The beginning of every school year heralds the arrival of a new MFA class. The first glimpse of these newcomers occurred during the graduate teaching assistant orientation when Mary Ann Samyn, director of creative writing, joined the new writers for lunch at Hatfield’s in the Mountainlair. These writers told stories about their various professions leading up to the MFA. Their previous places of employment range from a pet center to America’s Money Class with Suze Orman, and everything in between. Here’s a little more about the MFA class of 2017:

CREATIVE NONFICTION

Whit Arnold went to Muskingum University in Ohio. After graduating, he moved to Los Angeles and worked in TV for a few years. For the past four years he was in and out of South Korea working as an English teacher. Some of Whit’s favorite authors include: John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, David Sedaris, Lorrie Moore, Tobias Wolff, etc. (this list could go on and on). Fun fact: he used to show pygmy goats at the Coshocton County Fair.

Whit Arnold

Kelsey Liebenson-Morse was born in Madison, Wisconsin. She was raised in Florida and New Hampshire. In 2012 she graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a degree in English. After a two-year hiatus featuring stints at restaurants and gigs in childcare, academia called Kelsey back and landed her here, in Morgantown. Kelsey admires the work of Alice Munro and Roald Dahl. In her spare time, Kelsey can be found outdoors.

Kelsey Liebenson-Morse

FICTION

Kelsey Englert is a fiction writer from Palmerton, Pennsylvania, who earned a BLA in landscape architecture, a BS in history, and a MA in English from Ball State University. Some of her favorite writers include Jeannette Walls, Steve Kluger, Karen Joy Fowler, Jill Christman, Cathy Day, and Audrey Niffenegger. She has published a short story and had a screenplay developed into a short film.

Kelsey Englert

Megan Fahey is originally from Wheeling, WV, but spent the last two years getting an MA in writing from Coastal Carolina University in Myrtle Beach, SC. Her favorite authors include Nicholson Baker, Karen Russell, and Brock Clarke. When she’s not teaching and writing, Megan is a part-time crematory technician at the Ohio Valley Pet Center in Wheeling.

Megan Fahey

Andrea Ruggirello is originally from Staten Island, NY, and spent her undergrad upstate at Oswego State University where she studied creative writing and journalism. After reading a book called How to Avoid the Real World, she found herself joining AmeriCorps and spending the next several years at an education non-profit in Boston before making her way to WVU. A few fun things she has done along the way include hiking 500 miles across Spain and going to Harry Potter world. Favorite writers include Junot Diaz, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jhumpa Lahiri. She continues to avidly avoid the real world.

POETRY

Elizabeth Leo is from Philadelphia, PA. She attended Albright College in Reading, PA. Some of her favorite authors include Richard Hugo, Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, Donna Tartt, David Foster Wallace, and Kurt Vonnegut. Two of her favorite texts she often returns to are Milton’s Paradise Lost and Richard Adams’ Watership Down. She’s generally very fond of plants, being outdoors, insects and all manner of critters. She recently started wearing glasses and, even more recently, made the discovery that she can, in fact, wear them in the shower. This has greatly improved the quality of her mornings. Also, she lives with a cat named Jonas.

Elizabeth Leo

Sarah Munroe grew up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and spent most of her adult life to this point in Philadelphia, where her husband still resides. She finished her undergraduate degree at Drexel University in political science and worked as a copywriter for the University’s Enrollment Management department before leaving for WVU with her small dog, Bodie, whom she adores. She loves dinosaurs, is good at going down steps, and whiskey makes her cry. One day she hopes to own chickens and goats for eggs and company. Munroe admires and is inspired by the work of Anne Carson, Charles Wright, Gregory Orr, and Neil Gaiman.

Sarah Munroe

Welcome, MFA class of 2017!

While many of us spent time relaxing before the new school year, Professor Ethel Morgan Smith had other plans. Professor Smith spent her early August participating in the LEAP for Ghana organization in the Konko Village near Accra, Ghana.

Children enjoying the camp.

The LEAP (Literary Empowerment Action Project) movement’s mission is “to use innovative literacy, school improvement, and girls’ empowerment programming to expand educational opportunities and to strengthen communities” in developing nations. LEAP for Ghana runs many projects. In particular, Professor Smith mentioned a camp for elementary-aged children, fundraisers to send three girls to high school every year, and a program at the universities on “Choosing Careers.”

More children at the camp.

In Ghana, Professor Smith encountered history firsthand. “Going to Africa is a very emotional experience for African-Americans,” she said. “It was a difficult trip—going into the ‘Slave Castles’ and hearing the stories about how the soldiers raped captured women. And if they turned up pregnant they were thrown in the ocean. No books or films could’ve prepared me for the stench of 400 years of evil.”

Buildings in Ghana.

When asked about enjoyment, Professor Smith emphasized the emotional complexity of the situation. “Enjoyment is not a word I would associate with such an experience,” she said. Nevertheless, she added, “In spite of the extreme poverty, working with the children was a moving experience.”

All photos provided by Professor Ethel Morgan Smith.

Professor Smith has no current plans to write about her time in Ghana. “Much too soon for that now,” she said. But she is certain her experiences will find a way into her writing in the future.

The first weekend of the semester proved to be an eventful one. After a week of managing syllabi and meeting students, department events offered many welcome moments of relaxation.

Picnic attendees.

The weekend started on Friday afternoon with the department picnic. Faculty, graduate students, and staff met at White Park to enjoy the sun, snacks, and each other’s company. Many English department pets also made appearances, and some picnic-goers were lucky enough to see Tom Sura’s adorable daughter push him down the slide. Thank you to Marsha Bissett and Cynthia Ulrich for all their work in organizing this event.

Many attendees chose to stay in the shade.

Later in the weekend, Professor Mary Ann Samyn hosted a Meet-and-Greet at her home for all MFA students and faculty. Mary Ann provided multiple snacks, which the creative writers happily munched while catching up. Thank you to Mary Ann for hosting.

The various dishes prepared by Mary Ann for the Meet-and-Greet.

Overall, a lovely weekend and start to the semester.

For the eighteenth year, the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop regaled our downtown campus with readings, workshops, craft talks, publishing panels, and all other things writing-related. This year’s faculty included such esteemed writers as Allison Joseph, Jon Tribble, Marie Manilla, Reneé Nicholson, Natalie Sypolt, Lynn Bartels, Katherine Mathews, James Harms, and Mark Brazaitis. There were forty-six total workshop participants of all ages and backgrounds.

Workshop participants in E. Moore Hall.

The four-day venture contained multiple readings from workshop faculty. Jon Tribble treated the crowd to newer poems about his time working at Kentucky Fried Chicken, while Allison Joseph read from several of her published collections, including a poem about Skipper, Barbie’s little sister, from Allison’s book In Every Seam. Marie Manilla entertained a Saturday afternoon audience to the colorful Nonna Diamante, and her Italian accent, as she read excerpts from The Patron Saint of Ugly. WVU’s own Reneé Nicholson also read poems from her new collection Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center. Although illness prevented David Hassler from attending, the wonderful Ethel Morgan Smith stepped in to read intriguing and hilarious excerpts from her book Reflections of the Other: Being Black in Germany. Other readings included fiction from Mark Brazaitis and Natalie Sypolt, and poetry from James Harms.

Allison Joseph reads her poetry.

Mark Brazaitis kicked off the workshop on Thursday with his craft talk “Eye-Opening Openings,” in which he discussed how the beginning of a creative piece is a promise to the reader. Most importantly, Mark said, good work “has an identifiable tone,” one a successful opening conveys. Other craft talks included Jon Tribble’s advice on the ever daunting book-length poetry project, and Reneé Nicholson’s discussion on the importance of literary citizenship. Workshop participants were also provided an opportunity to ask publishing questions to a panel of workshop faculty, including PageSpring Publishing’s Lynn Bartels and Katherine Mathews.

Mark Brazaitis and WVU President Gordon Gee. President Gee stopped by to say a few words of praise for the workshop and writing.

The illustrious panel on publishing.

At Saturday night’s Open Mic reading, participants enjoyed food from Mother India while listening to each other share various poems, essays, and stories. WVU’s own Dominique Bruno kicked off the reading with a touching poem about her uncle peeling oranges, while workshop participant Dave Essinger had the room in stitches with his reading of The Cat in the Hat in the voice of Garrison Keillor. The participants ate, drank, and were quite merry. Sunday morning was filled with sweet goodbyes.

Dave Essinger and his infamous reading of The Cat in the Hat.

The participants say goodbye.

Many thanks go out to Mark Brazaitis, Reneé Nicholson, Natalie Sypolt, Dominique Bruno, Bonnie Thibodeau, Maggie Behringer, and Shaun Turner for their time and energy in making this workshop a success. For more information about the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop, click here.

We’re happy to pass along news of Kelly Moffett’s new book, A Thousand Wings, available through Amazon and Salmon Poetry. Kelly wrote this collection of poetry during retreats at a Trappist Monastery.

Poet Sarah Gorham has this to say of the collection: “Kelly Moffett believes the spirit lies in things–in landscape, air, water. Listen to this, from “Devotion”: “You have become both a wall and a parachute./ Just as lichen can be lichen but also holy food.” In her collection, A Thousand Wings, she leads us through a single day of reverent watching and listening, waiting for transformation, but remaining stubbornly human. Would that we all slowed down enough to want what she wants, “a more tangible space, like some thorny brush,/ I could stare into.” A lovely, aching book.”

Congratulations, Kelly! We look forward to reading.

by Rebecca Doverspike

Graduating MFAs read from their Theses and received thoughtful introductions and hoods from their Thesis Directors last Thursday. It was a wonderful celebration of their accomplishments as well as those (teachers, friends, family) who helped them achieve such growth as writers and people. Congratulations, MFAs! Enjoy photos from the reading below, courtesy of Melissa Ferrone, Jesse Kalvitis, and Xin Tian Koh:

Creative Writing Director Mary Ann Samyn delivering beautiful introductions.

Troy Copeland, nonfiction

Jessi Lewis, fiction

Christina Seymour, poetry

Sara Lucas, fiction

Jesse Kalvitis, nonfiction

Nathan Holmes, fiction

Rebecca Doverspike, nonfiction

by Rebecca Doverspike

For our Spring Formal Reading, we gathered in Colson 130 with a music theme and had a fun, relaxing time at the end of the semester. Thank you to Sadie Shorr-Parks for MCing with such a wonderful blend of humor and insight for each of her introductions. Thank you to Nathan Holmes for the fantastic poster and CD creation. Thanks to Jesse Kalvitis for remembering the key (!), as well as to all our readers and audience members. Enjoy the photos below, courtesy of Jesse Kalvitis!

Melissa Ferrone reading from a gorgeous essay titled “Beneath the Cedars.”

Mari Casey, reading a flirtatious scene from a short story.

Featured Reader Jessi Lewis reading from her newly completed thesis.

Maryann Hudak, illuminating her history with Beets.

Featured Reader Troy Copeland, reading from the middle of his newly completed thesis.

MC extraordinaire Sadie Shorr-parks dives into her own material for a spell.

Claire Fowler, reading wonderful, carefully crafted lines.

Poet Travis Mersing delivers the quiet atmosphere of his poetry.

Rebecca Doverspike shares her figure skating daydreams.

Featured Reader Nathan Holmes makes us laugh with his short story involving graffiti in a bathroom.

The audience listens pensively.

Poet Xin Tian delivers her eloquent, clear poems nearly memorized!

Faculty member, Kevin Oderman listens to students on a Friday evening.

Featured Reader Jesse Kalvitis holds our attention with a piece from her newly finished thesis.

Program CD Cover

Reading List.

Group Picture with Poster.

Readers!

by Rebecca Doverspike

The AWP Conference is a flurry of travel, bookfair, panels, connections, and the atmosphere a whole lot of writers in one space for a few condensed days can create. This year, WVU’s table was devoted entirely to The Cheat River Review. We gave away waves of magnets, showed our First Issue on tablets, and asked for submissions for our next issue due out soon, in April. In an effort to further engage passersby, we also asked folks to write a post-it response to the prompt, “I only cheat when I…” or “I cheat at…”. This sparked conversation about games, u-turns, grading, and, since we’re writers after all, the existential nature of truth.

When I asked for take-aways from those who went to AWP, poet Travis Mersing said he loved breathing in Seattle air. I, too, felt the most inspiration to write not from inside the conference center, but that moment after absorbing all that intellectual energy, stepping out into the air, into the city, into actual life. We especially loved the Pike Street Market. As Travis said, “hundreds of vendors with everything from fresh flowers, fresh food (the best Greek yogurt I’ve ever had!), to goods from India to Mexico.” He spent hours walking around.

Another poet, Jessica Guzman, had some take-aways from a Dean Young reading and a panel with Christina Garcia. At Dean Young’s reading, one of the audience members asked him if he believed in reincarnation and he replied, “I believe in recycling.” Jessica enjoyed this response because it brought that notion of lofty-poet down to earth (just as, I suppose, it brought a lofty idea down to earth). She also finds herself still contemplating something Young said: “One of the things poetry aspires to is to rival the body’s experience. So, it’s always in dialogue with the body.” Jessica and I smiled after an elevator ride when she told me the Christina Garcia quote that stood out to her most: “To surrender to a good cigar is to avoid time’s tyranny.” “Having grown up Cuban American,” Jessica added, “I just think it’s a good way of putting it.” I agreed.

Mary Ann Samyn also shared some insights from a group of panelists about Wallace Stevens. Here are a few of my favorite quote she shared:

Stanley Plumly:
The questions seem to be coming from the air.
Images are ideas with bodies.
Poems are images in search of a correspondence, or for a correspondent.
Nightingale is a not a bird for me, but the name of a bird.
Stevens has repetition at the level of silence.

Linda Greggerson:
The myths we inherent pass through many hands before they come to us.
The struggle is the key.

David Baker:
Stevens feels by thinking, and Roethke thinks by feeling—two approaches.
Stevens’ poems articulate obvious things said in not obvious ways.

Carl Phillips:
Blank verse is the physiology of walking.

Overall, it proved an abundant and rich time, from making professional connections with journals, attending off-site readings, to a lovely group dinner—a reprieve of both familiar and engaging conversation. Next year at AWP, we hope to present a panel about the Creative Writing Department’s community outreach programs, such as teaching poetry at Preston County Middle School and OLLI.

Xin Tian’s aesthetically pleasing array of Cheat River Review magnets, brochures, and pens.

AWP’s bookfair brings forth creative displays such as these pretty paper bouquets.

Editor-in-Chief Patric Nuttall describing Cheat River Review.

Rebecca, Jessica, and Travis working at the table.

I only cheat when I…

What do you cheat at?

Bookfair Aisles.

Patric and Jessica, working.

This is how the bookfair can begin to feel. . .

Seattle.

Market.

Poets, walking.

Xin Tian and Jessica enjoying the English Dept. dinner at The Yardhouse after a day of conferencing.

Poet travelers, wearied.

Poet travelers, renewed and ready to write on airplanes.

This semester, MFA students and Creative Writing Director Mary Ann Samyn paired with WVU’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, a self-directed organization of senior citizens, to workshop poems. We hope this pairing will continue for several semesters to come. Two MFA students share their experiences:

Christina Seymour, 3rd year, poet:

The WVU/Osher Lifelong Learning Institute writing classes provides current MFA students and local senior citizens a place to share work, suggestions, and relaxed, yet meaningful, conversation. Meeting at the Mountaineer Mall classroom location, and led by creative writing professor Mary Ann Samyn, our group was small and mighty.

Over the course of several weeks, our discussions included Japanese urns, celebratory language, vultures, Vietnam, an antique tintype’s imagined words, abuse, funerals, obesity, girlhood, political correctness, eroticism, and much more. These conversations sent me inward to consider such relevant topics as readership and gravity, at the critical time of making final edits to my thesis.

What felt most immediate and worthwhile about these workshops was our ability to relate, and our comfort in doing so. Critiques of our works were welcome invitations—the gifts of looking closely and caring. The OLLI classes reminded me most to treasure the exchange of writing as the social responsibility, the human connection, it is.

Morgan O’Grady, 2nd year, poet:

Each session was different, but always honest and helpful. The writing presented in the group touched on topics I see in our workshops, such as frustration or love. Their poems were moving and careful, and highlighted dandelions and even touched on the erotic. What can I say? I was certainly surprised!

I was inspired after working with OLLI workshop participants. Their ability to listen and give clear feedback was lovely. I enjoyed experiencing and talking about the work after first read. It gave a nice texture to the experience. This was a great opportunity for me to have an audience outside of the MFA program too.

In the future I hope the group expands to include more senior citizens and other MFA students. It can benefit everyone involved and help build a new niche in the community.

by Rebecca Doverspike

So far this semester we’ve had several wonderful readings. Karen Osborn read excerpts from Centerville, a novel published by WVU Press that centers on an explosion at a local drug store (an event that happened in Osborn’s childhood and that she further explored through writing). After her reading, a wonderful discussion took place as to how she balances creating suspense for the reader even while we already know the explosion will take place. Much the suspension created in the book happens through character development—going through each motion slowly, such that even though we now where it’s leading, we’re captivated by the details along the way. Osborn also talked about how writing is a way to try to understand or know a character, and she realized she couldn’t really know the person who started the explosion—that to think she could would be a kind of violation—and so his perspective in the book shows up as brief, italicized chapters in which mystery remains.

On Valentine’s Day, in the Robinson Reading Room, we had the pleasure of hearing Ethel Morgan Smith read from Reflections of the Other: Being Black in Germany and some entertaining short fiction. Mark Braizitis read from his novel Julia & Rodrigo as well as some poems. The reading drew to a close when faculty member Elissa Clay High gave each of the readers a jar of honey made from bees on her farm—a touching gesture that accompanied an even more touching speech about the importance of humanness, friendship, and connection between colleagues. She reminded us all of the need to see the value in one another and nurture those strengths.

We also heard from Tom Noyes, who read from Come by Here: A Novella and Stories. Here’s what novelist Darrell Spencer has to say about this collection: “Tom Noyes’ Come by Here: A Novella and Stories is a remarkable collection of narrative voices, of recalcitrant and uncomfortable souls trying to talk into existence the lives they want. But life, these talkers learn, is a stubborn thing. The novella, a brilliant one-(wo)man-band of a fiction, is emblematic of the collection in how it stitches together the past and present to reveal the phony, the fraudulent, the lie, but also in how it dazzles with its compassion for its motley coming-together of characters, who, despite their mismanaged lives, find redemption in Noyes’ prose.”

Please join us for the rest of the readings this Spring as the semester winds to a close!

On Wed. April 2nd, Diane Glancy (this year’s Native American Studies Elder-in-Residence) will give a reading in 202 Brooks Hall. There will be a welcoming reception at 7 p.m., with the reading to follow at 7:30.

On Mon. April 21st at 7:30 pm in Colson 130, there will be a reading from Calliope, the undergraduate run journal.

Stay tuned for the 418 Capstone Reading.

And Thurs. Feb. 24th marks the annual MFA reading in the Rhododendron Room at 7:30.

We hope to see you at these events!