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If you are interested in literary translation there are, in the United States at this time, only three MFA programs in literary translation. Only two of these are linked to creative writing programs. The Queens College MFA program in literary translation is one of those two. Even if I had not been a New Yorker, I would have given Queens College very serious consideration.
Gorey is known for his creature creations, wrought with slyly dark humor. In his own life, he had great respect for the tiny lives that inspired his drawings—in fact, he dedicated his estate to the benefit of animals, "not only cats, dogs, whales, and birds, but also bats, insects, and invertebrates."
The title page for the final Gorey-Neumeyer collaboration, Why We Have Day and Night.
Edward Gorey (left) and Peter Neumeyer pose on the buoy in Barnstable Harbor, Gorey's first home on Cape Cod, where the two first met.
Early correspondence between Gorey and Neumeyer centered on the children's book Donald and the..., which Neumeyer had originally written and illustrated in watercolor for his children. On the upper left corner of the letter accompanying this housefly illustration, Gorey taped the head of the "model." ("I add that it was a corpse before I began using it," Gorey wrote.)
Edward Gorey and Peter Neumeyer, both voracious readers, often exchanged insights discovered in books. Here, Gorey quotes Lady Murasaki, author of The Tale of the Genji; ancient philospher Gorgias; Jorge Luis Borges; and Ouida, pen name of novelist Maria Louise Ramé. (To read the quotations, click here.)
The next poet laureate, Philip Levine, who will succeed W. S. Merwin when he takes over the post in October, reads a selection of his poems, including "What Work Is."
Fiction writer and essayist Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot discusses and illustrates the hidden subtextual overtones and undertones in fictional works haunted by the unspoken, the suppressed, and the secreted. Using an array of examples from Melville and Dostoyevsky to contemporary writers Paula Fox, Edward P. Jones, and Lorrie Moore, Baxter explains how fiction writers create those visible and invisible details.
Go to a thrift store, explore an attic, or exchange with a friend three unfamiliar items: a piece of clothing, an object you can do something with—such as a coffee cup, a screw driver, or a letter opener, and a photograph or postcard. Wear the piece of clothing, use the object, and place the image in your work space where you can see it. Then write a scene about a character who is wearing the piece of clothing, while using the object, and has a memory filled with conflict conjured by the photograph or postcard.
The Library of Congress has named Philip Levine the next U.S. poet laureate; Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help, is being sued by her brother's maid; Wells Tower was a North Carolina garbage man; and other news.
