The reviews keep rolling in for Mark Brazaitis’ latest book The Incurables.

After being reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement, New Pages has called The Incurables “[masterful],” “hilarious,” and “haunting.”

Furthermore, they write “These stories, much like their characters, will surely carry on.” We think so, too.

Looking for a good, quick read this rainy fall day? Check out MFA alumna Sarah Beth Childers’ work in Wigleaf.

There might be something in water on the second floor of Colson Hall. Jim Harms had two books out in one month (Comet Scar and What to Borrow, What to Steal ) and he was named Chair of the English Department.. Mary Ann Samyn won the Benedum Distinguished Scholar Award (the highest honor a WVU Faculty member can receive for research) and the 2012 FIELD Poetry Prize for her collection My Life in Heaven. And now, Mark Brazaitis, fresh off of his recent win of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction for his collection The Incurables, has just won the 8th Annual Gival Press Novel Award for his novel Julia & Rodrigo. Besides a nice cash prize, Mark’s novel will also be published in 2013 by Gival Press.

Thaddeus Rutkowski, the final judge of the contest and the author of Haywire, Tetched, and Roughhouse had this to say about Julia & Rodrigo: “This expressive, touching and at times wrenching novel tells the stories of two young people living in Guatemala during that country’s civil war. Teenagers Julia García and Rodrigo Rax meet at a school pageant and find that they are drawn to each other. Julia, the daughter of an engineer, lives in one of the few two-story houses in town. Rodrigo, who comes from less privilege, is a soccer star. But what begins as a love story soon becomes a struggle against circumstance. Julia and Rodrigo rise above old-fashioned customs of marriage and religious worship only to collide with events they cannot control. Ultimately, this finely crafted novel goes a long way toward answering the question of whether human free will can overcome fate, or God’s will.”

To top off the good news, Notre Dame Press just released The Incurables. Congratulations, Mark! As for me, I’m going to go read The Incurables and get a nice, long drink from that second floor drinking fountain.

by Rebecca Childers

In the poem “Timothy McVeigh,” by Jill McDonough, the reader is left with the following image describing the audience’s perspective of his execution:

Most saw The Devil, back in hell, which caused
One man to say He’s not a monster, guys,
Not when you’re looking him in the face. He paused.
There’s no facial expressions on him, so there’s
No way of knowing exactly what he is.

The observer does not take away McVeigh’s humanity, he does not even ponder the possibility of it and begins to attempt to define the other that he believes defines McVeigh. This is a common occurrence for death row inmates: being stripped of things that seem intangible. Innate in the rest of us. One of the main casualties here, is voice. The ability to speak is not a given, and to be heard is almost an impossibility. Demands of the Dead: Executions, Storytelling, and Activism (from the University of Iowa Press), a collection of creative writing edited by WVU’s Katy Ryan and the authors she collaborated with on the collection, works to return that voice. The authors include: Jill McDonough, former WVU student Jason Stupp, Sherman Alexie, the late Willie Francis who survived the electric chair at sixteen then put back in it, Thomas Dutoit and many more. Other contributors are current death row inmates who find the inspiration to write words that so desperately need to be heard (we should all take a lesson from this).

I discovered the value of creative writing in the death penalty field last year when I took English 693B: Special Topics: The Death Penalty and 20th Century American Literature. In Caryl Chessman’s autobiographical novel Death Row: Cell 2455, the author begins in third person. Telling the story of a boy with a tragic life. Illness, poverty, a sick mother, a town scandal, and we see him slowly take to a life of crime after everything else falls through. The author cannot help but feel for the character and root for him. Then Caryl turns the tables. I am that boy, he tells the reader at the beginning of the next section. We’ve been rooting for a murderer. But you don’t feel tricked, you feel enlightened. Society’s view of death row is seen through a dirty window. We can pretend that if the window isn’t opened we won’t realize how like ourselves these people are, and how easily it could be us. But Caryl, and any writer who has been through the experience or even just thoroughly studied and cared, can show this in a forum that is approachable and riveting.

Eight years ago, Katy Ryan and one of her graduate classes found a way to allow prisoners to be heard even more: through letters. The Appalachian Prison Book Project is a free service to prisoners. Volunteers open letters, read the request, find a book to fit it, send it, and for a few hours that prison cell seems a little less small. Then the prisoner passes the book on to a friend. The requests vary greatly. Some ask for books to help them find employment once they get out, some ask for dictionaries to help them read and write, some ask for fiction: James Patterson, Louis L’amour, the Harry Potter series. The organization often receives thank-you letters in return, sometimes directly to the sender. Sometimes they include drawings.

In Katy Ryan’s class we read the play The Exonerated by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen. It highlighted the stories of six former death row inmates who at the time the play had been written, had their names cleared. One of the men was Delbert Tibbs, a poet, whose work is included in Demands of the Dead. The authors of the play chose to conclude on these words from him:

This
is the place for the thoughts that do not end in concreteness.
It is necessary to be curious,
and dangerous to dwell here; to wonder why
and how and when is dangerous—
but that’s how we get out of this hole.
It is not easy to be a poet here.
Yet I sing.
We sing.

In Demands of the Dead and through projects like the Appachian Prison Book Project people dare to dwell and the accused dare to sing.
If you would like to read Katy’s book, you can obtain a copy here. It is a lesson in how important the simple act of putting pen to paper can be.

Recently, Katy kindly took the time to discuss her book, and her beautiful answers are below:

1. Congratulations on your book Demands of the Dead: Executions, Storytelling, and Activism in the United States! That is so exciting, and I cannot wait to read it. What led you to get involved with this project?

Thanks so much for the chance to talk about this book.

Every beginning I can think of leads to another. Here’s one. In the mid-1990s I was introduced to two men on death row in Illinois, William X and Renaldo Hudson. In many ways, the collection grew out of my friendships with them. I met them through my dad who, after reading Dead Man Walking—and this will tell you something about my dad—called Sister Helen Prejean to tell her how much he liked her book. She encouraged him to visit someone on death row, and he did. At the time he was working at the Jane Addams Hull House in Chicago, and he ended up creating a mentoring program between some of the men he met on death row and the young people at Hull House. My dad retired a year or so later so he could work full-time on a death penalty moratorium in Illinois. I remember thinking it would never happen. Illinois issued a moratorium in 2000 and that was followed by abolition in 2011. So, a book and my father led me to visit death row.

But another beginning might be my best friend playing the song “Two Good Arms” for me when we were in college. Or Upton Sinclair’s admonishment in Boston: “So many hundreds of professors, of every kind of subject on earth, and they couldn’t teach anything worth while!” Or maybe it was a look on my mom’s face whenever one person harmed another.
I know two things came together in 2008: a question and a sabbatical. My question was, What is the American literary record of resistance to state killing? How have writers contributed to, or created, efforts to end executions? During my sabbatical, I was a research fellow at the University of Utah Tanner Center for the Humanities, and I had time to start to answer my question. I started by asking a bunch of people to send me their writings.

2.
Why do you feel it is important to write creatively about the death penalty rather than just critically?

Oh, this is so important. Debates about the death penalty are often abstract, driven by statistics or a vague, sometimes vicious, sense of justice. The human suffering on all sides is lost. Many years ago, I met the daughter of a man who had been executed, and talking with her was a shock: it woke me up to the impact of the death penalty on families. It is very hard to believe that mothers watch their sons be killed a few feet away, that a daughter knows her father is going to be killed next Tuesday. It is also impossible to understand the grief caused by (nonstate) murders, to even begin to fathom how lives can be so shattered. We do a poor job at preventing violence on streets and in homes. And we do a great job of masking violence carried out by the state.

Creative writing is one way to access these details and complexities. Emotion is never enough. And creative writers are skilled at sketching and analyzing cultural and personal dynamics. Facts aren’t enough either. I love this line from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping: “Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.” We need fuller, more accurate stories about why so many people end up in prison and why some end up in execution chambers. You can’t talk about prisons in the US without talking about race and class and inequality. This subject takes you right into history, and creative writers can be fantastic guides to this territory. Mumia Abu-Jamal credits prison walls in our country to a lack of imagination. I think that’s true.

3. Who did you get to work with while working on this project and what was it like?

Many wonderful people. I want to name all of them!

I’ll start with Kia Corthron, an amazing playwright from Cumberland, Maryland, who now lives in Harlem. In addition to over twenty plays, Kia has written episodes for the TV series The Wire and The Jury. I knew she had written a play about the death penalty, but it had never been published. I managed to contact her with help from the Women in Theatre program. She sent me the manuscript of Life by Asphyxiation, and I loved it. The play is set in the present, with Crazy Horse and Nat Turner on death row next to JoJo, a black man in his 50s. JoJo is visited by Katie, a white girl whom he raped and murdered when she was fifteen. There is nothing easy about this play. The rendering of death row—and of the racist history that surrounds and shapes it—is stark and painful. The characters are entirely moving. Kia is an exceptional artist whose work you must read and, if you can, see.

Another contributor is the poet Jill McDonough, who wrote a stunning book of sonnets called Habeas Corpus. Each sonnet is focused on a particular execution in US history. Jill recently won a Pushcart Prize and has taught creative writing in a Boston prison program for many years. Like Kia, Jill was a joy to work with, and both buoyed my spirits in the long book process.

I was fortunate to work with two writers, Steve Champion and Anthony Ross, who have been on death row in San Quentin for over twenty-five years. Steve and Anthony were close friends with Stanley Tookie Williams who was executed in 2005. In prison, the three of them, all former Crips, dedicated themselves to a disciplined working relationship, supporting one another and collaborating on writing projects. Steve’s essay recounts his spiritual and intellectual transformation and the unexpected moment when he fell in love with the writing process. Anthony wrote a haunting meditation that imagines his own death on a gurney. I just received a letter from Steve, and he and Anthony have co-written a philosophical and practical manual for young people called Architect. I’m going to try and help get that out into the world.
Working with imprisoned people presents logistical challenges. There is no access to email, phone calls are expensive, mail can be slow or lost entirely. Sometimes there would be a great exchange over email between contributors, and I hated that they were out of the loop. But those of us on the outside just have to work harder to make communication possible.

The collection also has poems by Delbert Tibbs, a writer and activist whom I admire more than I can say. In the 1970s, Delbert was wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to die. A few years later, he was exonerated. Delbert has dedicated his life to speaking out against the death penalty and mass imprisonment. He visited WVU in 2004 and spoke to my classes about the global need to work for peace, for health, for justice. Delbert was also featured in the play The Exonerated and Studs Terkel’s collection Will the Circle Be Unbroken. He’s a remarkable human being.

I wasn’t kidding about mentioning everyone!

Sherman Alexie contributed a poem, “Capital Punishment,” told from the perspective of a prison cook preparing a last meal for a Native American man. Elizabeth Stein co-produces a radio program in Houston each night an execution occurs in Texas, and she wrote a marvelous ten-minute play. Rick Stetter, a former Texas correctional officer, wrote a personal essay that takes us into the place of the most executions in the country (and hemisphere). He also describes solitary confinement. It was important to me that this collection not isolate state killing from other torturous conditions in US prisons and jails, and Rick’s thoughtful essay helps to make connections.

And there is Willie Francis. In Louisiana 1946, an African American sixteen year old was convicted of killing a white pharmacist by an all-white jury in a quick and absurd trial. Willie Francis had no history of violence, there was no physical evidence, and his attorneys did not bother to offer any kind of defense. They actually made a motion—without his permission—to change his plea from not guilty to guilty. First-degree murder carried a mandatory death penalty, so the judge would not accept the plea. On the day of his scheduled execution, Willie Francis walked to the electric chair, was strapped down and subjected to two separate charges of electricity. He did not die. The men who set up the chair, it turned out, were drunk. So, Willie Francis walked out of the execution chamber and back to his cell.

A year later, a divided Supreme Court ruled that another execution would not violate the Eighth Amendment, and Willie Francis, who should have been in high school, was killed. Between the botched and final execution, Willie Francis wrote a pamphlet called “My Trip to the Chair” to help to raise money for his defense. It is probably the most important undefined116122.undefined116123.undefined116124.undefined116731.undefined213152.document in the book.

I’ve neglected my own crowd—the literary scholars! Bruce Franklin is the leading scholar of American prison literature, and he helped me from start to finish with this collection. My first conversation with him at a conference would be another beginning to this book. Bruce contributed a brilliant essay on Melville’s Billy Budd. I’m also indebted to Thomas Dutoit, a professor at the University of Lille in France, who co-edited Jacques Derrida’s final lectures on capital punishment. He took the time to write a fabulous essay on Derrida, Kant, and Kafka. Jennifer Lierberman, an expert in science and technology, returns to an obscure novel by Gertrude Atherton and to the use of electricity in state killing. David Kieran examines lynching imagery in post-1960s African American poetry. Matthew Stratton delves into Da Lench Mob’s 1992 hip hop album Guerrillas in the Mist. Tom Kerr discusses his friendship with Steve Champion. John Barton provides a survey of nineteenth-century anti-gallows writing. I comment on the documentary play The Exonerated. A graduate of our doctoral program Jason Stupp looks at Willie Francis’s narrative and Ernest Gaines’s novel A Lesson Before Dying. It was Jason who put “A Trip to the Chair” into my hands. And Gaines’s novel is surely one of the great twentieth-century American literary responses to the immorality of executions.

I could not have asked for more. Every contributor was professional, considerate, and committed to the project.

4. What are some moments in the works you edited that you found particularly inspiring?

I included a poem from Delbert that has nothing to do with the death penalty. It is a lyrical, lovely celebration of art, beauty, the impulse to create. I read it often.

The murder victim Katie in Life by Asphyxiation offers a key to the whole collection: “Murder . . . once you been through it, you never wish it on anyone.”

As an aside, and this is not in the book, Kia said in an interview that she “would rather error on the side of being a little didactic than error on the side of not really having said anything, not challenging the status quo.” I appreciate that artistic clarity.

Willie Francis explains at the start of the pamphlet that he doesn’t want to talk about the execution, but “if it could help people understand each other, then I want to tell everything.” I had to stop reading when I came to this line from him: “it is one of the hardest things to make yourself learn how to die right.”
I’ve received letters from people in prison who were inspired by Steve’s work, by his insistence on having a purpose, finding a fulcrum. There are moments of quiet revelation in Rick Stetter’s essay, and I love the ending of Elizabeth Stein’s play—but you’ll have to read the whole thing to get it!

Before each section in the book I have an epigraph from people who have had a family member murdered and who are opposed to executions. Azim Khamisa’s son, at twenty, was fatally shot by a fourteen-year-old named Tony Hicks. Azim Khamisa writes, “I decided to become the enemy not of my son’s killer but of the forces that put a young boy on a dark street holding a handgun. Tony now writes letters from prison that we use in our programs and that we see having a positive effect on other kids. Think of how many kids he may save. That’s going to bring me a lot more healing than if he had gotten the death penalty.” Click here for an interview with Azim Khamisa

I also have an epigraph from Kimberly Davis, Troy Davis’s sister. It is very much about remembering the dead and working for justice.
I could go on, but I should stop.

5. Congratulations on becoming a non-profit! How will this be able to expand your outreach?

We are now eligible for more and larger grants. APBP attracts great volunteers, amazing students, lots and lots of letters from men and women in prison. The only thing we never have enough of is money. Some grants would allow us to expand into specific areas—into women’s prisons or GED and educational programs in prisons. To become a nonprofit, we also had to restructure our organization and bring more people onboard. This has been a great thing in itself.

6. What is a moment (one of a million I am sure) during your work at APBP when you felt you had really made a change.

Certain letters stay with me. One man wrote to tell us he had won a writing contest and that he had been inspired to write after receiving a book we had sent him by Sherman Alexie. Another man who had been receiving books for years told us that his health had deteriorated and he was now in a wheelchair. He wanted us to know how much books help him every day. We receive letters from mothers whose children are in prison. People describe living in isolation, locked in cells 23 hours a day. Sometimes a note arrives on a tiny piece of brown paper or napkin. Several people have written that they stayed up all night reading a certain book. One person said he had been trying to find Paradise Lost for three years and was so grateful to have received it. Another joked that he wanted a Scrabble dictionary because he thought it would cut down on the fighting inside. But honestly, every letter tells a story and assures me that the work of APBP is essential.

I’m also inspired by the people who volunteer at APBP and the staff at the Aull Center. We have created a place for conversations, ideas, good company. That’s also part of making change.

8. What led you to start the organization?

ABPB grew out of a graduate class on American prison literature that I taught in 2004. I mentioned to students that there were no projects devoted to sending books into prisons in West Virginia. We soon discovered that there were very few in this region of the country. So, we decided to try to make something happen. We spent two years collecting books, raising money, and finding donated office space. People who love to read are drawn to the project; they get the importance of a book. Mark Brazaitis, the creative writing program director, has been part of APBP from its inception and has helped in every way, especially grantwriting. This summer we sent out our 10,000th book, so that’s pretty phenomenal.

If anyone is interested in joining APBP, we always need help! Just email me.

Follow the link to find out more information about Katy’s book, Demands of the Dead: Executions, Storytelling, and Activism

Finally, please join us to hear Katy read on Wednesday, October 3, at 7:30 pm in Colson 130.

by Rebecca Doverspike

photo credit to Doug Van Gundy

The first piece of Jessie van Eerden’s that I read was an essay titled “Soul Catchers,” and I was so deeply taken by the ways she was able to describe people’s interiority and complexity. I’ve since read several other essays of Jessie’s and I recommend looking through her list of published works on her website (jessievaneerden.com), and reading as much as you can, too. Her work speaks to me on a number of levels; I love the quality of thinking-through-something I feel in her writing. Instead of re-instilling particular ways of thinking, her work seems to question that and in doing so describes people’s lives with the kinds of details that follow from close observation and empathy. Whether she’s writing about a particular people and place, holiness, relationships, or language, her work goes beneath and beyond assumptions to get at the real. There’s a unique voice that threads throughout her work, one that opens readers to more closely perceive and experience their world.

Jessie is an undergraduate alum of WVU, and she received her MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa. She currently directs the low-residency MFA program at Wesleyan College. Her debut novel, Glorybound, has been recently published and I am eager to delve into it. I was very pleased to have the chance to e-mail Jessie some questions about her work, and grateful for her wonderfully thorough response, to share with you all.

1) From the pieces of yours I’ve been lucky enough to read so far, your writing draws partially from growing up in rural West Virginia. What other places have you been between your time as an undergraduate at WVU and returning to teach at Wesleyan? How has distance from West Virginia affected your perception of the place and/or your writing?

Great question. After graduating from WVU, I served with Mennonite Voluntary Service for two years in DC. I taught adult literacy there for The Academy of Hope, a small nonprofit housed on the second floor of an historic Baptist Church. I fell in love with literacy work and kept at it for another year in Philadelphia while I applied to grad programs. Went off to the University of Iowa in Iowa City to study nonfiction for three years, completing my last year from Elkhart, Indiana. The year after graduation landed me in Seattle; I received the Milton Fellowship for work on my first novel and feverishly wrote nonstop then popped my head up at Seattle Pacific University once a week to teach a creative writing class. After Seattle, I taught for four years at an intense wonderful program in southern Oregon called the Oregon Extension. Then, after another few months of transition in Philadelphia, I ended up back in WV, happily accepting this position at WV Wesleyan to carry on the late Irene McKinney’s vision for a vibrant low-residency MFA program.

It’s true that much of my writing is rooted in my first 22 years of life lived in WV, especially the rural WV of my youth. I’ve lived away from here for the last eleven years, coming back as often as I could to visit family. One of the things that has struck me since I’ve been back is how fun it is to drive on WV roads. I learned on these roads—how to bank the curves, how to scan for whitetails and find the shortcuts—so driving these roads again has been like reconnecting with my younger self, and that’s been intriguing. Because this is a major transition time in my life, connection with my younger self has been rich and perhaps even generative for my writing, at least the kind of inwardly-focused, meditative writing I’m doing right now.

2) Do you think of your work as place-based, or does that feel reductive? After reading, I feel more loving and curious toward people—I feel you write about people’s complexity and dimensions so well. Do you find it challenging to describe people? How does that process differ for you between creative nonfiction and fiction?

Well, this is an incredibly complex bundle of questions! I’ll do my best here: First of all, yes, I would say my writing is place-based, though that’s a highly nuanced topic we discuss here in Wesleyan’s MFA Program a good bit since a study of “place and identity” (particularly the place of Appalachia and the identity of the Appalachian) is something our program is committed to. My work is grounded in the particularities of the terrain I know, and I think my terrain might be, for better or worse, a bit stranger than the terrain of others’ – that is, most of my friends in grad school didn’t have a milk cow growing up, didn’t churn butter and walk to the neighbors’ to sell it, didn’t experience a laying-on-of-hands in prayer. But the quirkiness or non-quirkiness of your growing-up doesn’t matter all that much when what you’re trying to map out, or just explore, is the terrain of being human which of course is the terrain we all have in common. In some piece of writing by Eudora Welty, she said the term “regional writing” is a label for those outside the work and probably the region. For “regional writers” it’s just writing.

I guess I do think growing up in Appalachia has affected the way I think about the ethics of depicting or representing the people who populate my surface terrain. Appalachians can be really dismissed by the mainstream culture – like, geesh, so many distinct people groups can be dismissed – so I suppose it became a real project of mine to resist any reductionism, any dismissal of folks I write about, any collapsing of an individual into a set of assumptions, especially assumptions about the interior life. (And of course it happens the other way around too, in this sometimes-xenophobic terrain, strangers and outsiders can get pegged, and I grew up watching that happen a lot too.) Just because this is my approach and orientation toward depicting characters doesn’t mean I always succeed; in fact, writing does reduce people: it reduces them to these words, this narrative – you can never draw all the water from the deep well of a person. I have to accept that inevitable failure of language and can only hope that my work can create a space for and gesture toward what is ineffable about a person, what is beyond anyone’s reach. I think I’m trying to do something for the interiority of characters like what Li-Young Lee does for silence in his poetry, as he says in that wonderful book of interviews, Breaking the Alabaster Jar: “I’m trying to use words to inflect the silence so that the silence becomes more palpable.”

But, to be more direct: yes, I find it difficult to write about people! I find it the easiest, most natural thing in the world, and I find it next to impossible, both in fiction and nonfiction. That you feel curious and loving about people after reading my work is the highest compliment I think I’ve ever received.

3) Along with the previous two questions, what kind of audience do you think of while you’re writing? How does that differ between genres? Who do you want to read your work and why?

Honestly, I want anyone and everyone to read my work, in any and all genres I write in. I’m shameless. I want to connect with people. My best attempt at answering the question of whom I write for is in an essay called “So Great a Cloud” – it discusses the question of the audience that lives in my head – you can find it in Issue 21 (Autumn 2011) of a wonderful little magazine called Ruminate. There is a core of people (my “cloud of witnesses” I call them in this essay) whom I draw close when I’m writing because they keep me closer to writing what’s true. But I love it when anyone picks up my stuff.

4) Faith seems rooted and infused in a lot of your work—could you speak to the relationship between religion and writing for you?

This question is of course related to the previous one. If you’ve got a soft spot for Jesus and like to wrangle over the Scriptures, sometimes you get lumped as a Christian writer, a writer of faith. I don’t mind it so much since I think labeling is just what we do as human beings, especially as human beings who have to market stuff and who like to target marketing campaigns. And I also know full well that my work often resonates most deeply with folks who sat in oak pews every Sunday growing up (especially those who feel a few bruises on their bums because of that pew-sitting); I remember hearing a story read by my now-friend Paul Willis in which he had a scene including The Four Spiritual Laws booklet, which is a common tool for evangelism in the Evangelical world, and I thought: That can be in literature?! And it was important for me to see that it could be in literature because anything can be in literature – each of our imaginations get forged in a fire and mine happens to have been forged in a fire of faith and doctrine and altar-calls. (And, to keep going with this metaphor, I would say that the fire sometimes illuminates and sometimes burns, so there is critique in what I write about religion as well, not just embrace.) But I’ve always intentionally sought out readers with no churchiness in their pasts and no King James Bible informing their syntax because I don’t want to write in code. There are good models for me out there, spectacular ones: Marilynne Robinson’s theologically-oriented work in particular has shimmered for me.

But I appreciate that you see, I think, what I’m trying to do which is to include and also to ultimately go beyond my tribe. Such going-beyond feels to me like some of the most hopeful work we can do as humans.

5) I didn’t think much about the differences between genres before I applied to an MFA program… I thought good writing was good writing and all of it offered irreplaceable insight into reality. How do you decide which genre to write in? How does your new novel, Glorybound, compare or contrast with your nonfiction essays and/or poetry?

I agree: good writing is good writing, and all of it is the work of the imagination, no matter its genre label. I’m a pretty firm believer in listening to your material: it will tell you what form it needs to be written in. Maybe that’s a little smushy and artsy, but that’s been true of my experience. I was writing portrait essays in grad school, and I loved the form, and then all of a sudden I was confronted by a young woman who took a vow of silence, someone who was not part of the factual cast of characters in my life, and I wanted badly to know why she would do such a strange thing, and she had to tell me through the medium of a novel. Mainly, I’m interested in telling the truth. Fiction allows me to say things that nonfiction doesn’t; poetry allows me to peer more deeply inside the tiniest of language-spaces and sit there until a truth comes through. As my friend and mentor David Duncan says, “we all dip into the same inkwell of imagination.”

6) I would say you write with a kind of love, and a kind that I’m able to (gratefully) feel more fully after reading. What would you say drives your work?

Well, this humbles me and pleases me to know end, that you sense love here. In a seminar at Iowa we had to write our mission statements as writers, and I just went looking for mine. I was all nervous to submit mine because I thought the professor would think it was fluffy because the last line of mine read: “I hope that if someone reads what I write, that person will be somehow more assured of love. At the end of the day, that’s the point of it for me.” It’s hard to get away from love as a driving force when I get down to the bedrock. It’s the most interesting thing intellectually, spiritually, socially; it’s the anchor. Of course that doesn’t mean I write all kittens and rainbows and shmarminess – far from it. Love is the lens of spiritual vision, and as Flannery O’Connor says, in so many words, the spiritual vision can be the darkest vision, can peer into the most violent, the most desperate of places. And to draw from another fierce young female genius, Simone Weil: love is the fiercest and most demanding kind of attention.

7) How is teaching at the low-residency program going?

Oh, so wonderfully! We have an amazing cohort of committed students and we’ll graduate our first class this year. The Wesleyan faculty is energetic, gifted, diverse, and so have been all the visiting readers and instructors who have graced us: Sara Pritchard, Karen McElmurray, Dan Albergotti, Ann Pancake, Denise Giardina, Maggie Anderson, Gerry LaFemina, to name a few. I love the apprenticeship-model of our low-residency program – I think it prepares students well for the writing life, its essential mixture of solitude and community.

8) How long have you been working on Glorybound? Could you speak a bit to the process?

I wrote a short story that was slow as molasses one summer during grad school, and it was clear that it would be better as the beginning of a novel since it flopped as a story. David Duncan sent me a postcard that said something like: “Many of us find writing a novel to be an expansive experience. You should try it.” So I did. I pitched it to the Milton Fellowship folks at Image in Seattle and they gave me a blessed year of pay to draft the book, which happened pretty quickly, in about 10 months. I had to do a bit of research, especially on charismatic religion and prisons in WV. Then I let the manuscript draft sit while I started teaching at Oregon and spent another 5 months or so the next year revising it. I shopped for agents and publishers for a few years, and had many, many rejections (the most frustrating being: “I love your writing, but our last Appalachian book didn’t sell.”). The fiction bug had really bit me by then, so while I shopped the book around, I kept my writing self alive (the self you have to keep protected from the market if at all possible) by saying, Well, hell, I’m just going to write another one! So I did, and I learned even more from writing that manuscript. It still needs some attention, but I’m hoping to send it out there soon.

9) What projects are in the works lately? What have you been reading?

The novel I mentioned above; also an essay collection and a narrative poetry sequence. Most immediately I’ve been working on an essay exploring grief through the story of a little-known biblical character named Rizpah, a concubine of an Old Testament king. Seven of her sons were executed because of the debt incurred by the king, and Rizpah protected her sons’ corpses for seven months. Sat there for 7 months with dead bodies. The story intrigues me and it’s porous enough to enter into, roll around in, weep inside of. We’ll see what comes of it.

I’ve been reading some studies of that biblical character – also a book on midrash by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg The Murmurring Deep, some beautiful fiction by Karen McElmurray, The Motel of the Stars, Richard Schmitt’s wonderful novel The Aerialist.

10) You have a long list of publications; are there pieces you still feel more strongly connected to than others?

I feel pretty connected to the novel Glorybound since I devoted so much of my time and self to it and since it speaks to some of the issues that really make up the “firmament” of my growing-up years. I still feel very connected to the essay you mentioned “Soul Catchers” (also entitled “Woman with Spirits” in Sarabande’s forthcoming anthology of Appalachian writing Red Holler) – that piece feels important to me regarding all the things I’ve mentioned here about my approach to writing about people, seeing people.

I wrote an essay about my mother called “A Good Day” (The Literary Review, Fall 2010) that still feels very important to me, and, I think, to my mom who has always been an amazing supporter of my work.

11) What do you enjoy doing when you’re not writing?

Ha! So little time? I like to run by the river to clear my mind, play Frisbee, cook (I’m such a mediocre cook, I always congratulate myself on anything I put in the skillet – it’s a real confidence boost!). I’ve tried to learn banjo and I’m hoping to get back to that once I get settled in my new life here in Buckhannon. I love live music and slow evenings spent in the company of one or two people. I try my hand at linoleum block prints now and then and make little books.

12) Any advice for current writing students or writers at large?

You know, I’m usually short on advice. Maybe I’ll share someone else’s. When poet Irene McKinney launched this program last July, she had all of the faculty give a piece of writing advice (I was visiting faculty then). She battled cancer for years, and it took her life this past February, and she was doing some writing about her illness at that time – well, writing about all sorts of core, bedrock things, not just illness. She told us to not be hampered by shame; in fact, I believe she said: “Shame is the new pride.” Write through and in and for and out of your shame; may it be generative and not stifling or silencing. Don’t let anything get in the way – that’s the imperative I felt around Irene, during the little time that I knew her. I think it’s good advice.

If you’re interested in talking with Jessie about her writing or about the low-residency MFA program she directs at WV Wesleyan College, she welcomes comments & inquiries. Follow the link to email Jessie or mail her directly at:
59 College Avenue, Box 46
Buckhannon WV, 26201
304.473.8329
You can also learn more about her writing and the program here.

Learn more about Jessie on her website.

by Jessi Kalvitis

“Who the f**k keeps birds? It’s like having loud fish!” So said Wells Tower during a reading in the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning last fall. I laughed a little too loud, but then so did everybody else. I met and spoke with him after, gushing like a hopeless fan-girl and making an ass of myself. Then, again, so did everybody else. That night, Tower read a dazzling excerpt from his novel-in-progress. He also tormented his audience with the suggestion that he may go back and re-do the entire thing, shifting it from third person to first. If he does that, I may cry. I don’t want to wait.

In the interim, I am left to mournfully wear out the pages of the relatively few short stories he put out into the world before getting sucked into the novel-writing void. Though “Raw Water,” anthologized in the Year’s Best last year, blew my mind, the classic (and my personal favorite) collection is still Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

I read the title story, a gory but melancholy romp through the imagined lives of Vikings, quite a few years ago, for Gail Adams’s creative writing workshop. I didn’t particularly like it.

How, then, did I end up a gushing fan-girl? Well, I didn’t like it, but it sure did stick in my brain. Long after I’d forgotten many of the other readings for class, or remembered them only in fragments, the story would swim up from the deep and wallop my cerebellum all over again. And again. And again. Finally, I walked past a library end-cap display in Berryville, Virginia one day and there it was, the collection with that story’s title. Figuring that the same logic works with stories as with songs (i.e., if it’s stuck in your head, go through it one more time and it’ll go away), I checked it out.

Turns out that a) the song trick doesn’t work with stories, and b) it’s okay that I didn’t particularly like the Viking story; his others are so much better. Tower’s characters are complicated and flawed, but not so much so that you want to hit them. His worlds matter-of-factly tiptoe along the line between the darkest bits of reality and the oddest areas of fantasy. There’s humor. There’s tragedy. There’s hope for the human race. And all, every line of it (even, yes, the Viking story), so very beautifully written.

Since I first picked it off the library shelf (and, of course, later bought my own copy), I have badgered my English 101 students, my capstone class mentee, my future father-in-law, and anyone else within shouting range into reading this collection. And now all of you. You’re welcome!

It’s been a good summer for us Mountaineers. Join us in celebrating our current student and alumni achievements. Please share your current achievements by emailing Rebecca Thomas.

Alumni News:

Read Justin Anderson’s (MFA in Fiction) essay, “To the National Endowment for the Arts,” in Brevity.

Amanda Leigh Cobb, MFA in Poetry, has wonderful poems over at Verse.

Justin Crawford, MFA in Fiction, had his short story “Bone County Snake Oil” appear in the June issue of Prick of the Spindle. Read the story here. Justin’s story short story “Converge” appeared in the June 2012 issue of Inwood Indiana. His story is on page 273 in the digital file.

Heather Frese, MFA in Fiction, had her short story “An Open Letter Written to Patricia Ballance,” in Barely South Review. Heather also got married last week. Congratulations, Heather!

Matt London, MFA in Fiction, will have his poems, “Future Birthdays” and “Monday Afternoon, Frame-by-Frame,” appear in an upcoming issue of New Delta Review. Plus, Matt just got married, too. Congratulations, Matt!

Kelly Moffett, MFA in Poetry, has two new collections coming out in the spring: When the God of Water enters your Basement, Bow (Salmon Poetry, Spring 2013), and the chapbook Ghost Act (Spring 2013). Read more about Kelly in our alumni spotlight.

Rebecca Schwab, MFA in Fiction, has a new short story, “Thick on the Wet Cement,” out in The Future Fire. Read the story here.

MFA in Nonfiction Kelly Sundberg was a finalist in The Southeast Review’s 2012 Narrative Nonfiction Contest, judged by the wonderful Jennine Capo Crucet. Kelly’s essay, “Snow. Angel. Ghost.” will appear February 2013 in The Southeast Review’s Winter/Spring issue, Volume 31.1. Kelly’s poem, “Approaching Monday,” appeared in Literary Mama Look for Kelly’s essay “Indian Creek” in an upcoming issue of Mid-American Review.

Jessie Van Eerden’s (BA in English) debut novel, Glorybound was released this spring through WordFarm. Read more about Jessie and her novel in our undergraduate alumni spotlight.

Current Students:

Jessi Lewis, MFA candidate in Fiction, will have her short story, “Walnuts,” appear in an upcoming issue of Ghost Town, a literary magazine out of Cal State San Bernardino.

MFA candidate in poetry Christina Seymour has a poem, “Home is Dead When He Fights,” on display in Speak Peace, a travelling exhibit that pairs poetry with art from Vietnamese children. Read Christina’s poem and see the accompanying painting here. Listen to NPR’s segment about the exhibit, follow the link. Her poem “It’s Just a Dark Hill” will be published in the upcoming issue of Third Wednesday.

Andi Stout, MFA candidate in Poetry, read at the the Connotation Press reading at the Chicago AWP. She also took second place in the Hungry Poet Contest in April. Scissor and Spackle will publish one of her poems later this month. Andi was nominated by the department for the Best New Poets 2012 anthology. Finally, Nicelle Davis picked one of Andi’s one-line poems for Nicelle’s poetry in motion project. Andi’s poem has been made into a car magnet and is traveling around Southern California.

by Rebecca Thomas

In mid-July we were praying for rain. The sudden downpours and flashing lightning that are synonymous with a West Virginia summer had disappeared. Instead, my lawn had become crispy. My plants weren’t happy.

But then, on the eve of the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop, Christina Seymour, a fellow MFA student, and I were heading over to Stalnaker Hall to help set up when we looked at the sky and saw trouble. “That doesn’t look good,” we said, and then, the heavens broke loose. For four days straight we got rain. Plants grew again. We rejoiced when we weren’t cursing from getting caught in the rain. What was to cause the end of our drought? My theory is that the sky saw the lineup for this year’s West Virginia Writers’ Workshop and was trying to listen to the readings. And who could blame the sky? For four days amazing authors graced our campus.

Every July, writers flock to Morgantown for the writers’ conference, and this seemed to be an exceptionally great year. Celebrating its sixteenth birthday, we participants got to participants to attend craft talks, workshop, read work, and hear professional writers read. From Thursday to Sunday, we immersed ourselves in all things writing.

Our very own poet, Mary Ann Samyn (who just won a big award, by the way. Read the post all about it) kicked off the craft lectures and the public readings. She had us travel through some lovely poems and helped guide us along the way. Let me tell you, Mary Ann as a guide for a Brenda Hillman poem is pretty splendid. And the other craft talks did not disappoint either. Jim Harms examined the question of lying in poetry (you can do it, he says). Stephen Amidon discussed the same question about nonfiction (stay true to the heart of the your topic, he says). Faith Shearin asked what makes for a great poem and led us through a few examples. And, Mike Czyzniejewski challenged us to create vivid nine sentence stories (it’s tough, but the results were great).

But it wasn’t all craft talks and workshops. Every afternoon and evening we were able to snack on refreshments while hearing our lovely lecturers read. And oh the readings we had.
When one of our visiting authors, Faith Shearin, read Thursday night, joy burst through her voice as she read about messy kitchens and the good old days when you could get hurt playing outside. She is the author of three full-length poetry collections, including the May Swenson-award-winning The Owl Question. As if that wasn’t enough, Garrison Keillor has read her poems several times on National Public Radio. Her poetry is poignant yet funny, and, just like her, incredibly warm.

Stephen Amidon was another visiting writer. He is the author of nine books of fiction and non-fiction. His latest is The Sublime Engine: A Biography of the Human Heart, which he co-authored with his brother Tom, a physician. Heart is an appropriate word for Stephen. He was generous with his time and comments. The passion that he brought to writing (turn up the volume on your writing, he kept reminding us) he brought to workshop as well.

Visiting authors seemed to be the theme of this year’s workshop. We had a whopping five of them. Friday afternoon’s reading was all things fiction with Renée Nicholson and Mike Czyzniejewski’s work. Renee, the assistant for the workshop, has appeared in Mid-American Review and Chelsea. Mike Czyzniejewski is the author of two books of fiction, including Chicago Stories. The plethora of readings continued with John Hoppenthaler, the author of two full-length poetry collections, reading Saturday afternoon.

The list goes on, though, as our amazing faculty also visited us and read. Kevin Oderman, Mark Brazaitis, Jim Harms, and Mary Ann all read their work and reminded me of how lucky I am to be a part of this program.

That reminder resonated with Christina Seymour as well. “At the writers workshops (mine led by the bright and welcoming Faith Shearin), I felt an air of excitement that renewed my appreciation for having a constant, dependable outlet for my writing in the MFA program,” Christina said. “The workshop participants offered lots of positive support (delivered with pure, eager appreciation for the musicality of language) and honest critique (delivered with the delicacy and sympathy of friends who know how much writings mean to the writer).”

The workshop is a reminder of how special it is to have communities of writers, and this weekend fostered such a community. The participants and workshop leaders were open, honest, and generous with their time. “It was wonderful to feel visited by the eclectic mix of readers and workshop teachers,” Christina said. “I felt a great sense of what life might be like post-MFA, and thanks to those writers, it looks comfortable, not-so-scary, and sometimes even rosy.”

As I walked away from my workshop, I realized just how special that sense of writing community is. I was able to spend four days immersed in all things writing. Is it any wonder the rain wanted to join us?

Join us next year. Follow the link to find out more about the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop.

by Connie Pan

There are a few things that pop into mind when I think of Rebecca Childers, MFA candidate in creative nonfiction and the Vice President of EGO: cats, laughter, and comfort. For anyone who has even heard a peep from Rebecca, the first item in that list is a no-brainer. Everyone knows Rebecca Childers loves cats. I’ve had the pleasure of having two fiction workshops and one creative nonfiction workshop with her, and every one of Rebecca’s copies of my stories and essays returns peppered with underlines, exclamation points, and cats—always cats. A fun-fact and something only a few people know: Rebecca didn’t like cats until she was seventeen. The second item in the list, laughter, is also obvious. Just a couple weeks ago, I was at McClafferty’s with friends from the English Department, and there was a sudden eruption of Childers-y laughter. The kind of laughter that makes you wonder if you’ve ever truly laughed. The kind of laugher that makes you wonder if you’ve ever had genuine fun. The kind of laughter that makes you think sit-ups are pretty ineffective, and people should start laughing like the Childers for summer abs of steel. But back to McClafferty’s . . . When we heard that familiar laughter, we didn’t have to crane our necks to know a Childers was there, but we did and said hello. It was delightful. The last—but not least—item of the list is probably the strongest feeling I have when I think of Rebecca. Comfort. She is quiet and loves quiet and alway sits with her legs curled under her, folded gracefully and magically like Origami. And I think of comfort because of her flowy skirts and flip flops and shoes without socks (just one of Rebecca’s many favorite things).

I say one of her many favorite things because Rebecca loves a lot. She loves (and this is just the abridged version) Doritos, Ranch Romances, An Affair to Remember, “strumming on the porch music,” “plants that get bigger than you thought they would,” the Olympics, Ryan Gosling’s face, and “old men in their mowing hats.” Another one of her loves include her family. A perfect day for Rebecca is filled with reading, reading breaks to laugh with her sister / roomie, and writing. Rebecca grew up with two older sisters (which includes one of our own tenants of Colson Hall, Sara Beth) and a younger brother “a few hills past Huntington” where it takes “thirty minutes to get anywhere.” Along with cats and foxy men, Rebecca’s family is one of her daily motivators, “I’ve realized that when I lose my connection with [my family] I am a bit of a hapless wanderer, and not the cool kind. I tell much better jokes when I am around them.”

When Rebecca was younger, her hobbies were rooted in true love (“the reading and plotting of romance”) and art, specifically photography and sculpture. Rebecca didn’t find writing until college and applied to graduate school because she “only felt happy when [she] was writing.” Rebecca, we are oh-so-very-ecstatic to have such an intelligent and thoughtful writer (and cat-artist) here with us. I got the chance to ask ask Rebecca Childers about herself and her experience thus-far at West Virginia University.

What led you to writing? When did you begin writing creatively?

At five, my big sisters and I made books from notebook paper and staples. I wrote the King series. Each book occurred on a different holiday and King would always try to charm his wife, Queen, into telling him his present. Once, he decided to wheedle it out of her by pretending to be her friend. I took a little break after that until my freshman year of college, where I took a class because, again, my big sister told me to.

Can you describe your writing process?

While I’m petting my cat, or cleaning the toilet I think of something—an old story or an odd connection and then I run and tell whatever person or cat is around. Then I let it incubate until I’m ready. Then I let it pour out, skipping sleep and food, pausing only to hug my cat. Then I wait a little while. Then I rewrite the whole thing. Sometimes, I keep the title.

Who and what inspires your work?

One day my Aunt Anita asked my Aunt Delane to go buy her some groceries. Some Tang, some chicken livers, and since she’d been good that day, some beer and cigarettes. My Aunt Delane went to the store and came back with the chicken livers and the Tang. “Anita,” she said, ” I prayed in the aisle, and the Lord told me it wouldn’t be right for me to buy you the beer and cigarettes.” Anita said she understood, if the Lord told her, she couldn’t very well do it. Soon her cousin Emerson came in with her brother, Ralph Waldo, and she told them the story. About an hour later Emerson came into the kitchen and handed her beer and cigarettes. “Funny thing, Anita,” he said, “I went to the store, stood in the aisle and prayed, and the Lord didn’t mind me buying these for you at all.” Thirty years later she told me this story while we ate fried chicken at a family reunion. The need to keep telling these stories is what inspires me.

How has your writing changed during your first two years in the MFA Program? You entered the program as a MFA candidate in fiction and switched to nonfiction. Who or what influenced this transition?

When I first started writing at WVU, I felt a block in my brain in regards to fiction. I couldn’t make anything up. So then I took nonfiction with Kevin Oderman, and the block went away. And with this never ending source of material, I began to be wooed by the way themes and structure build a nonfiction essay. Also, that semester, Kevin had us read Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas. In it, her sister stops her every few chapters and goes, “Wait you need to explain that more!” Suddenly I realized I’d been prepping for nonfiction for a very long time.

How has working in two different genres impacted your writing?
Lately, in nonfiction, I’ve been obsessed with all of the different Rebecca characters I have been/ am. Last year in workshop, Kevin mentioned that the Rebecca on the page was a “spineless twit” but the Rebecca you see around Colson was not (shoo). But for two years of my life, I totally was. Also, there have been times when I was a heartless doofus, and a rebellious scamp. I think I’ve probably been a couple of good things, too, but those aren’t as interesting to write about. I think working with fiction helps me separate myself into sections more in order to tell the proper story, what parts of myself made that story possible.

Congratulations on being nominated the MFA Representative for EGO! In addition to this, what are your plans for your last year at West Virginia University?

Well, thank you. I plan to make EGO a club where we practice for flash mobs, but don’t tell anyone that yet. I’m thinking Sound of Music themed. As for the rest of this year, I would like to iron out my writing process a bit, making it less frantic and more regular so maybe my first draft will be readable. Kiss my cat’s pink nose a lot. Read a lot of books about true love. Eat too many pepperoni rolls. Teach my students how to spell definitely (this might be a bit ambitious). And finish my thesis.

What are your plans following graduate school?

My main life goal is to write Harlequin Romance Novels. I want to make old ladies giggle on their daybeds while they wait for Wheel of Fortune to come on. To do this, I will probably need to have a ranch and a cowboy husband for inspiration. So, comforting rodeo riders with wounded hearts and tragic stories in Montana would probably a good place to find me after I graduate.

Any advice for new MFAs or words of wisdom for fellow writers?

If you don’t have a cat, get one. I got Little Joe my first week in Morgantown, and I am not sure I would have made it without him. Also, don’t be freaked out if you don’t write everyday when you first come. It’s hard. But you’ll get a rhythm.

by Christina Seymour

Lynch on Lynch is a book of interviews with a man who dislikes talking about his art—intrigued? As he says, “I don’t like talking about things too much because, unless you’re a poet, when you talk about it, a big thing becomes smaller.” This book is a breeze because Lynch says things just like that, simply and with innocence. And with refreshingly skewed imagination:

“You know what dogs are like in a room? They really look like they’re having fun. They’re bouncing a ball around and chewing on stuff and they’re kind of panting and happy. Human beings are supposed to be like that. We should be pretty happy. And I don’t know why we’re not.”

“Black has depth. It’s like a little egress; you can go into it, and because it keeps on continuing to be dark, the mind kicks in, and a lot of things that are going on there become manifest. And you start seeing what you’re afraid of. You start seeing what you love, and it becomes like a dream.”

Maybe Lynch is a poet in disguise.