Faculty Lectures Online
Spring Cleaning! Audio Upgrade!
We are delighted to announce that the first of many sets to come of our wonderful archival lectures have been cleaned, audio-upgraded, and digitized. Ten terrific poetry lectures and classes delivered between 1989 and 2000, including ones by Heather McHugh and Larry Levis, are now available for download and sale. For a short time we are offering the first set at a special, celebratory low price. Catalog copy describes each lecture, enabling you to have a good idea of what you are buying. Each lecture is introduced by Ellen Bryant Voigt and all monies raised go to the MFA scholarship funds. For further details please see the FoW web page!
Click here to go to the FoW store
Going by the (Children’s) Book
In an article for the Wall Street Journal, Warren Wilson faculty member Liam Callanan searches Paris for sites from classic children’s books:
THE FIRST remarkable sight we caught in Paris was our own 4-year-old daughter. Standing on a sidewalk in the Marais, she looked around, hands on hips, and said: “I think I’ve been here.”
She hadn’t—we monitor her play dates more carefully than that—but it was a delight to realize what made her think so: books...[Keep Reading]…
Alumni Updates
Bob Ayres (poetry, ‘93): Bob’s first collection of poems, Shadow of Wings, is just out from Main Street Rag Publishing Company. Bob’s manuscript was recommend by Gail Peck (poetry, ’87) for the Author’s Choice Chapbook Series. Shadow of Wings is available at mainstreetrag.com
Shadow of Wings
What will it be like to open that door
if when I do a folded piece of paper
drops to the floor, and I bend down
to pick it up and see my name?Remember the first day of junior high
gripping the colorless plastic tray
queasy, uncertain where to sit
in that sea of kids?Or younger, standing at the porcelain sink
milky-white as a pre-dawn sky
hands cupped to catch the water fall?
“Provincial Thought”
Warren Wilson faculty member Maurice Manning’s poem is up at the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Provincial Thought
We get things in our head, a sort
of wonder I suppose, a notion,
about where to stand on the hill to see
the white blur of a steeple eight
or maybe ten miles away
at the center of a country town
whose school has been consolidated,
and the little country store, where news
and gossip spread around and maybe
a local discovery was claimed
by one of the loafers there, is closed...[Keep Reading]…
Maurice is the author of The Common Man
Alumni Updates
Greg Pierce (fiction, 2012): Greg was recently featured in a New York Times article about his collaboration with Tony Award-winning composer John Kander:
Throughout May Mr. Pierce has been juggling their musical, “The Landing,” a triptych about love and obsession that is now running Off Broadway, with rehearsals for “Slowgirl,” his tense new play about a troubled young woman visiting her uncle in Costa Rica. Both projects are attention-grabbers: “Slowgirl” is next month’s inaugural production at Lincoln Center Theater’s new stage, the Claire Tow, while “The Landing” is no less than Mr. Pierce’s debut as lyricist and book writer at the side of a musical theater legend...[Keep Reading]…
Photo courtesy NY Times.com
Alumni Updates
Natalie Serber (fiction, ’05): Natalie’s story “Developmental Blah Blah” is up in serial this week at Five Chapters.com:
Developmental Blah Blah — Part One
Mini cupcakes — iced, sprinkled, and dressed in ruffled paper wrappers — lined the pastry case like a jolly marching band. Cassie leaned forward to peer in at all the tiny perfection. “I don’t know…He’s going to be fifty.”
The young woman behind the counter, bleak and gothic with kohl-lined eyes, a metal stud flashing high on her cheek like a hammered-in beauty mark, and thick black sweatbands on both wrists, was a flesh-and-blood contradiction to the buoyant mural on the wall behind her — rainbows and bluebirds.
“Little cupcakes seem appropriate for an eight-year-old girl’s birthday party. Are these too hopeful?” …[Keep Reading]…
Natalie is the author of Shout Her Lovely Name
Alumni Updates
Lee Polevoi (fiction ’93): Lee was recently interviewed by Highbrow Magazine, where he is Chief Book Critic:
What’s the worst job/assignment you’ve ever had?
A year spent as a copywriter at a wildly dysfunctional boutique ad agency. One condition of employment: Mandatory karaoke at the annual retreat. The horror! …[Keep Reading]…
Lee is the author of The Moon in Deep Winter
Alumni Updates
Joseph M. Schuster (Fiction ’91): Joe’s essay “Reference Point: Fathers and Sons” is up at The Millions. He’s also written an essay for Largehearted Boy as part of their “Book Notes” series, where authors “create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.” Joe’s playlist complements his novel The Might Have Been (2012, Ballantine).
“The Tracks of My Tears,” Smokey Robinson and the Miracles
While my novel never mentions this Motown classic by name, this is precisely the sort of song I had in mind when I describe, in a couple of places, the high school dances Edward Everett would have gone to when he was a teenager, like the dances I went to a few years later than when he would have been in school, when couples would cling to each other under subdued lights in an overheated gymnasium, not so much dancing as turning slowly in tidy circles, feeling the weight of their love and lust for the two and a half or three minutes the song lasted, all the while the song they were dancing to was often about heartbreak...[Keep Reading]…
Alumni Updates
Joan Frank (fiction, ’96): Joan’s new novel Make It Stay
Stacey D’Erasmo Wins Lambda Foundation Award
Warren Wilson faculty member Stacey D’Erasmo has won the Lambda Literary Foundation’s 2012 Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, for her novel, A Seahorse Year
The award consists of two cash prizes of $5000 to authors who have made significant contributions to LGBT literature and community. This year’s prize recognizes Stacey and novelist Brian Leung for “creating works which incorporate multi-faceted LGBT characters and who are themselves often involved in the mentoring and teaching of a new generation of LGBT writers.”
Awards will be presented June 4, 2012 at the 24th Annual Lambda Literary Awards ceremony in New York City.
FRIENDS OF WRITERS 