D. A. Hosek

18 Jun 2013

mfa

Residency day 6

The seminar slots today were the conclusion of Heather Sellers’s three-part pedagogy workshop dealing this time with syllabus planning and interviewing for academic jobs. There were a number of good ideas offered up. Overall I found Heather’s seminars far more helpful than her books.

Also on the docket today was the “wildcard workshop.” The idea behind this is to give students a chance to interact with a faculty member on a sort of trial run for a future tutorial. I went with Brock Clarke even though he only teaches in the fall and thus I wouldn’t have the opportunity to work with him since I only have one more term after the upcoming term. It was more a chance to get some face time with the best known of the faculty (purely mercenary on my part). As it turns out the entirety of the attendees at the wildcard workshop were third and fourth-term students so none of us was going to be a future mentee of Brock’s.

The evening reading consisted of Don Morill reading some of his poetry and an excerpt from a memoir that will never be published, Steve Kistulentz reading from his poetry (which really blew me away and made me likely to go ahead and buy one of his books) and Heather Sellers who broke the poetry streak by skipping her own poetry and instead reading a couple excerpts from her memoir about face blindness.

Tagged brock clarke, don morrill, heather sellers, steve kistulentz

17 Jun 2013

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Residency day 5

The mid-point of the residency and the traditional morning-time reading and writing period. I got a bunch of work done including some work on the novel. After lunch we had first synthesis (it was interesting to see someone else’s take on the time). Interestingly, it seemed that most of the synthesis groups finished up early. If I recall correctly, we used the full time last year.

The lone seminar of the day was Pedagogy I, the first of three pedagogy seminars led by Heather Sellers. There was a wealth of good information in the seminar. My big takeaway was the idea of having colleagues review syllabi and lesson plans, something that I rather wish I had done something along these lines back when I was teaching.

Evening readings were Josip Novakovich and Terese Svoboda.

Tagged heather sellers, josip novakovich, terese svoboda

16 Jun 2013

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mfa

Residency day 4

The morning seminar was John Capouya talking about ways that as writers of fiction or narrative non-fiction we can employ some of the techniques of screenwriting. There’s a lot to be said for the highly formalized structures that screenwriters apply from the “save the cat” approach to making the protagonist sympathetic to the audience to the three-act structure. As Capouya observed, rarely does structure become cliché. Characters and plots and language, sure, but not structure.

“Give the audience what it wants but not necessarily in the way that it expects.” —William Goldman.

We had a double-dose of workshop including my work getting examined and the academic part of the day concluded with a presentation about poetry publishing from Enid Shomer, stepping in for Barbara Ras. It was interesting to get a sense of the process of selecting and publishing poetry collections happens at a university press, although it only made me more inclined to get a mainstream publishing deal for my own work.

The day was intended to conclude with a social outing to Davis Island. Unfortunately, this happened:

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and also this:

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although we weren’t the only ones to have a bad day:

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needless to say our social outing was cut a bit short and I ended up returning to the hotel to begin my reading and writing period a little early.

Tagged barbara ras, enid shomer, john capouya

15 Jun 2013

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Residency day 3

Today started with a conversation with agent Chris Parris-Lamb. It was a fairly well conceived presentation, although most of this was things that I already knew. A few choice quotes:

Most important thing is to make the book as good as possible. Wait and take your time.

Your query letter needs to be as well-written as your book.

Keep query short but be able to talk about what writers you’re in conversation with/read alongside/inspired by.

I honestly don’t read query letters that carefully. What is the book about? Does the writer tell me what the book is like and what kind of writer they want to be seen as? I see a lot of impressive bios on top of really bad books.

Chris handles mostly fiction which is a somewhat rare thing in the agenting world. His list of journals that he reads looking for new talent includes: McSweeney’s, Tin House, n+1, Ploughshares, Granta, Paris Review and New England Review. Publications like Zoetrope, Harpers and The New Yorker rarely if ever publish new authors.

He commented that the big publishing companies are skewing towards blockbuster model of publishing, and while he is willing to handle people published by small and independent presses, there is only so much smaller press stuff he can afford to do.

We moved into workshop from there. Terese is a bit more directive in how she runs workshop than most of my workshop leaders in the past have been, but it does mean that things are also a bit more instructional. I rather enjoy it and I can see this doing a lot to counteract my own tendencies as a writer to be lazy and impatient.

In the afternoon, the first session was a Q&A with Miranda July followed by a workshop with Chris Parris-Lamb. It seemed a number of people were a bit disappointed in the workshop which had the entire first cohort on stage doing a critique of the two stories to be discussed with Chris as discussion leader. Many people, myself included, thought we’d get more of an insight into how Chris evaluates a work.

The evening reading had Miranda July return to read a story from No One Belongs Here More Than You, an excerpt from It Chooses You and the opening of the novel that she is working on which she unveiled for the first time.

Tagged chris parris-lamb, miranda july, terese svoboda

14 Jun 2013

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Residency day 2

Don Morill’s seminar was “Sentences & Paragraphs as Aesthetic Performance.” There were some interesting thoughts on linguistic structure and how it can be enhanced, although perhaps the most interesting part of the seminar came early when he produced Su Hui’s “Star Gauge”

Courtesy of some aspects of Chinese linguistic structure the above can be read in a variety of different ways, with over 3000 poems possible here. A sort of prefiguring of Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes. Also of note in the seminar for me was the introduction to me of William H. Gass’s Life Sentences, a book that I now feel compelled to read.

Workshop with Terese Svoboda began with a freewriting exercise, on the title of “How did I get Here.” I managed to come up with a somewhat entertaining piece of 600 words which I think may get some refinement and submission.

Genre workshop was with Mikhail Iossel and Jessica Anthony. While nominally about transforming personal experience into fiction, it was largely about some expansion and compression of time and space looking at two short pieces from The New Yorker: “Getting Closer” by Steven Millhauser and “Going for a Beer” by Robert Coover.

The afternoon seminar was Stefan Kiesbye on “How We Cannot Say What We’re Talking About” which was largely about dialog, looking at some masterful uses of dialog and concluding with a bit of a teardown of some of the bad writing that is the output of Dan Brown.

Our evening reading was a triple header. First we had John Capouya reading from an unpublished essay on a soul singer which he says will appear in print in the year 20never. Corinna Valliantos read the first chapter of a novel in progress about a girl who had been raised by dogs. Some of the lines seemed earily reminiscent of The Island of Doctor Moreau. Finally, Kevin Moffett (who is also Valliantos’s husband) read some selections from The Silent History. I realized just yesterday that Moffett is the author of one of my favorite stories from Best American Short Stories, “Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events.”

Tagged corinna vallianatos, don morrill, jessica anthony, john capouya, kevin moffett, mikhail iossel, robert coover, stefan kiesbye, stephen millhauser, terese svoboda

14 Jun 2013

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beautiful sentences

Beautiful sentences

And what Sunny would like to say, but doesn’t, is that she’s afraid that after living here she’ll go home no different. She’ll be the same as she was, and she won’t have learned anything about anything.

Maile Chapman, Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto

Tagged maile chapman

13 Jun 2013

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mfa

Residency day 1

And I’m back. Today I inaugurated a new tradition for the first day of the residency. Unlike past residencies, I managed to make it to the meet and greet not only on time, but a bit early. There was the usual mix of greeting the old and familiar and meeting the new and the strange. Between the meet and greet and lunch, I managed to say hello to most of my critique group. This time around, I have all of my workshop critiques finished although I am doing a pair of gratuitous critiques because, well, why not? There was a bit less open time than last term since I had to attend the seminar on the critical essay although I did get a better sense of what I needed to do this week to be ready to start. I’ve already begun work on the essay proposal, which I should get finished up early.

The evening readings were Brock Clarke and Tibor Fischer at The Oxford Exchange. But not only were no Oxfords exchanged in the course of the evening, but the beer and wine were inadvertently locked up and unavailable early on, much to the distress of many.

Tagged brock clarke, tibor fischer

07 Jun 2013

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beautiful sentences