Philip Roth Resident Mike Scalise

Congratulations to nonfiction alum Mike Scalise; his Philip Roth Residency is now official.

& Art Taylor, yo

Also congratulations to Art Taylor, whose story "Here for You" appears in the latest Fiction Weekly.

Philip Levine Interview w/ Brian Brodeur

Hi Everyone,

Brian Brodeur has interviewed Philip Levine about the creation of a poem. I just discovered Brian's blog. Brian appears to have decided to interview as many poets as possible about the creation of their poems. Others interviewed include Eric Pankey, Sandra Beasley, Dorianne Laux, etc. Visit if you haven't already.

This post is short because I am very tired and must now go wash dishes.

Goodnight,
Ryan

Alexis Santi nonfiction at Prick of the Spindle

Hi there.

Go read Alexis Santi's nonfiction piece up at Prick of the Spindle. It's called "One Pure Thing."

The essay features Richard Bausch, alcohol(ism), a dying raccoon, and those goddamned old office chairs that Mason seems to always give to their creative writing professors.

(Incidentally, you can read two poems by my sister and see some of her artwork in the same issue, though I'll leave that for you to click around and find on your own).

Good work, Alexis Santi.

(let us know if you have pubs, please)

An Interview with Liam Callanan

Liam Callanan received his MFA from George Mason in 2001. Since then, he's had a couple books published, The Cloud Atlas (Delacorte 2004) and All Saints (Delacorte 2007). He directs the graduate creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Aside from writing, a recent project of his is the Poetry Everywhere animated film series, which he created and co-produces.

The following is an email interview that took place over the past six months. 

Thanks, Liam, for taking the time to answer the questions.

First of all, because it's new and exciting, I'm interested to hear you talk a little about this good-looking project, Poetry Everywhere. I took a while to watch several of the videos online at the PBS site, and I wanted to know how you became involved as a producer. How did the project start up? What's its status right now? Goals for the future? Or maybe could you walk me through production of a video, from its genesis and composition to final placement online or on air or on one of many public buses in the city? I think it's great that so many different groups are working together on this (big and small) and it's admirable that UW-M students (I hope I assumed correctly) can participate in such a thing. Reminds me a little of the work going on over at Ninth Letter, you know?



Poetry Everywhere? It's a fair question, given that the guy behind it all is a novelist. But I'm also a bus rider, and therein lies the story. (A cliche I've always liked, mostly for that verb.)

I live, write, teach and ride buses in Milwaukee, now, and so became an eyewitness to a gradual revolution in transit, which is the proliferation of onboard video screens. They give out route information, but they also provide programming. It seemed to me to be a perfect place to air some poetry, so I gave them a call. The programmers said, great, but it has to be more visually exciting than a guy at a mike in front of a drape -- there's a lot of competition for one's attention aboard a bus -- and so I found a wonderful filmmaker here at UW Milwaukee, Brad Lichtenstein. He drew up a budget, and I went looking for money, and found it at the Poetry Foundation, the publishers of Poetry magazine. They turned out to be an amazing sponsor, not only coming through with financial resources, but great ideas.

Back on campus, we brought in an animation professor, Tim Decker, ex-Fox, ex-Disney, who convened a class of undergraduates. We recorded a number of contemporary poets -- some famous, many not -- and then let the students have at it.

I love the poems, I love my colleagues, but I don't really have a verb for how I feel about the students and what they did. I'm still in awe. We definitely pushed them -- don't feel compelled to be literal in your interpretation; do include every word onscreen (a must for the noisy bus environment) but not in boring closed-caption style. They delivered these works of art that not only amplified the poems, but were something wholly new.



Do you know of any similar programs, such as Poetry Everywhere, that are happening in other cities? Or is there any possibility that your program might eventually expand?



Other than the Poetry in Motion program in NYC -- those print placards, which I understand are being cut back -- I'm not aware of any such programs. But there are definitely other people doing videos of poems, or "video poems," and Shanghai has a Starbucks-sponsored soap opera airing on its metro screens. So yes, expansion is in our future! One of the most gratifying aspects of this program is when other cities contact us about getting involved -- it's a great inversion, poetry driving the mass transit agenda. Who knew literature was so green?

Well, I suppose the poets always did.



Talking about Poetry Everywhere has made me wonder about everything else you're up to, and I'm trying to count how many things you've got going on that I know of: your wife and children, promoting the two novels and hopefully working on a third book(?), teaching undergraduate and graduate classes, directing the Creative Writing Program at UW-Milwaukee, Poetry Everywhere, the occasional literary journal publication, etc. Anything else I'm leaving out?

I'm curious as to how you manage your time, and specifically, when do you have a chance to write? Do you have a current writing project to work on? If so, would you like to share anything about the project?



I think you've got a fairly complete census there. We also have a few more community media/Poetry Everywhere projects in the pipeline, but they don't take up too much of my time yet.

I don't really know how I manage my time. It manages me. I take advantage of every last electronic convenience available to me and insist my students do the same; that helps.

The important part, the writing part -- well, in grad school, I was all about writing every day. Now it's more like every week. Then comes summer, and things get better. Kind of. I also feel like that if I just look hard enough -- in the sock drawer somewhere, or maybe down in the basement, I'll find all this spare time I didn't know I had. I don't know. I feel like it got left behind in the move to Wisconsin.



I've talked a little bit with some of the people I'm working with here at Houston, who've gone through the PhD program at the university, about the PhD vs MFA issue, and I'm curious what you think about it. Is there a difference between the two as far as their purposes? Does the PhD 'defeat' the MFA when it comes to finding 'jobs'? Is that even something worth considering or is it all about the writing? I ask this because one of my friends here suggested that some might think of the PhD as a last ditch attempt...Frankly, I am a little confused; I get anxious when I think about these matters, so I wonder, would you be able to offer an opinion on the whole thing? What's the worth of a PhD in Creative Writing today versus an MFA?



There is a difference between the degrees; I used to think there wasn't. I've certainly become a convert to the notion of the creative writing PhD, which is good, because although I hold an MFA myself, I'm now the coordinator of the country's oldest creative writing PhD programs.

It's not necessarily that one route is better than the other; as I've come to discover, they're different, and thus should appeal to different people with different goals. An MFA is a great degree for someone who wants time to write, people to write with, and would like to have a publishable manuscript in three years, or at least be on a trajectory toward same. A PhD is good for someone who wants time to write but who also is very interested in, and committed to, teaching in a college or university. The PhD we offer at UWM really isn't any different from a 'standard' PhD in English; our students go through all the same theory and pedagogy and lit courses, pass the same foreign language requirement, write the same scholarly papers--and creative work-- along the way. The difference is at the end, when they write creative dissertations -- novels or poetry collections -- instead of a scholarly tome. The whole process takes longer; 4-6 years.

Initially, I was startled by how successful our students were getting jobs. Not because they weren't great -- of course they're great, Go Panthers! -- but because our PhDs were/are able to get tenure-track jobs without books, whereas an MFA needs to have published at least one book before getting a similar position.



Now that you've brought up the idea of having a published book, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how your first book, The Cloud Atlas, went from MFA thesis to publication.



When I finished my MFA thesis, I of course thought I had written a novel. And I remember Susan Shreve, my director, smiling sweetly and patting it and saying, "Lovely. Now, if you want to make this into a book...." I had similar conversations with the other members of my committee, Beverly Lowry and Steve Goodwin, and all of them had wise things to say. I recall Susan pointing out that I'd somehow written an entire novel without any female characters -- legacy of my attending an all-boys high school, I suppose -- and when I added a female protagonist, suddenly, the novel came alive. Beverly pointed out that
I'd spent vast expanses of the novel inside quotation marks -- I'd basically written a 17-hour play -- and Steve noted that I'd made my protagonist a bomb disposal sergeant but never showed him defusing a bomb.

Small things, perhaps, in the retelling, but in actuality, all huge -- and hugely helpful. There would be no novel without those meetings I had that last month of school.

I wound up rewriting the first 100 pages, and adding about 200 more on the back. The thesis and the novel definitely resemble each other, but they're different books. The editor who eventually acquired the book also had comments, but they didn't require as dramatic a rethinking of the narrative as had the earlier round.

For about a dozen years -- starting before Mason -- I'd taught a continuing education course at Georgetown, a writing workshop from 8-10 at night. (Among my students: CNN's Campbell Brown.) It was a rough time slot for all concerned, and some semesters I wondered why I fought my way in and out of Georgetown every night to do it, but when it came time to send out the book, I remembered that one of my students, Nani Power, had gone on to a successful writing career. I contacted her, asked if she'd look at my book. She did, and passed it to her agent, Wendy Sherman, who called not long after.

Some people hear this story and think, "lucky dog -- he got his first novel published lickety-split." (Actually, no one's ever said 'lickety-split' to me, and here I thought, as a child anyway, I'd hear the word all the time when I grew up.)

It's true, that part, the very last part, went relatively fast. But these people didn't see the decade before...



And finally, what advice, if any, do you have for Mason MFA students about to graduate or recently graduated from the program?



Advice? Hmm. To myself: be more prompt in replying to e-mails. To my fellow Patriots? I'll venture out on a limb -- ah, there's the cracking sound; let me start to bounce a bit -- and say, ease up on the blogs.

Not THIS blog, of course, but any blog or news source that causes you undue anxiety. One thing that we never talked about in MFAland that I think crucial to consider is how we, as authors, need to serve as good caretakers of our mental (and, sure, physical) well-being. Sounds like obvious advice, but I don't think a lot of people follow it. Say you'd set yourself and your laptop up on a pretty park bench to get some writing done. Then, about five feet away, a crew starts jackhammering the sidewalk. How long would you stay? How much writing would you get done if you did?

To me, reading about who got what deal with what agent, or who won this prize or even who has advice on how to enter this or that contest -- that's noise I have to avoid.

But again: that's me, to the extent I know myself. Other writers I know thrive on the latest buzz, and really do use it to their career advantage. They know where to submit, now, whom to call tomorrow and where to post their news.

Really, it all gets back to what my Mason profs said, back in the day: do your work. (With the occasional time-out, of course, to correspond with your alma mater's fiction blog.)

~~~

That's all, everyone. Thanks for reading. If you have a chance to attend AWP this year, Liam will be participating in a panel called 'Don't Stand So Close to Me: Controlling Narrative Distance' at noon on Thursday the 12th.

Also, if you haven't yet, please check out the interview that David Heath conducted with Andrew Wingfield.

Brian Brodeur, Guest Blogger at The Writer's Center

According to my Facebook feed, Brian Brodeur is a guest blogger this week over at the Bethesda Writer's Center blog. He writes about his short-lived career as a plate spinner, sailing around the world in a hot dog, and where the wild things are. And he writes about his new book Other Latitudes. Here's an excerpt from his post:

When an interviewer recently asked if I’d thought the publication of my first book would change my life, I responded with one word: “No.” I then went on to express my gratitude for the trickling of e-mails I’d received from sympathetic strangers who wrote to tell me how much they’d enjoyed my book. How shocked I was that anyone had actually read it. Feeling a little guilty now for not being one-hundred percent honest, I’d like to revise my answer.

Brian Brodeur and Eric Pankey will be reading this Sunday at The Writer's Center. Details at the website. The reading starts at 2:00pm.

Two Online Pubs

1) Laura Ellen Scott has a new story up in the November issue of Storyglossia. The story is called "Felly Stories" and can be read here.

2) Scott Garson has a short short at the new online journal Sir! and it can be read by clicking here.

Good work everyone. This is a good week.

Fiction Magazine out now

The latest issue of Fiction Magazine is out, apparently, and in it is a new story by Ryan Effgen. You can check the site here for more information; also, I imagine Politics and Prose is carrying it. They tend to have a few good lit journals up front.

Folks, tell us about your pubs.

Congrats to Rob Drummond

I've been waiting a little to post this information - mostly because I wasn't sure when the anthology was supposed to come out and because I've been a little busy with the move and getting situated down here in Houston. But now I'm happy to say that the latest New Stories From The South is out and it contains fiction alum Rob Drummond's award winning story "The Unnecessary Man," which received the 2007 Arts and Letters fiction prize judged by Robert Boswell.

I spotted Cliff's post here and it reminded me to bring this up. Cliff also links to a review in the Miami Herald. And fiction alum Art Taylor wrote a nice review of the anthology here.

Drummond's story appears alongside stories by Clyde Edgerton, David James Poissant, Jim Tomlinson, Pickney Benedict, and some other people. And Z.Z. Packer is listed as the guest editor this time around.

Ryan Call at NOÖ Journal

NOÖ Journal has named recent Mason alum Ryan Call associate editor—congrats and a big capital-o umlaut to you, Ryan.

Congrats Alexis

Alexis Santi has new work up at Word Riot. CHECK IT OUT.

Poet Pubs

Congratulations to poets Robb St. Lawrence and Wade Fletcher ('08), who have had recent acceptances for their work: Robb heard from A Public Space and Wade from Barrelhouse.

'From Laura's Pocket Guidebook to the Americas'

Congratulations to Laura Scott, who has a piece in the latest online issue of Hobart.

Go here to read it.

An Interview with Andrew Wingfield

In his own words, Andrew Wingfield “grew up east of Sacramento, California, in the bumpy transitional zone between the flat floor of the Central Valley and the steep slopes of the Sierra foothills.”[1] A sense of place pervades his work, drawn from the Sacramento where he grew up, the changing neighborhood in Alexandria where he lives with his wife and two boys today, and places he has lived in and traveled through in between. His writing shows this sense, but it also became evident early into our e-mail exchange, in which we discussed his novel, Hear Him Roar, published in 2005, and his current project, a collection of short stories. We talked as well about writing in general; life after the MFA, which he earned at GMU in 1999; and teaching, particularly his work at George Mason’s integrative studies program, New Century College, where he has taught since 2000.

Q: Your novel, set in Sacramento, follows semi-retired biologist Charlie Sayers as he sorts through the region’s cougar dilemma as well as his own restlessness with life, past and present. Not only is your novel set in Sacramento—it seems to capture its essence in terms of setting, environmental issues facing the region, and the mix of personalities you’ve brought to life—locals and transplants, old-school department of fish and game officials and suburban conservationists. It seems like part of your heart is still out there. What brought you out of California, and what brought you to George Mason?

Andrew Wingfield: Yes, California will always have a special pull on me. I imprinted on that Central Valley landscape, that climate, which is so distinctive. The hot, dry summers with their tawny palette of colors. The smell of rice fields burning after the harvest. The joyous relief the fall rains bring. The dense tule fogs in winter. The bright green grasses on the hills in early spring. Those are all part of me. And California is a truly fascinating place—in its diverse natural environments, in its 
human communities, and in the meanings it holds (and has long held) for so many people. A lot to unpack there.

I left California after my first year of college because I was restless. I had decided to be a lit major, I liked history and art. I wanted to go east, where the “culture” was. I guess I went east in answer to the flip side of the impulse that brings so many young people west, a lot of them right after college. And then I just wandered—Chicago, Bloomington, Madrid, Philadelphia. I’m very attached to more natural landscapes, yet I’ve chosen to live in a lot of heavily populated areas. I just really like cities, too. One of the nonfiction writers I like, Edward Hoagland, shares my dual attraction to cities and wild places. For me, each place has its poetry. Sometimes it takes a while to find it. That’s why I’ve never been much of a tourist or much interested in travel writing (unlike Hoagland). I like to live in a place, to experience it day to day, explore its 
crannies. Some places reveal themselves very slowly. Madrid is an example. That city takes time. I visited Rome and fell in love in about two hours. In Madrid, a more austere place, I had to get to know the 
neighborhoods, the tapas bars, the public gardens, the picture collections, the language—and then I was hooked. It took about a year.

What brought me to George Mason? The writing program, especially Alan Cheuse. Alan and I bonded on the phone after I got accepted to the program, I think when we discovered our mutual admiration for Saul Bellow. We developed a real affinity while I was there. I’m still in frequent contact with him. I never planned to stick around as long as I 
have. The fact that I’m still at Mason is a combination of happenstance 
and intention. New Century College, the integrative studies program where I teach, was just a few years old when I taught my first class there. I just kind of carved a niche for myself, and I’ve been having too much fun to leave.

Northern Virginia has yielded its poetry slower than anyplace else I’ve lived. Much of the region flat out repulses me and probably always will—you know, the tract house wastelands. But I live inside the Beltway in an interesting, complicated, and changing neighborhood. The stories I’m writing now are set in a community like the one where I live. And I find it increasingly fascinating—and at times, I admit, a bit horrifying—to live hard by the nation’s capital, especially during the Bush years. Until a couple of years ago, everything I wrote dealt with California. Not anymore.

Q: So do you think you are definitely a proponent of “write what you know”? I know, that’s a cliché—perhaps you have a better way of putting it.

AW: I like the way Wright Morris puts it: “Writing is finding out what you don’t yet know about what you know.” I write about places that are familiar to me, but my work is about exploring aspects of these places that hold some mystery. I’m searching for what I don’t yet know about what I know. For instance, I know what it was like for me to grow up between Sacramento and the Sierra foothills as my home landscape succumbed to sprawl, but what would that experience be like for a cantankerous Dept. of Wildlife biologist who’s growing old in that place? How does he, a man beginning to feel the bite of his impending mortality, experience the changes in the land? I can’t know until I write it.

Here’s another example. My wife and I are relatively privileged white Americans. When we decided to make a family, we bought and began renovating a rundown corner store building in a neighborhood just beginning to emerge from decades of blight. I know what it’s been like for me to live in this neighborhood the past eight years. But what does this place mean to a teenage African American girl who lives two blocks away, where blight persists? She’s here because her great-grandparents settled in the neighborhood decades ago, when her great-grandfather started working in the big railyard nearby (blight began when that railyard closed). Curiosity about such a girl led me into one of the stories in my current collection.

Q: Current collection—do you have a short story collection going out? I see you have a story in the Antioch Review this year and one in The Fourth River and another in Prairie Schooner forthcoming—congratulations. Do you have a preference for short pieces like stories and nonfiction articles or a long-term project like a novel?

AW: I have a nearly finished collection of stories that are all set in a “recovering” neighborhood near D.C. Some of them are out in journals, some forthcoming, a couple still looking for homes, and a couple still in process.

I started writing these stories when I became a parent and a professor and my writing time was pretty fragmented. I liked that I could sit down at my keyboard, read the few paragraphs or pages I’d already written, and push forward—using the writing time to write, rather than using it to try and remember what the story was all about, who the characters were, etc.

While writing my novel, I lived with it more fully day to day, week to week, because my life was less complicated and my writing time more regular and predictable. That said, I think I’m more of a novelist by nature. I tend to bite off novel-sized chunks of material. It’s taken me a long time learn the discipline of the short story, to resist the temptation of exploring side characters, subplots, and back stories that can be fatal to a story.

Even now my stories, the ones that work, push against the boundaries of the short story form in terms of the kind of complexity it can accommodate. Novels are roomy, and I like that. Once I wrap up this story collection my next project will be a novel. My life is still complicated and full, but I’ve become a bit more savvy about how to manage it all. Plus, my kids sleep through the night now. That changes everything! I look forward to getting back to the novel.

Q: About your novel, the way each chapter wraps up was very satisfying—finishing, in a last paragraph or even the very last line, with a new thought that reflects the whole, the way a good short story ends or an essay concludes. Do you feel you picked up novel-writing techniques like this instinctively, by reading, or do you think it was more a conscious effort? I am particularly curious how the MFA program influenced the way you approach a novel, if it did—such techniques seem hard to come by in a workshop, for example.

AW: My way of closing chapters is an instinctive thing, as far as I know. It’s certainly not a skill I tried consciously to hone in a workshop setting. Your question about novel writing techniques and workshops is a good one. When I was in the Mason program, every fiction student was working on a novel but every fiction workshop focused on the short story. The craft of novel writing was something I pursued independently for the most part, reading lots of novels, talking about them with Alan, and getting feedback from him on my manuscript. A couple of the lit courses I took also created opportunities to talk about novels from a formal point of view. For obvious reasons, the novel doesn’t lend itself as readily as the short story to the workshop format, but I think it’s important for writing programs to be intentional about helping students develop their novels and study the craft of novel writing.

Q: What about the end product, after you’ve finished it? Some MFA students and alums have said they would have liked more help navigating the publishing world, while others have been adamant that it’s better that we remain focused on the craft. I suspect it’s probably a little like the Appalachian Trail mantra of “hike your own hike,” but can you tell us a little about your own experience getting the book out there?

AW: As an MFA student, I fondly hoped that one of my professors would recognize the brilliance of my work, set me up with an agent, and launch my career for me. I doubt I’m the only person who has ever entertained such a fantasy. To be passive, yet to achieve success—sounds pretty nice! But it’s not realistic, or even desirable. The real service writing programs can provide is helping their students learn how to be smart, active, and persistent about getting their work into the world. Some teachers are pretty good about incorporating this part of the writing life into their workshops. I suspect there should be a short course devoted to it, a required course for the degree. Absent such a course, I poked around for clues on my own, gathering hints wherever I could. A more structured introduction to publishing would have served me well and saved me some time. But, hey, some of the most critical learning happens outside school.

Getting my novel into the world provided me with a kind of crash course on publishing, from which I gleaned some good lessons. I found an agent fairly quickly, and this agent found a junior editor at a commercial press who liked my manuscript. I worked with her to make it shipshape before she showed her bosses, who didn’t like the novel enough to publish it. Big disappointment.

Eventually the agent and I parted ways, and I started searching on my own for small independent presses and university presses that publish fiction. (Agents usually aren’t interested in such presses because there’s not enough money to make it worth their while.) I did some of my searching online, and some of it at conferences on literature and environment. I got to know some writers who shared my interest in environmental themes, chatted up editors at the book display tables, and made myself familiar with their lists.

The landscape and environment of the American West is a big focus for Utah State University Press, the publisher that bought my book. A great fit, but it took some time and effort for me to discover it. The near misses and rejections were tough to take, but I believed in my story, believed I’d find the right editor, the right press, and eventually I did. You have to persist.


So, sure, part of a writer’s education is putting in the time to learn the lay of the land. Who else is writing the kind of stuff you like to write? Where are those writers hanging out? Where are they publishing? How can you get your foot in the door at the places where your work will be valued? I’m not saying, however, that publishing should be the primary focus of students in a writing program. It’s one piece only. The primary focus should be working on the craft—and by craft I mean not just writing, but reading. Most writing students don’t read as much as they should.

Q: On reading, do you find yourself reading in a strategic way to suit your writing? Or do you read what you’re interested in, and the writing follows?

AW: After I wrote the first of my neighborhood stories, and decided it might be fun to write a whole batch of them, I re-read a couple of the place-based story collections that I’d read in the past—Joyce’s Dubliners and Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Then I read other collections of this kind—Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago, Maxine Claire’s Rattlebone, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, a couple of others. Those books helped give me a feel for this particular niche within the larger genre, which in turn helped me clarify for myself the kind of book I wanted to make. So, that was some strategic reading tied directly to an existing project. But as you say, much of the reading I do feeds my writing in less direct, more mysterious ways. I’m kind of fatalistic about it. I figure if a topic or an author holds interest for me, there must be a reason, and eventually I’ll come to perceive some ways different things I’ve read percolate into my writing.

Q: In our earlier conversation you said teaching for New Century College allows you to investigate topics that feed your writing, and I imagine this in itself lends a great variety to what you read? I’m looking through the courses you have taught, from the 100-level “Community of Learners” to upper-level courses like “Narratives of Nature” and “Conserving Endangered Species: An Integrative Approach” . . .

AW: For years, I’ve been teaching “Self as Citizen,” this freshman course on citizenship and civic engagement. I began teaching it more or less by accident, but I’ve grown hooked on the material over time. I keep seeing the themes of this course—the challenges of tolerance and diversity, individualism vs. community commitment, and so forth—surface in my neighborhood stories. My teaching colors my writing in other ways as well. I have a lot of 
flexibility in what I teach, and I often team-teach with colleagues whose disciplinary backgrounds differ from my own. I sometimes build a class around a group of readings I want to explore, and often my teaching partners introduce me to material I never would have discovered on my own. Some of the stuff my colleagues want to put on syllabi doesn’t excite me as a reader—academic prose can be pretty dry—but it introduces me to ways of knowing and engaging the world that were alien to me previously. How does a conservation biologist understand a cup of coffee? What kinds of stories do economists tell? This is good exercise for a fiction writer. It stretches the imagination.

Q: About teaching—when I talked to you earlier you gave me some really sound advice about looking for a teaching position, how someone just getting out there with an MFA, with the hope of balancing teaching with writing, might approach it. Can you speak to that a bit, given your experience and that of some of your fellow alumni?

AW: I assume anyone in a graduate writing program is already passionate about writing. If you go into teaching, you should have a passion for that as well, because you’ll do a whole lot of it to support yourself and your writing habit—unless of course you’re independently wealthy or supported by a gainfully employed spouse whose big salary enables you to teach for experience rather than a living. (I’m not independently wealthy, and my wife is a painter. She and I both teach to put food on the table.)

I love writing, of course, but I also really love teaching. It’s work that stimulates me intellectually, as I’ve already said. It also draws me out of my shell, requires me to interact with students and colleagues. For me the give and take of the teaching life is a healthy counterpoint to the solitary work of writing. Also, I like the university atmosphere—the learned people, the visiting writers and speakers, the arts programming, the libraries. These are wonderful resources.

You will probably need to teach a while to find out if the passion is there. That’s fine. Just don’t teach for ten years, letting your writing go dormant, and then look up one day and decide teaching isn’t right for you. What I’m saying is that you should always be strategic, always keep the big picture in mind if you’re a writer who teaches. A few of my peers who came out of the writing program around the same time I did took teaching jobs that paid them peanuts and sucked up all their writing time. That’s a predicament you want to avoid, and avoiding it can be tricky.

One person who seems to have managed the transition well is my fellow Mason writing program alum, Sally Shivnan. Sally graduated the same year I did and now teaches full time at University of Maryland Baltimore County while building up an impressive portfolio of published work. She interviewed me a while back while writing a magazine piece about balancing teaching and writing. I just re-read the piece; it’s full of sound advice, and more thorough than I could hope to be on this topic. Here’s a link.

Q: So—you have taught undergraduates for nearly a decade, you put out your novel in 2005, you’re working on a collection of stories, you’ve written and published a number of personal essays over the last five years, and you look forward to the prospect of getting back into another novel. There is so much in the media now about how students today, and by extension, our future populace, have so much less appreciation for reading fiction or writing a decent sentence, let alone a good piece of creative work (the latter according to a recent Washington Post article). You don’t seem to be buying it?

AW: I was teaching a course with this conservation biologist who has devoted his life to saving species whose populations are pretty much doomed to extinction in the wild. One of the students asked him why he bothers. “What else am I going to do?” the biologist shot back. “Sell Volvos?”

I’m not looking to sell Volvos—I’m not that resigned. But I am pretty realistic about what it means to devote oneself to literary art in these times of iPods and ear buds and young thumbs busily massaging miniature keyboards. As a writer, I don’t fret much over the changing literacies of the young. I write the stories I have to write, according to my own lights, and I try to find a home for them in the world. That’s what I do.

As a teacher, this issue concerns me more. In the 10 or 11 years I’ve taught at Mason (including as a grad student), the students coming in have arrived better prepared academically because admissions standards have risen. But that doesn’t mean they’re more literate, in the conventional sense. They’re not. Oh, they encounter a lot of text and images in their daily lives, and they can be pretty savvy about certain kinds of “reading.” But many of today’s college students arrive on campus with a real deficit of experience when it comes to navigating complicated academic writing, or sophisticated literary works. A big part of my job is helping my students develop some fluency in working with these kinds of texts. It’s a struggle. But it can be very satisfying to see students learn to read and write better. Once in a while the writing bug will bite one of the kids in my class—or, more rarely, it will infect the whole group like a virus—and when that happens, I remember why I bother to try.

Q: Well, I, for one, am glad you are not selling Volvos. You or the biologist. Thank you so much for your time—this has been a great exchange. And again, congratulations on the recent publications, and good luck with the rest of your collection. I’m looking forward to reading what you have out there.

AW: I’ve enjoyed it too. Thanks for your thoughtful questions.

Good Job Twila

George Mason offered recent graduate Twila Johnson a position as a full-time term instructor—congratulations, Twila! Congratulations to GMU, too, for winning her talents and hard work.

Well Done, Ryan

In case some people read this blog but haven't seen Ryan's and, like me, don't actually see people in live contexts: The University of Houston offered Mr. Call a two-year fellowship to teach and, well, write things. So he'll work near the likes of Antonya Nelson and Chitra Divakaruni as he communes with Houston-haunting Donald Barthelme's ghost. Meanwhile, a little thing called the Sewannee Writer's Conference has invited him as a Tennessee Williams Scholar this summer. Good job, Ryan, and good luck.

Congratulations to Rion

Recent fiction graduate, Rion Scott, just had a story place 2nd runner-up in the Pan African Literary Forum's Special Contest for emerging writers of Africa and the Diaspora. It looks like they haven't yet updated the website, but it looks like Rion's story's placing in the contest will earn him a free trip to Africa to participate in the conference.

You can find info about the Forum here. To give you an idea, Helon Habila is listed on the faculty page for this year's Forum, along with Yusef Komunyakaa.

If you know Rion, send him an email. If you don't know Rion, maybe visit his site and leave a nice comment.

Our Stories Recognized

Our Stories, the online lit journal run by alum Alexis Santi, has received a bit of recognition from two organizations - 1) the folks at One Story, as part of their "Save The Short Story" project, wrote up a nice little feature on their blog, and 2) the storySouth Million Writers Award, the judges of which nominated "These People I Know" by Alex Stephens for the award. In May, Jason Sanford, publisher and editor of storySouth, will post the top ten finalists out of the many nominations and open the award up for the public to vote. Other nominations include stories from online journals such as failbetter.com, Blackbird, Agni, The Mississippi Review, and StoryQuarterly, so Our Stories is in good company. Good work to Alexis and his staff.

Virginia Arts and Letters LIVE, featuring...

...work by fiction alum Ryan Effgen.

Here's the basic info:

On Saturday, March 29th, The James River Writers and Barksdale Theatre will present a series of short stories by Virginia writers. The stories will be performed by Virginia Actors to music performed by Virginia Musicians. It's all very Virginian, obviously, which is good.

Anyhow, Ryan's story, "The Pirate's Life for Me," which was published recently by Painted Bride Quarterly in one of their many Pirate-themed issues, is in the line-up.

The program begins at 8pm.

For more information, go to the site at James River Writers.

Reading Tonight with Liam Callanan

Tonight at 7:30 in Research I, room 163 fiction alum Liam Callanan will read from his work as part of the Visiting Writers series.

At 6:30 before the reading there will be a "mixer" for everyone attending.

Here's some basic info about Liam -

His website.

An interview by fiction alumna Colleen Kearney Rich posted over at The Mason Gazette.

And for those of you who haven't read anything of his, here's something from the '03 archives at failbetter.com. A story called "Taken."