by Rebecca Doverspike

Funded by Mr. and Mrs. Bolton and coordinated by Mary Ann Samyn, each semester MFA students teach creative writing to undergraduates in the dorms. Once a month, graduate students bring writing activities and prompts to the dormitories and offer enthusiasm and feedback to the writing those activities produce. To read about some of this material, visit the Bolton Workshop blog.

At the end of every semester, there’s a reading free and open to the public, for participants to share their work from the workshop. At this semester’s reading on Sunday, December 8th, while eating Mary Ann’s delicious cupcakes and fresh fruit, we heard each Bolton workshop leader describe their workshops and the students they worked with. We then listened to two brave students read their poetry. And, finally, special guest Jim Harms read from two of his most recent poetry books, After West and Comet Scar.

It was lovely to see such a diverse audience of professors, graduate students (some Bolton workshop leaders and others just there to listen), undergraduates, Resident Faculty Leaders from the dorms, and others. The audience actively listened—when Bolton students read their poems, I noticed several nods and “mm hmm”’s, and a “wow, that’s very good.” I felt glad that such work can reach a variety of ears. We were each there to celebrate writing, all of us in different stages of that pursuit.

Before Jim read us a few poems, he shared the epigram to After West by Walt Whitman: “Long having wander’d since, round the earth having wander’d, / Now I face home again, very pleas’d and joyous, / (But where is what I started for so long ago? / And why is it yet unfound?)” Jim said he feels like all literature is about journeying home and realizing you can never quite get there—that we write to find our way home and simultaneously realize it remains “unfound.” To me, that articulated the writing space quite well. Perhaps it isn’t just about the tension or sorrow in the “unfound,” but rather that the space between home and not comprises its own familiar place that one can become okay with, or maybe even love. As he read, I pictured the way writers exist in that space, somewhere on the edges of a thin blue-lit boundary (am I thinking of the stretch of light where sky meets water, or maybe the way light looks on mountains from a distance, or just a horizon and the way it shifts, daily?), learning the art of translation—translating life.

Photos courtesy of Morgan O’Grady:

Bolton workshop leaders Hannah McPherson and Christina Seymour talk about their semester working with students in Summitt Hall.

Caleb Milne, reading poetry with wonderful pacing, like going for a walk and actually noticing what’s happening, inside and out.

Mitchell Glazier, reading poetry. Christina Seymour says: “his writing is visceral, often offering an electric voice that is full of emotion and tension. You can tell there’s personality behind his writing.”

Poetry guest Jim Harms, reading, and conversing about, poetry.