Genre: Fiction
The @ Noon Reading Series at Wayne State University
Poet and English professor Caroline Maun blogs about P&W–sponsored The @ Noon Reading Series, held at Wayne State University in Detriot. Maun's poetry collections include The Sleeping, and Cures and Poisons. She is also the editor of The Collected Poetry of Evelyn Scott.
The @ Noon Reading Series began at Wayne State University during the 2010 winter semester. That first year, we paired creative writing faculty from the English department with student writers. In subsequent years we have showcased some of the finest poets and writers from the southeast Michigan region and beyond, and have continued to pair our guests with up-and-coming student writers. Since 2010, the series has enjoyed growing popularity and success with six public readings and one public workshop.
We managed to fund the first two years of the series with modest support from our department budget. This year, thanks to funding from Poets & Writers, we were able to extend the series considerably. This was helpful during a time when university budgets are shrinking, but also when creative activity in our city is burgeoning. It was great to provide this venue to wonderful artists and offer excellent programming to our students and the community.
We have a collaborative approach to programming. Creative writing faculty select a date and a guest to invite to read and then find the student who is available and will compliment the featured guest’s work. Our students read for fifteen minutes. Our featured readers read for twenty to twenty-five minutes, and there is time for discussion afterwards. We offer coffee and snacks in our lounge where audience members continue the conversation. This semester, we regularly attracted audiences of twenty-five to fifty students, community members, faculty, and staff of the university.
Featured poets this year have included Matthew Olzmann, Vievee Francis, Keith Taylor, and Rob Halpern, and writers Lynn Crawford and Mitch and Megan Ryder. Student poets and writers have included Vincent Perrone, Aricka Foreman, John Kalogerakos, Jill Darling, Mathew Polzin, and Ricardo Castano IV. One of the many highlights was Vievee Francis reading from Horse in the Dark, a poetry collection forthcoming from Northwestern University Press characterized by personal lyrics, which is a departure from the persona poetry in her first poetry book, Blue-Tail Fly. She was joined by student poet Aricka Foreman. Another highlight was Lynn Crawford reading from Simply Separate People, Two, accompanied by student writer Matthew Polzin. During the question-and-answer session, poets as well as fiction writers engaged with Lynn’s work enthusiastically for its condensed, lyrical style.
Jennifer LoPiccolo, one of my very talented students, commented on the series: “I make it a point to attend The @ Noon Series because I gain exposure to various forms of poetry and fiction that help me to hone my own work. Wayne’s creative writing students share a stage with our guest readers, which allows the audience to draw connections between their peers and more accomplished writers. While taking notes on both, I see the gap between my friends and the authors on my shelf narrow. It’s a rewarding hour."
We are looking forward to planning next year’s series and continuing this rich supplement to classroom experiences for our students.
Photo: Lynn Crawford and Matthew Polzin. Credit: Caroline Maun.
Support for Readings/Workshops events in Detroit is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.
More Words From Winners: Sarah Falkner
To accompany our May/June 2012 issue's feature "Winners on Winning," part of our special section on writing contests, we're posting a selection of mini-interviews with prize recipients on the benefits of their awards and what they learned from winning. The final author in our series is New York City fiction writer Sarah Falkner, who received the Starcherone Books Prize for Innovative Fiction in 2010 for her debut novel, Animal Sanctuary.
How did winning the Prize for Innovative Fiction change your career?
Winning the prize changed my life enormously in a variety of ways—I was so surprised and elated after hearing the news that I rode my bicycle very joyously and recklessly through a rainy night in Brooklyn. The prize money was extremely helpful to me as a self-employed person of modest means and frequently-tenuous existence, but the money was the least of the advantages I have enjoyed from winning the prize. I am a writer who for various reasons did not pursue an MFA in creative writing, although I value and recognize many reasons why a person might do so, and am not myself wholly an outsider: I do possess a BFA in painting. While I might, outside of an MFA program, still be able to reach some of the same goals an MFA candidate strives for—sustained focus and purpose; devotion to craft and technique; submission to peer and mentor analysis, guidance, and feedback—there is no easy substitute for the public credential of having completed a degree program. After all, an MFA is justifiably and understandably a clear demonstration of a writer's quality and seriousness. The juried evaluation and approval process that winning a prize suggests confers some sort of quantifiable credential, a common currency that peers and the public can measure and accept. After winning the Starcherone Prize, I applied for the first time to the MacDowell Colony, and was given a fellowship; I highly doubt that without the credential of the prize I would have been accepted.
Did the award have an effect on any decisions you made as a writer, on the path you chose to take in life or in your work?
Winning the prize encouraged me greatly to take myself more seriously as a writer, to feel entitled to publicly identify as a writer, and to allow my writing even more time in my life. Artistically, I have navigated many storms of cognitive dissonance during my development—my origins are of low socioeconomic status, but thanks to my mother and the wonderful thing that is the public library, I was exposed early to arts and letters that were foreign to our friends and neighbors. That both saved and ruined me. Since first studying visual art in college alongside people of greater privilege and means than I, then working for a time in the palace of inequity that is the New York City art world, I have frequently found myself at odds with myself—and others—about the necessity, wisdom, and appropriateness of identifying myself as an artist and prioritizing my artistic practice over more "practical" activities like earning a living or working for social justice, or other things that would more directly and immediately benefit my family, friends, and all sentient beings. Sometimes it's like I have an internalized hardline Maoist who tells me I shouldn't spend time alone at my computer expressing my most personal feelings in selfish bourgeois decadence when instead I could be out contributing to the collective good. Lately, the inner Maoist seems appeased by the fact that The People, or at least Some People, value my writing enough to have given it a prize and a readership.
What advice do you have for writers looking to contests as a way to get their work into the world?
I don't feel qualified to speak to the majority of writers or contests out there—but for writers working in experimental, interdisciplinary, and other non-mainstream modes, and less-common forms such as novellas and chapbooks, all of which are published by only a fraction of all the presses in existence, I can attest to the fact that there are a number of very high quality small independent publishers and literary magazines who seem to use the contest model very effectively to find emerging writers. Starcherone Books, Fiction Collective 2, Dzanc Books, Fence Books, and DIAGRAM are just a few who accept unsolicited submissions [via a competition model] during a specific reading period each year. Often an esteemed writer not published by or affiliated with the press is chosen to judge the winner from a group of finalists. My only advice for writers is the obvious and logical: Read a lot, apply to contests for presses that publish lots of books you think are both generally exemplary and also somehow simpatico with your own projects, and especially apply to contests judged by writers whose books you greatly admire and with whom you feel a kinship or resonance.
Below is the video trailer for Falkner's Animal Sanctuary.
Colm Tóibín, Farzana Doctor Among Lammy Winners
The twenty-fourth annual Lambda Literary Awards for LGBT literature, also known as the Lammys, were announced last night at a ceremony in New York City, where authors rubbed elbows with luminaries in other arts, including actress Olympia Dukakis, Broadway performer Anthony Rapp, and drag legend Charles Busch.
Dukakis and National Organization for Women founder Eleanor Pam presented Lambda's Pioneer Awards for lifetime achievement to novelist Armistead Maupin, author of the San Francisco–based Tales of the City series, and feminist writer Kate Millett. Fiction writers Stacy D'Erasmo and Brian Leung won Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prizes.
The Lammy for gay poetry award went to A Fast Life, the collected poems of the late Tim Dlugos (1950–1990), edited by David Trinidad and published by Nightboat Books. The prize for lesbian poetry went to Leah Lakshmi Piepza-Samarasinha for Love Cake (TSAR Publications).
In lesbian fiction, Farzana Doctor won the Lammy for her novel Six Metres of Pavement (Dundurn Press). Colm Tóibín won in gay fiction for his story collection The Empty Family (Scribner). The award in bisexual fiction went to Barbara Browning for her novel, The Correspondence Artist (Two Dollar Radio). Debut fiction writers Rahul Mehta and Laurie Weeks were also honored, Mehta for his story collection, Quarantine (Harper Perennial), and Weeks for her novel, Zipper Mouth (Feminist Press).
In lesbian memoir, Jeanne Córdova won for When We Were Outlaws: A Memoir of Love & Revolution (Spinsters Ink). Glen Retief won for gay memoir with The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood (St. Martin's Press). Justin Vivian Bond won the transgender nonfiction prize for Tango: My Childhood Backwards and in High Heels (Feminist Press).
For the list of winners in all categories, including erotica, young adult literature, and mystery, visit the Lambda Literary Foundation website.
In the video below, poetry awardee Piepza-Samarasinha performs a poem from her winning collection at a finalists reading held in April.
Once Upon a Tweet
Last week the New Yorker’s fiction department serial tweeted Jennifer Egan’s story “Black Box,” which appears in the magazine’s science fiction issue. Egan structured her story in prose bursts of 140 characters or fewer—the limit for a single tweet. Challenge yourself to write a story that could appear in small installments by shortening the length of the story’s paragraphs to one or two sentences. Try to advance the story with each terse paragraph.