(Warren Wilson MFA Faculty and Alumni) Founded in 1976 by Ellen Bryant Voigt as the nation’s first low-residency program, the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College has counted some of the country’s finest poets and fiction writers among its faculty and graduates. Continuing a tradition started by the program at Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, NC—The Fastest Reading in the World—hour readers will be joined by other Warren Wilson MFA faculty and alumni in attendance to celebrate four decades of literary achievement.

Published Date: July 19, 2017

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:05):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2016 A W P conference in Los Angeles. The recording features Deborah Alberry, Dean Baer, Natalie Beil, Charles Baxter, Robin Black, Maryanne Baruch, Karen Brennan, Gabrielle, VOI Lon, Samantha Chang, Victoria Chang, Jenny Johnson, Ivonne, Jordan Rose McLarney, Matthew Osman, Megan Arru, Kristen Valdez, KU Aidid, Mary SBIs, Peter Turkey, Monica Yawn, and Del Yang. You will now hear Deborah Alberry provide introduction.

Speaker 2 (00:01:11):

Good afternoon everyone. We have a lot of readings to get through, so we're going to get started. My name is Deborah Alberry and I'm the director of the M F A program for writers at Warren Wilson College.

Speaker 2 (00:01:28):

In honor of our program's 40th anniversary, we're celebrating in the best possible way by providing you with a sampling from across the decades of the creative gifts of the fiction writers and poets, both faculty and alumni associated with Warren Wilson. We're proceeding in alphabetical order with the briefest of introductions true to form and I'm going to ask and here's going to be the hard part that you hold your applause until the very end of this 75 minutes because if you don't, we will run out of time and we don't want to leave off. Monica Yun and Dale Young, so let's begin. Dean Opis is the author of three novels most recently summer long. He teaches at Grinnell College and he's been on our faculty since 2009.

Speaker 3 (00:02:23):

Wonderful to be here to help represent this program, this community of writers that has changed my life and the life of many others in immeasurable ways. This is the opening of a novel that is in progress. The story I'm about to tell you is a story I lost control of the minute I made myself. Its protagonist and so before I begin to tell it to confess, it really, I want you to keep in mind that all of this, or at least my part in it, began in late September here in the Midwest. That part of autumn is a time of almost unspeakable beauty and deepening uncertain gloom stand under a shedding silver maple or a shag bark hickory. And what can you feel besides grief followed by an almost unbearable urge to quell it with whatever is available to you? This makes it the easiest time of the year to fall in love with the wrong person.

Speaker 3 (00:03:18):

This is why so many hearts get broken in the weakening yellow light. One is quite helpless about it. In all honesty, whatever one does or fails to do, one cannot be blamed. Chester Pines was my friend because I asked him to be one night and late autumn while he wandered home along a drainage ditch. I was in a small thicket of willow and I was waiting for him and when he was about five feet away from where I was standing, I jumped out of the bushes and yelled, boo. He didn't flinch. Not only that, but he didn't even move into any sort of defensive posture. Don't even, he said and looked down at me, Chester, I said, Chester Pines. He stopped, took the earbuds from his ears. You with the press? No man, I'm Springsteen Springsteen, Wallace Springsteen. He said, we had geometry together sophomore year.

Speaker 3 (00:04:13):

I said, he didn't look at me so much as over me, but there was nothing picturesque in the distance to look at where we lived. What do you want? He said, I want to be your friend. Don't you have any other friends? No, I said, which was the God's honest truth. I haven't had a real friend since seventh grade. I could hear the freight trains heading through the industrial corridor on the freeway and we could hear closer than the trains. The increasing wind losing all of its warmth as the night got darker in November near our bleak horizon. Me neither, he said. And then I could see that the world was opening in a way it hadn't opened to me in a long time. When Chester Pines finally grinned.

Speaker 2 (00:05:00):

Natalie b Brazil's debut novel Queen Sugar is currently being adapted by Ava DuVernay for Oprah of Winfrey's cable network. Natalie was a Holden scholar and graduated in 2007. Hello.

Speaker 4 (00:05:14):

I'll be reading just a short excerpt from the novel and it's always nice to be back with my Warren Wilson peeps. You make me feel like I'm coming back home. And so as they reach the second quadrant, Denton told Charlie to pull over when she did. Denton got out, knelt down at the field's edge and palmed a handful of dirt. This is what I was talking about last Friday. Denton said this, here's good LMI soil. You can tell by how it holds together. He pinched a bit of soil between his fingers and then put it in his mouth. Not too much clay, he said, but not too sandy. Now you Charlie knelt. She pinched a finger full of dirt and then raised it to her mouth, but then she hesitated thinking of all the creatures that had probably crawled or slithered over that spot. Go on Ms.

Speaker 4 (00:06:07):

Bolan, it ain't going to kill you. All that scribbling won't do you any good if you don't let this get inside you. It's the only way you're going to learn. Charlie guessed this was what Denton meant when he warned her that she'd have to do it his way. She looked at him again expecting his face to have darkened with impatience, but he only gave her an encouraging nod. Charlie put the dirt in her mouth and swallowed quickly. Well, Denton said, what did it tell you? Nothing. Charlie said, I didn't taste anything. I don't know what to look for. Do it over. Take your time. Charlie raised the dirt to her mouth again. She sniffed would smoke grass damp like a sidewalk. After it rained, she tasted grit. Fine is ground glass chocolate and what maybe ash, she closed her eyes as soil dissolved over her tongue and slowly, slowly, almost like a good wine, the soil began to tell its story.

Speaker 4 (00:07:06):

She tasted the muck and the peat and the years of composted leaves the branches and vines that had recently been plowed under and the faint sweetness. The cane left behind. She swallowed a moldy aftertaste. She knew what would stay on her tongue for the rest of the afternoon, and though she didn't yet know the terms to describe what she had experienced, she understood a little more clearly what Denton was trying to teach her. When she looked over at Denton again, he nodded. Approvingly then without another word, brushed the dirt from his knees and walked back to the car. Thanks.

Speaker 2 (00:07:41):

I knew you wouldn't be able to do this. Charles Baxter is the author of 11 works of, excuse me, 13 works of fiction poetry and craft essays he teaches at the University of Minnesota. He has taught at Warren Wilson for 29 years,

Speaker 5 (00:08:02):

Very honored to be here. He had once committed a murder. He was sure of it. The trouble was he couldn't remember whom he had murdered or how exactly he had gone about doing it. One morning he had awakened, bathed in sweat. His heart thumping like an engine about to seize up. Alma slept peacefully next to him breathing with delicate feminine snores. The outline of his victim pointedly clear in his dream, had now faded away to a distance from which he could not grasp it and retrieve it for proper inspection. How could you be a murderer if you couldn't remember the specifics of your crime and how had it occurred? The dream memory had not involved a gun but a knife almost infinitely sharp, sharper a surgeon's scalpel And despite the gaps in the narrative, Harold did remember how blood seemed to be spurting everywhere and the inner parts of the body exposed and the screaming.

Speaker 5 (00:09:08):

He remembered the screaming, a baritone scream, the rattling, gurgling outburst of a man in his last moments, but who had been his victim he couldn't remember. You don't expect retired bank loan officer to be a murderer. Here he was a virtuous person who had volunteered in soup kitchens who had helped raise two beautiful daughters, driven them to softball games, soccer games, attended their piano recitals and plays, helped them do their homework, walked them down the aisle at their wedding, paid everybody's college tuition, done everything right. He had all the qualifications to be labeled A good man.

Speaker 5 (00:09:51):

You Harold, a murderer Fiddlesticks, his wife said when he had told her his dreams, she laughed, you think you're a bad boy, you just wish. And she had given him an affectionate kiss on the cheek, but then in a bookstore idly paging through a collection of European and African aphorisms and fables, he had come upon a passage planted squarely in the middle of the page. In midlife, a man wakes up believing he has murdered someone. He cannot however remember who his victim was or what method he used to employ the killing. For years however, the man is weighed down by the memory of his crime, his guilt becomes intolerable and leads to his physical decline. On his deathbed, he is visited by the angel of God who tells him that his only victim was himself and that he has murdered his true self for the life that he actually has led.

Speaker 2 (00:10:54):

Robin Black is the author of two works of fiction and a just published work of nonfiction crash course essays from where Writing and Life collide. She graduated in 2005.

Speaker 2 (00:11:10):

It's just a huge honor to be here and I'll just say briefly, Warren Wilson saved my life, so it means a lot. I'm just going to read the opening of one of the very short essays in this book. This one's called My Default Man. My default man is a bit passive and he's a good guy. Solid or anyway, he seems to be though he's prone to sexual straying now and then, which argues against that first impression, but the guilt, it tears him up. He's late forties, early fifties, good looking in an aging athlete wearing glasses kind of way and he is married or he has been married but he screwed it up somehow or he has been married but his wife left him. For someone a little less dependable, a little more exciting because that occasional sexual indiscretion aside, he is dependable, arguably to the point of being dull.

Speaker 2 (00:12:04):

And he's a good father too to daughters, especially with whom he has that relationship where they know him a little better than he knows himself, which makes him appear to be sheepish in a lovable way. Daughters who say things to him like, oh dad, you poor old fool, because he's really just a big befuddled softie inside and he has a one syllable name, often one that involves a K, Jack, Hank Mike. He's kind of a big lunk is the truth, which also ends with a K and you can't help but like him even if you wish, he'd take a little more control of his life and there he is. Every time I sit down to write waiting for me, bill, Joe, Dick. If it weren't for the need to explain why anyone named Richard would choose to go by Dick, especially this guy who emphatically would not, he is there fully formed and ready to be kicked around bit by the women in his life even as he passively slips into a bed or two that he probably should avoid along the way.

Speaker 2 (00:13:07):

And I at my keyboard am dismayed to find him there because for all that he seems so passive, so close to bumbling at times. It turns out he is tyrannical with me, a fool for every other woman in his life. He is my master outsmarting me perpetually, insisting not so much on my attention as on my collusion in keeping him front and center in my work. He isn't my father. I should just get that out there and he isn't my husband nor either of my brothers. He isn't any man I know I have been dealing with him for many years at this point and believe me, I have tried to trace his origin and it isn't to be found in human form. So what is he other than an embarrassment and a foil all at once? My best guess is that he's a neurotic tick and he's a tool literally he is the tool to which I instinctively turn when I start writing and am in my most unintentional state of mind. He is the guy whose sole purpose in life is to pull the writing out from my inchoate creative being which he alone can do because something about him puts me in immediate touch with the wounds from which my fiction writing grows.

Speaker 2 (00:14:24):

Maryanne Bruce is the author of 11 works of poetry and nonfiction and is a recent winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award. She teaches at Purdue and she's been teaching with us since 1988.

Speaker 6 (00:14:44):

All I can say is Warren Wilson. What a great idea. Thank you Ellen.

Speaker 6 (00:14:56):

The art of poetry isn't sleep. Isn't the clocks steady one in one in one, those seconds eventually make an hour and morning passes into a thing it might not recognize by afternoon or you practice the ordinary art of shrinking strangers back to children who they could have been bangs straight across boys and girls the same. I blink kids into grownups too who they might be the exaggerated gesture, gestures. We do the weight on each word a warning kindly or just so full of ourselves we can't help it, but it's odd, not old or young male female this century or that it's simply visits this. This what? This art of suspension. Wait. If you've ever acted, you understand what it is standing in the wings, the dark murmur out there. Every dream for days, you nightmare that saying or not saying. Then wake to lights, the other pretenders on stage happy enough, bowing except it's not like that.

Speaker 6 (00:16:07):

This wish being small to make an emptiness, an occasion. The art of calling it down to wonder for the first time as I write it and elegant is good and story an edgy half uttered in fragments is good. Always that sense of the dead overhearing or simply voice, I never, not once in the world. Give me a sign, I'll pick it up. I'll pick up the thread, dally with it, sit in its coma, wait for its snooze in the little room off the nurse's station. Don't be maudlin says the garden. Don't be pretty, pretty, pretty and don't think whimsy unto irony disguises because it is a garden. You walk and walk and twilight now it's darker, half floats, a yellow still visible and high spiky things. There's a dove cut where nothing nests. There's an expanse orderlies blueprint, but flowers get wily. Only make believe they agree the best place to lean or to stand.

Speaker 6 (00:17:15):

It's not the sun. I can't decide anything. Can't decide begging bowl. Ask until asking is a stain. Every garden's a mess. Am I poised at an angle? Am I listening? A stillness so different than winter's. Lush and forgetful, though all the lost summers lie in it. Old photographs, children a century ago who never thought to leave, still busy fading into ceia, making houses in the yard out of porch chairs tipped over and sheets their worn shirts, their hair every which way someone loved them. She raised the camera but I don't, don't mean that it's the art of the makeshift almost house or how the children don't see her. So aren't dear yet.

Speaker 2 (00:18:18):

Go ahead. I give up. We're going to have to applaud each of them. We'll applaud everyone again at the end. Karen Brennan graduated from our program in 1979 and is the author of seven works of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. She's professor Emerita from the University of Utah. She's taught in our program since 1991. Well anyway, to Ellen, I'm reading a poem Easter at the place where my daughter is incarcerated, there are three types of dwellers. The drooler, their bony legs clacking beneath one of those inane mobile say and sist upon today a bunch of twirling bunnies and construction paper eggs instead of darting around like the over anxious lost eyes off somewhere, strain neck cords thick as stalks of celery. I will be there someday. A grizzly fantasy when we're supposed to imagine resurrecting, but persistent details rise up like vomit from some sight of horror.

Speaker 2 (00:19:27):

I keep close pink slippers. Someone has given me a little dusty and my old iPhone from 20 years ago. Earbud wires snaking gray lee, overnight nightgown, also gray and yeah, I'm drooling too. The screamers meanwhile commence to scream as I walk by, as if this particular presence had any power. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I mutter to a corridor of deaf ears. Who wouldn't hate to pass these sufferers? I imagine I'm Dante already beyond finding himself in the dark wood and into a circle of unfulfillment and rage. A a modest desires for sleep or food or would somebody please talk to me desire or once turned down the fucking music though there was none. Did I say three types? Only three. I don't know what I was thinking. Did I say incarcerated? That's her word actually. I prefer to think she is safely home, but who am I kidding?

Speaker 2 (00:20:35):

There are the ones who are so aggressively friendly that you find yourself rushing by rushing, rushing, rushing. They want to touch you or hold your hand. They want to kiss your hand and in the case of Rachel, she wants to kiss my lips and kiss my hands. She wants to hold me and introduce me and I say, please don't introduce me. What's wrong with me that I don't want to be introduced? Happy Easter. I've always liked the concept of the resurrection, the idea that up from the grave and into the clouds he went the fact that an angel rolled back a boulder on his behalf. I loved how things went from bad to good so dramatically, but today I am bitter in my very soul. It feels like thorns in there going every which way. I share the iced bunny cookie I bring to Rachel.

Speaker 2 (00:21:28):

I help her walk down a corridor holding a railing. I put all her earrings in a box. See, I say no one's stealing them. Thanks Gabrielle Calver, CSI's third book Rocket, fantastic is forthcoming from Persia. She teaches at U N C Chapel Hill. She's taught at Warren Wilson for a decade. Hi, it's wonderful to be here and a decade. It's been a great decade. It always feels like coming home. The first, the title of this poem is a line, a sentence from a short story by Grace Paley. I was popular in certain circles among the river rats and the leaves. For example. I was huge among the lichen and the waterfall couldn't get enough of me and the gravestones. I was hugely popular with the gravestones, also with the meat liquefying beneath I'd say to the ion birds, I'd say, are you an eagle? I can't see so well that made them laugh until we were screaming Eagle.

Speaker 2 (00:22:40):

Imagine the vultures love me so much they'd feed me the first morsel from their delicate talons, which is what I called them such delicate talons. They loved me so deeply. They'd visit in pears, one to feed me, one to cover my eyes with its velvety wings, which were heavy as theater curtains, which I was sure to remark on, why can't I see what I'm eating? I'd say, and the wings would pull me into the great bird's chest and I'd feel the nail inside my mouth. What pals I was with the scavengers and the dead things too. What pals as for the living the fox would not be outdone. We'd sit on the cliff's edge and watch the river like a movie and I'd say, I think last night and the fox would put his paw on top of mine and say, forget it. It's done. I mean we had fun. You haven't lived until a fox has whispered something. The ferns told him in your one good ear, I mean truly you have not lived. Lance Samantha Chang is the author of a collection of short fiction and two novels and the recipient of numerous fellowships. Sam directs the Iowa Writers Workshop. She joined our faculty 16 years ago.

Speaker 4 (00:24:20):

Thank you Ellen for creating this wonderful supportive community for all of us.

Speaker 4 (00:24:28):

That evening was mild. The sky had darkened to an indigo, blue, softly cloaking Ming and Sansan as they left the house and made their way to parent teacher night. The streets along the school block were lined with parked cars. The school treated conference night like a festive occasion with smiling administrators, welcoming visitors at the orange doors. Every window was lit and as she and Ming approached, San could see bright artwork and paper cutouts decorating the classroom walls. It was like a rural village. On festival night she thought of blackout curtains hiding from the enemy planes, the ceremonial cutouts, hanging limply from the beams inside silent New year, silent meals of the ceremonial foods, the expectation of disaster, like a long intake of breath. She slid her hand into the crook of Ming's arm. He strained with the wiry confidence that years in a foreign country had not hammered out of him and yet she noticed in the set of his jaw the change America had wrought. He had acquired the forbearance of reduced expectations. Still he said high standards for himself. He usually came home worn out. Ming San began. Sometimes I think about learning to use the car. Something is eating the Bach choy. Ming said The zucchini is untouched, but something is definitely wrong with the bok choy.

Speaker 4 (00:26:00):

The zucchini is enormous. She said dropping the subject, certainly the idea that she might learn to drive was something they had never discussed by letter. When she had been in Taipei and Ming Freshly arrived in Chicago, they had barely known each other. He had disclosed his modest salary, his plan to live in a smaller town and his desire for a wife, a child. He apologized for being so unromantic in her own letters. Sanson wrote about her own desire for a family. She outlined briefly how it had come to be that she was alone in the world, in that chaotic city frenetic with fellow refugees. After decades of war, only the wealthy or the experienced would venture out behind a wheel. But here in Iowa everybody did it. School teachers, high school girls, even the wives of technicians such as Ming and her observation of this had weakened a curiosity that would not be appeased on Saturday mornings. As Ming drove sans from the cleaners to the red owl and then to the bank, she observed the cars that passed counting the number of women at the wheel. She had counted as many as six in one morning and some of their cars were decorated with daisy stickers and colored ribbons. She peered into each open garage as often or not there were two cars. Thanks

Speaker 2 (00:27:22):

Victoria Chang's third book of poems. The boss was published by McSweeney's and won the Penn Center u s A literary award and the California book Award. She was a Holden scholar and graduated in 2005.

Speaker 4 (00:27:35):

Thank you. I'm so nervous. My poems are so sweaty and it's because Warren Wilson is such an amazing program and so rigorous and I think it brings out the best in every writer. I'll just read one poem.

Speaker 4 (00:27:52):

My father says, my father says the wrong things. I say the wrong things. My father thinks he is 42, not 69. My father was born in 1942. My father thinks his address is 1942. My father sits in a hospital. He thinks the year is 1942 that I'm 1942 years old that his knee is 1942. He thinks his name is 1942. He says he's in the hospital because of weight or maybe he means weight or lean. Maybe he means he leaned on the toilet he was fixing and fell down. He doesn't know where his nose is, but he knows. 1942. When I was 19, I wanted to be a doctor. In a few years I'll be 42 and I'll be afraid of doctors. I can no longer think of the right words to say. My words come out of my mouth twisted, turned in spirals like a dancer wrapping her leg around a pole.

Speaker 4 (00:28:41):

On some days the boss takes our 1942 and turns it into 24 91. On other days she turns it into 1429 and on the worst day she smiles at us and her smile looks like a nine turn on its side with the cat's tongue sticking out. When asked to close his eyes, my father points to the white stack of papers. When asked if his name is Adam, he points to the papers as if to say, ask the papers. Don't ask me. He no longer knows that a Chinese man from Taiwan can't possibly be named Adam or Bill or Bob or John or Gus. Maybe now he thinks a Chinese man from Taiwan can be a c e o, can be a boss in America. Maybe now he thinks his name is Adam. Maybe that is why he named me Victoria. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:29:31):

Jenny Johnson's debut collection of poems in full velvet is forthcoming from Sarah Band, a 2015 recipient of a Whiting award. She's recently been awarded a hotter fellowship at Princeton. Jenny graduated from Warren Wilson in 2011. I'm so grateful for this community, so I'm going to read a poem about community that's set in a dive bar and outer space. In the dream, I was alone in a dike bar. We'd traversed before or maybe it was in a way all our dives merging together suddenly as one intergalactic composite, one glitter spritzed black hole, one q stick burn down to a soft blue nub picture. An open cluster of stars managing to forever stabilize in space without a landlord scheming to shut the place down. Anyways, I was searching for someone there that we hadn't seen in years and what could have been sisters babes, the Lex, the pint, the palms or the E room, but the room had no end and no ceiling.

Speaker 2 (00:30:44):

Though I could see all of our friends or exes with elbows up or fingers interlocked on tabletops, zinging with boomerangs. Maybe the tables were spinning too. I can't be sure, but just as a trap that trips before hammering a mouse is not humane. The dream changed or the alarm that I carry in my breast pocket in my waking life was sounding because in the dream, three people on bar stools who were straight or closeted, but more importantly angry turned and the room dwindled like a sweater full of moths eating holes through wool or they were humans sure but not here to love. With jawlines set to throw epithets like darts that might stick or nick or flutter past as erratically as they were fired. You could say their hostility was a swirl nebulous as gas and dust diffuses the stress of body meticulously stores like how when I was shoved in grade school on the blacktop in my boy jeans, the teacher asked me if I had a strawberry because the wound was fresh as jam glistening like pulp does. After the skin of a fruit is peeled back clean with a knife. I was in the dream as open to the elements, yet I fired back and I didn't care who eyed me like warped metal to be pounded square. I said, do you realize where you are? And with one finger, I called our family forth and out of the strobe lights they came

Speaker 2 (00:32:40):

A van. Jordan is the author of four collections of poetry and his numerous prizes include the 2015 Lanin literary award. Van was a Holden scholar, graduated from our program in 1998. He has been on the Warren Wilson faculty for the past 12 years.

Speaker 5 (00:32:57):

I am just happy to be here. This is Blazing Saddles. What's so funny about racism is how the racists never get the joke in both settings. Racists stick out like count bases the orchestra in the middle of a prairie, just as awkward as he is elegant compared to the world around him. And if you still don't get it, imagine a chain gang with perfect pitch singing Cole Porters, I get a kick out of you to their overseer whose frustration swells. So for an authentic nigger work song, he and his crew demonstrate their darkest desires and breaking the song themselves. That camp town ladies sing this song, Doda Doda kicking up their heels in the dirt, tasting an old slave trick on their tongues, each syllable falling from their lips like a bowl of cotton funny to the naked eye, but consider the Native American who speaks Yiddish emerging from the dust of the old west reminding us of how we learned to comfort in making ourselves a little uncomfortable over time in the fossils of race.

Speaker 5 (00:34:02):

Jump cut black Bart, our hero enters town where danger awaits him, our hero who we hope to see beat up bad guys. And when the woman, even when the hero is black and the womanly van is German, one false move and the nigger gets it, yes, self-sacrifice holding his gun to his own head, but the unwitting white liberal save him from himself, which is their lives mission. You see what's so funny about racists is how they never get the joke because the joke always carries some truth. Notice how we can laugh and recognizing a sambo of our own design and our own likeness, a likeness we own. So we can laugh at the absurd pain of it all. This joke like aloe smoothed on a wound like a black man trying to do a job in a town where he is not wanted like a black man unzipping his pants in the old west for a white woman in a hotel room in the center of this town.

Speaker 5 (00:34:53):

Did I mention how he was just released from a chain game? Did I mention that she was an exotic dancer who slept with men for money, helping them hang their insecurities on a hook on the back of a hotel room door before entering? Careful with your laughter, one false move and nigger hair gets appropriated. That's not funny to you. Well, when they saw themselves on screen in their comedy, drama, romance in the theater's darkness, they laughed. They needed to see it projected on the white screen to get a good cathartic laugh from the tragedy of the 20th century. And it's okay to laugh at these ironies today because they're blown from a wind of past pain with the velocity of memory. You see, when the Jewish artist has suffered enough, he knows he can strike back with just a stroke of a black man stopping a German floozy who tries to snare him between her legs but gets hoisted by her own garder. Well, that's just some funny shiza. So please excuse all these humor wrapped in truth or as chiasmus ready or not. Stand back please and back away from all those stereotypes restraining you from stereotypes you aspire to as you deny self through elective surgery on your nose or lips. Excuse me please. As I rear back in laughter and excuse me, as I recall the 1970s and remember myself laughing Blo, black gut bursting songs of truth. Yeah, please excuse me folks as I whip this out.

Speaker 2 (00:36:23):

Rose McLarney is the author of two books of poetry. Most recently its day being gone, selected for the National Poetry series. She graduated in 2010 and now teaches at Auburn. So the poem I'm going to read, the feelings are a little more conflicted than my feelings about Warren Wilson, but I chose it. I love Warren Wilson because the program helped me find the work that I was supposed to do and make a life out of it and also make a lot of friends. It's been nice to see so many of you. I float when the river flooded. When I was a child, I boated around the fields and so it began my mythmaking. I recall that altered time foremost, I float transformative washes over the world. The time of evening when I can have a drink, being in love, the lyric wave of speaking, that's what I've turned out to live for though I know what's more worthy is the solid ground and those who stood on and worked it, my mother would've been chopping food. She'd grown in those fields while I was drifting over them. I was heading out beyond the sounds unintentionally but always made by cooking. Not a special bell, no lifting song. The economical and earthly summons.

Speaker 2 (00:38:05):

There must have been as every night the clunk of cast iron and a heavy meal. I was little help in preparing, but what struck me was the rarity. Watching a lost garden believes wafted. The rounds of fruit that had hung the ruined were buoyant, now broken by refraction, they changed to bobble. I wanted the flood was a costumer. A jeweler and the way the water cut ordinary sites that was appealing. Labor making, stone toss about weightless light. Matthew Osman is the author of Mezzanines in the forthcoming contradictions in the design. He graduated from our program in 2009 and is currently Keenan visiting professor at U N C Chapel Hill.

Speaker 7 (00:39:16):

Thanks Warren Wilson. As always, I'm grateful to be among you. This is a letter to Matthew Osman from the Roman Empire.

Speaker 7 (00:39:28):

Two or three mornings per week, I wake up and say, dang, I'm the Roman Empire. I'm the land where Jupiter swings as mighty marble columns. Check out these temples, check out these fine ass aqueducts. I've got the arch of Janus, the arch of Titus, the arch of Septimius Severus. What does one do with all these arches? Beats me, but two or three mornings per week, I wake up ready to conquer, ready to ride my chariot down the block again. Look at these golden rims. Look at this platinum sideboard gaze upon this diamond en crusted, crossbar and yoke the rest of the week. I just want to stay inside. I just want to read a book and go to bed. This happens, I reckon to everyone. You might not understand now, Matthew, but you will initially, you'll enter the world with a cry that soars like a bald eagle.

Speaker 7 (00:40:15):

The audience will applaud your first steps. You'll go to school and solve the conundrum of two plus two. You'll discover who Marcus Aelius is or was. You'll get a job smile for the cameras subjugate a couple promising territories. It'll be one victory lap after another, but before you know it, Visigoths scrabble the horizon and your garage needs a new roof. You press on, govern admirably mow the lawn, but your legions quibble in cater wall. Your boss calls on the weekends and some new God begins a campaign of turning water into whatever in the neighbor's yard. Suddenly you can't remember where you put your keys. Next, your pres have all been corrupted pillars, crack and molder. No one's been near the cossum in years.

Speaker 2 (00:41:10):

Megan O'Rourke is the author of a memoir in two collections of poetry. Megan graduated from Warren Wilson in 2005 and now teaches at N Y U in Princeton. Thanks. It's such a pleasure to be back among the Warren and Wilson community. It's just a special place that Ellen created a place that is a place of both rigor and play, which is hard to do and really extraordinary. This is a poem from my third book of poems, which will come out next spring. I wrote it during baseball season, so it's called unforced error, but that's really only the baseball. The only baseball in my poem. Unforced error. Once those long wet Vermont summers, no money, nothing to do but read books, swim in the river with men in their jean shorts, then play bingo outside the church celebrating when we won. Nothing seemed real to me and it was all very alive.

Speaker 2 (00:42:11):

It took that long to learn how wrong I was. Over the rim of the horizon, the sun burns heiddeger. Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one. The bones in us still marrow full the moon up there too, an arctic sorrow, I'm sorry, another scotch. Some nuts. I used to think pressing forward was the point of life endlessly forward, the snow falling, godly falling. I made a mistake. Now I have a will. It says, when I die, let me live. A white shirt, bare legs, bones beneath numbers on a board. A life can be a lucky streak or a dry spell or a happenstance. Yellow raspberries in July, sun, bitter plums, curtains and wind.

Speaker 2 (00:43:17):

Kirsten Valdez Quaid is the author of the Story Collection the Night of the Fiesta, which recently won the John Leonard Award from the N B C C. She'll begin teaching at Princeton this fall. She joined our faculty in January. What a joy to be part of this community. Thank you so much, Ellen. In so lada, the houses cluster by the river. There is no store, no train, no doctor. There is no longer a priest in the rectory behind the old mud church. Christ is here, but he is bleeding. Our lady is here, but she's weeping. No one has seen God or the devil in years. The prayers that are prayed and solada take the form of curses and spells and the house of Ignacio Vi Hill is an outdated atlas of the world. He sits hunched at the table learning those places, tracing those borders. The pigments in the book are faded.

Speaker 2 (00:44:12):

Sometimes he sends letters to himself but no one is fooled because they know that in Soledad the mail no longer comes or goes. Ignacio v Hill turns the page and sucks his bleeding gums Virginia Zal is young and lovely, but her loveliness is wasted in soda. The men are all too old and sad to court her. The women are too old and sad to court her as well and it would not have occurred to them anyway. At Twilight, she braids pink ribbons into her hair, pinches her cheeks and walks through the dusty street. She walks as though she's being watched. Sometimes Virginia Zal walks into other people's houses and if they are asleep or at the stove or rocking with blank eyes, she will take things. A statue of a saint whose name no one remembers a jar of choke cherry preserves a photograph of someone's dead father. One Padilla lives with the ghost of his first wife and his second wife and the infant son who so many years ago lay asleep on the warm bricks before the wood stove until he came into the kitchen with his arms filled with wood, which he dropped before the stove. The wives do not get along. The first will never forgive. The second and the second will never forgive. Juan Padilla who crushed her only child. The child is curled and asleep on the hearth beside woods, still stained with his blood.

Speaker 2 (00:45:39):

RA is everyone's great-grandmother. She walks through the brush and worries her rosary and her feet are swollen in black shoes. As a child, she received the stigmata, but the priest was already gone, so she wrapped her wounds in gauze and dreamed about angels disguised as travelers. Sometimes the river swells its banks and the desert is loud with the croaking of frogs. Sometimes the river shrinks to a trickle. Sometimes the river washes pieces of the world down to soad, a toy truck, a wig, a single dancing shoe. In the seconds after Sophia Romero releases her soul to the thin dry air, every clock, telephone and bell in Soledad begins to ring. If you are walking the hills, you would hear the din that rises from the town by the river. In the houses of Soledad, the people lift their phones from cradles and ask, hello, hello, hello. But all they hear is the sound of wind and some say waves. Thank you. Mary Shevat is the author of two collections of poetry, the most recent of which won the National Book Award. She teaches at Lewis and Clark College and joined our faculty in 2011.

Speaker 8 (00:47:00):

I've loved being a part of Warren Wilson and how much I learn at every residency I'm building a body in my mind and it is your body mother not disappeared into the grave, but into blizzarding. Swan colored lines of lace holding something like your shape and just like flesh, you open absorbing each stray iridescence, each veil of updraft up swirl white, noon scattering your edges, your something like a dress I can't put on. I am building your body, building a mind to move through every curve of you, compose you do you feel Now my embellishment of falling ash, my flock of filaments, my costume of sound.

Speaker 2 (00:48:22):

Peter Church's books include maps of the imagination and a muse and Amaze. Pete served as director of our program from 1993 until 2008. He teaches at the University of Houston. He continues to teach with us every summer,

Speaker 9 (00:48:42):

Rigor and play community good themes. This is a paragraph from a story told by a man at a kind of anniversary. He's playing softball at an annual 4th of July picnic. The people at the picnic are all old friends and neighbors for reasons we don't have time to explain. The narrator's wife and son are understandably angry with him. He and his son called Ernie are for the first time on opposite softball teams and our narrator is pitching. This is for Ellen who understands these games.

Speaker 9 (00:49:18):

I had no intention of letting Ernie off easy. The first pitch, all side spin. He fouled badly scattering a group at one of the picnic tables. The second pitch, he wisely let pass. The third one got away from me. The arc was too high and long, and if he had stood still, it might very well have come down on his head. But instead he stepped back and made an adjustment with his arms. And when the ball left the bat, I knew we were cooked. There was no point in backing up. Third, I headed into cover home. Ernie ran like the runner. He is ran like a pronghorn antelope hitting first base in about three strides nearly at second before the ball even hit the ground. All I could do was admire the pure athleticism of the young. And I heard the shouts, all our old friends and their kids yelling, even though the score meant nothing to anyone, the game was meaningless and at the same time, not meaningless at all.

Speaker 9 (00:50:11):

Because the game forced us into close company into odd configurations, a strange intimacy. Have I told you how I love those people? Is it obvious that we never talked about how much we cherished what we had created or priced this thing that had grown up around us almost without our noticing? If it had been a painting, we would've hung it on a wall. If it had been a vase, we would've locked it in a safe. But it was part of our lives, something we had made that transcended us and we had no choice but to hold onto it as well as we could, as long as we could. We play our game, we laugh and we took another summer off an invisible calendar wondering more each year how many pages we have left. I wasn't thinking about any of that of course, but somehow I felt it.

Speaker 9 (00:50:54):

And as I stood at home plate, I had an inexplicable urge to hold up my arms and embrace them all the men and women we'd come to know and the beautiful children we had raised these talented, complicated, vulnerable young men and women. But then I saw that Emory bounding like a man with those springy new artificial legs had cut the ball off in deep right center and through the miracle of who knows what combination of dalax and Zoloft and ephedrine, Flomax and Rolaids and Viagra, he catapulted the ball toward home. It's something like 95 miles an hour. Worse yet the throw was four feet up the third baseline and sinking. I had no choice but to go down on one knee in the base path and without looking, I knew Ernie had no intention of slowing. Through years of instinct, I tracked the ball coming in and down, got my body solidly behind it since my boy lowering his shoulder, braced myself for what I had coming to me.

Speaker 2 (00:51:53):

Monica Yon is the author of three collections of poetry, including the forthcoming Black Acre. She teaches at Princeton and has taught at Warren Wilson since 2014.

Speaker 4 (00:52:04):

What I love about Warren Wilson is the faculty learn as much or more than the students do. And so I'm going to read two things that are both I would not have been able to write without having been at Warren Wilson Brown anchor after the clear plastic sheeting has been pulled back, folded away after each woody rhizome has been pried loose from the soil. Each snarl of roots traced to its capillary ends. Twigs and pebbles tossed aside worms, reburied elsewhere after the soil has been rubbed through a sieve after the ground has been leveled with rakes and stakes and string, no lead for further labor. Further motion, nothing has been sewn. Nothing is germinating in the bare dirt. The light strikes each granule the same as any other. A wind rises becomes a precondition. Why is it hard to admit you couldn't live here? No one could live here.

Speaker 4 (00:53:03):

This is not the texture of the real lacking attachment lacking event. This is neither landscape nor memory. This is parable, a caricature of restraint. But why does this shame you? Even now you're trying to hide that your gaze is drifting upward. This plainness cannot hold your attention. You're searching the sky from some marker of time of change in a cloudless sky. The sun beats down. But if you observe that the sun warms the soil, you must also concede that the soil must grow colder. The sun stains only the body and the body is what is simply not at issue here.

Speaker 4 (00:53:49):

And this is called gold ac. It's based on this sort of urban legend that Twinkies were actually not a baked product, but they would exude this white tube that would kind of grow the in froth, this like orange outer layer. And it turns out not to be true, which disappointed me greatly. But I wrote this based on it goldacre, as if you were ever wide enough to believe in urban legends, as if these plot elements weren't the stylish of cliches, the secret lab, the anaerobic chamber, the gloved hand, ex machina, the chemical infused fog, as if every origin story didn't center on the same sweet myth of a lost wholeness, as if such longing would seem more palatable, if packaged as nostalgia, as if there had once been an instant of unity, smoothly, numinous, lucid as if inner and outer were merely phases of the same substance as if this whiteness had been your original condition, as if it hadn't been what was piped into you.

Speaker 4 (00:54:52):

What seeped into each vacant cell, each air hole, each pour as if you had started out skinless. Shameless, blameless, creamy as if whipped passive, as if extruded, quivering with volatility in a metal mold as if a catalyzing vapor triggered a latent reaction as if your flesh foamed up, a hydrogenated emulsion consisting mostly of trapped air as if though sponge light like you could remain shelf stable for decades. Part embalming fluid, part rocket fuel, part glue as if you had been named twin. A word for likeness or wink, A word for joke or ink. A word for stain or key, a word for answer as if your skin oxidized to its present. Burnished, hue. Golden as if homemade. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:55:56):

See Dale Young is the author of three collections of poetry. Most recently the halo and is the recipient of Guggenheim and n e A fellowships. He practices medicine in San Francisco and he has taught with us since 2005

Speaker 5 (00:56:10):

In order to prove to a hunter, you are not prey, you have to kill him. It's that simple. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. My shy hunter was a model for me, a model of a man, but I'm not a man. I'm an accident. Some kind of hybrid. I'm a monster. I thank the generous God who prompted wings from inside my back. Thank the God who gave me the keenness of sight. My ability to harness all of my senses gave me speed. I thank the drunk woman who ran a red light, the result being deep sleep. Thank her for crippling me, for leaving three cracks in the bone to be seen on an x-ray. I think the many failures that came of these events, because I am a grateful thing. I'm grateful I wanted most of all to be a man, an ordinary man.

Speaker 5 (00:57:14):

I suppose that is the most human aspect of me. The want real men hunt. So what choice did I have but to apprentice myself to this hunter? My shy hunter says, tell me what you see in the field. And I do. I catalog the hiding places. I list off potential targets without batting an eye. When I list him as one of the things I see, his only response is to chuckle and remind me. He is a person and not a thing, not an animal. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. You already know what happens. You already know how this story ends. How could you not? I removed my shirt, the bandages to my wings unfurled. And when I raised the rifle and told him to run, he ran.

Speaker 2 (00:58:22):

Let's give a round of applause for all of our readers who have taken instruction extraordinarily well. We are not running late. And so let's also please thank the founder of the feast, Ellen Bryant Voight, without whom we would not be here.

Speaker 2 (00:59:10):

It is such a thrill to look out in this room and see so many generations brought together. And if you'll indulge me, I'm going to read the first poem in Larry Levi's darkening. If I can get through it. I had to leave the documentary earlier today because I couldn't bear it. But the way we hold all of you here, it's one of the great gifts of this program. So this is a short poem. It's called Gossip in the Village. And apparently a dates about from the winter stars period of his poems, gossip in the Village. I told no one, but the snows came anyway. They weren't even serious about it at first, then they seemed to say if nothing happens, snow could say that. And almost perfectly, the village slept in the gunmetal of its evening and there through a thin dress. Once I touched a body so alive and eager, I thought it must be someone else's soul. And though I was mistaken and though we parted and the roads kept thawing between snows in the first spring sun and it was all like spring irrevocable irony had made me thinner. Someday, weeks from now, I will wake alone. My fate I will think will be to have no fate. I will feel suddenly hungry. The morning will be bright and wrong. Thank you all for coming.

Speaker 1 (01:00:55):

Thank you for listening to the AWP podcast series. For other podcasts. Please visit our website at www awp writer org.