, who taught English at Bowdoin from 1946 to 1986. The actual Fishouse now sits in the woods behind O’Donnell’s home. Along with its online offerings, Fishouse runs a visiting poet reading series on campus, co-sponsored by the Bowdoin College Alpha Delta Phi Society Literary Fund.

O’Donnell and From the Fishouse were profiled this week on the website of 32 Poems Magazine.

Read the original article here: http://www.bowdoindailysun.com/2012/01/from-the-fishouse-the-poetic-pursuits-of-bowdoin-magazines-matt-odonnell/

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Steve Almond Interviewed about Sex by The Nervous Breakdown

The Five Question Sex Interview: Men Undressed Edition: Steve Almond
     by Gina Frangello

Closing off our “Six Question Sex Interview” series featuring various contributors to the anthology Men Undressed: Women Writers and the Male Sexual Experience, we decided to give the lone man in the book—foreword contributor, Steve Almond—a whirl with the questions.  One question (in which female contributors had been asked whether they would ever consider having sex with “their” male character from the book) no longer seemed to make sense, and so I struck it from the list . . . although in typical Steve Almond fashion, he had found a way to answer it, actually, in quipping, “Well, I am my male character, and I have sex with myself all the time.”

A number of readers, as well as students in an academic setting, have asked us why we chose a male writer for the foreword.  Did we feel the need for a male stamp of approval?  Want a counterview for the sake of balance?  In the end, though, the answer was less political and more easy than that: we chose Steve because he’s one of the best literary sex writers we know, and probably more articulate and lucid about the current role of sex in American lit than anyone else we could call to mind.  And he did not disappoint.  We hope you’ll check out his foreword—and of course the rest of the book—and thanks for following this series!

Gina Frangello, Stacy Bierlein, Cris Mazza and Kat Meads
(editors, Men Undressed: Women Writers and the Male Sexual Experience)

Read the interview here: http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/gfrangello/2012/01/the-five-question-sex-interview-men-undressed-edition-steve-almond/

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Julianna Baggott Praised at the Association of American Publishers' Midwinter Breakfast

Midwinter Delights: The Third Annual AAP Break

For Julianna Baggott, who has panic attacks in book stores, libraries are “like animal shelters. All the books are tended to; they have a home.” For Val McDermid, deadpanning, the librarian’s habit of fostering reading is positively dangerous: “children walk in innocent and leave as crackheads.” Alex George wants to say “thanks as a writer but especially as a reader.” And Robert Leleux, told by his partner that the women in his family are “ladies but also badasses,” says that librarians fit the pattern: “I had the wrong idea that you were just tweedy, but you’re badasses, too.”

Badasses or not, the 150 or so librarians attending the Association of American Publishers’ Third Annual Midwinter Breakfast at ALA Midwinter in Dallas knew they were loved. And they reciprocated in kind; hardly a seat was empty, hardly a soul left even as the breakfast ran over (well past the opening of the exhibit doors), and everyone hung around for the book signings. I had the pleasure of introducing the six authors featured. Here’s a rundown.

Coolest mom…with a movie coming soon. In Julianna Baggott’s Pure (Grand Central. Feb. 2012), the Detonations have left a ruined landscape and survivors fused with whatever was at hand. The Pures, though, were mysteriously safe from the Detonations inside the Dome. Doll-fisted teenager Pressia and her bird-backed friend Bradwell join forces with one Pure, Partridge, who has escaped the Dome in search of his mother. For Baggott, the book became a bridge to her 16-year-old daughter, who hadn’t liked her award-winning mom’s work until reading an early version of Pure and declaring it the best thing she had written. “The teen world is dystopian,” mused Baggott. The book is the first in a trilogy, with rights to all three books purchased by Fox 2000 Pictures. How cool is that?

Read the full article here: http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2012/01/prepub/midwinter-delights-the-third-annual-aap-breakfast/

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Kelly Link and the Art of the Story at Adelaide Festival

The Art of the Story: Etgar Keret, Kelly Link, Ron Rash
The short story is one of contemporary literature’s niftiest tricks. Smart, unexpected, beautiful and strange, it’s where these three extraordinary writers dazzle. Journey to the unpredictable worlds of Etgar Keret (Suddenly a Knock on the Door), to Kelly Link’s fantastical places (Pretty Monsters) and Ron Rash’s lyrical South (Burning Bright) with Kate De Goldi as she inquires about the mechanics of the short story.

See the full article here: http://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/2012/writers_week/adelaide_writers_week_day_one/the_art_of_the_story?event=the-art-of-the-story-etgar-keret-kelly-link-ron-rash

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Camille Dungy Discusses the Writer's Responsibility in the Moment

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Drew Perry to Be Resident Artist for Super G Mart

Super G: Experiential Residency Program

Drew Perry’s debut novel, THIS IS JUST EXACTLY LIKE YOU, was a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction. He holds an MFA from UNC-Greensboro, teaches writing at Elon University, and has had work appear in The Oxford American, New Stories from the South, and many magazines and journals. He lives in Greensboro with his wife, a toddler son, two cats and a dog. A second novel, SEMI-FLIGHTLESS BIRDS, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books. www.drewperry.net

Read the original post here: https://supergresidency.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/upcoming-resident-drew-perry/

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Thera Webb Featured in 'Sign & Symbol'

The 22 is annual arts and literature online magazine that seeks to explore connections and intersections between the works of artists, musicians and writers. In some portions of The 22 the structure is presented as a diptych or sometimes triptych, allowing the viewer to actively participate in the task of opening the hinges that link conversation between the pieces.

Read the issue here: http://issuu.com/the22magazine/docs/the22magazinev2

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Gabriel Spera Wins Richard Snyder Prize

Gabriel Spera Wins Richard Snyder Prize

Congratulations to Gabriel Spera, whose manuscript, The Rigid Body, was chosen by Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the 2011 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize!  Spera’s manuscript was one of nine finalists selected from 408 entries that were screened by APP Editor Deborah Fleming.  The Rigid Body will be published in fall 2012.

Gabriel’s first book of poems, The Standing Wave, was published by HarperCollins (New York) in 2003.  It was selected for the 2002 National Poetry Series and also received the 2004 Literary Book Award for Poetry from PEN USA-West. Spera’s poems have appeared in journals such as Chicago Review, Crazyhorse, Doubletake, Epoch, Folio, , Laurel Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, New England Review, Ontario Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Southern Review. His work was also featured in The Best American Poetry 2000. He grew up in New Jersey and lives in Los Angeles.

Read the full article here: https://ashlandpoetrypress.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/gabriel-spera-wins-richard-snyder-prize/

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Drew Perry Reviewed for His Debut Novel 'This Is Just Exactly Like You'

Local author Drew Perry and his debut novel This is just exactly like you
     by Taylor Madaffari
If you haven’t yet read Drew Perry—local Greensboro resident and English professor at Elon University—you should.  Perry recently published a remarkable debut novel, This is Just Exactly Like You, which was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s best first novel of the year.  It is wise and witty, a little tour de force on love and infidelity, parenting, suburbia, and the ways in which we are broken. 

Hapless but charming protagonist Jack Lang is bad at life.  He simply cannot get it together no matter how hard he tries.  "He goes ahead with projects without planning them all the way through first.  It makes [his wife] crazy.  He knows this, does it anyway.  Gets excited,” Perry writes.  When Jack finds himself raising his hand at the auctioning of the house directly across the street from his own, a house with a floor-plan identical to his current home, his already fed-up wife, Beth, leaves him—for his best friend Terry Canavan.  Jack finds himself with little besides his business, Patriot Mulch and Tree, in a small college town in North Carolina (a town that sounds a lot like Greensboro) and his severely autistic six-year-old son, Hendrick.  When Terry’s ex-girlfriend, Rena, shows up at Jack’s door and then promptly moves in with him, Jack is more bewildered and lost than ever.  But the one thing he almost always manages to get (mostly) right is his son. 

his is the story of a man attempting—however clumsily or brokenly—to fix his life; it is a story about baseball, karaoke, backyard sidewalk tricycle racetracks, and enormous fiberglass undersea creatures stolen from a defunct putt-putt.  Oh, and a dog named Yul Brynner.  At once funny and terribly bleak, with alive dialogue that perfectly captures real, honest to goodness Southern colloquialisms, this novel artfully depicts the wants and needs that reside within us all.  Amid the chaos and tangled romantic relationships, there is the center of gravity, the heart of the story—one brilliant and flawed little boy and his deeply felt, complex relationship with his father—a man who tries.

Read the full article here: http://www.examiner.com/books-in-greensboro/local-author-drew-perry-and-his-debut-novel-this-is-just-exactly-like-you-review

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Julianna Baggot's Book 'Pure' Part of the Electrical Book Cafe's New Contest

CONTEST: Pure By: Julianna Baggott
Hiya, my lovely readers. School started a few weeks ago so I've been crazy busy with that. I haven't been able to find time to read for fun at all D: But I am taking a lit class about Western European and Russian Literature from the 17th-19th Century, and I've never done ANYTHING with those kinds of stories so I really like it ^^ So far we've read Tartuffe and Candide and I've enjoyed both. We're reading Faust now, which I like, but it's hard to concentrate because I keep having Black Butler and Ao No Exorcist flashbacks. Well....I'm getting WAY off topic.....

Anywho, to kind of make it up to you guys I have a contest for y'all :3 Enjoy!!

Title: Pure

Author: Julianna Baggott

Summary: PURE focuses on Pressia, a scrappy, brilliant, and tough-as-nails teenage girl fighting for survival in a city destroyed by “the detonations.” Her world is one populated by mangled survivors, known simply as Wretches. Pressia’s life, like that of all Wretches, is dictated by the Pures, an aristocracy unharmed by the denotations. To remain untainted, Pures never step out of the Dome that protects them. But what happens when an unsatisfied young man escapes from the Dome and into Pressia’s world?

YEAH~

Le rules....
Contest will end on 2/8/2012

Read the full article here: http://theelectricalbookcafe.blogspot.com/2012/01/contest-pure-by-julianna-baggott.html

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Scott Owens Talks about a Life-Changing Moment for His Writing

Bending the Rules: Or a Poet Has to Be a Poet (Life Changing Moments Series)
This week I'm pleased to share Scott Owens as the next contributor to the Life Changing Moments Series of blog posts. I first "met" Scott online, but last year, Tammy and I were able to talk with him in person at the Blue Ridge Writers Conference (in Blue Ridge, GA). Later this year, we'll be reading our poetry at one of his Poetry Hickory events (in Hickory, NC).

So, Robert wrote to me with a simple request: write a 500-1,000 word personal story about a moment that helped guide my life or shape my worldview. Easy, right? No need to complicate things, just tell about the time I learned the meaning of love while holding my sick 4-month old daughter at 2:00 A.M.; or the moment my stepson burned himself and in caring for him I realized that I had overcome my own childhood abuse and was ready to fully embrace fatherhood; or the night I listened to my grandfather string stars together into his own constellations and recognized the power of creativity and self-determination; or the time when I was 8 and had to reach up inside a birthing cow and turn the calf so it could come out and realized none of us can do it alone. Easy, right?

The problem is, all of the moments I could think of I have already written about in the form of poems, and telling those stories now as prose would seem somehow sacrosanct, a reductionist undoing. The poems, I hope, embody the tensions of those moments, recreate the epiphanies as if they were the readers as well as mine, retain the life of the moment in a combination of language, imagery, and association that might well be lost in the single-minded clarity of prose. At least that's how the poetry-lover in me thinks. As a teacher of poetry, I would never ask a student to retell the story of Galway Kinnell's "Little Sleep's Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight" in prose. I would, of course, invite them to write about the poem in prose, but not to try to prosaically recreate the moment of the poem by undoing, even negating the energy contained and conveyed through the poetic compression of the moment's perceptual, physical, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual experience.

Read the full article here: http://robertleebrewer.blogspot.com/2012/01/bending-rules-or-poet-has-to-be-poet.html

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Kelly Link Is a JoCoLibrary Staff Pick with 'Magic for Beginners'

Magic For Beginners by Kelly Link

See the original post here: http://blogs.jocolibrary.org/staffpicks/01/2012/jcl-webteam/7534/

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Julianna Baggott Reviewed, 'Pure'

Book Review: Pure
     Written by: Amodini
Pure is not your ordinary dystopian novel, it treads into the horror category. It is a story of a bleak future, one where the Detonations have maimed and deformed all life that remains. A selected few were chosen and taken to a safe Dome, and remained unaffected – they are the Pures – the one with whole limbs and whole faces. The rest are like Pressia, fused to whatever object they were near when the world exploded. Pressia has a doll’s head fused to one hand, Bradwell has live birds in his back, and others have glass, metal and a variety of other objects embedded in them. They live in a world with scarce resources, a dog-eat-dog world, struggling to survive from one day to the next. The only law there is is the OSR, a thuggish army given to unexplained raids and killing sprees. All young adults are required to turn themselves into the OSR at age 16.

Pressia turns 16, and goes renegade. She meets up with Bradwell who’s anti OSR. Then they meet Partridge Willux, a Pure who has left the Dome of his own free will, to look for his mother. He is unprepared for the devastation he sees, and for the hatred towards people like him, the privileged Pures. He can barely survive until he meets Pressia. When Pressia is taken by the OSR, both Bradwell and Partridge set out in her search.

Read the full review here: http://www.fridaynirvana.com/fiction/2012/01/book-review-pure.html

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Faculty David Roderick Discusses the Place He Writes

The Orion Blog
The Place Where I Write: David Roderick
On occasions when the muse deigns to visit me, I’m usually catty-cornered and nursing a latte at the Green Bean in Greensboro, North Carolina. It’s the only café in town that could survive if situated in one of the world-class caffeinated cities like Seattle or San Francisco. I’m drawn to the Green Bean because of the quality free-trade beans, but also because there’s a southern mellowness to the atmosphere, and because the baristas are friendly and sport garish tattoos on every square inch of their arms, and because I can go wireless for free all day. The clientele is business/slacker, black/white, old/young. Bohemian is hard to find in this city. I’m more fauxhemian, but the Green Bean is the only place downtown where it’s maybe normal for a gawky, bald dude to lumber through the door every morning and wrestle with poems in the corner.

Right now I’m studying the scene from that very corner. The layout is narrow but deep. Gouges and scuffs mar the wide-board floor. There isn’t a wobbly table or chair in the joint. A white stamped-tin ceiling stares down at me when I beckon the heavens for inspiration. In years past this place might have been a salon or refectory; it might have been a pool hall, a bookstore, a gastro pub.

Read the full article here: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/newsfrom187/entry/6684/

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Faculty Holly Goddard Jones Talks about Literary Fraternity

Literary Fraternity

In my first semester of graduate school, I took a class called Forms of Fiction with the man who would eventually become my thesis director, Lee K. Abbott. Lee’s a brilliant teacher—I’ve been thinking about that fact recently, because he’s in his last year of teaching before retirement—and I steal from him for my own classes all the time. This past week I used a reading he assigned me in that class eight years ago: the introduction to an anthology of fiction, The Secret Life of Our Times, published in Esquire back in 1973, when Gordon Lish was editor. This intro, written by Tom Wolfe, is a pretty entertaining document, and I feel moved to share a couple of quotes from it:

“The rules of the game in modern fiction changed decisively during the 1960s. In that brief interval the American short story moved from the vulgar stage to the poetic stage, in terms of cultural evolution, and the abruptness of the transition all but cost it its life….The upshot has been a type of short story that exhibits all the daring—and all the difficulties—of formalism. By the very nature of his task, the formalist is no longer writing for a vague ‘public.’ He is not out to entertain or arrest attention in the usual way. He is writing for a fraternity not merely of other writers but also of those readers who are sophisticated enough to appreciate form, technique, and the state of the art, who are able to read new work against the background of what has already been tried” (xx–xxii).

Stephen King talked about this same issue more recently in the introduction he wrote to Best American Short Stories 2007. You can read the intro in its entirety here if you missed the first time around, but he basically discusses the problem of writers writing for other writers, and reading not for the thrill of a story but for the sake of sizing up the marketplace, figuring out what sells. King calls it “copping-a-feel reading.”

You know, I’d like to write for a “vague ‘public’” rather than a fraternity, and I’d like to “entertain or arrest attention in the usual way.” The simple response to that is, of course, “Well, do it,” and I’ve tried. I tried it with my story collection, which seemed for the most part to only reach other writers, aspiring writers, and academics, and I guess I should just be happy that the fraternity ensures even that much of an audience. I’ve tried it again with my first novel, and maybe it stands a better chance, since (for now) general readers will still pick up a novel for entertainment’s sake. But who knows?

Read the full article here: http://www.hollygoddardjones.com/2012/01/literary-fraternity.html

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Steve Almond Reads at Woodstock 2010

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Julianna Baggott Reviewed, 'Pure'

Review: Pure by Julianna Baggott

Oh what to say about this one. The world Pressia inhabits is about as post-appocolytic/dystopian as could imagine. Unlike some recent dystopias, this is a harsh, incredibly bleak world without a scrap of beauty to redeem it. Society is almost non-existent, the few survivors are horribly deformed, struggle to eat and live, and the remaining younger members live in fear of being press-ganged in to a militia as soon as they turn 16.

Partridge’s world, may be filled with all the beauty and food, that is missing from Pressia’s, but it is run with a heavily oppressive rule, and Partridge and his peers, are forced to have ‘enhancements’ made to their brains and bodies.

This all works wonderfully well. But there’s another part of the book that’s also goddamm weird. Those that were outside the dome when the detonations hit (and survived) were ‘fused’ to whatever they were touching at the time… Pressisa was holding a doll for example, so now her hand has been replaced by her dolls head… Another character’s back is covered by still living birds… You see what I mean? Weird.

Julianna Baggott, some how however makes it work and keeps it the right side of over-the-top. I’ll be honest it takes a decent amount of the book to do so, but at some point, you do just accept it ‘as is’ and stop worrying about it.

Read the full review here: http://www.bartsbookshelf.co.uk/2012/01/11/review-pure-by-julianna-baggott/

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org