24 Mar

Poet Mary Moore shows us the light

Andrea | March 24th, 2017
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Poet Mary Moore spoke of light, endurance, dysfunctional families, and, of course, poetry during her reading in Colson Hall on Monday, March 20th. She read from her most recent books, Flicker (Broadkill River Press, 2016) and Eating the Light (Sable Books 2016).

Before reading, Moore spoke of poetry as a process of thought, a way to understand. “Poetry is the insight,” she said. She first read from Eating the Light, beginning with a poem about the old battleship, the HMS Victory. Other poems she read include “Colonizing Eyes,” “Woman Seated on Stairs,” and “At Second Sight,” which explored the Bay Area and described San Francisco as “squid-bodied.”

She also read from Flicker and insightfully described a flickering light as an illustration of both endurance and loss. These poems included several about family; Moore joked that most poets seem to come from dysfunctional ones. The reading concluded with two new poems not included in previous collections.

Moore’s poetry has been published recently in Georgia Review, Poem/Memoir/Story, Birmingham Poetry Review, One, Cider Press Review, McNeese Review, Canary, and Coal Hill Review. She has published a previous full-length collection, The Book of Snow. Her work is also featured in the recently released anthology of West Virginia writers, Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods (WVU Press, 2017). She previously taught poetry, Shakespeare, and writing at Marshall University.

6 Feb

Alumni Round-up

Andrea | February 6th, 2017

Here’s the latest from MFA and Creative Writing program alumni:

Keegan Lester, who graduated from the creative writing program, will launch his book, this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all i had, so i drew it here in Morgantown at 123 Pleasant St. on Feb 18th at 6pm.

MFA alumni Melissa Ferrone (2016) and Kelly Sundberg (2012) have received a Pushcart nomination for their essay, “I was Raped/I was Battered,” which appeared in Guernica.

Shaun Turner, who received his MFA in 2016, has launched an online poetry journal: Fire Poetry is now open for tip jar submissions!

Rebecca Thomas (2013) has received a Pushcart nomination for her story “Surviving the Postseason,” which first appeared in Fifth Wednesday.

Congratulations to all our alumni on their many achievements and we hope to see them at AWP. We will be at Booth 436, so come by and say hello!

29 Nov
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In his Q&A session on Thursday morning, November 17, poet and novelist Alan Michael Parker, or AMP or Amp, and sometimes Parker, claimed to be a compulsive liar, which is why fiction and poetry suit him. If he is to be believed, after a promising early start, with a handful of high profile publications such as The New Yorker, AMP’s career took an always-the-bridesmaid-never-the-bride turn: his first book was a finalist for twenty-five major prizes over ten years, but was never the winner. This was the “cold comfort” portion of his career—several of the runner-up letters used that exact phrase, such that is partner, the visual artist Felicia von Bork (http://www.feliciavanbork.com/), nicknamed him C.C.

Today though, AMP is the author of eight books of poetry and three novels, with more in the works. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, the Kenyon Review, and Paris Review, among many, many others. He was included in the Best American Poetry anthologies in both 2011 and 2015 and is the recipient of three Pushcart prizes as well as the 2012 North Carolina Book Award and the 2013 and 2014 Randall Jarrell Poetry Awards. He is the Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English at Davidson College, and he teaches in the University of Tampa’s low-residency MFA program.

His 2016 collection, The Ladder, from Tupelo Press (https://www.tupelopress.org/product/the-ladder/), shines with his characteristic humor and wit, serious content “spun around hairpin comedic moves.” The poems are immediate and in the moment. He demonstrates that even if you are not the kind of person who walks around singing, the work of poetry and life—and even dying—is to be open and aware; it is to be approached with humility, measures of both hope and doubt, and, above all, tenderness and a kind of love.

From “Springtime in Tampa”:

I wish you were here:
hotel sex is the best.

Instead, alone in my room,
I get naked once the luggage arrives,
naked to unpack, to order fish tacos,
to call my octogenarian dad,

to email my destable old friend
who refuses to be happy.
I get naked to see the city from on high:
I put on my invisible suit made of love,

and in your honor I do
naked jumping jacks on the balcony.

AMP does not call himself a formal poet, but a formalist, which can be heard in his obsessiveness. “I wrote a lot of list poems until I was Buzzfed out of that particular genre,” he said during his reading on Thursday night in the Robinson Reading Room, referring to the form frequented in his 2012 collection Long Division (https://www.tupelopress.org/product/long-division/). His partner calls him a tuning fork, which he finds an apt description: “The more I do my job, the more I become that [a tuning fork]—vibrating in relationship to the world.” And he does vibrate, with an eagerness and intensity to learn about the people and the place around him, to share ideas and reading lists—hearing what other people are reading and getting recommendations is one of his favorite parts about giving readings—and to continue the conversation about poetry, literature, our institutions, etc. and the role these occupy in society in this particular cultural moment. As a writer, he feels it is is his job to be awake, to notice, to see and figure out how to process being in the world. Teaching, then, fits naturally into this approach to life, and he seems a natural teacher. Teaching helps him to articulate things he didn’t think he knew and allows him to test ideas in the air, to see what works, changing the relationship to the material. And indeed, his answers to questions during the reading demonstrated his working out of things on the spot: each answer was accompanied with several “or” statements, alternate answers, all of them building and playing off of each other, a keen mind at work.

6 Nov

New York Times best-selling author Beth Macy has just published a book twenty-five years in the making. On Monday, October 24th, Macy spoke at WVU’s Mountainlair about her new book, Truevine, and the challenges and joys of researching and telling this story.

Truevine

Truevine is a non-fiction account of two albino African-American brothers who were kidnapped and sold to the circus in the Jim Crow South. Macy was able to forge a connection with their granddaughter, Nancy, gaining a toe-hold in the community that held the story of the Muse brothers. As she traveled around the Roanoke area, speaking to family and community members, she realized the challenge she faced of tracking a family history when that family was illiterate. This spurred her forward. She drove people she met around the neighborhood to jog their memories; she Googled for more information in the middle of the night; she hired analysts to dissect the few photos she had for additional clues to put the story together.

Slowly, the book emerged, and she began to realize the true themes revolved around Jim Crow and the indignities it placed on black Americans. It was also about this place, Truevine, VA. She read an excerpt that described the town, which ended with this line from a resident she interviewed: “Only in a place like Truevine could a kidnapping seem almost like an opportunity.”

Macy ended her presentation by sharing audio of Willie Muse, one of the brothers, singing. She did this, she said, in order to give him the last word in his own story.

29 Oct

Rooftop Reading 2016

Andrea | October 29th, 2016
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The annual fall reading, sponsored by the Council of Writers, is one that MFAs look forward to each year. During this reading, they get to hear each other’s work across genres and across years.

The evening was unseasonably warm and the rain held off for the event which was held on the rooftop restaurant atop the famed, possibly haunted, Morgantown Hotel. COW President Meredith Jeffers welcomed students, professors, and guests, and proceeded to hand the mic off to third-year students. After readings by Whit Arnold, Kelsey Liebenson-Morse, Sarah Munroe, Andrea Ruggirello, and Megan Fahey, second-year students were invited to read. Natalie Homer, Bryce Berkowitz, Meredith Jeffers, and Maggie Montague entertained the crowd with lively poetry and prose about things such as baby teeth, mothers, and home. We were delighted that many first-year students took the opportunity to read as well, including Jacob Block, Evan Kertman, Heather Myers, and Thomas Martin.

Afterwards, students and guests were able to mingle, enjoy food and drinks, and congratulate each other on a reading well done.

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First and second year MFA students enjoying a lovely evening and the great view of Morgantown.
20 Oct
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On Monday, October 10th, Valerie Boyd, the 2016 Virginia Butts Sturm Writer-in-Residence, spoke about her writing and research process to a room of eager listeners in WVU’s Robinson Reading Room.

Boyd is the author of Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston and the forthcoming Spirits in the Dark: The Untold Story of Black Women in Hollywood. She spent the majority of the talk sharing her experience working on Wrapped in Rainbows in Sarasota, Florida, where Hurston wrote most of her books. Boyd read the opening pages of the book, telling the story of Hurston as a young child who wanted a horse so badly, she imagined one. Boyd made her own dreams a reality too when she embarked upon the journey of writing Wrapped in Rainbows after a previous biographer, Robert E. Hemenway, said at a festival that Hurston’s story needed to be written by a black woman.

While working on this book, Boyd had the opportunity to meet Alice Walker who agreed to blurb the Hurston biography. She then asked Boyd to work with her on her own project, compiling and editing Walker’s journals into a book which will be published next year entitled Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker. Boyd spoke with unabashed joy of the experience of wading through Walker’s journals. She read everything from Walker’s grocery lists to the handwritten opening to The Color Purple. When she asked Walker about depicting the darker moments of her life, Walker said, “A flawed humanity is the only kind of humanity I believe in.”

Boyd concluded the talk with a Q&A covering topics ranging from her note-taking process to her view on womanism and Black Lives Matter. She closed by returning again to the archives, telling us that it was there she learned what she wants to write about – simply, life, through other people’s eyes.

The Virginia Butts Sturm Writer-in-Residence leads a week-long workshop with selected graduate English students. The students selected for 2016 were:

Whit Arnold
Meredith Jeffers
Ryan Kalis
Kelsey Liebenson-Morse
Kayla McCormick
Maggie Montague
Katherine Saunders
Emilie Shumway
Sarah Jordan Stout

Congratulations!

13 Oct
Heather Hartley

Poet Heather Hartley returned to her alma mater Wednesday, October 5th, to read from her new collection, Adult Swim, and her 2010 collection, Knock Knock. She was introduced by first-year MFA student Jacob Block, who spoke of the humor and heart in her work.

Hartley grew up in Charleston, WV, and currently resides in Paris where she is Paris Editor for Tin House magazine. Her poetry took those of us in the room on a world tour from the Netherlands to Naples and, of course, to Paris. The poems read covered topics such as tennis shoes, drinking by a pool, loneliness in a foreign place, and even, in her final poem, “Syrenka,” pretending to be a mermaid during a job interview.

After the reading, Hartley participated in a lively Q&A session during which she advised the audience to keep a notebook with them at all times and discussed writing about the mundane. When asked, she listed her influences as Sylvia Plath, Dr. Seuss, and Baudelaire. An audience member noted that what she read aloud was not always precisely what was published in her book. She replied that editing is an ongoing process and described what she referred to as a “zut alors!” moment, when she realizes the poem is not done when she thought it was.

A line from Hartley’s poem, “Everything Tastes Better with Bacon” urges the reader to “take this beauty, take it.” We gladly took in the beauty Heather Hartley brought to WVU Wednesday night.

6 Oct
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Photo: Kelsey Englert

On Thursday, September 22, Alysia Burton Steele visited WVU’s Media Innovation Center to give a guest lecture about the writing process for her latest book, Delta Jewels: In Search of My Grandmother’s Wisdom. Burton Steele, an award-winning photojournalist and author and a professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi, was introduced by Professor Glenn Taylor who said, “I want to know sometimes where are the great listeners?...Tonight, one of them is in West Virginia.”

Burton Steele began her talk with the importance of listening when preserving oral storytelling. She said that years after her grandmother died, she desired to hear her voice and her story. She cited this as her inspiration to interview and photograph African American women of her grandmother’s generation who lived in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era.

The key to her research, Burton Steele said, was being able to really listen and hear the stories the women were trying to tell. She didn’t prepare interview questions. Rather, she tried to play off what she referred to as the “vibe” each woman gave her. She cited the ability to listen well and earn the women’s trust as necessities to successfully playing the role of oral historian.

At the end of her research, she’d driven 6,000 miles to interview 54 women. While it began as a personal project to better understand what her grandmother’s life may have been like, Burton Steele plans to develop her research into several books. She told the crowd that, as a writer, it’s important to trust your instincts about what a project can become.

Burton Steele said the research and writing of Delta Jewels has inspired her next book. She plans to interview those who picked cotton in the South because while interviewing the 54 women, so many of them and their family members wanted to share their cotton stories.

To Burton Steele, the success of the project goes beyond her book’s publication. On a personal level, assuming the role of oral historian allowed her to add 54 women and their families to her life while helping to preserve their stories.

The event was co-sponsored by the Department of English, the Department of History, and WVU’s Reed College of Media.

1 Oct

Poet and winner of the 2016 Slope Editions Book Prize Keegan Lester writes about his special connection to WVU, his new book, this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it’s all i had so i drew it, and the moment he almost gave up on writing.

Keegan Lester

Photo Credit: www.KeeganLester.com

This summer, about a week after I got off the the Travelin’ Appalachians Revue Tour, I was sitting on a Mega Bus headed to NYC, and at some point on that nine hour trip I made up my mind that I was done. I was done with touring and trying to write professionally. I was done trying to get a book published. I was 29 and felt it. I had only slept in a real bed once in about three months. I decided to move home to California from NYC. I decided I’d failed and figured I’d never be able to get my book published.

It was a strange time.

I had been mulling it over the weeks surrounding that trip, and it was this heavy weight on my shoulders that no one knew about, except for two people in my family and my girlfriend. Each night on that tour I went out on stage as if it was the last time.

The day after I got back to NYC, my girlfriend and I went out and had the most somber happy hour margaritas ever. We went home, and sang songs because singing songs always helps. After singing, I checked my email as I do thousands of times a day, and I saw an email from Slope Editions. I read Mary Ruefle had selected my manuscript this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it’s all i had, so i drew it, for the 2016 Slope Editions Book Prize. And believe me, no one was more shocked than me.

I almost passed out. I danced pretty hard. I yelled a bunch. And I only write this now, because in the age of social media I think people often don’t realize how hard it is out there, even when you are getting published in top tier journals and are touring the country. Choosing to dedicate your life to the writing vocation will ensure you a life of self doubt, but sometimes it works out fine.

So persevere. You have time.

Keegan Lester Sign

Photo Credit: www.KeeganLester.com

My connection to WVU goes way back. Everyone on my dad’s side of the family went to WVU and even my great grandma on my mom’s side went there too. Morgantown is where the majority of my father’s family still live today. Even though I grew up in Huntington Beach, California, Morgantown was my home away from home where I’d often spend summers and winter vacations and usually attend two or three football games a year. It’s a place where I’ve always felt most free and most creative.

I was wrangled into the undergraduate creative writing program at the end of my sophomore year, per the suggestion of Renee Nicholson and Gail Adams, and I never looked back.

There was so much support and such a terrific cast of writers and mentors, and I was always surrounded by wonderful people during my time in Morgantown. Renee and Natalie Sypolt were both important and influential mentors for me, and I must credit Mary Ann Samyn for teaching me the building blocks for every poem I’ve ever written. Without Mary Ann, none of this would have been possible. I was the editor-in-chief of Calliope my senior year, which was an incredible honor and later led to me co-founding Souvenir Lit, the online lit journal I co-curate today.

Keegan Lester Book

Photo Credit: www.KeeganLester.com

The majority of the poems in the collection focus on figuring out where I come from, with regards to physical, spiritual and mental landscapes. I always thought I was more like my dad, but over the last couple years I’ve realized that I’m much more like my mother and through the exploration of our physical and mental issues including depression and autoimmune disorders, I’ve learned we share a bond and a closeness I never realized before. The more I investigated my mother, the more I came to understand myself, and the investigation of our physical and mental spheres became a kind of road map that helped me see the world, and understand myself more clearly. It is also comforting to know that there is the other person going through the same things as you, and you have that person to talk to and share and scheme with.

At this moment I’m selling my book at a pre-order discount, and Slope Editions is graciously letting me keep the profits for tour expenses. So, if you buy a book now, from me, you are helping support the continuation of my touring this winter, which means all of my gratitude will undoubtedly cascade upon you. If you buy my book pre-order now and want to pick it up at AWP 2017 in DC or in Morgantown, WV at my book launch party which will take place Feb 18th at 123 Pleasant St., I will take an extra $2 of the price of the book.

You can preorder the collection on my website by clicking here.

Some early praise:
Mary Ruefle: “Falling in love while losing a loved one and watching the war news on TV? Life is difficult, and the poems in this marvelous collection ask a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human? Each poem supplies part of the answer—to go looking, to make mistakes, to be confused, to be wounded, to keep moving toward a new life. “The expression of our faces when we almost get to where we are going”—that is the expression we have while reading this book, which has the pace of an intense, anticipated journey, one that acknowledges that language is a problem, that art, science, and history are problems, but nonetheless many disparate lives, both past and present, somehow meld into one small life lived, and when that life speaks—”mouth deliver us to the present”—we sit up and listen, for the experience of reading has handed us a strange joy.”

Scott McClanahan: “Keegan Lester is one of the best young poets around. Tender and wild, this shouldn’t be beautiful/but it was/and it was all i had/so i drew it pops and bleeds with poems full of mothers and ghosts,time machines and asshole poets. This a book that knows it’s a hell of a lot better to write about Jenny Lewis or Abelard or a cousin who drops acid than something that doesn’t belong to you. It’s a book full of magic tricks and walking forward. Open it up and see. Don’t worry. It’s good to be free.”

Congratulations, Keegan! Keegan’s collection will launch right here in Morgantown on February 18th at 123 Pleasant.

26 Sep

Hungry Hungry Poets

Andrea | September 26th, 2016

The 12th Annual Hungry Poets Night took place at the Blue Moose Cafe this Saturday, September 24th. Created in honor of Gabe Friedberg, the event showcases emerging local talent by asking poets under 30 to submit their best work. Eleven finalists were chosen and they performed their pieces to a packed cafe. Along with the finalists, “less-hungry” poets read their work, including English Department Chair Jim Harms, West Virginia Poet Laureate Marc Harshman, and local poets Michael Blumenthal and Andi Stout. The poetry was interspersed with musical performances and several tributes to Gabe.

The WVU Creative Writing program was proud to have many graduate and undergraduate representatives read at the event. Congratulations to the winners and finalists!

1st place: Heather Myers, “Kairos” (1st year, MFA Poetry)
2nd place: Natalie Homer, “Liquor Outlet” (2nd year, MFA Poetry)
3rd place: Evan Kertman, “The Hunting” (1st year, MFA Poetry)

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Heather Myers reading her winning poem, “Kairos.” Photo Credit: Lauren Milici

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