Mentor Requests for Winter/Spring

Hello All,

Please download the Mentor Request form at http://www.wcsu.edu/writing/mfa//forms.asp and email your requests to me no later than Dec. 1, even if you have already emailed me about your requests. If I have not received your requests by Dec. 1, I will assign your mentors.

bc

A Call for Work by WestConn MFA Students

We just wanted to remind everyone that the deadline for submissions to the Spring 2009 issue of Black & White's annual edition is coming up soon -- November 30! We consider any material which can be represented on a 6x9" page. We have no restrictions or guidelines on form or subject matter. For more details on submitting work, see our new website: http://blackandwhitejournal.com. Also on the site is our archived print material and new electronic edition.

We are also looking for material for our electronic edition. If your submissions can reasonably be presented in either print or electronic form, please specify to which edition you are submitting (or both).

Submissions to the electronic or annual edition -- and further inquiries -- can be sent to submissions@blackandwhitejournal.com.

Thank you for your support, interest, and contributions thus far and in the future.

Cheers,
Jake Edward Kara
Kevin McNulty-DeNunzio

Post-MFA Opportunity

We write with a message for your graduating MA, MFA, and PhD students in creative writing. We¹d like to let them know about the approaching deadline for the writing Fellowships here at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and hope that you will forward this email to those students and to others you think may be interested in applying.

For the last forty years, the Fine Arts Work Center has run the largest and longest residency Fellowship in the United States for emerging writers. Writers from any country who have not yet published a book with significant distribution are welcome to apply. Fellows receive a 7-month stay at the Work Center and a monthly stipend of $650. Fellows do not pay or work in exchange for their fellowships in any way. Fellows are chosen based on the strength and promise of their application manuscripts. Former Fellows have won every major national award in writing and include Denis Johnson, Louise Glück, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yusef Komunyakaa, and 800 others.

No degree is required for a Fellowship, but we have found that students who are about to finish or have recently finished graduate writing programs are often in search of opportunities like the Work Center Fellowship.

The application is straightforward. For details, please visit http://www.fawc.org/winter/index.shtml

The postmark deadline for next year¹s Fellowships is Monday, December 1, 2008.

We¹d be grateful for your help in passing on word of this unique opportunity to your students.


Yours,


Salvatore Scibona
Writing Coordinator
Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown
24 Pearl Street
Provincetown, MA 02657

Application for Graduation

Those of you who are graduating this semester need to complete an application for graduation. You can download it from the program web site, www.wcsu.edu/writing/mfa and submit it directly to the Graduate Studies office.

bc

Residency Hotel

MFA Students,

Please contact the Maron Hotel to make your reservation for the Winter Residency no later than December 15. Contact info at http://www.maronhotel.com/.

The rate will be $69 per night, which includes continental breakfast. Those of you with special dietary needs may need to make personal arrangements for breakfast. My understanding is that the amount of the residency fee will be adjusted to reflect that you're no longer paying for breakfast on campus.

bc

The Thing About You Birds

Hi gang,
Happy to report that my piece "The Thing About You Birds" came out today at the literary humor site The Big Jewel. Some of you might be familiar with the piece. I read it at the last residency open mic.

Dave

Writer's Group to Start in Danbury Area in 2009

I attended the Writer’s Roundtable last evening, a meeting called by Lisa Scails, director of the Housatonic Valley Cultural Alliance (HVCA). HVCA is willing to coordinate the startup of a writer’s group in the Danbury area, as part of their mission to support the arts in the ten-town region they represent.

The writers attending were from across the spectrum -- those making a living at writing to those not published.

Key outcomes of the meeting:

• It was agreed that a writer's group is desired in the Danbury area. The only ones nearby seem to be the Ridgefield Writer's Guild and one in Southbury. Some of the attendees were members of CAPA (Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association), which meets monthly in Avon.
• The goals are to have 4 to 6 program meetings per year, where there would be a speaker and time afterward to network with other writers. The first program meeting will be planned for March 2009.
• Between program meetings, a critique meeting would be established; the first critique meeting will be planned for January or February.
• The meetings would most likely be held in Danbury.
• The next meeting with the HVCA will be on December 8th to plan the first program and critique meetings.

If you're interested in the writer’s group, to participate in the planning or to see how it all unfolds, send a note to Lisa Scails at lscails@snet.net, so that she can include you on future notices.

For more information on the HVCA, go to their website hvculturalarts.org.

Holly

Writing Mentor Tim Weed in The Writer's Chronicle

Tim Weed's article Accessing Eden: Novelistic Landscapes and the Domaine Perdu is out in the new (December) issue of Writer's Chronicle. It is a fascinating look into the development of style and form of the novel and it's roots in the concept of innocence lost.

Registration

If you received paperwork from the Grad Studies office or from the Registrar regarding registering for next semester, ignore it. Registration will be handled at the residency, as usual.

Charles Wright in New Haven

Hello All Locals--

Here's an opportunity to hear one of the most important living poets read from his work. If you're going, I hope to see you there.

Poet Charles Wright
Tuesday, November 11, 2008, 6 p.m.St. Anthony Hall, 483 College Street, New Haven
Sponsored by the Department of English and St. Anthony HallFree and open to the public
Charles Wright is one of the most widely acclaimed and critically beloved poets of the past thirty years. His poems, which in their long lines combine near-Biblical weight with a sharp wit, examine with striking clarity the central dilemmas of time, experience, and language's power to capture either. "The secret of language," he wrote in his most recent collection, "is the secret of desire," and Wright's preoccupation so often is to probe his own unfolding language for the bedrock truths that, almost geologically, underlie it. His subject is landscape; his landscape, Appalachia. His most recent book is Littlefoot (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007); his other volumes include Scar Tissue (2006), Buffalo Yoga (2004), Appalachia (1998), Black Zodiac (1997), Zone Journals (1988), The Other Side of the River (1984), Country Music/ Selected Early Poems (1982), and The Southern Cross (1981), among others.Wright has been the recipient of many awards, most notably the Pulitzer Prize(for Black Zodiac), the National Book Award (for Country Music: New and Selected Poems), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit Medal. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, he is Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.

Residency

Folks, a couple of points about the residency:

*We will not be working after dinner on New Year's Eve, nor before 1:00 on New Year's Day. Lunch will not be served on the 1st, so you'll need to be prepared with food in your room or be prepared to eat at one of the nearby restaurants. Laurel will try to provide a list of nearby establishments open on the 1st.
*We plan to be at the Maron Hotel at the bottom of the hill and to hold the residency events on the Westside campus. More info will follow on room arrangements.
*I currently only have three people signed up to present enrichment projects at the residency: Moretti, A. Miller, and Rinker. If you need to present your project at the residency, please let me know immediately.
*Laurel recently sent out a group email message asking for a response on attendance at the residency. Please respond to her as soon as possible, and let her know, too, whether you intend to stay at the hotel or at your own residence.

More soon!
bc