Congratulations to MFA alumni, Sarah Harris. Her short story, “The Kitchen,” won first place in Nano Fiction’s Third Annual Nano Prize. Sarah won $500, and her story will appear in the fall issue. Read about it on Nano’s website.

Sarah will also be presenting at AWP this year. Speaking of AWP, WVU will have a table in the fabled bookfair, so come on over, see Sarah’s presentation, and say hi to WVU as well.

WVU Alumni Spotlight
by Rebecca Doverspike

For this fall’s Alumni Spotlight we chose to focus on two wonderfully talented alumni who were granted fellowships after their time here in WVU’s MFA program, Renee Nicholson and Sarah Beth Childers. When I sat down to talk with Sarah Beth she recalled at first being shocked about receiving the Colgate fellowship because she said in a remarkably competitive field they usually choose people from the University of Iowa or Columbia University. This goes to show that WVU’s MFA community develops its share of finely tuned craft as well. It was quite inspiring to converse with two such writers.

Renee Nicholson graduated from WVU with an MFA in 2008 and currently holds the Emerging Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at Penn State Altoona. While her genre of study was technically fiction, she took workshops in all three genres and went on to publish in all three. During her time here, she received the Rebecca Mason Perry Award for Outstanding First-Year MFA and the Russ MacDonald Prize for graduate fiction. Her stories, essays, and poems have since appeared or are forthcoming in many places including Chelsea, Mid-American Review,Paste, Dossier, Naugatuck River Review, ABZ, Poets & Writers, Prime Number, The Superstition Review, The Gettysburg Review and more, as well as anthologies Not a Muse, and A Generation Defining Itself. Her work has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prizes, and her essay “Five Positions” earned a Special Mention. She has also been a semi-finalist for the Raymond Carver Short Fiction Award. From 2007 to 2011, she has served as the Assistant to the Director of the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop.

I was only able to communicate with this talented writer through e-mail and was extremely intrigued to read about the connections between Ballet and writing in her life. Certainly, I will be seeking her work now, and continue to look for it in the future.

Renee provided a lot of responses to my questions, but here are some elements of our exchange:

What fuels your writing?

Before becoming interested in writing, I trained in classical ballet and eventually ended up dancing professionally. Dance became the central interest in my writing while in the MFA program and beyond. I retired early in my career when I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, but recently have found both more effective therapies to manage the disease, and underwent a knee replacement surgery. Between the two, I have been able to be more active in ballet again, and have earned teaching certification through American Ballet Theatre, which I funded with a professional development grant from the West Virginia Commission for the Arts, and teach in WVU’s Dance Program. I also teach in WVU’s Multidisciplinary Studies program, and I enjoy both very much.

How did you discover this fellowship? What motivated you to apply?

The Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Penn State-Altoona was posted last Spring in the AWP joblist. I keep up my membership with AWP, and look for interesting opportunities from time to time. The Emerging Writer position at Penn State-Altoona rotates through genres, and last spring the faculty wanted to bring in either a fiction writer or nonfiction writer. I applied as both, because I not only work in both genres, but had two projects, one in each genre. In fiction, I’ve been drafting a novel, and in nonfiction working on a memoir about my past and present involvement in ballet.

What was the application process like?

The application included a writing sample, a letter of interest (cover letters are so important in these applications—it’s really where you get the chance to shine), my c.v. and letters of recommendation. I keep a dossier with AWP’s career services, which helps streamline the process. I was then interviewed by three members of a committee that was tasked with choosing the Emerging Writer. The interview was by phone, which is tough because keeping three people distinct while not being able to see them is challenging. But I could also tell the interviewers were enthusiastic about the Emerging Writer, which made me even more excited for it. The program has been going on here for over 10 years, and so far every Emerging Writer except one has published a book soon (a year to 3 years) after the residency. I keep telling myself that I don’t want to break that streak!

How long is your residency?

The residency was for the Fall 2011 semester—each year the emerging writer is on campus in the fall—and this appealed to me because I had these projects, and because the time was a more manageable time-frame for being away from my husband, Matt Bauman, who is a CPA and Senior Financial Analyst at Mylan Pharmaceuticals in Morgantown. Matt has been very supportive of the residency, and we see each other on the weekends. A longer residency would be nice writing-wise, but it would be tough to be away from home (both Matt and my beagle, Emmie, as well as our constantly renovated house in First Ward) for a longer time.

What does your fellowship entail?

As the Emerging Writer, I’m given a lot of time to write. I do teach one creative writing class, and am asked to give two public readings, and be available to students on campus interested in creative writing. I’ve been supporting the efforts of the creative writing club, as well as Hard Freight, the campus literary magazine. When the magazine recently had an open mic, over 100 students showed up and nearly 30 participated by reading or playing music. It was a fun evening, and exciting to see so many undergrads interested in and supporting writing.

Since arriving on campus in August, I’ve finished a draft of the memoir and have made significant headway on the novel draft. Two New York-based agents are considering the memoir manuscript, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but mostly I don’t focus on that. I write for the bulk of the day each day, which is an amazing luxury. I’m also taking a ballet class at a local company’s school while I’m here, and so it’s really fueling the work, too.

Do you have any plans after your residency?

This summer I’ll be returning to American Ballet Theatre to finish my teaching certification. These trips to New York always yield interesting essays, too. This spring I’ll teach in WVU’s MDS program and Dance program, but I’m cutting back on some teaching to continue to work on my writing. Dance and writing always vie for my attention. In addition to the dance classes I teach for WVU, I have many private lesson students, and often get asked to guest teach at places like Pittsburgh Youth Ballet, which I love to do. I am looking at jobs in creative writing, but I tend to be selective in applying. Last year I was a finalist for a position at Duquesne which was part creative writing, part composition. Having the on campus interview last year prepared me well if other opportunities arise, but I’m not sure that an academic job is 100% what I want. Although finding the balance is difficult, I like being able to move back and forth between dance and writing. And in that way, I’ve been really blessed. I keep working on publications, both in the journals and now book-length, but I try not to obsess over them. Instead, I try to have writing projects I’m working on as I send work out. I’d hate to lose the sense that my best work is still ahead of me. On the dance side, I’ll be busy getting students ready to audition for competitive summer programs. Last year, I had dancers at programs ranging from ABT to Florida Ballet, all accepted via competitive audition and application processes. It’s been pretty fortunate to get to focus just on the writing this fall. Like many others, my writing often gets juggled with all my other commitments and activities, although I do try to write at least 2 hours 5 days a week most weeks. I suppose the self-discipline I learned as a dancer is what saves me as a writer.

Sarah Beth Childers, already a good friend though I am new to the MFA community, was kind enough to meet with me during the busy mid-term week for delicious custom made omelets at Morgantown’s Blue Moose Café. Sarah Beth graduated from WVU with an MFA in creative non-fiction in May of 2007. Her work has been published in SNReview, Paddlefish, and the Tusculum Review. She is currently an adjunct at WVU and is simultaneously working on her manuscript while teaching four sections of English 102. She applied for a Fellowship at Colgate in her last semester as a graduate student here at WVU, the spring semester of 2007. When we sat down for a late lunch of decadent breakfast, she described the beauty and luxury of Colgate in its architectural elements as well as the intellectual motivation of her students.

Here is part of our Q & A:

Generally, what was your time in the MFA program here at WVU like?

The MFA gave me a great opportunity to work with inspiring faculty. My work completely transformed during my time at WVU. My voice stayed basically the same, but that’s about it—I learned so much in terms of structure, imagery, syntax, and what quality/kind of writing actually might eventually publish. When I came in, I had the discipline to be a writer (I wrote 2 novel manuscripts in undergrad), but I’d mostly read eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction, and I’d taken a bit too much inspiration from writers like George Eliot and Sir Walter Scott. In my first class at WVU—fiction with Gail Adams, I started reading some of the writers who have become my new inspirations, like Alice Munro (though I still do read plenty of old novels). From Ethel Morgan Smith, I learned to love James Baldwin (“Equal in Paris” is one of my favorite essays ever). From Mark, I learned so much about being a teacher—I really learned how to comment on essays and structure a workshop from mentoring in his English 418 class and from taking his fiction workshop. Ellesa High challenged me, rightly, to think more about my Native heritage, much of which has been sadly forgotten because my great-grandmother was an orphan. And of course I can’t say enough about what Kevin Oderman taught me about revisions, structure, and salvaging your life through essays. During my fellowship, I mostly met other writers who had gone to Iowa, Columbia, or the University of Michigan, and while they get more opportunities based on the clout of their program, I can’t believe that their professors are any better than the ones I worked with here at WVU.

What was the application process for your fellowship?

It was the least stressful fellowship application—I didn’t have to write a cover letter, and I was scared by those at the time. I still find them difficult. I managed to eke some stress out of the application, though—I did my application on the last possible day when I was home (in Huntington) for the weekend, and I had to go to two different libraries to find a computer without an elderly woman on facebook on it, and then I made it to the post office less than 5 minutes before it closed. What got me the fellowship was “My Dead-Grandmother Essay,” which Kevin Oderman recommended I write after I told him that was all I was thinking about at the time (my grandmother had just died about 6 months before), and that I had a lot of funny and strange stories about her. The search committee had read too many normal dead-grandmother essays as teachers and enjoyed the play on the dead-grandmother genre. You never know what will catch their eye.

What inspired you to apply?

The requirements sounded a lot more plausible than the rest of the jobs I was applying for—a book project but no book, just a few years out of grad school, etc. I’d never lived that far away from home before, so I figured it would be good for me as a writer if I got it, and it was. I got a new clarity about Huntington and some freedom from the family voices that are always in my head. I can still feel their presence from a 4 hour drive away—that magnetic feeling was weaker from 14 hours away. Also, I wanted the opportunity to live in a tiny, very snowy town in upstate New York. I’d never seen so much snow! It felt peaceful to have malls, shopping centers, and fast food at least a half-hour drive away. I rode my bike a lot and learned how to jog.

What did your Fellowship entail? What were some of the highlights?

It was one year, and I taught one introductory class in my genre each semester at Colgate and gave a formal reading from my manuscript at the end of the year. It really helped me that I’d gotten to teach intro to creative writing at WVU—I was a lot more confident from that about how to set up workshops and select readings. I really loved teaching creative nonfiction at Colgate—some of my students were amazing writers, and almost all of them always had their reading done, even though it was generally 40 pages. The best thing about the fellowship was the people I met. The university is so small (2,000 students) that there is a great community of professors that crosses department lines. I had friends in the art department, foreign languages, drama, and more. Also, the creative writing faculty helped me out and treated me as a colleague in a way I wasn’t expecting. Something I learned from Jennifer Brice, the nonfiction writer at Colgate, was when I should call a family member the name I called them (like Granny), and when to use the actual first name. It seems like a small thing, but of course improving as a writer comes from little breakthroughs like that. Jennifer Brice also showed me how to properly select my silverware at a fancy dinner—I ate much fancier food than I was used to, with some fascinating writers, including Yiyun Li (who likes to matchmake), and Elizabeth Strout, who had just won her Pulitzer for fiction. I also got to go to England for the first time on a research grant to study the Brontes—that was as important to me as the writing time, for sure. I got to take a walk on the moors on a rainy day—out beyond where they are any powerlines or cars—it must have looked very similar when the Brontes walked there. I ended up completely soaked; if I was a Bronte, I would have gotten tuberculosis.

How was the adjustment from receiving an MFA from WVU and embarking on this fellowship?

Not terribly difficult, except that I was lonely at first. It was a good bridge from the support and writing community you get as an MFA student to the isolation (and sometimes despair) you can feel when you have to adjunct for a few years. I’d had some fears that I wouldn’t find the time or motivation to write after I graduated, and this fellowship enabled me to write almost as much in a year as I wrote during my entire time at WVU. I was able to establish writing habits that I’ve been able to continue for the most part since I’ve started adjuncting, and that’s helped a lot.

What piece of advice do you have for anyone wanting to apply for such a fellowship or one like it in the future?

Edit your writing sample mercilessly, and select pieces that are striking in some way. My essay that got me the fellowship was organized in a way that made it visually stand out in the slush pile, and my voice was clear from the first line (“When Granny felt fancy, she doused herself in Interlude?”). It’s painfully random, though, of course, just like we’re used to from sending out to journals.

My main advice is to not despair if it doesn’t work out. Not getting a fellowship you want does not mean you have no chance at publishing or continuing to write. It is definitely possible to make time to write while adjuncting—in most cases, you get a couple of days off a week, and you can get up on those mornings and devote a few hours to your writing. And I’m sure there are jobs other than teaching that leave you with enough mental energy to write—probably a lot better than teaching during the hellish midterm week.

by Lisa Beans

Look,
I took that path which led
to this one, and here I am,
the far-away one who listens.
— “What I know of Happiness” by Rachel King

Rachel King makes it a goal to travel outside of Morgantown twice a month. As I write this article, she is currently exploring the White Mountains in New Hampshire. Yes, part of the impetus for travel comes from the need for a literal change in scenery, but more that that, Rachel has a deep curiosity of the worlds around her. She is an observer, a listener, a wonderer. Writers are always told to write what they know. Rachel doesn’t limit herself to that.

Her writing takes the readers to a monastery in West Virginia, post World War II Portland, and the coast lines of Prince Edward’s Island in 1835. Not only does she excel at creating a different physical world, but she is able to clearly represent other people: a nine year old boy building a fort, a young woman taking a train ride across Siberia, a drifter stopping over in a sleep clinic to make a quick buck. Even though Rachel works to create these worlds that are so different from her own and ours, we always feel for her characters.

Author Tim O’Brien states, “The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about what the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.” This is what Rachel’s characters make us feel no matter what continent they appear on, no matter what century they live in.

Rachel is a Portland, Oregon native. She has resided in Maine, Maryland, Russia and currently West Virginia where she is a third year MFA candidate in fiction. Her stories and young adult novel have won contests through the West Virginia Writers, Inc. She has poetry forthcoming from nibble and a short story, “Elevator Girl,” forthcoming from the Farallon Review. While at WVU, Rachel has worked at West Virginia University Press as an Editorial and Production assistant. She works on copy-editing, proofreading, and the layout of books in InDesign. Because the press only has ten to fifteen titles come out every year, and only has a staff of about five people, Rachel has been able to actively work on titles. Last fall, she was able to copy-edit Ugly to Start With, a short story collection about a boy who grows up in Harper’s Ferry. She was able to work with the author as the book went through publication. This fall she gets to work on another fiction project as well. Not only has she been able to see the publication process first hand, but the job has also taught Rachel a great deal about West Virginia history.

I asked Rachel a few questions about her journey with writing.

When did you start writing fiction? What drew you to this genre?

As far as I can remember, I wrote my first fictional story, a pioneer mystery story, in fifth grade. The next year I wrote a story about a Jewish family who escapes from Poland in 1939. Writing, to me, was a natural effect of being an avid reader. I learned to read maybe later than some writers; I was seven. I remember simply being alive in the world and then being alive in the world and being alive inside books. I’ve always viewed myself as living inside two worlds. Perhaps I’m drawn to fiction, and specifically to novels, because it creates a completely different world, whereas poetry and nonfiction seem a little more reliant on this one

Who are authors that have influenced your work/life? How so?

As a child, my favorite books were Grandpa’s Mountain, Huckleberry Finn, and Emily of New Moon. As an adolescent, my favorite writers were Willa Cather, C.S. Lewis, and Fyoder Dostoevsky. All these books/writers confirmed or challenged how I viewed the world and/or influenced the kind of writing I like. I’ve gone through different favorites as an adult, but currently the writers whose work I think about most are Carson McCullers, Mary Gaitskill, Jim Shepard, and Jack Gilbert. McCullers, Gaitskill, and Shepard all, to a greater or lesser extent, are teaching me how to effectively use backstory, how to describe emotion precisely and without sentimentality, and how to embed historical events/attitudes within the all-important stories of characters. Gilbert’s work dares me to be more fully alive.

You don’t seem to write by the mantra “Write what you know.” You stories are often research based exploring other times and cultures. What draws you to writing about worlds outside of your own?

Maybe this predilection relates to my view of fiction as another world. In this world I rely on my practical nature, but I enjoy allowing my strong intuition and imagination to take over in fictional worlds. If I wrote solely from my own experience I’d limit my imagination, and my writing would suffer. In fiction-writing, I get inside different psyches and time periods, and share those experiences with the reader. I’ve always read a lot of history and historical fiction, so using historical events as a jumping off point for my imagination seems natural. I’m also a quiet observer, taking in whatever people and situations I’m in, and I consciously or unconsciously conjure up these observations when I formulate characters. I guess sometimes I write more from observational experience than personal experience. All that being said, I utilize personal setting or object or anecdotal details, even if the plot or protagonist is very different from my experience or me.

You’ve had some interesting life experiences (living in Russia, teaching in Baltimore, growing up in Oregon). How did you end up at WVU? And do these experiences impact your writing?

Growing up, I always wanted to be adventuring. As I became an adult, I realized that, for better or worse, being a traditional tourist wasn’t a sustainable option for me, because I take a while to process new situations, and I’m concerned with depth and intimacy. Wherever I live, I’ve tried to take Barry Lopez’s advice in his essay “The American Geographies”—to seek out a local or locals who know and love that place and allow them to share their love and knowledge with me. In Morgantown, I’ve been privileged to work at the co-op and WVU Press, both places in which I’ve learned much from WV locals about WV history and culture.

You’ve taken workshops in all three genres since you’ve been here. Has this had an impact on your fiction writing? If so, how?

Writing poetry and nonfiction has probably affected my fiction, but I’m not sure exactly how. While at WVU, in whatever genre, I’ve been trying to pay more attention to the integrity of my sentences. The impetuses to write in certain genres, at least right now, are different. I write fiction to tell an imagined story, often about people and places outside my own experience. I write poetry to work through personal emotions. I have so many story ideas that I know I’ll be writing fiction forever. Because my emotions vary, I’ll be writing poetry forever, too. I’m a fairly private person, so if I write more nonfiction, I’ll probably try my hand at scholarly creative nonfiction, not memoir.

What have been the most valuable lessons you’ve learned here at WVU?

A few lessons: I’ve learned not to interrupt. I’ve learned writing deliberately and well is very much preferable to writing quickly and poorly. I’ve learned to curb my inclination for backstory. I’ve learned how to use ellipses (in poetry). I’ve learned “revising is writing.” I’ve learned to let life happen to me more; to not be such a go-getter.

Jim Harms on His Forthcoming Books and Writing
By Connie Pan

If you haven’t already met him, Jim Harms, a Professor of English here at WVU, has this airy laidback coolness to him as if he still has California in his hair. Because I’m in the fiction MFA Program, for the first year, my contact with him would be limited to hall-passings and extracurriculary things. In the hall, we’d smile and nod. At Creative Writing functions and in emails, each time I’d introduce myself with the standard, “Hi, my name is Connie. I’m a fiction MFA.” That lead into “Thanks for hosting this reception.” Or “I enjoyed your reading.” Or “I’m interested in taking Poetry this fall.” He’d entertain me and let me go on until one day he said, smiling, “I know who you are, Connie.” See, him: airy laidback coolness. Me: fumbling bumbler—but that’s another kind of memorable and another kind of article.

Despite introducing myself to him 4,587 times, he allowed me to take his Poetry Workshop this fall. It is a class I look forward to every week because he is a wellspring of jokes, anecdotes, and is guns-ready with all those things we wish we could remember, like he’s a walking database for writers-on-writing quotes.

Not only is he a wonderful professor who is thoughtful and thorough with his feedback on work, willing to chat, and always-always motivating MFAs by sending calls for contests, fellowships, grants, and cool writer stuff, he is also the Director of the Low Residency MFA Program in Poetry at New England College, dedicated husband to Amanda Cobb, and loving father to Walt, Phoebe, Grace, and Dashiell. Plus, he’s busy racking up fellowships, grants, and publications of his own. Some of Jim’s credits include a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, the PEN / Revson Fellowship, and three Pushcart Prizes. He has been published in The American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and that’s just to name a handful. He is the author of eight books in addition to two forthcoming volumes of poetry including What to Borrow, What to Steal from Marick Press (2011) and Comet Scar from Carnegie Mellon University (2012). Even though we’re all keeping track, he’s cool enough to lose count.

As the generous person that he is, Jim shared some insider information that can’t be found anywhere else about his forthcoming books. What to Borrow, What to Steal was birthed out of wonder. Jim divulges, “What to Borrow, What to Steal could have been subtitled, ‘Uncollected Poems’” because the volume began with a hundred poems that didn’t quite fit in his previous collections over the last fifteen years, and he wondered what he could do with them.

For the most part, Comet Scar is a book of homages and elegies inspired by other artists or works of art. Some points of inspiration for Jim were Jimmy Cliff, Cary Grant, and Bill Murray, and ten poems in the collection are elegies for Grant McLennan, an Australian singer/songwriter who Jim honors for redirecting his work. Jim explains, “[Comet Scar is] about how art exists in our daily lives, how it helps us endure and persevere. The epigraph . . . from James Salter . . . sums [it] up rather directly: ‘How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?’”

So, where do these myriad poems come from? A lot of writers are reluctant to talk about the creative process because it is a mysterious, slippery thing, but Jim delves right in, “One of the things I like best about writing is making stuff up, but I rely on recognizable names and landscapes to create and maintain verisimilitude. Yes, my poems are often about my family and friends, but they don’t attempt to recreate specific dramatic situations. As most poets will say, I’m more interested in the truth than the facts. What happens, if I’m lucky, when I’m writing a poem is that I very quickly find myself falling into that trance that’s so necessary to creating art.” Even though Jim has two forthcoming collections, he’s not slowing down anytime soon. “Along with making stuff up, the trance state that accompanies the writing of poems, that interaction of the imagination and language that seems to slow down time and expand our sense of the real, is one of the things that keeps me coming back to the page day after day.”

Not only is he not slowing down, he’s already thinking about future collections, “I could imagine putting together another book like What to Borrow in ten or fifteen years. There are always a lot of perfectly good poems that don’t make the team.” I’m sure—and I’m sure I’m not alone in the thought—that there will be books on top of books between then and now. On that thought, if you’re in the halls of Colson and see Jim make sure you stop to congratulate him because he makes WVU and Colson Hall oh-so-very-proud, and support one of our own by picking up What to Borrow, What to Steal and Comet Scar.

The Bolton Writing Workshop

by Lisa Beans

Sonnets and flash fiction and memoirs, oh my! Once a month in eight residence halls around campus, West Virginia University students are getting down to the business of creative writing. The Bolton Creative Writing Workshops give MFA students the opportunity to lead undergraduate students in the creation of original writing. The writing focuses around the first year experience at WVU. Topics include the idea of home, the PRT and favorite places around campus. A recent workshop led by second year MFA student, Rebecca Thomas, imagined a Halloween themed WVU: professors, roommates, friends as vampires, zombies and werewolves. Within a span of an hour or two, students created their own work from scratch and had the opportunity to share it with their peers.

Mary Ann Samyn, Creative Writing professor, is the Bolton Professor for Teaching and Mentoring. She started the program in 2008 after being awarded the professorship, a three-year appointment. It was renewed this year, which mean the workshops will continue through 2014. Russel K. Bolton and Ruth Buffington Bolton, WVU alumni, established the Bolton Professorship to improve freshman writing. Samyn’s main goal for the workshops are for the students and leaders to have fun which will in turn lead to improvements in writing. It also gives students perhaps the only opportunity to learn about creative writing as their schedules might not give them the opportunity to enroll in creative writing classes.

This is a great opportunity for the MFA students. The workshops give them the chance to improve their skills of leading workshop and teaching creative writing. Samyn stated of the graduate student workshop leaders, “They’re enthusiastic teachers; they especially want to teach [creative writing].”

Samyn would like to point out that the workshops could not happen without the help of the Resident Hall Advisors and Resident Faculty Leaders in each dorm who promote the workshops, provide food, and often attend and participate in the workshops.

With all the demands on first year students, it’s a great chance for students to take time out of their busy schedule and create art. Also, as many first year classes are large, lecture style classes, students appreciate the one-on-one attention they receive in the workshops. Samyn stated, “More than once, undergrads have told me, at our end-of-semester readings, to continue the workshops, please, because they don’t have any other place where they can write or any other group of people with whom they can share their work. That means a lot.”

Read more about the Bolton Writing Workshop on the Bolton’s blog. Make sure to check the Bolton Blog for information about the end of the semester reading in December. For more information contact Mary Ann Samyn.

by Elissa J. Hoffman

Congratulations to Katie Fallon on her new book, “Cerulean Blues: A Personal Search for a Vanishing Songbird!” It will be released by Ruka Press on October 18th in paperback and Kindle e-book editions. The book has gotten high praise from writers such as Scott Weidensahl and David Gessner, and Katie dubbed “a rising star among contemporary nature writers.”

Katie first became interested in the cerulean blue warbler about ten years ago when, as a graduate student here in creative nonfiction, she attended a talk about mountaintop removal’s effect on forest birds. She learned how the numbers of cerulean warblers have been declining rapidly, at 3% per year, the population now 80% smaller than in 1966. However, the estimated population of 300,000 is still considered too large for the tiny 9 gram bird to be granted either endangered or threatened status. Haunted by its plight, Katie began studying the cerulean warbler and the links between human action and the decline of a species.

Multiple ecological problems impact the cerulean warbler’s survival. Katie’s research led her throughout Appalachia and finally to The Third Annual Cerulean Warbler Summit in Bogota, held, interestingly, at the National Federation of Colombian Coffee Growers headquarters, the group of “Juan Valdez” fame. Why there? Because the loss of forest habitat to non-shade-grown coffee production in South America is destroying the winter habitat of cerulean warblers in the Northern Andes. And the Juan Valdez Federation says “We do not want to be known as the destroyers of birds.” The cerulean warbler also faces problems on its migratory routes from resort development in the Yucatan Peninsula and worsening storms over the Gulf of Mexico. And, as Katie learned from the start, mountaintop removal mining deals yet another blow to hopes for the preservation of this songbird, for 80% of the cerulean warbler global population breeds in central Appalachia, with about 30% breeding in West Virginia. This beautiful but elusive bird lives among us in areas such as Coopers Rock, Wetzel County, and the New River Gorge. Katie hopes her book will keep the cerulean warbler in the public eye. And I’m sure it will!

For more information about Cerulean Blues visit Amazon.

Read about Katie in her alumni spotlight.

by Rebecca Thomas

“Soil in your mouth sounds like soul—
like the word’s been oiled, all the old
consolidated, uprooted, from
this spit of overtold land.”
-Ida Stewart, “Soil” from Gloss

Congratulations to undergraduate alumna, Ida Stewart, whose first collection of poems, Gloss, won the 2011 Perugia Press Award (a national poetry award for a first or second book by a woman). With the above excerpt, it’s easy to see why Gloss, Ida’s first collection of poems, was chosen over the other five hundred submissions. It’s also easy to see why Terrance Hayes calls Gloss “a brilliant and endlessly resonant first book.”

With such high praise, it may be surprising to note that Ida didn’t even take a poetry workshop until she was halfway through her undergraduate career here at WVU, but she describes that experience with poetry as “love at first sight.” Graduating in 2004 with degrees in Political Science and English with an emphasis in Creative Writing, Ida calls herself “one of those students who changed her major a few times, and even spent more than a few hours in science labs. But [she] had always been drawn to language—especially the material sounds and textures of words. [She] didn’t realize that preoccupation could become an actual occupation until, in that poetry class, [she] encountered contemporary poets whose writing spoke to and from the world [she] knew, in language that [she] knew. [She] had wrestled with picking a major and a career path because [she] was wary of limits—wanting to major in “everything” and stay connected to many disciplines and parts of the world at once. Indeed, drawing connections between seemingly disparate parts of the world is one of the beautiful things that poems do.”

Gloss seems to be doing just that. Drawing on the Appalachian region, Gloss is a collection that explores the landscape and politics of Appalachia. Ida says that “many of the poems respond to mountaintop removal coal mining—in some of the poems the “mountaintop” actually speaks in a humanized, female voice—considering what it means to live simultaneously amid both great beauty and great turmoil, tradition and upheaval, simplicity and complexity. Other poems in the book are set in more emotional landscapes—driving on the hairpin turns within the mind and heart.”

This blending of landscapes seems to be exactly what drew Perugia to Ida’s work. In a press release about the award, the publisher describes the language of Gloss as “in flux, full of paradox and thresholds, each word and line a peak or a range. The poems are mined from the ruptured and fragmented rock and dirt of the colloquial, creating a kind of “landguage” or “langscape.” Indeed, the poems (mis)behave like little ecosystems, in which word-play, rhyme, and enjambment simultaneously make and break sense, join and repel—evoking the tensions between progress and resistance.”

Ida, a current PhD candidate in Creative Writing at University of Georgia, seems to be drawn to this dichotomy in her work. She says that “the joy and challenge of writing is its endlessness. This is a wonderful thing when you’ve found subject matter—like my mountains—that you find endlessly fascinating. But it can be frustrating for beginning writers who want to know whether their work is correct or good. Writing requires patience and an open heart. Recklessness is where it’s at… Ditch your eraser and fill up your notebook as fast as you can…”

Ida will be reading with MFA alumni and WVU faculty member, Katie Fallon, on Wednesday, January 18 at 7:30 p.m. in 130 Colson Hall.

If you are interested in Gloss, click here to visit Amazon.

Life After an MFA
Or Reasons for Me to Get Out of Bed and Hope for the Future
by Rebecca Thomas

As a second year MFA candidate in fiction, I try not to think about spring of 2013, that scary year that I’ll have to leave the safety net of WVU and venture out into the academic “real world.” In fact, that thought alone is enough to make me hole up in my house and watch copious amounts of Jane Austen period pieces. In short, it’s enough to make me live in a world of denial, and I like my denial world to have Colin Firth in it. Luckily though, there might be a reason to turn off Pride and Prejudice (the BBC version, of course) and have hope for the future. The hope? With preparation comes the possibility of employment.

Every fall, our very own poet, Mary Ann Samyn, hosts a job talk about life after an MFA. Jobs are possible; you just need to know the market. The first step, it seems, is to understand your options. “Think about the kids of jobs out there,” Mary Ann writes, “community college, religiously affiliated college, liberal arts college, regional state university, flagship university, major private university. Study teaching loads (5/5? 4/4? 3/3? 3/2? Less than that??) and become more discerning about what particular schools are looking for (Hard-working teachers with or without publications? Published writers as an absolute requirement? Name writers? One or more of these?).”

It’s crucial to know how you can market yourself. What do your publications look like? Mary Ann acknowledges the importance of them: “Realize that without major publications (a book, or at least several good journal publications), you are probably not a viable tenure track job candidate at a four-year school with a creative writing program.”

Understanding where you are a viable candidate is critical. While the MFA is traditionally the terminal degree, not every university sees it that way. It’s important to “realize?, that many smaller liberal arts colleges and regional state universities are less likely to view the MFA as the terminal degree that it is,” Mary Ann writes. She continues, “Partly, that’s because these schools need people who can teach more than one thing. They’re not going to hire a fiction writer who only teaches fiction. You’d be expected to teach all genres and some field of literature and probably composition as well.”

After you’ve come to an understanding of what type of university to apply to, it’s important to get your materials together. Mary Ann suggests to “ask for letters of recommendation well in advance (and provide the recommender with some info about you/about the kinds of jobs you’re applying for if he/she is not currently in contact with you).” Get your cover letter in order. Mary Ann writes that “it’s wise to ‘customize’ the letter when you can do so honestly and interestingly. If you can’t, don’t. Think about what a school will want: a teacher, first and foremost. How is your letter going to convey this?” Along with a cover letter, start putting together your C.V (“If your tendency is to embellish, don’t,” Mary Ann says. “If your tendency is to downplay, don’t.”) Mary Ann says to “Consider designing a teaching portfolio: pedagogy statement, sample syllabi and assignments, proposals for courses you’d like to teach (be both practical—introduction to literature, creative writing in genres other than your specialty—and allow yourself some “dream courses”).”

She tells MFAs to “know that if you do want an academic position and you’re not ready for tenure track jobs (and even if you are), you’ll likely be required to teach a lot and show evidence that you have been and plan to continue to be a member of the larger community (the department and beyond).

Finally, Mary Ann reminds MFAs of the thing we should never forget: “Keep writing and keep your poems/stories/essays in the mail and aim to accumulate some publications.” As with all things writing, Mary Ann says, “Make sure you don’t lose sight of what you love? and let that enthusiasm/dedication/interest/passion come through in your work, your job letter, your teaching—all of it. That’s [her] best advice.”

I run through the list in my head, checking off things that I’ve begun, making notes for what to do next. As always, publish, publish, publish. But hopefully, or as the optimist in me insists, knowing, being aware, is the first step. It’s enough for me, at least, to turn off Pride and Prejudice, leave the house, and have some hope for the future. Well, I might just finish the second disk of Pride and Prejudice first. Mr. Darcy also gives hope for the future, too.

Ron Carlson’s
A Kind of Flying
by Rachel King

When I reread one of these short stories, I reread it twice. Carlson’s sentences and plots are probably the most intellectually refreshing things I’ve ever experienced. As a writer, you have no excuse not to have read this book. Let’s try a few. Excuse: I write realistic stories. Response: So does Ron Carlson. E: I write experimental stories. R: So does Ron Carlson. E: I write short-shorts. R: So does Ron Carlson. E: I write novella-ish stories. R: So does Ron Carlson. E: I have a lot to read for grad classes. R: Skim it for this week (especially if it’s pedagogy). Carlson has singlehandedly taught me how to write satisfying endings. What fiction writer doesn’t need to be able to do that?

Robert A. Johnson’s
We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love
by Rachel King

In here, I enjoyed most the history and cultural contextualizing of romantic love—a factual revelation of the Western unconscious, and the description of the similarities and differences between male and female psyches—a good reference if you want to write effectively from the other gender’s point of view. Johnson uses a Jungian interpretation of the myth of Tristan and Iseult as a starting point, which made this discussion more palatable to me than straight-up textbook psychology.