We here at Barely South Review are excited about the week-long Literary Festival at Old Dominion University. One of the great benefits of this program is the opportunity to interview attending writers and artists for our annual craft issue. This year we are excited to offer a preview of Amana Katora’s interview with Dustin Lance Black on the blog here. The theme this year is “Words with Teeth,” and I think we can all agree that Dustin Lance Black’s writing has teeth:

If you’re a fan of Dustin Lance Black’s writing for film and television, thank Dostoyevsky. The Academy Award winning writer spent time studying Russian literature before earning his degree from the Theater, Film, and Television program at UCLA. Seeking an affordable creative outlet after college, he began writing. In an interview on the craft, I learned he appreciates truth, jazz, and a good joke. Here’s an excerpt:

Q: How does your ideal vision of what you sit down to write change from initial inspiration to fully realized film or television? Has the final product ever surprised or disappointed you?

Lance: “I can’t say I’ve ever had any project turn out the way I had originally envisioned it and I think—I  know—that’s a good thing. I always say I want to hold on to the ‘why’: why do you want to tell that story, why do you want to tell it right now. That’s what you can’t lose. But how you’re going to do it, who your characters are, what your plot is, you need to be willing to change those things and be excited about changing them. At a certain point when a draft is finished, you have to be willing to kill your precious little babies and continue to refine what you’ve done and get back to the original question ‘why.’ It always turns out your shooting draft is very different than that first aha moment of ‘let’s do this.’ That’s because of discovery, with your research or through executing an outline. You make discoveries and I think it’s best to leave yourself open to those discoveries.”

Dustin Lance Black is the writer of Virginia, Milk, J.Edgar, Pedro, and wrote for the HBO series Big Love. He will speak at 7:30 PM October 2^nd, at Old Dominion University as part of The President’s Lecture Series and the 35^th annual Literary Festival. Check out the January 2013 issue of Barely South Review to read his full interview.

Old Dominion University M.F.A. Creative Writing Program student Wendi White attended the 2012 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) national conference in March. She queried a diverse group of women writers on how they have navigated the rocky waters of composing a writer’s life. She spoke with women authors of varying genres and ages about the empowerment strategies they have used to break through the barriers that women writers still experience. These conversations also explored what is needed for women to make continued progress in the profession.

For writers there are three roads that wind toward truth: reportage, lyric imagery, and narrative. While all these roads traverse different landscapes, at their best, compassion for our shared humanity is the destination of each. So though there is great variation between nonfiction, poetry and fiction’s relationship to “facts”, in the end they are all ways to push the pen beneath the surface of experience and ask, “What does this mean?” Pablo Picasso put it this way, “Art is the lie that tells the truth.”

This past March, I had the honor of discussing how writers come to speak their truth with three very accomplished women authors: the nationally acclaimed poet, Dorianne Laux, award winning novelist and short story writer, Bonnie Jo Campbell, and journalist and author of a bestselling memoir, Janine Latus. Though they each write in a different genre, there were striking commonalities across the three conversations; an indispensable teacher, a pivotal text or artist, and an experience that emboldened them to say what they had to say.

In my conversation with Dorianne Laux, a poet whose pitch perfect voice and deep reserve of empathy caused Philip Levine to compare her to Walt Whitman, I asked her what sparked the writing fire in her soul. Without missing a beat, she revealed that Bertol Brecht held that place of honor. She fell in love with drama in high school, studied it in college, but eventually became disillusioned with how actors were always, well, acting. Then she read and saw Brecht’s work, recognizing that he was doing something very different. “I admired how Brecht was speaking his personal truth.” To this day, the power of such truth telling informs her writing.

But being inspired by Brecht was not enough to launch her poet’s journey. At this point, Laux was only writing poems in private.  It took that alchemy of necessity and good fortune for her to publically proclaim herself a poet.  As a single mother, Laux was waiting tables and felt she needed to return to school to be a good role model and provider for her daughter.  She recounts how she chose her academic field: “I am naturally lazy, so I knew I had to pursue something I love. I decided to take English classes because I enjoyed writing and thought maybe I could be an editor or a journalist . . . do something practical with my life and get job writing.”

It was in her first composition class that Laux met the poet and teacher, Patricia Traxler. After being assigned poems to compose, Laux’s professor responded by saying “You know you really excel at the poem, you should write poems.” So Laux recalls,

“I took poetry classes and eventually studied with Steve Kowit, a wonderful poet. He introduced me to all the women poets, and world poets. I didn’t know there were women my age that had children and were writing poetry . . . After I found out about the whole thing . . . the readings in the bookstores, got my first poems published in local magazines, then I realized I wanted to be a poet. “

And though recognition of her talent and knowing that other women in similar circumstances were undertaking a poet’s life helped Laux imagine a life of verse, it was the political courage that poets like Carolynn Forche and Sharon Olds displayed in addressing state violence, racism and family violence, that convinced her of a writing life’s worth.

“I was a single-mother. I was a waitress living in a border town who had seen a lot of domestic cruelty, and who had seen a lot of political cruelty. Forche had the courage to go down to Central America and Olds was so outrageously honest even though she grew up with so many family secrets. (After reading their poems, I understood) people can tell the truth . . . Quietly, in a darkened room with one light on a person, just saying what they have to say.”

Bonnie Jo Campbell, a writer of stories of people and places at the margins of society, took a similarly roundabout route to being a writer, although she confessed,

“All my life I wanted to write but I never let myself. I didn’t want to be involved in something I saw as cruel and competitive because I thought I didn’t have a chance. What does a little farm kid from Michigan have to say? I am pretty tough, but writing makes you very vulnerable with all you have written out there in the world.”

Like Laux’s flirtations with editing and journalism, Campbell could not imagine herself as a novelist, and so she got two undergraduate degrees in other fields: one in philosophy and one in mathematics. She was on her way to a Ph.D. when a math adviser, who knew she still wanted to write, suggested she take a class with author Jaimy Gordon.  Like Campbell, Gordon outlines the human condition through the narratives of people and places that have fallen on hard times. After reading Campbell’s work, Gordon told her, “You have what it takes,” and having someone that Campbell so admired value her as a writer, provided the final push she needed to call herself an author.

It also gave Campbell permission to tell the stories of outsider women: circus performers and the struggling inhabitants of Campbell’s native Kalamazoo for example. In our conversation, I asked why so many of the characters in the her short story collection, Women and Other Animals, are souls just eking out an existence or living on the edge and Campbell responded:

“I want to take the reader to the dark side to show what true resiliency looks like. My women are not victims. They are facing dire and desperate circumstances, but they are survivors. Interesting stories are not about victims but survivors.”

That there is something inside of us that can rise up whole after shattering abuse, that after betrayal and loss, our capacity to love and speak that love can redeem us, certainly makes survivors worthy protagonists. This a literary truth mirrored in the non-fiction work of writers like Janine Latus.

In her New York Times Bestselling memoir, If I Am found Dead or Missing, Latus shares the story of her sister’s murder and her own experience of sexual and relationship abuse. When I queried her about her motivation to reveal such difficult personal stories, she replied:

“I wanted to write a book as important as Are you There God? It’s me Margaret?, by Judy Bloom. It exposed something nobody was talking about. It was so revolutionary then.  If you can write, you can make people consider things they would never have thought of before.

I couldn’t save my sister Amy, so I wrote my book to save the other Amys out there. I wrote it because as Harriet Tubman said, ‘I saved a thousand slaves. I would have saved a thousand more if they knew that they were slaves.’ I did it to create a wedge so dangerous behavior in the beginning of relationships would be recognized.”

And speaking these truths about her sister, herself, and her family’s history took immense courage, but Latus knew she had to tell these stories because they epitomized the dynamic of abuse she wanted to expose:

“I wrote (about what happened to me)so people would recognize  the abuse in their own lives and turn to each other and say ,we need to talk.”

And it is one thing to tell your own secrets but quite another to tell the stories of your family.  Latus called negotiating these waters the one of the most difficult parts of her project:

“Everyone but my father read my book before it was published and almost all of them supported me because they are so incredibly brave. It was also helpful that a magazine article I wrote for Oprah, “All the Wrong Men,” had recently come out and my family members were told by their colleagues that our story was their story too. My family understood the impact the book could have because of the way people responded to that article.”

So with Latus, as with Laux and Campbell, it was clear that chance to make a positive difference made telling a personal truth worth the risk. The act of writing is important, but it is the reader who ultimately concerned the women I interviewed. They write to touch another person’s life through literary truth telling, and if their words are “the best words, in the best order,” these women believe that the world might be better off for their breaking the silence and lifting their pens.

The Norton Girault Literary Prize is named after Norton Girault, who has been a long-time supporter of ODU’s M.F.A. Creative Writing Program, and familiar face in program workshops.

Norton Girault Interview at Prince Books

Thank you to John Henry Doucette for the video.

http://www.lib.odu.edu/litfest/32nd/girault.htm

http://hamptonroads.com/2009/10/odu-literary-festival-words-still-matter-91yearold-writer

Judge Cristina García

chose a single winner from nearly one hundred entries:

“Ayida” by Karim Julien

“A haunting, beautifully imagined story that surprises the reader on every page with its arresting imagery and insights. Although the two main characters are quite young, their preoccupations are serious: identity, displacement, rites of passage, death.  The setting, too, is immaculately rendered—and we linger in the unforgiving cold of their remote Canadian home.” – Cristina García

Julien wins $1,000 and his story will appear in the April 2012 issue of Barely South Review, which will go online in its new format April 16th, 2012.

In 1955, The Academy of American Poets established its University and College Poetry Prize program at ten schools.
The Academy now sponsors over 200 annual prizes for poetry at colleges and universities nationwide (including ODU since 2005), and has awarded more than $350,000 to nearly 10,000 student poets since the program’s inception.

This year’s contest was judged by poet Adrienne Su:

Su is the author of three books of poems, Middle Kingdom (Alice James, 1997), Sanctuary (Manic D Press, 2006), and Having None of It (Manic D, 2009). Her writing awards include a Puschart Prize, an NEA fellowship, inclusion in Best American Poetry, and residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Su teaches creative writing and chairs the department of English at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. Recent poems appear in The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, and Hawai’i Pacific Review.

THE WINNERS:

Undergraduate Winner:  Richard Frailing

From Adrienne Su:

This poet knows how to get quickly from one place to another, wasting not a single word on transition, yet bringing the reader along. The proximity of certain words to each other – “skeletal” and “zealots,” “emptying” and “entropy,” “sycamore” and “mysterious” – suggests a sensitive ear.

Richard Frailing is currently a senior at Old Dominion.  If all goes as planned he will graduate in December with a degree in Biological Sciences and a minor in English.

Graduate Winner:  Kevin O’Connor

From Adrienne Su:

The energetic language, the delight in repetition (“inversion” used beautifully in “Concurrent Blues”), the unexpected yet plausible images (especially in “Ruins”), and the sensory description made these poems stand out. This poet seems to savor the word and the thing equally – and to celebrate both with music.

Kevin O’Connor was born in Hornell, NY.  He received a B.A. and M.A. from Johns Hopkins.  His poetry has appeared in Slant and other journals.  He lives in Norfolk, VA.

Undergraduate Honorable Mention:  Amanda Ralph Lawson

From Adrienne Su:

The humor and engagement of the senses in “Rye” are powerful and inviting. “Plenty” cleverly suggests anything but. This poet has a keen sense of image and a distinct voice.

Amanda Ralph Lawson is a genderqueer Creative Writing major who grew up among nomads and apocalyptic conservatives.  Ralph has made a home in Virginia with several supportive partners and a couple of spoiled cats.

Graduate Honorable Mention:  Jeffrey Turner

From Adrienne Su:

These poems capture the wild and mundane in the same strokes. The vocabulary ranges far and wide without becoming pretentious: words seem chosen for both accuracy and pleasure.

Jeffrey Turner received his B.A. in Philosophy in 2003.  He is a second year poetry student in the Old Dominion University M.F.A. program.  He enjoys walking.

All of the winners and runners-up poems will appear in the April 2012 issue of Barely South Review, which goes online in its new format on April 16th, 2012.

Old Dominion University M.F.A. Creative Writing Program student Wendi White attended the 2012 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) national conference in March. She queried a diverse group of women writers on how they have navigated the rocky waters of composing a writer’s life. She spoke with women authors of varying genres and ages about the empowerment strategies they have used to break through the barriers that women writers still experience. These conversations also explored what is needed for women to make continued progress in the profession.

In conversations with six well-known women authors over this past month, I queried each about the barriers women face in composing a writing life and though there were a range of responses as to how far women have, or have not come, there was one situation where all agreed that women still struggle mightily to put pen to paper: motherhood. When women become mothers, they take on a role laden with societal expectation. It is a role that becomes their “primary identity” in a way that becoming a father, I suspect, does not for men. Moreover, there is an inherent tension between the social construction of motherhood as the ultimate calling for women and writing, which is work that requires a writer to turn away from the world’s demands and focus solely on the page.

My interviews with poets Joanne Diaz and Kelli Russell Agodon were particularly insightful regarding the balance women writers must strike between their words and their children. Diaz related some of the strategies writers who are mothers have employed to compose, and Agodon, a mother herself, spoke about how hard it is to carve out time to write when there is laundry to do, children to carpool, and even at times an inner voice saying, “Your writing must wait.” Claiming permission to write is the first hurdle every mother must clear.

Russell Agodon, in addition to being a poet, is the editor of Seattle’s Crab Creek Review and and co-publisher of Two Sylvias Press and she has just published the first e-book anthology of women poets, Fire on Her Tongue. Her front row seat to many other women writer’s struggles prompted these reflections:

It is very challenging in already busy lives to create balance and find time to write. Sometimes when women take time off to go on a writing residency, they can be labeled as “selfish” or “that they don’t have their priorities right.” I’ve made a point of making sure not to call my writing residencies “writing retreats” because people think I’m off on a girl’s weekend with pedicures, wine & a little journaling. They have no idea I’m in a room by myself devoting 12 hours (or more) to my writing.

Sometimes the barrier for women is self-imposed, such as “I can’t take time to write until my children are older” or “My family needs to always come first.”

This doesn’t surprise me as so many of the most famous role models of successful women poets didn’t have children—Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore—and the ones who did (Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton) committed suicide. Those are not great odds in the motherpoet department.

But both Russell Agodon and Diaz offer that the flipside of motherhood’s tight confines, like the confines of a sonnet, can provide the frame and focus for great creativity. When strategies for producing work in small parcels of time are employed, Russell Agodon relates, good writing and mothering can co-exist:

There are many women artists/writers who are also mothers doing incredible work and having a family. A favorite documentary of mine on women artists is Who Does She Think She Is? which explores women who are mothers and also artists. It’s fascinating and inspiring!

Also, for me, connecting with other women writers is a way to overcome social/cultural barriers and self-imposed barriers as many of us struggle with these things.

I try to find strong role models of women in the arts who work on balancing their lives and are taken seriously. Maya Lin, Denise Levertov, [and] Gwendolyn Brooks are three of my personal heroes, artists and writers who also raised children.

Making a similar point, Diaz relates the story of Lucille Clifton, who at one time in her writing life was also raising six small children, “Throughout the day, while care-taking, she would memorize the poem (she was composing), and write it down at night after the children had gone to sleep.” For Diaz, this is a perfect illustration of the way mothers “know how precious a single hour to write is. They are going to get the work done . . . you can see this in (Clifton’s) choice of form. She wrote very tight, compressed poems, and perhaps this had something to do with her constraints as a young mother and writer.”

And you don’t have to do it alone. Diaz uses her writing group as an example, “I have a group with many writing mothers who support and hold each other accountable for producing work. We meet every other week in a local coffee shop.”

But regardless of whatever strategy a mother devises or group she builds to support her writing, passion is essential if she is going to have the strength to ignore the dirty dishes and persevere. Diaz pinpoints the moment she became a poet when she studied with Marie Howe as an undergraduate, “she lit something in me that grew into a passion for poetry.” Algodon similarly encourages young woman writers to keep faith with their passion to write, offering these sisterly thoughts:

Know that success doesn’t always move in a straight line, but sometimes circles back and scribbles all over the page.

Realize there will be a lot of rejection, but it is part of the deal and we all get rejected (and will continue to). Always remember the Sylvia Plath quote: “I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.” And if you believe this is what you should be doing, keep going and know there’s a whole group of us wandering the same forest with you–when it’s dark, watch for our flashlights. We can all help guide each other.

So for the next generation of women writers out there wondering if they can be both the mother and writer they dream of becoming, the consensus of those just a little bit further down the road is clear: lean on each other. Don’t let other voices, internally or externally, tell you that you can’t write. If you are nursing a child, your hand is free to write, if you are waiting in the pick-up line to get the kids from school, you can read and compose. The best thing about being both a mother and a writer is that your office is your mind and its desk is always there waiting for you and your words.

Wendi White is an M.F.A. candidate in the Creative Writing Program at ODU, and the 2011 recipient of the ODU Graduate College Poetry Prize. She writes poetry about our only planet, imagining how we might live more mindfully upon it.

Old Dominion University M.F.A. Creative Writing Program student Wendi White attended the 2012 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) national conference in March. She queried a diverse group of women writers on how they have navigated the rocky waters of composing a writer’s life. She spoke with women authors of varying genres and ages about the empowerment strategies they have used to break through the barriers that women writers still experience. These conversations also explored what is needed for women to make continued progress in the profession.

Recently, I have pondered how fortunate I am to have that pen, paper, or iPad lying next to me on the table, ready to catch any fresh meaning I might squeeze from life. I realize that such easy license to write hasn’t always been available to women. In the not too distant past, a woman who wished to write was considered an oddity or a nuisance by her male peers. Nathaniel Hawthorne described the female authors of his day as those “damn scribbling women.” Samuel Johnson most famously shot down women speaking publicly with this critique, “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

Why was Johnson so surprised to hear a woman’s voice in church? Because 18th century English girls were rarely educated outside the home and thus were effectively silenced. If they learned to read (but not to write) in Puritan New England’s common schools, it was only so they might open the bible.

It used to be, not long ago, if you were a woman lucky enough to have a liberal arts education, raising your voice to engage the issues of the day through essays, novels or poetry was very dangerous business indeed. A lady risked her reputation; she might be deemed un-marriageable, divorced, or separated from her children and sent to an institution where she and the books that caused her “nervous anxiety”, her strange desire to stand on her principals and speak, would be locked away.

Despite this history, there have been exceptions across cultures and epochs where women’s literary contributions were encouraged. Naturally, such inclusive times produced some of the greatest literature, by both men and women. At this year’s Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference, which took place in Chicago during the first week of March, I interviewed the accomplished poet and professor of creative writing at Illinois Wesleyan University, Joanne Diaz. She kindly reminded me that it stands to reason that Sappho was not the only female Greek poet of the 6th century. If we have her fragments, she must have flown from the shoulders of other women writers. No doubt she shared a sisterhood with other artists that allowed her to imagine herself as an author, and certainly the ancient Greeks and we, their cultural descendants, have been enriched by the permission to write Sappho enjoyed.

Diaz also offered the English Renaissance as an example of “a period when women were writing all the time…they were also literary patrons…so that there was culture where women were very prolific. I don’t presume that social sanctions have been the story of every woman writer’s life.” And to back this statement up with examples, Diaz referred me to Queen Elizabeth, Mary Sidney, Mary Wroth and Aemilia Lanyer. These powerful literary fore-mothers are well remembered when I feel tempted to succumb to a victim’s mentality, “Oh, how can I ever have anything to say, no one ever listens to women!” And I don’t have to draw my courage to pick up a pen from the Classical era and Renaissance alone. I have more recent role models to thank who struggled and succeeded in being heard, making my life as a writer much more likely.

For example, in Mary Wollstonecraft’s, “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” written two hundred and twenty years ago, Wollstonecraft argued compellingly against the “nattering naybobs” of her day, who saw women as fit only for the domestic joys of diaper-changing and husband-helping. She radically opined, “. . . that women are capable of rationality; it only appears that they are not, because men have refused to educate them and encouraged them to be frivolous.”

Today, in liberal arts classrooms across our country, you can draw a direct line from Ms. Wollstonecraft’s courageous refutation of gender bias through the first and second waves of feminism to an undergraduate student body that is now more female than male. The line that separates those who may speak from who may not has clearly shifted.

Diaz affirmed women’s progress, especially for the middle class students she teaches, by sharing that not only are her creative writing classrooms’ gender demographics at a 50/50 split, but also that the achievements of the young women she mentors are second to none. “They are incredibly focused, confident, attentive and engaged . . . They are meeting their male peers or exceeding them.” Diaz’s concerns are not for white middle class women authors “In the United States, white middle-class women have been the direct beneficiaries of a wide range of educational and cultural opportunities. My bigger concern is whether women of color and working-class women have the same access to these opportunities.”

In another interview, this time with women’s rights activist, poet and founder of the lesbian press, Arktoi Books, Eloise Klein Healy, I was cautioned not to assume that complete parity for women writers has been achieved. Healy responded to my data on women making up the majority of undergraduate and writing student as a sign of gender equity in the writing profession with the following caution: “To have more women in creative writing classes is not the same thing as being equally published. In fact, I can’t think of any journal where women authors predominate . . . and if you do get published, they don’t review you as much.”

I agree with Diaz that I enjoy a great deal of privilege as a white, woman writer from the middle class. No doubt the fact that I can hop on the internet and shout my truth to the world without fear of reprisal is a sign of great progress, but after speaking to Healy, I wanted some hard numbers. I went directly to the VIDA website to browse The Count. VIDA is a literary association that, according to their website, was “founded to address the need for female writers of literature to engage in conversations regarding the critical reception of women’s creative writing in our current culture.” The Count is an annual spreadsheet compiled by VIDA tallying the number of women’s essays, books reviews of women’s work and women’s poems that are published in the leading American literary journals.

What I found there confirmed what Healy had intimated, though it did not break out women’s publication numbers by ethnicity or class. Nonetheless, out of 13 publications not one had an equal number of women writers as men. You should check it out yourself, but to give you a taste, The Count pegs the New York Review of Books at 143 women authors to 627 men in 2011. After reading the count I concluded that women may have “come a long way, baby,” but not far enough to get them even a 25% publication share.

Healy has taken women’s unequal access to the publishing field seriously. She says that such inequity persists because of barriers to “networking, familiarity, and knowing the right people…The suits are not seeing women as writers because women are not being invited in to their clubs.” Her sense of the struggle was formed in the seventies when she claimed permission to write from reading and working with women like Audrey Lord, Margaret Atwood (the keynote speaker at this year’s AWP conference), and Adrienne Rich. “They gave me a sense of community and literary history. We taught ourselves to press our own books.”

Now she urges second wave writers like herself to “seek friendships with younger women, to create some dialogue so there is a place for (young women) to start from,” so they remember the victories won in their name. “After the first wave of feminism, much ground was lost because women did not recount their struggles and pass the baton to the next generation”. To avoid repeating that mistake, Klein Healy, of the second wave, mentors and publishes women from the third wave (and beyond), nurturing their belief in themselves because “the bigger rewards still go to the brothers.” (VIDA has those numbers, too.)

In mentoring, publishing, and teaching, both Joanne Diaz and Eloise Klein Healy are actively developing the next round of women’s voices headed for the stacks. But beyond their work with young writers, both poets have through their craft exemplified the best of what I would dare to call a woman’s aesthetic. Diaz’s poems are sensual and grounded in the body’s way of knowing. When I asked why her poems imagine the taste, smell and feel of things more than their appearance, she responded, “The body is how we know our world.” Healy’s poems, on the other hand, map out territories and divisions between genders, spheres of work, and realms of power often using the Greek goddess Artemis as a figure of womanly struggle.

In my final analysis, both poets lay claim to important aspects of a woman’s way of knowing and writing and their perspectives on our progress as writers complements rather than contradicts each other. After all, when you are up against boneheaded views of the sort that Samuel Johnson once spouted, you need confidence rooted in past victories, but you also must know that the struggle won’t be won in your lifetime. In both cases, there’s a story that has to be told, a poem that must be written, and a space that must be preserved for women, their words and the future.

Wendi White is an M.F.A. candidate in the Creative Writing Program at ODU, and the 2011 recipient of the ODU Graduate College Poetry Prize. She writes poetry about our only planet, imagining how we might live more mindfully upon it.

ODU’s Creative Writing MFA program and the Friends of the MFA Program invite you to an afternoon with author Steve Almond! Almond’s new short-story collection God Bless America arrives in bookstores on October 25th, and on October 27th he’ll be reading selections, as well as answering some questions and signing books (as time permits). Almond is always an entertaining presence, and has been a real friend to the creative writing program over the last several years. The reading will take place in ODU’s Batten Arts and Letters building, room 1012, from 4:20 – 5:20 p.m. We expect this to be a popular event, so arrive early to make sure you get a seat!

Free parking is available in Garage C, located at 43rd and Hampton Blvd, from 3:00 to 6:00 PM on 10/27/11. Cars parked in other reserved spaces, or in Garage C at other times, are subject to towing.

The MFA Creative Writing Program thanks all the fine poets who participated in this year’s College Poetry Prize, Co-sponsored by the MFA Creative Writing Program, the Poetry Society of Virginia, and the Academy of American Poets. The College Poetry Prize is one of the longest running poetry prizes offered to college students in the nation; many of our best poets received a College Poetry Prize as their first literary recognition in their careers. We hope you will send us your best work again next year!

Winners:
Sarah Goughnor (Undergraduate Winner) and Wendi White (Graduate Winner)

Honorable Mentions:
Sarah Goughnor and Elizabeth Dwyer (Undergraduate); Wendi White, Jeffrey Turner, and Heather Weddington (Graduate).

Matejka

The 2010-2011 contest was judged by Adrian Matejka. Matejka’s first collection of poems, The Devil’s Garden, won the 2002 Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books. His second collection, Mixology, was a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series and was published by Penguin Books in 2009. Mixology was subsequently nominated for an NAACP Image Award. He is the recipient of two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards and fellowships from Cave Canem and the Lannan Foundation. His work has been featured in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry 2010, and Ploughshares among other journals and anthologies. He teaches at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville where he is the William and Margaret Going Endowed Professor for 2010-11.

Below are Matejka’s selections with comments:

Undergraduate

Winner:

“Thin Ice” by Sarah Goughnor is a lovely mediation on personal history and the way it relates to memory. What is so wonderful and surprising about the poem was the clarity of image. Moments like “My feet would glide over the glossy ripples / in the frozen water” and “I kept walking on thin ice just by believing I could” are engaging in their imaginary and stunning in their fragility, like the very ice itself.

Honorable Mentions:

“Mango” by Sarah Goughnor — The attention to detail and the tactile moments in this poem are striking. The imagery is reminiscent of one of my favorite William Matthews poems, “Onions.”

“Décor” by Elizabeth Dwyer — Really powerful allusions and surprising resolution in this poem. The tone reminds me of some of Charles Simic’s earlier writing.

“September, closet raider” by Elizabeth Dwyer — I love the play with tropes and emotional clarity in this poem. The tone is insistent while still maintaining its imaginative narrative.

Graduate

Winner:

“Galilei’s Glass” by Wendi White is a graceful and balanced poem that ruminates on our “proper position” in this sometimes unimaginable universe. The poem is full the kinds of linguistic revelations that bring the reader close like “the sidelines of the firmament” and “Jupiter festooned with moons.” Through these imaginative images, the poem reminds us to praise the smaller moments because it is through them that we understand the bigger world.

Honorable Mentions:

“Benediction” by Wendi White — This is a lovely poem of appreciation and reverence. The individual images are powerful and the linear rhythm is nearly a song in itself.

“Punctual” by Jeffrey Turner — I really appreciate the associative connections in this poem and the playfully expansive diction. It reminds me of some of Mary Jo Bang’s work in that way.

“Chosen Ancestry” by Heather Weddington — The way this poem weaves the historical and personal into one narrative is really wonderful. It draws its intellectual strength from the exterior and the emotional power from the poet’s insides.

Bios

Dwyer

Elizabeth Dwyer (two Undergraduate Honorable Mentions) is a senior at Old Dominion University and studies English with an emphasis in creative writing. She plans to attend graduate school and hopes to become a college Professor. She agrees with what T.S. Eliot has said about how genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

Goughnor

Sarah Goughnor (Undergraduate Poetry Prize Winner plus Honorable Mention) is a native of Herndon, Virginia and a sophomore at Old Dominion University. She is majoring in English with a concentration in creative writing, and hopes to minor in vocal performance. The College Poetry Prize is the first writing award Sarah has received since the sixth grade, and is a deeply appreciated boost to her self-confidence.

Jeffrey Turner (Graduate Honorable Mention) grew up in Plymouth, MA. He completed a baccalaureate degree in philosophy at Dickinson College. He is a first year MFA Creative Writing student at Old Dominion.

Heather Weddington (Graduate Honorable Mention) is a third year student in the MFA Creative Writing Program, and the recipient of the Sutelan Scholarship. In summer 2010 she received a work-study scholarship to the Juniper Writers Instutite at the University of Massachussetts in Amherst.

White

Wendi White (Graduate Poetry Prize Winner) comes to Norfolk, Virginia after an odd assortment of sojourns in Austin, Boston, Mexico, Guatemala, The Philippines, and originally, The Adirondack Mountains of New York. She was drawn to Tidewater by a siren song promising crab cakes and fried oysters on a regular basis. At home she keeps one husband, two sons, a dog named Charlie, and too many books to count.

John-Henry Doucette, an MFA student at ODU, got the chance to interview poet-in-residence Kristin Naca last June on issues of craft in relation to her book of poems, Bird Eating Bird. John recently posted portions of that interview on his blog–check it out.

Kristin Naca, our writer-in-residence this semester, will be on campus next week. Check out the news posting for more.

Old Dominion University visiting poet-in-residence Kristin Naca, the author of “Bird Eating Bird,” will give a poetry reading and book signing at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, March 17, in the University Village Bookstore.