Poetry Workshop Offered this Fall

New York State Writers Institute Writing Fellow Rebecca Wolff, editor of FENCE magazine, will conduct an intermediate to advanced poetry workshop during the Fall 2010 semester. The workshop will give students opportunities to develop and revise poems; emphasis will be on taking each poem on its own terms, and some work will be done to determine those terms. This work will include presentation to and discussion with the group of influences and interests vis à vis poetic lineage.

The workshop is scheduled for eight Monday nights (September 20, 27, October 4, 11, 18, November 1, 8, 15) from 6 to 8:30 p.m. The class will take place on the University at Albany’s uptown campus. The workshop is limited to ten writers and is open to UAlbany English graduate students as well as members of the general community.

Admission is based on the submission of writing samples. To be considered, submit manuscripts to the Writers Institute according to the guidelines listed on our website. The application deadline is Wednesday, August 25, 2010.

For more information contact the Writers Institute at writers@uamail.albany.edu.

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Summer Readings at Skidmore

The New York State Writers Institute is proud to announce the reading schedule of the Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore University in Saratoga. All events, apart from the opening event with former U. S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, take place in Palamountain Hall. For directions to Skidmore, click here. Call (518) 580-5599 for more information. All events are free and open to the public.

SUMMER PUBLIC READING LIST 2010

An Evening of Poetry and Jazz Robert Pinsky (former US Poet Laureate) with Skidmore Jazz Institute faculty members June 28, 8:00 pm Gannett Auditorium

Fiction and Poetry Reading, Jim Shepard (Like You’d Understand, Anyway) and Mark Strand (Pulitzer Prize, Poetry) June 29, 8:00 pm Davis Auditorium in Palamountain Hall

Fiction and Poetry Reading, Joseph O’Neill (novelist, Netherland, 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction) and Frank Bidart (poet, Desire) June 30, 8:00 pm Davis Auditorium in Palamountain Hall

Poetry and Fiction Reading, Charles Simic (Former U. S. Poet-Laureate, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet) and Lydia Davis (author, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis) July 1, 8:00 pm Davis Auditorium in Palamountain Hall

Poetry and Fiction Reading, Carolyn Forché (winner, Lamont Poetry Prize; author, The Angel of History) and Elizabeth Benedict (novelist, Almost) July 2, 8:00 pm Davis Auditorium in Palamountain Hall

Fiction Reading, Francine Prose (novelist, A Changed Man) and Victoria Redel (author, The Border of Truth) July 5, 8:00 pm Davis Auditorium in Palamountain Hall

Fiction and Poetry Reading, Allan Gurganus (author, White People) and Franz Wright (Pulitzer Prize, Poetry) July 6, 8:00 pm Davis Auditorium in Palamountain Hall

Fiction and Poetry Reading, William Kennedy (Pulitzer Prize, Ironweed; Roscoe) and April Bernard (poet, Romanticism), July 7, 8:00 pm Davis Auditorium in Palamountain Hall

Fiction and Poetry Reading, Caryl Phillips (novelist, A Distant Shore, The Nature of Blood) and Campbell McGrath (poet, American Noise) July 8, 8:00 pm Davis Auditorium in Palamountain Hall

Fiction Reading Phillip Lopate (author, Waterfront) and Claire Messud (author, The Emperor’s Children), July 9, 8:00 pm Davis Auditorium in Palamountain Hall

Poetry and Fiction Reading, Richard Howard (Pulitzer Prize, Poetry, Talking Cures) and Danzy Senna (author, Caucasia) July 12, 8:00 pm Davis Auditorium in Palamountain Hall

Fiction and Poetry Reading, Ann Beattie (novelist, Love Always) and Honor Moore (author, Red Shoes, The Bishop’s Daughter) July 13, 8:00 pm Davis Auditorium in Palamountain Hall

Fiction and Poetry Reading, Russell Banks (novelist, The Darling) and Chase Twichell (poet, Dog Language) July 14, 8:00 pm Davis Auditorium in Palamountain Hall

Fiction Reading, Joyce Carol Oates (National Book Award, them; We Were The Mulvaneys) July 15, 8:00 pm Gannett Auditorium

Fiction and Poetry Reading, Mary Gaitskill (author, Veronica) and Tom Healy (poet, What the Right Hand Knows) July 16, 8:00 pm Davis Auditorium in Palamountain Hall

Fiction and Poetry Reading, Amy Hempel (fiction writer, The Dog of the Marriage) and Henri Cole (poet, Middle Earth) July 19, 8:00 pm Davis Auditorium in Palamountain Hall

Fiction and Poetry Reading, Rick Moody (fiction writer, Demonology) and Peg Boyers (poet, Honey with Tobacco, Hard Bread) July 20, 8:00 pm Davis Auditorium in Palamountain Hall

"In Conversation: What We Write About When We Write 'Creative' Non-Fiction" with Geoffrey O’Brien (The Fall of the House of Walworth) and James Miller (Democracy is in the Streets) July 21, 8:00 pm Davis Auditorium in Palamountain Hall

Fiction and Poetry Reading, Jayne Anne Phillips (author Termite & Lark, Fast Lane) and Mary Kinzie (poet, Summers of Vietnam) July 22, 8:00 pm Davis Auditorium in Palamountain Hall

Fiction and Poetry Reading, Howard Norman (novelist, The Bird Artist) and Lloyd Schwartz (Pulitzer Prize, Criticism; author, Cairo Traffic) July 23, 8:00 pm Davis Auditorium in Palamountain Hall

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Chang-Rae Lee on Tavis Smiley

Chang-Rae Lee talks about writing, the self, and the relationship between his father's experiences during the Korean War and the events of his harrowing new novel, The Surrendered (2010), on Tavis Smiley last week, March 18, 2010.

"In some ways, this book is a response to all the silence that I had met about the Korean War, both from my family and from a lot of people. Most people who are inside that kind of trauma, inside that kind of conflict, never want to talk about it. So for the purposes of the book, of course, I turn that inside-out. I take that silence and completely peel away every layer of anguish and scarring."

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Nobody Wanted Me Respectable

Jules Feiffer talks about his inability to become a mainstream hack in a 2009 interview with Bookslut.com:

"There was no way of doing what I was doing in the mainstream. The mainstream was not interested in anyone with my opinions and certainly anyone working in the form I did. No one was working in the form I was working in at that time except me. I made up that form to fit the direction I was moving in. "

"I didn’t know what I was doing. I knew what I had to do. I knew I needed an outlet for my political rage and I knew that in this time -- but it’s true of any time -- in this particular time of suppression, I had to be entertaining. I had to be funny. It couldn’t be a polemic. It couldn’t be, as one sees in alternative forms today, confessional moralizing. It had to in a sense be disguised as something else in order to make the point I wanted to make and also fit the talents that I had begun to learn at Will Eisner’s."

"So at the start -- and “Munro” was the start -- I started fooling with a form which was essentially narrative and long, and such things generally weren’t published. And it told what were considered subversive stories at the time if someone really got the point. And so I knew I was entering foolishly in terms of making a living, or in terms of a potential career, this field with no outlets at all. There was no books publisher, there were no comics publishers. There were no newspapers. And I tried all over. By the time I was trying this I had tried the more conventional routes. I had tried very hard to be a hack. I had tried very hard to have a traditional career. No one was interested in me doing that. When I went for broke I wasn’t risking anything. Nobody wanted me. Nobody wanted me respectable. "

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Rediscovering Djuna Barnes (1892-1982)

A "rediscovered" short play by Djuna Barnes, Kurzy of the Sea (1920), will be featured as part of the upcoming Authors Theatre program, "Women Playwrights of the Early 20th Century," on March 11, 2010.

Barnes's work in general is currently a subject of rediscovery by readers, writers and scholars. New editions of Nightwood (1936), The Book of Repulsive Women (1915), The Antiphon (1958), and other works have appeared in recent years.

Here is an appreciation in the Guardian (UK) of Nightwood by major avant-gardist Jeanette Winterson, who wrote the foreword to the new 2006 edition of Nightwood (which also retains the original foreword by T. S. Eliot).

"Certain texts work in homeopathic dilutions; that is, nano-amounts effect significant change over long periods of time. Djuna Barnes's Nightwood is not much more than a couple of hundred pages long, and more people have heard about it than have read it. Reading it is mainly the preserve of academics and students. Others have a vague sense that it is a modernist text, that TS Eliot adored it, that Dylan Thomas called it "one of the three major prose works by a woman" (accept the compliment to Barnes, ignore the insult directed elsewhere), that the work is an important milestone on any map of gay literature - even though, like all the best books, its power makes a nonsense of any categorisation, especially of gender or sexuality."

"Nightwood is itself. It is its own created world, exotic and strange, and reading it is like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass. You have taken in more than you know, and it will go on doing its work. From now on, a part of you is pearl-lined." Read more....

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The Frenchest of All Our Fiction Writers

Novelist Lydia Millet presents the argument that Lydia Davis is the "Frenchest of all our fiction writers" in a review of the Collected Stories that appeared recently in the Toronto Globe and Mail:

"She's a commander of white space, an expert at sly insinuation and the meticulous craftswoman of a self-deprecating introspection that always manages to seem more metaphysical than mundane. By “our” fiction writers, I mean not only those writing in English but the collective mass of all non-French writers; I mean any writers not native to France, to say nothing of all the actual French writers who are, in fact, less demonstrably French than Davis (herself born in Northampton, Mass.). "

See the full review.

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Lydia Davis: "A Deeply Satisfying Precision of Expression"

Chris Power in his Brief Survey of the Short Story, a running feature of the Guardian.co.uk Books Blog since October 2007, devotes his most recent, 24th entry to Lydia Davis:

"As well as exquisite similes... a deeply satisfying precision of expression is sustained throughout her work, and an arresting facility for capturing the circling, convoluted progressions and digressions of thought.... She elicits emotion; she generates suspense and engenders surprise, pleasure and revelation. She does all the things it is in a good writer's gift to do, but in ways that most writers don't think of."

Davis will speak about her new Collected Stories on March 4, 2010 as part of the Visiting Writers Series.

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