R183. Sounds Through the Wall: Writing about Music and Musicians

Room 101, Western New England MFA Annex, Level 1
Thursday, February 27, 2014
12:00 pm to 1:15 pm

 

This panel brings together writers with experience writing about music and musicians to discuss the unique challenges encountered when representing something as visceral, immediate, and sensory as music in a literary medium. How can such attention to auditory experience enhance one’s storytelling, and how do these authors evoke music without relying on abstraction, cliched language, or assumed familiarity with certain songs?


Participants

Moderator:

Phong Nguyen is the author of Memory Sickness & Other Stories, and Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History. He is co-editor of Pleiades Press, for which he edited the book Nancy Hale: The Life and Work of a Lost American Master. He teaches creative writing at the University of Central Missouri.

A. Manette Ansay is the author of eight books, including Vinegar Hill, Blue Water, and, most recently, Good Things I Wish You, based on the life of pianist Clara Schumann and her friendship with Johannes Brahms. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Miami.

Will Boast is the author of the story collection Power Ballads and a forthcoming memoir, The Pantomime Horse. He has received fellowships from Stanford University and the University of East Anglia and has taught at Stanford, the University of San Francisco, and San Francisco State University.

Constance Squires is the author of the novel Along the Watchtower, for which she received the Oklahoma Book Award. Short fiction has appeared in the Atlantic monthly, the Village Voice, This Land, the Dublin Quarterly, and Ginkgo Tree Review. She teaches fiction writing at the University of Central Oklahoma.

Tom Williams

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