Looking for something to do this marvelously sunny Sunday? Come join us at 4 pm in the Honors Residence Hall for the Bolton Writing Workshop Reading. Listen to our wonderful Bolton students read from their work and also listen to the also wonderful Jim Daniels read. Follow the link for more information on Jim Daniels.
Follow the link for more information on Bolton.
Hope to see you there!

Hey, Internets,

Stephen Kuusisto is here and giving a reading tonight! So come join us as we hear some amazing prose and possibly some poems tonight, April 5, 7 pm, Gold Ballroom, Mountainlair.

If you cannot wait until tonight, or you want to learn everything you can about the man before the reading, check out his website.

Until then, read one of his poems on the Poetry Foundation’s website.

See you all tonight!

on Mary Ann Samyn’s new collection of poetry My Life in Heaven

by Ben Bishop

“Writing this book was a beautiful experience.” Mary Ann Samyn

This statement about writing My Life in Heaven, winner of Oberlin College Press 2012 Field Poetry Prize, says as much about the grace of the author as it does about what one can find within the pages of this book. There is much to be said about the role of time in the coalescing of these poems, and of the intra- and inter-personal, but there really isn’t any easy way to say what these poems do and do for the reader: they inspire us to go, read, play, experience, live.

The book’s official publication date is April 12, and it is with anticipation that I await its arrival and the chance to place it in my collection of most cherished books.

Read about Mary Ann’s thoughts on writing and My Life in Heaven in her blog post The Next Big Thing

by Rebecca Childers

Just a little under a year ago, in Colson Hall, Sarah Beth Childers quietly stood up from her computer, shut her office door and began to dance. A few months before, down in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, a similar scene played out. Christina Rothenbeck checked her e-mail. A press she’d recently sent her book to had replied: “Thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to see this…” the e-mail began. Christina’s shoulders slumped. However, instead of the usual “but” that would follow that sentence, Christina got an “and:” “and I want to publish it,” it said. There was jumping and screaming. Christina’s cat was frightened; her mother was called.

On these days, Sarah Beth Childers, a 2009 MFA graduate from WVU, and Christina Rothenbeck, a 2011 graduate found out their first books had been accepted by publishers: Sarah Beth’s by Ohio University Press in the series Race, Ethnicity in Gender in Appalachia; and Christina’s by Dancing Girl Press. Their joy was large, and their earlier disappointment, fortunately, had been very small. Both were published on their first try. (Current MFAs: We come from good stock.)

Christina’s book is currently available through Dancing Girl press, and Sarah Beth’s book will be available in Fall 2013 through Ohio University Press.

MFA alumna Christina Rothenbeck

Christina’s chapbook is titled Girls in Art, a title chosen during her time at WVU. She was sorting through her poems, labeling the types: newspaper poems, childhood poem, and she realized that there was a gap. “I think I need to write more ‘girls in art’ poems,” Christina said to Mary Ann Samyn. To which Mary Ann responded, “that would be a great book title, “Girls in Art.” The idea stuck.

Sarah Beth’s memoir-in-essays, Shake Terribly the Earth, comes from an essay of the same name in the collection. Sarah Beth is drawn to the poetic language of the book of Isaiah in the Bible.

Isaiah 2:19-21:

19 And they shall go into the holes of the rocks, and into the caves of the earth, for fear of the LORD, and for the glory of his majesty, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth.
20 In that day a man shall cast his idols of silver, and his idols of gold, which they made each one for himself to worship, to the moles and to the bats;
21 To go into the clefts of the rocks, and into the tops of the ragged rocks, for fear of the LORD, and for the glory of his majesty, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth.

In Sarah Beth’s early twenties, she had a few bad experiences with men. “I realized I had to get over a boy, and part of that process in both cases was throwing away all the crap I’d collected related to that person.” She read the passage and instantly connected to it. “[What] I’d kept as treasures had suddenly become garbage, like I was throwing my idols to the moles and to the bats after the earth shook terribly beneath me.” Sarah Beth wrote about this purging in the essay, but decided the title fit not only the essay but the whole book because it captured her themes in “strength during moments of upheaval.”

Both of these writers, being recent graduates, made good use of their MFA thesis in the creation of their book. MFA alumna Maggie Glover also used portions of her thesis. Check out her thoughts on her forthcoming book How I Went Red in our current alumni spotlight.

Each used a different process when selecting pieces, or separating the wheat from the chaff.

Sarah Beth’s process: There are fifteen essays in the book, and five of them are from my thesis. I had ten essays in my thesis, so I ended up having to take out half of them, either because they didn’t fit thematically or because of quality (some were about Austen and the Brontës, and I’ll work the Brontë material into a later book). I figured out most of the major themes and characters while putting my thesis together, but I knew those 150 pages weren’t really a book. My first big step post-thesis was to boldly make a file called “book draft” (things like this always help me mentally—in undergrad if I’d been procrastinating by making too many notes for a research paper, it helped to call a file “the paper”). I put in everything I had from my thesis that fit together, and I made a table of contents for it, putting the essays I had into the best possible order, as if it was a complete book. I had to be really honest with myself when I was throwing things away. Then, every time I wrote a new essay, I added it to that file and table of contents, usually changing the order around so my new material would fit. Much later in the process, I wrote a chapter summary of about 200 words for each essay, reading those summaries all together helped me find gaps, and then I had new ideas for essays I needed to write.

Christina’s process: The nucleus of my chapbook comes from my thesis. Twelve of the 20 poems in the chapbook were in my thesis, and three or four other poems are substantially reworked versions of thesis poems, too. I knew when I’d finished it that my thesis wasn’t ready to be a full-length book (that’s what my dissertation will be, I hope), but I thought it had a chapbook hiding inside. When I first moved to Hattiesburg for school in July 2011, I had almost a month of total inactivity stretching ahead of me (which sounds like a fantastic idea at the moment). I pulled out the poems from my thesis that I thought worked well together, and I taped them all up on a large blank wall in my apartment. I arranged and rearranged them, and I cut some out that didn’t quite fit. Then I started looking for the gaps—the places where the whole manuscript was missing something—and the poems that would tie everything together. I wrote a few new poems for the chapbook, mostly to supply a kind of thematic unity, and then in the time between acceptance and publication I ended up adding a few more because some of the poems I was writing in my first semester at Southern Miss fit in well.

After they were done writing and revising and again revising their manuscript, the girls began the brave process of choosing a publisher.

Christina’s publisher came from a conversation at WVU: “I learned about Dancing Girl in workshop; we’d been reading Karynna McGlynn’s I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, and we started talking about the gurlesque and places that publish kind of experimental poetry by women, and Sara Kearns brought in a Dancing Girl chapbook (and of course Mary Ann has a chapbook there too).” She then began to read the website religiously, learning the aesthetic of the editors, the type of poems published. She read chapbooks published there and practically memorized their sample poems.

Another thing she used: Twitter. She told us, “Use Twitter! By which I really mean use all of the tools you have, but seriously, Twitter is a gold mine. Virtually every small press has a Twitter feed (and a lot of big ones do too), and they tweet about open reading periods and contests, and also post interesting articles.” Christina said that she learns a great deal about the happenings of the writing world through the internet. “Right now, I’m reading Delirious Hem’s roundtable discussion on women in publishing, and learning about lots of new places to send work,” she said.

Sarah Beth found her press by looking to see who published the books that she had used as models when putting together her own book. She offered us some advice on how to do the same, “Look at the publishers of the books you’ve used as your models—the ones with similar aesthetics and structures, and especially ones whose success you can reasonably hope to emulate, given your subject matter, style, and experience. I looked at essay collections I loved, and I realized that with a couple very famous exceptions (like Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of My Youth), these books were all on good university presses.” So she thought that this would be the direction she needed to head in, and after having an agent read her work, praise her voice, characters, and language, but question the lack of “a central plot arc that had a major epiphany three-quarters of the way through,” she realized she definitely needed to go with a university press, because she could not get her collection to read like a novel, and a university press would accept that. 2011 WVU grad Sarah Einstein recommended Ohio University Press to Sarah Beth because of their Appalachian series (that’s another tip she gave—”creatively find something that takes your subject matter if you possibly can!”)

Like Christina, she did a lot of research. She headed to the library after this recommendation and came out with her arms, and the arms of sister, filled with books. She read everything in that series. “At that point, I was ready to write a thorough book proposal, explaining how my book would fit into that series and why they needed my book to make the series feel more balanced and complete,” she said. Fortunately, they agreed, “I was thankful I’d spent all that time finding books and reading, since that step ended up being so crucial.”

I’ve always pictured myself in the days following the publication of my first book: I’m lounging by the ocean, wearing a crown, surrounded by kittens. The ultimate in luxury. But Sarah Beth and Christina warn us, you have to put that off for just a little while. Christina and Sarah Beth both had to wait over a year before their books came out.

Self promotion is also one bump in the road. As a busy PhD student, Christina doesn’t really have the time she needs for self promotion. She said, “now that I have the chapbook, how do I get people to buy it? How do I get my work out to its audience?” She has to worry. But she is figuring it out. “I’ve given a couple of readings (I went back to my high school over break and read for the creative writing classes—it was weird, but the school also bought several copies of Girls in Art for the library).” Her local music store/coffee shop in Mississippi put a few copies on the counter for her, and she has made an author page on Goodreads.

Sarah Beth is still working on final edits and cover choices. A piece of advice she offered to us to avoid heachaches during that process, “If you can possibly help it, don’t quote songs! It doesn’t matter if it’s just a tiny line from the song—you’ll have to get permission. The copyright owners of the most important song in my book, “O Glorious Love,” were very gracious about giving permission, but I wasn’t able to get permission for another song I wanted, and I’ll probably have to just lose the quote.”

Both girls wanted to thank a few people for help and love given along the way.

Christina’s thank you’s: Mary Ann and Jim, of course—this book wouldn’t exist without their encouragement, prodding, and well-timed kicks in the pants. All my workshop buddies at WVU and USM collectively. And Charity Gingerich, Danielle Ryle, Tori Moore, and Lisa Beans specifically, because being one of The Poet Girls was such a hugely important and formative experience. I still hear all of your voices in my head when I’m writing (but in a good way, not a creepy red-rum kind of way).

Sarah Beth’s thank you’s: Kevin Oderman and my sister Rebecca most of all, for reading so many drafts of everything and motivating me to get the book done. My cat Arwen for sitting with me, on the back of my chair or on my lap, during every word I wrote. Other very helpful faculty at WVU and Marshall University—Mark Brazaitis, Gail Adams, Ethel Morgan Smith, John Van Kirk, Mary Moore, and Kateryna Schray. Some of these faculty members helped directly with my essays, and some just gave me the foundational knowledge I needed to write it in the first place. Many workshop friends—especially Lori D’Angelo, Sarah Einstein, Ami Schiffbauer, Ann Claycomb, Emily Watson, and Ashley Jenkins. And other friends who gave me support during my years of writing this book, like Christina Tremill, Hannah Saltmarsh, Charity Gingerich, Jericho Williams, Kate Klein, and Jim Greene. I’m also deeply thankful to Colgate University for the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship, and especially the support of Jennifer Brice, Jane Pinchin, Patrick O’Keeffe, and Peter Balakian. And the rest of my family for inspiring me and believing in me—particularly my siblings, my parents, my grandparents, and my Uncle Bill.

Just four years ago, both of these accomplished writers were where we MFA students are now, frantically grading stacks of Feature Articles, reading in-depth for workshop. And writing in between in all. And now they did what we dream about: they published a book. So take heart. We are doing this for a reason. Not too long from now, it will be you dancing.

Winter might have been rough on our skin (and our souls), but it was kind to Mountaineer writers. Read on to find out about our alumni and current student achievements. Please share your recent achievements by emailing Rebecca Thomas.

Alumni

Mountaineers took over the 2013 AWP Conference this year. Besides many of our professors having books out, we also had alumni on two different panels. Alumna Sarah Einstein was on a panel entitled “The Art and Craft of Short-Form Nonfiction.” Alumnae Sarah Beth Childers, Heather Frese, and Lori D’Angelo were on the wonderfully titled panel “Don’t Stop Believing: Leading the Writing Life After the MFA.”

Even all the way over in Poland on her Fulbright Fellowship Lisa Beans has been writing away. Her poem “The Elk” was accepted by The Southeast Review and is scheduled for their September 2013 issue.

Amanda Cobb’s poem “You Owe Me A Coke” appeared in The Boiler.

Sarah Einstein’s essay “A Meditation on Love” is in the current issue of The Fiddleback.

Charity Gingerich has three poems in the spring issue of Moon City Review (“After June,” “Beauty is a Mountain We See While Driving Our Car,” and “Conflict is the Only Way to Intimacy”). She also has one poem “Pay Attention, Real Quick” in the Penwood Review.

Kelly Moffett’s chapbook Ghost Act was published by Dancing Girl Press.

Renee K. Nicholson also has work in the current issue of Moon City Review. Look for her essay “In Sickness” in the latest issue. Her poems “Filigree” and “Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center” are forthcoming in Linden Avenue. Her essay “Five Positions,” will be re-published in Redux: Work Worth A Second Run. It was originally published in The Gettysburg Review. Renée has also been made a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Danielle Ryle’s chapbook, Fetching My Sister, will be published by Dancing Girl Press.

Natalie Sypolt and Renee Nicholson were featured as a guest podcast in Sundog Lit’s This State of Literature.

Natalie Sypolt was also recently awarded first place in the Glimmer Train New Writers Contest. Her story “My Brothers and Me” will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal. Her story “Fractured” is in the most recent edition of Superstition Review. Natalie was also nominated by Still: The Journal for the Best of the Net for her story “Home Visit”.

Kelly Sundberg’s essay “Cruelty Was The Only Thing She Knew” will be in a forthcoming issue of Quarterly West. She was also awarded the Vermont Studio Center Partial Fellowship and Artist’s Grant.

Current Students

Jessi Lewis MFA candidate in Fiction has a short story, “Huckers,” in Stymie: A Journal of Sport and Literature. She also received a Pushcart nomination for her short story “Walnuts,” which appeared in Ghost Town

Christina Seymour MFA candidate in Poetry will have her poem “Something that Stands Still” appear in the next issue (summer/June) of New Haven Review.

Shane Stricker MFA candidate in Fiction had his story “How To Lose a Mother and a Brother in the Same Day: The Story of a Drive-Thru Funeral,” appear in the Winter edition of Midwestern Gothic.

Rebecca Thomas MFA candidate in Fiction has a short story “Her Time. Their Time.” in the current issue of Graze Magazine.

Jacqulyn Wilson MFA candidate in Poetry will have her poem “In the Middle of Feeling It” will be published in the in the Summer 2013 print issue of Emerge Literary Journal.

by Christina Seymour

This semester we have had the pleasure of attending readings by some of our wonderful professors and alumni. Read on to find out more about them. If you weren’t able to attend the readings, don’t worry. You can catch many of the readings by listening to The Center for Literacy Computing’s podcasts.

Mary Ann Samyn Reading

Much like the title of her new book My Life in Heaven, winner of the 2012 FIELD Poetry Prize, Mary Ann seems to be in heaven when she shares her poems with us. Her poems, like her, radiate with the rare joy (even when they’re about the not-so-joyful) that you just don’t witness in 130 Colson everyday. A few MFAs remarked that she’s like a musician up there, providing subtly profound anecdotes throughout her “set list,” with us thinking, “Will she do this one? Will she do that one?”—questions which don’t matter much because her precisions expand to contain it all.

One staggering moment for me: “The internal life is life. The roses live there.” I’m sure you have your own.

Jessie van Eerden and Kevin Oderman Reading: Sweeter than Cookies

On February 26, we listeners gathered round to hear our favorite nonfiction writers read their unspeakably good fiction. Kevin Oderman and Jessie van Eerden did not hold their books open to reveal colorful illustrations to all of our wide-eyed stares like in a grade school classroom, but in many ways, that’s exactly what they did. Both writers paint clear pictures with stark details and strong characters so that their images dance through the air—Kevin materialized a man in white on a white Vespa suffused in white light and baguettes like an open beach; and van Eerden unveiled yellow curlicues, almost-too-pretty black eyes, and two graspable female characters: Crystal with a vow of silence and Amy with a vow of chastity.

We clapped at the end and had cookies and juice—all things not as sweet as the listening.

Check out Kevin’s novel White Vespa and Jessie Van Eerden’s novel Glorybound.

The Funny and the Sad: Mark Brazaitis and Amanda Cobb Reading

The Mark Brazaitis and Amanda Cobb reading was a night to remember, beginning with “alcohol is in it!” and ending with a ghost “strong enough to cross from the hereafter to the here.” Both writers have the special talent of being simultaneously hilarious and profoundly sad, as evidenced by Amanda’s “It took a long time to think of stains as colors” and Mark’s “I was born dead and was never allowed to forget it.”

Thanks to both for serving up their very best.

Check out Mark Brazaitis’s new book The Incurables: Stories, winner of Notre Dame Press’s 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize.

Find Amanda Cobb’s poems in Verse, Arts & Letters, Pebble Lake Review, Controlled Burn, and elsewhere.

Thank you to all of our wonderful writers for such fabulous readings! Stay tuned to the creative writing website for future readings.

by Christina Seymour and Xin Tian Koh

Line 1: Write a statement about the weather today. End it with a period.
Line 2: Tell us something else about it. How does the weather make you feel?
Line 3: Does today remind you of any other day, a person, or a memory?

CTB/McGraw-Hill’s Student Art Project provided us MFAs with the opportunity to teach poetry workshops to 110 6th, 7th, and 8th graders at West Preston Middle School. Disney Imagineer artist Jim Sarno will arrange the students’ poems into an art project, and about 30 student poems will be on display at the Arts Alive! celebration at Charleston, WV this April. These displayed poems will then be auctioned off, with the proceeds going to the middle school.

On the snowy mornings of the 13th and 14th of March, 2013, we stepped into a school of fresh-faced and eager writers-to-be. Mary Ann Samyn had planned the workshops with Ms. Keisha Kibler and her team of teachers, who had a visible rapport with their students. Ms. Kibler introduced her classes to us, and soon the bells started ringing, nudging us towards our first class.

Christina:

I don’t typically believe the cliché that children have some sort of wisdom we inhibited adults no longer have access to; however, spending just five minutes with the 6th, 7th, and 8th graders at West Preston Middle School makes me question that doubt. The students don’t necessarily possess a clichéd wisdom, per se, (especially not the creepy kind Haley Joel Osment sports in The Sixth Sense or that tiny, adorable, secretly profound kind of the girl in We Bought a Zoo), but they practice an unabashed desire to learn—desire to hear new perspectives—that we don’t find often in the more settled workplace of college.

Their learning is porous; they know one of the biggest lessons I’ve first unlearned and then had to relearn: school is about you. They know how to internalize, relate, gather images, insert the devices we tell them to (similes, metaphors), and skillfully arrange it all to let the meaning dangle on the edge of possibility. They do this like pros by very naturally rooting their abstractions in the contextual details of their immediate realities—their shoes, their desks, their teachers, their favorite pieces of jewelry, their grass-stained knees.

Partial credit for the success of these workshops goes to Mary Ann and her ability to be present with the students. At one point, she sympathized with them, “This is a long day you all have. I feel it.” They all nodded in agreement. (So did we.) Mary Ann also urged each of us MFA helpers to share the things we miss/admire about our hometowns, and the variations of those place-based details were just as poetic as the prompt she advised us to use, a prompt less focused on generating writing and more on reflecting on the moments that compose a life: the wishes, the weather, the memories, the lucky charms, the beloveds. Our task of administering the prompt was not easily conceived until we felt the immediate warmth of the children, staring at us with the hope that we’ll just do something worthwhile. And when we started with the sky, they jumped on board.

Of course, no two students are alike. I saw ones who wanted to do what they should do, ones who wanted to playfully break the rules, and more subtly, ones who wanted to listen to themselves, to measure my directions against their beliefs about literature, and to make decisions of language and focus. Some students wanted to continue the conversation; some wanted to practice humor; some wanted to just write their poems. It was very refreshing to be reminded that there are people in this world who want to practice being just who they are, and it was fun to be the person to let them do that, and express it, in a circle of desks, pencils, and notebook paper.

To bring about the second biggest cliché about children—the students at West Preston Middle School taught me more than I taught them. They enlivened my sense that writing is, first and foremost, self-expression. I hope they see the process of poetry as one to apply to their everyday lives; I hope some of the subtle talking and crafting sunk in because there is no question they had the hearts for it.

Xin Tian:

On the second day, the students recounted what they had done on the previous day and read their poems aloud to one another, with various degrees of confidence. Some traded poems with each other and read them aloud. We invited the students to polish their poems, by adding a few more closing lines about what they liked about their state, or by covering and rewriting the lines they already had and seeing if any new words or ideas emerged. Some of them erased or added new words. Others found that how they read a poem was different from what they saw on the page, and put the words that came from their mouths down in writing.

We got a glimpse of the books which students were currently reading. The Hunger Games was a favourite. An 8th-grader expressed interest in writing and reading, did a lot of thinking with us about his lines and how to add to them, but wrote much less than others and spent more time brooding over the task. Perhaps that is the age when one gets conscious of one’s own writing, or decides—or knows for sure—whether one should be a writer. Not everyone will, of course, but something must happen then to make that age determine so much.

The best poems came from students who didn’t know they were innate poets, or, as Christina observed, who are keen on hearing new perspectives on writing. Among this group of young writers, how many will find that putting their thoughts or desires down on paper remains important to them and keep writing? Hopefully more than we can guess!

Line 4: Do you have a lucky charm you keep in a special place? Or is there something you would like to own?
Line 5: Say something you really like about West Virginia that makes you wonder.
Line 6: What are you secretly proud of?

Go ahead and type your poems up.

by Rebecca Doverspike

Solitude, Ballard Locks

Ships wait in the narrow passage, their long white masts like tangible light,
like the kind that brims on the hard bed of this hotel room, its bleached curtains.

And then the fish ladder—so like my body, how I’ve always pictured it:
slow green bone; salmon pushed against a glass throat.

Try speaking that emotion, the therapist said. But even I
can’t understand what I’m always on the verge of saying.

If you were here, we’d link arms through the market: workers throwing the dead fish
back and forth, calling as the sea-moon spins between them—

—Melissa Atkinson

Melissa Atkinson right after she defended her thesis!

I first encountered Melissa’s writing in a nonfiction workshop. “Poets write the best essays!” I exclaimed, a revelation. Her language felt precise and private, like each sentence was a generosity delivered from her world to ours (which, in fact, is also ours made anew). I felt moonlight more thoroughly; I felt loss more acutely. She drew my attention to impermanence, and in doing so, to the present. “Why isn’t Melissa a nonfiction writer?” I asked. This was before I saw her poetry.

I got to know Melissa as a poet and a friend simultaneously. The way the lines in her poetry move speaks to something of how my interior world moves as well (and I know many readers feel this way). Throughout Melissa’s poems several words keep returning: moon, sky, body, kites, lemons, dishwater, porch, fish… and through these words and others, her lines arrive at mortality, grief, forgiveness, stories, trust, myth, distance, closeness. I remain amazed by the timing in her lines—they carry us somewhere, deliver us to deep places inside; they change us.

Often, in our moments together, poetry and friendship have overlapped. We claimed a sycamore tree one summer, sat beneath it on the hottest day of the year. We rescued a kitten on a dark and snowy night after workshop (Melissa named her Ariel; Plath an influence). We stood outside in the backyard at my apartment and hushed while fireflies glowed around us. Both rather serious people on the page, in our friendship we find space for joyfulness, playfulness—loose and full laughter; we speak each other’s languages. Or, we at least have a good ear for one another’s voices.

Mary Ann often says that good poems aren’t paraphrase-able, and I think this is true. Melissa’s poems and her private process behind them remain mysterious. I know that often the collective response after reading one of Melissa’s poems is, “How does she do this?” And while our friendship, which seems lifelong though it bloomed only during our overlapping time in the program, has often interweaved with talk of poetry, I sat down to have a slightly more “formal” conversation with Melissa about her poetry for this article.

After Mary Ann’s poetry workshop one evening, honey colored light settled on the Colson Hall walls and we took what we’d absorbed, too, and walked, feeling more sunlit laughter than cold wind, to a quiet booth at Black Bear. The light that had settled across some faces in class and then on the walls as we left stayed with me, and maybe Melissa, too, because when I asked her how a poem begins or happens for her, she said, “The lines just don’t go away until they’re settled.” A poem begins for her with sound—the sounds of words “clicking” up against one another, and then, later, a line clicking into place. We spoke about images. I tended to think of an image as sight-based, but Melissa feels the sounds of the words are never apart from the image. “Like Mary Ann often says,” Melissa remarked, “What’s being said and how it’s being said are the same thing.”

Melissa’s been writing ever since she can remember. I could picture the limericks Melissa told me about, in her North Carolina elementary school, her first encounter with poetry, the ones she wrapped ribbon around. Ribbon brought to mind a poem of Melissa’s titled “But, still, the sky—soft satin, pinned up like ribbon” in which “Shadows moved, room to room to ground. She stitched / my hem, the gold of a salmon stream / where fish pushed up, then out. Night opened and took them; / we will never remember this world once we leave it.”

We talked about memory. I nearly asked her what she’d miss about leaving Morgantown and the program, but I stopped myself. “Do you consider yourself a nostalgic person?” I asked instead. “I don’t consider myself that kind of person,” (I didn’t think so) and we smiled. After a brief pause, Melissa added: “Memory never leaves you and the moments that you’ve had are never not there. We put all kinds of lives inside our own life and we carry them around and different moments might recall other moments.” You see her brilliance there, no? Yes, Melissa’s poems do involve memory, and conscious myth-making, but not necessarily nostalgia—the memories remain present, other lives inside one’s own. I think again of the clicking of sounds, their settling into lines. If the Italian “stanza” translates into “room,” perhaps such memories are windows. Why feel nostalgia for what’s still there?
Melissa spoke of landscape in a similar capacity. I told her about an essay I’d recently read in which Trudy Dittmar describes two geographies—how she thinks of one while she’s in the other. She describes the inability to be in both places at once as a kind of death, or a glimpse into understanding something about death. Melissa feels that whichever landscape she’s in influences her poem. “Even when I write about NC from here, WV is there.” Again, landscapes co-exist inside, the way that others’ lives and memories can.

Still, she knows when she leave Morgantown in May she will miss how “All the lights are fishes in the hills,” and the low-windows of her apartment, sunsets over the street. (Yes, I went ahead and asked anyway.) She will miss both landscape and people, as we all do. “How far down am I on the list?” I teased her. “These things are in no particular order!” Again, interiority allows for co-existence.

I told Melissa a brief story about how memorable I find the lines in her poems. I was riding with a close friend of both Melissa and I’s, poet Sara Kearns, and somehow, something in the light made me utter, “A red-doored church grows evening from its heart.” Sara, who was paralleling parking, stopped mid-attempt, looked at me with surprised seriousness and said, “That’s beautiful,” though I thought I’d said it under my breath. “That’s not me,” I smiled. “That’s Melissa.” It sparked a whole conversation about Melissa’s poetry between us just from that line.

Throughout our conversation, Melissa spoke lines from poems she’d recently memorized. “That’s what defines my connection to a poem,” she said, “Whether or not I want to keep returning to the line.”

Melissa said that since she’s been in the program here at WVU, her poems have changed dramatically. “I’ve been writing constantly,” she said, “with little pauses in between.” She feels she’s really come into her line. “When did you recognize your own line, your own voice?” I asked. “When it ‘clicks’ into place,” she reiterated. I wondered if her interaction with language had always been like that, remembering those early limericks.

“No…it wasn’t always like that—the limericks were more being playful with language rather than being inside language,” she said. Interesting, as I’d thought of language as being inside of her rather than the other way around.

“Well,” Melissa said, “language feels so much larger than me, so I’d err on the side of my being in language.”

As you can recognize, talking with Melissa brings about lines as beautiful as her poems. When I asked Melissa about common threads throughout her poems, she mentioned voice and silence. She said she’d always been more comfortable with her voice on the page than off, that writing poetry is “Asking [herself] to speak,” rather than being called on to speak. We talked about that distinction, because, for me, honesty is often pulled out through conversation—I almost cannot speak outside relationship. Melissa, too, said that her poems often begin with something someone’s said to her, or something she has said—from sound in the world to voice on the page.

I feel this poem of Melissa’s, “Assisted living” shows that struggle between what words are able to say and the edges they come up against for what’s unsayable:

I sit with my uncle, talking of the dark flat coat;
walking there, the trashcans kept looking like people. I tell him how
souls could come unstuck, slipping out into the warm sand.
Of course, he says. But still,
how relentless do I want this to be? I’m not exactly careful of beauty.
My uncle’s smoker hands clot with dark circles
like the miles of marshland
where we found the cranes and couldn’t stop watching.
How when we tell the story, sometimes, thousands of them watch us back,
feet barely stirring the water.
We felt the words go out from us like bright squirming fish;
the cranes caught them quickly, whole in their mouths—

I also asked Melissa if she’d keep writing after graduating with her MFA. “Of course,” she reassured, “I feel happier on the days when I’m writing; I feel more like myself. It’s a kind of self-preservation.” This news warmed me because I love both Melissa and her poetry. “By all means,” I said, “Preserve yourself as long as possible!”

After reading one of Melissa’s poems, I’m always convinced she’s going to be famous, though she’s filled with humility. I am blessed to know her as a person as well as a poet—the questions she asks me as a friend, helping me to elicit that honesty, resembles the kinds of questions she asks of herself in her poems. She’s the kind of poet that reminds me how rare some souls are. She’s the kind of person who reminds me of how much good poets can do in this world; her poems feel generous, which is connected to how generous of a person she is. The most. And whether you are blessed to know her or not, I know you will feel that generosity and depth in her poetry—how she gives her beautiful voice to us.

Since Spring of 2012, several MFA students had the hopeful idea that the West Virginia University MFA program had the potential to host a fantastic literary journal. A small hope grew into a great idea, and now three MFA students act as editors of the Cheat River Review and submissions are coming in. Recently Jessi Lewis, the fiction editor, Rebecca Doverspike, the nonfiction editor, and Morgan O’Grade, the poetry editor, discussed the process of getting to this point with this new journal, and where they hope the Cheat River Review will go.

Jessi, what is your hope for the fiction portion of the journal?
We’re already getting submissions sent in for all three genres, so it’s really exciting across the board. We mention on our site how we want unique pieces, and I don’t think I can stress this enough. Ideally, CRR editors will look for fiction that really catches the eye with characters that are hard to shake from memory.

Rebecca, what are you most excited about as the journal begins to read nonfiction manuscripts?
I enjoy reading writer’s work in a variety of capacities. Reading as an editor for the journal differs from graduate workshops or teaching, and I expect it will feel like a process of discovery. I think of it as sifting through voices to find those that resound most with the journal—pieces where the placement and timing of each word allows its pulse to come through most clearly, and writing that holds surprises and discoveries for readers, too.

And Morgan, what elements do you plan to look for in poetry manuscripts?
I look for something exciting, that stays with me after I’ve read it. At this point, which is terribly early in the process of reading, I’m looking for writing that has urgency.

Jessi and Rebecca were the first grad students to work toward the journal in their first year of their MFA. Jessi, what was the most difficult part of getting this journal started?
Choosing the name. Including a part of the landscape of West Virginia was a no-brainer for us since this area is so influential on the people who live in it. But what to choose? This was also so important because the title produces an identity for readers and writers to remember. We went with the Cheat River Review for a lot of reasons, but it helped that other people in the department seemed to latch onto the idea of it—a river that is memorable and unconquerable.

Morgan, you’re really active in the online presence of CRR. How is the journal connecting to other journals, editors and writers?
Well, we have emailed with other journals. At AWP I was lucky to talk with other editors or readers of student run literary magazines. These lovely people provided me with invaluable support and information. We are also on Twitter and just hit 100 followers! The other night I made a Tumbler, but I have no idea how to use it yet. I really need to stay technologically sound to connect with people outside of our immediate community. We have a ton of awesome postcards and pens to give out to writers, editors, and journals. We gave away about half at AWP.

Finally, in the fall, Rebecca and Jessi will be moving out of their positions to let new editors come in and make their mark. Rebecca, what advice do you have for these new editors?
While time is always an issue, try to be careful, too. Try to be attentive and quick, not just quick. As with anything else, trust your instincts but also make sure you’re listening.

—-Good advice for anyone. Cheat River Review’s inaugural issue will appear online in October of 2013. Submissions are free and open..

by Jesse Kalvitis

I’m gradually reading my way through Murakami’s body of work but in no particular order. This collection contains stories written between 1983 and 1993, all translated into English, some previously published. It’s interesting to read these samples of some of his earlier short works, having already read his later writing. More on that in a moment.

Let’s be honest here. It’s impossible to read Murakami’s stories or novels without getting the impression that he is a delightfully odd man. His characters, while made entirely relatable by the use of interior monologue, by their common human traits and experiences, are constantly in touch with the more mystical, bizarre side of the universe. Phone calls full of nothing but rushing wind come into one character’s life, weeks of inexplicable insomnia into another’s. In the title story, a full grown elephant does, in fact, vanish. These events are remarked upon but taken with a certain calm bafflement by the characters. The simple, honest weirdness of Murakami’s world reminds me of the fiction of WVU’s own Shane Stricker, but also of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, genre-straddling authors who found literary merit on the fringes of science fiction and horror.

I accidentally found out a little about Haruki Murakami himself while confirming the timeline of his publications. I generally try to avoid learning too much about the personal lives of my favorite authors. I find it difficult to enjoy a story or novel if I have learned that the author’s a real jerk. In this case, that wasn’t a problem. What I did discover is that Murakami may possibly be as odd as his writing. He only started writing fiction in 1979, at age twenty-nine. He experienced a moment of inspiration while attending a baseball game, and went home to immediately start writing a novel. At the age of thirty-three, he began running marathons and participating in triathlons. He eventually ran a 62 mile ultramarathon around Lake Saroma. Before his late twenties, he mostly devoted his time to music, specifically jazz. He worked in record stores, and he and his wife ran a coffee shop and jazz bar in Tokyo.

I am fascinated by Murakami’s reinvention of himself at the age when many people are beginning to settle into one particular field, one track. This openness to change shows up in his writing as well. Many of his characters exude a sense of frustration and wonder, willingly entering in to the strange avenues opened up by events beyond the norm. The primary example of this, of course, is the protagonist from his novel The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, in which an unemployed young husband finds himself the center of an increasingly peculiar series of events. I read the novel a few years ago and was delighted to find a short story in this collection that parallels the events of the first several chapters. In the short story version, the protagonist is far less reflective, less distressed by what he perceives as his sudden pointlessness in life. The deeply mystical elements of the novel don’t enter in at all—the story looks mostly at the protagonist’s relationships and home life. It’s actually one of the more ordinary stories in the collection. I can’t imagine the authorial mental leap that took this narrative from one form to the next, but I’m glad that it happened. I’m perfectly content if Haruki Murakami keeps on being as weird as he wants to be, and creating the intensely beautiful writing that comes with it.