text:
November 17
Here's our final list of contributors for issue 3 of Cherry Tree!
Thank you to our fantastic student screeners: Nicolas Anstett, Julie Armstrong, Reilly D. Cox, Dylan Hogan, Sarah Mann, Ryan Manning, Meaghan Menzel, Aliya Merhi, Catalina Righter, and Emma Way. Thank you as well to our fabulous senior readers in poetry: Emma Sovich and Alex Vidiani; in fiction: Sarah Blackman and Elise Gallagher; and in nonfiction: Elise Gallagher (again!). And a huge round of applause for our Creative Nonfiction & Literary Shade Editor James Allen Hall (who is also our Editor-in-Chief), our Poetry Editor Jehanne Dubrow, and our Fiction Editor Roy Kesey. Issue 3 is only possible because all of the volunteer work that you all do for Cherry Tree.
The issue is now being laid out by our Production Intern Caroline Harvey. Proofs will be sent out to all contributors in late December. Issue 3 is scheduled for release on February 9, 2017 at the AWP Conference in DC. So if you do not have a current subscription, now is the perfect time to remedy that! Buy a subscription for yourself or as a holiday gift for a dear friend. Just subscribe! And you can do that here.
October 21
Though we are knee-deep in submissions for issue 3, we have taken a brief break from reading new work to decide which six pieces from issue 2 to nominate for 2017 Pushcart Prizes. The nomination period runs each year from October 1 through December 1.
Brief note in service of transparency: Roy Kesey served as contributing editor for issues 1 & 2, and recently joined the staff as Fiction Editor (starting his tenure with issue 3). The selection of prize nominees is handled exclusively by the Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor.
September 29
Announcing a new section of Cherry Tree: A National Literary Journal @ Washington College: Literary Shade!
Starting with our third issue, Cherry Tree will now have a regular section dedicated to Literary Shade. The call for submissions for this section begins today! Here's the section description:
Since we are nearing the end of our regular reading period, which closes on October 15, we only have a short amount of time to receive your submissions of the greatest literary shade for this next issue. So if you have shade of the literary variety (and we know you do!) please send it to us between now and October 15.
August 29
Every semester the Rose O'Neill Literary House offers free, non-credit-bearing workshops in antique letterpress printing and bookbinding with Master Printer Mike Kaylor.
Print Shop Workshops at the Rose O'Neill Literary House are due to begin the third week of classes in the fall semester and registration is now open!
Intro to Letterpress Printing, our beginners' class, will be held on Tuesday evenings from 6:30-8:30 p.m. in our Lit House Print Shop beginning Tuesday, September 13, 2016. You will learn about the history of the printing, from Gutenberg to the twentieth century, while getting a hands-on education in the art of antique letterpress. Set type letter-by-letter and get your hands dirty cranking out your words on one of our antique printing presses.
Our Advanced Workshop in Book Arts will be held on Thursday evenings from 6:30-8:30 p.m. in our Lit House Print Shop beginning Thursday, September 15, 2016. You will learn about the long history and various techniques of binding books by hand while sewing your own books to take home.
All workshops are free and open to all–students, faculty, staff, and community members. But there are a limited number of available slots. To register, please e-mail firstname.lastname@example.com.
August 8
Cherry Tree opens for submissions for our third issue on August 15.
Somehow August has rolled around once again, which means that our Cherry Tree editorial staff and student screeners are gearing up for our next open reading period. We will be reading submissions in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction from August 15 to October 15 for our third issue, which will be released in February 2017 at the AWP Conference in Washington, DC.
In the past few months we have had a few changes in the Cherry Tree masthead. Here's our editorial line-up for issue 3 and beyond:
You can see their smiling faces and read their bios on our website here. Also there, you will find our 2016 Production Intern, Caroline Harvey '18, who will help us lay out the third issue after all of the final pieces are selected. Caroline isn't entirely new to the business: she worked as the Literary House Press Intern for the Spring 2016 semester, during which she assisted in the editing and proofing of LHP's newest poetry anthology, Still Life with Poem: Contemporary Natures Mortes in Verse.
There is also a good mixture of new and familiar faces in the roster of student screeners for this upcoming reading period: Nick Anstett '16, Julia Armstrong '15, Reilly D. Cox '16, Dylan Hogan '16, Sarah Mann '16, Ryan Manning '17, Meaghan Menzel '16, Aliya Merhi '16, Catalina Righter '17, and Emma Way '16.
We're all so excited to read the fantastic submissions you send to us! So mark your calendars: send your best poetry, fiction, and nonfiction to Cherry Tree (via Submittable) between August 15 and October 15. Help us to make issue 3 the best yet!
May 9
For the fifth consecutive year, the Rose O'Neill Literary House will be hosting its community-centric Summer Literary Salon series. There will be three Salon events this summer and they will be held on May 24, June 28, and July 26, 2016. Formerly called the Summer Poetry Salons, these Literary Salons now have been expanded to include readings from prose writers, as well as poets.
Each of these events, which begin at 4:30 p.m. at the Lit House, are free and open to the public. They are always held on the fourth Tuesday of the month and feature two poets reading from their work, as well as a local musician or band.
The first event of this series will be held on Tuesday, May 24 at 4:30 p.m. and will feature poetry readings by Joseph Harrison and Tess Taylor, as well as music from new local band Twice the Other. The Literary House Press will also debut two brand-new letterpress broadsides at this Salon, featuring work from of each of the presenting poets, in honor of this year's series. Broadsides are printed on-site in the Lit House print shop.
The second event of this series will be held on Tuesday, June 28 at 4:30 p.m. and will feature poetry readings by Emilia Phillips and Lesley Wheeler, as well as music from Pam and Bob Ortiz, two members of Chestertown's The Pam Ortiz Band.
The final event of this series will be held on Tuesday, July 26 at 4:30 p.m. and will feature readings by poet Sarah Blake and fiction-writer Katey Schultz, as well as music from local duo Beth McDonald and Joe Holt.
Each Summer Literary Salon will be followed by a book sale and signing, and light refreshments. Wine will also be served. For more information on these events or the Literary House visit the website at http://www.washcoll.edu/centers/lithouse/.
May 5
2016 Literary House Press Intern Caroline Harvey '18 recounts her experiences assisting in the editing and publishing of LHP's forthcoming anthology, Still Life with Poem.
From FALL SEMESTER 2015
From LYNDA COURSES ON INDESIGN
From STILL LIFE WITH POEM, DRAFT 3
From COVER ART
From STILL LIFE WITH POEM: CONTRIBUTOR PROOF (RESPONSE NEEDED) EMAILS
From SLWP INTERIOR_DRAFT 8_FINAL.PDF
From STILL LIFE WITH POEM: CONTEMPORARY NATURES MORTES IN VERSE
April 27
The Rose O'Neill Literary House has awarded this year's Cave Canem Residency to Darrel Alejandro Holnes.
In June 2016, the Rose O'Neill Literary House will welcome Darrel to Chestertown for a writer's retreat. He was selected from this year's pool of applicants as the winner of the Literary House's 2016 Cave Canem Summer Residency. He will spend his time here working on his own writing projects and quietly exploring the town for a few warm, restful weeks.
Darrel Alejandro Holnes's poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Best American Experimental Writing, American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, Callaloo, The Caribbean Writer, Day One, The Puritan Magazine, and elsewhere in print and online. He is the co-author of PRIME: Poetry & Conversations, On Poetics, Identity & Latinidad: CantoMundo Poets Speak Out, and the co-editor of Happiness, The Delight-Tree: An Anthology of Contemporary International Poetry. He teaches at NYU.
The Cave Canem Summer Residency at The Rose O'Neill Literary House is a partnership with Cave Canem, the nation's preeminent organization for young African American poets. Cave Canem's mission is to serve as "a home for the many voices of African American poetry and is committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of African American poets." Our Cave Canem Summer Residency is a month-long Chestertown retreat offered annually to one outstanding former Cave Canem Fellow. Previous Summer Residents include poets Kamilah Aisha Moon in 2015, Jamaal May in 2014, Yona Harvey in 2013, Kevin Vaughn in 2012, and Arisa White in 2011.
The Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College serves as one of the cultural centers of campus, bringing together students, faculty, alumni, and local community members from across the disciplines. Our literary programming provides access to a wide variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, scholarly prose, playwriting, and hybrid forms; our letterpress studio and Literary House Press introduce participants both to old and new technologies. We are dedicated to promoting the articulated word and to supporting students through professional, on-the-job training.
April 20
The Stump is where our contributors stand to read their work aloud to the wide web-audience. Here we post audio recordings of select contributors reading their poems, stories, and creative nonfiction from the pages of Cherry Tree.
And we're back at The Stump with new readings from our second issue! Here are the featured contributors you can listen to on our page:
We're also once again featuring a few chosen pieces from the new print issue as preview PDF on our Work We Love page. Here you can read issue 2 excerpts from Rick Barot, Sara Biggs Chaney, Vievee Francis, Roy Kesey, and Jennifer S. Cheng!
And if you still haven't had enough? Well, then it's time to subscribe! Get a copy of the full second issue with a new subscription here.
April 20
At the 2016 Senior Reading, the Rose O'Neill Literary House announced this year's winners of three annual student creative writing prizes: The Literary House Genre Fiction Prize, The William W. Warner Prize for Creative Writing on Nature and the Environment, and The Jude & Miriam Pfister Poetry Prize.
The Literary House Genre Fiction Prize is a prize awarded to a Washington College undergraduate for the best work of science fiction, fantasy, mystery, or horror. The winner receives a cash prize of $500.
The William W. Warner Prize is awarded to the Washington College undergraduate who shows the greatest aptitude for writing about nature and the environment. This prize is named for, and was endowed in the honor of, William W. Warner, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay, based on his experiences living and working among crab fishermen on the Chesapeake. According to Mr. Warner's wishes, the judges will give preference to—but will in no way limit their consideration to—students who write about the natural history of our Atlantic Littoral, from the Canadian Arctic to the Gulf of Florida. The winner receives a cash prize of $500.
The Jude & Miriam Pfister Poetry Prize was created through the Academy of American Poets, one of the nation's most influential poetry organizations, and is administered through the Washington College Department of English and the Rose O'Neill Literary House. The prize is awarded to a Washington College undergraduate for a single poem and the winner receives a cash prize of $100 and a certificate from the Academy of American Poets.
We offer our most sincere congratulations to this year's prize winners for their fine writing!
The Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College serves as one of the cultural centers of campus, bringing together students, faculty, alumni, and local community members from across the disciplines. Our literary programming provides access to a wide variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, scholarly prose, playwriting, and hybrid forms; our letterpress studio and Literary House Press introduce participants both to old and new technologies. We are dedicated to promoting the articulated word and to supporting students through professional, on-the-job training.
March 4
To celebrate the release of our second issue, we asked contributors, subscribers, and friends to fill Facebook and Twitter with their CT2 selfies, using the hashtag #cherrybomb. And you did it!
We are so incredibly excited to be able to welcome the second issue of our beloved Cherry Tree into the world; and we are so grateful to all of you for sharing in our excitement!
Thanks to all of you (and your photogenic pets) for helping us to announce the arrival of CT2 to the social media world. You rock our cherry-loving world! And because we love them all so much, we have gathered all of your #cherrybomb photos in a happy little gallery you can flip through here:
P.S. If you haven't subscribed yet, do it now!
January 25
On Friday, January 22, we sent our newest beloved issue off to the printers. This, of course, means it's time for the big cover reveal!
January 15
A poem from the inaugural issue of Cherry Tree has been selected for the yearly anthology.
Enormous congratulations to Cherry Tree contributor Julie Kane, whose poem "As If" (which first appeared in our inaugural issue) has been chosen for the 2016 edition of Best American Poetry by guest editor Edward Hirsch! This volume is due to be released on September 6, 2016.
Thank you, Julie, for taking us along for the ride! We are thrilled for you and your beautiful sonnet.
December 15
The editorial staff of Cherry Tree share the top book titles on their holiday wishlists for 2015. Let it snow!
December 9
The Rose O'Neill Literary House's Red Mug Sale is back in time for your last-minute holiday shopping!
Copies of LHP books and broadsides are available for purchase and may be ordered online.
Domestic shipping for Media Mail is $5 for the first item plus $1 for each additional item. Overnight is $15 for the first item plus $2 for each additional item. 2-day air is $12 for the first item plus $1 for each additional item. International shipping by special request.
December 2
After a few months of reading submissions and working to shape them into a complete volume, we have our final list of contributors for issue 2 of Cherry Tree!
October 1
Though we are knee-deep in submissions for issue 2, we have taken a brief break from reading new work to decide which six pieces from issue 1 to nominate for 2016 Pushcart Prizes. The nomination period runs each year from October 1 through December 1.
September 9
Poems from Cherry Tree's inaugural issue have been featured on the free daily poetry site, Verse Daily. Huzzah!
Monday, August 31, 2015 on Verse Daily:
"Women Defending Castle with Bow and Crossbow," by Christine Stewart-Nuñez.
Tuesday, September 1, 2015 on Verse Daily:
Friday, September 4, 2015 on Verse Daily:
Tuesday, September 8, 2015 on Verse Daily:
"The Exotics," by Kate Gaskin.
July 9
From fall 2014 to spring 2015, the Literary House staff, with the help of book designer Jim Dissette '71 and Chestertown artist Stuart Cawley, began assembling the newest fine press chapbook from Literary House Press, a short story by James Magruder.
Magruder is a Baltimore-based fiction writer, playwright, and translator. His adaptations of works by Marivaux, Molière, Gozzi, Hofmannsthal, Lesage, and Dickens have been produced on and off-Broadway, across the country, and in Germany and Japan. His debut novel, Sugarless, was a Lambda Award finalist and shortlisted for the 2010 William Saroyan International Writing Prize. His linked story collection, Let Me See It, was published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press in June 2014. He teaches dramaturgy at Swarthmore College.
For this particular project, a darkly funny story called Worth Our Breath, we wanted to incorporate original illustrations that evoked an atmosphere we can only describe as "Edward Gorey goes to Baltimore." Gorey's iconic pen-and-ink line drawings of the gothic humorous are personal favorites of the Literary House Press staff and so they shaped our initial imaginings of this story visually. Luckily, local freelance artist Stuart Cawley, whose artistic style can also be described as Goreyesque, was up to this task.
We gave Stu a copy of the short story and asked him to pick five scenes that he felt were ripe for illustrating. Finding these scenes wasn't a difficult task; it was narrowing them down to just five that was the challenge. We don't want to give away too much of the story here, so we'll just describe the five illustrations and let you try to extrapolate possible plot and characters on your own (if you can). On the title page, you are greeted by a toothless black cat sitting cantankerously beside a large ceramic container in the shape of a molar. The second illustration appears on the first page of the story: a copy of the iconic Baltimore Sun spread out on a tabletop, the obituaries section laid on top, and a half-empty Café Hon coffee mug set on top of that. Rings of spilled coffee adorn the newspaper beneath. A few pages later, the third illustration is a Polaroid photo of a young girl, a toddler with her dark straight hair clipped back with a barrette. She is not smiling. In the middle of the book, the fourth illustration is a centerfold, a panoramic shot of a street full of Baltimore rowhouses and the blank sky above them. The final illustration is the bleakest of all. A bare mattress covered in old semen stains leaned against the wall of a dark, empty room lit by a bare bulb. The whole story is bookended by a close-up of this bare bulb.
Stu's pen-and-ink illustrations were turned into photopolymer plates for us by Boxcar Press. It is from these plates that we can letterpress print custom images that have not been carved in wood, linoleum, or stone. Thanks to the skills and design work of Jim Dissette (who also designed and printed Lost Originals in 2013), both the illustrations and the text turned out beautifully. The typeface of the book title and the decorative dropcaps scattered through the chapbook are another homage to illustrator Edward Gorey that help to set the visual tone of the story. It is a typeface called (believe it or not) Gorey that is taken from the extensive hand-lettering work on all of his books. All printing was done in-house by Jim on our Vandercook 4 Proof Press during the winter months of early 2015. Aside from the book's interior pages, Jim also printed a ghosted image of the Baltimore rowhouses illustration on the cover papers.
After the printing was completed, the Literary House Press staff went to work hand-tinting the illustrations in all 150 books in the edition. Our color palette for this project was shades of brown. Brown cover paper with a much lighter brown spine cloth and bronze embossing of the title and author name on the cover, brown endpapers, dark brown ink for the title on the title page and for each decorative dropcap. For the illustrations, we chose one piece of each to add a spot of color to with brown watercolor: the hinge on the cat's tooth container, the coffee in the mug and the rings of spill on the newspaper, the barrette in the toddler's hair, a couple of rowhouse windows, doors, and roof turrets, the semen stains on the mattress, and the metal base of the light bulb in our story bookends. This tedious but meditative watercolor work was undertaken by each staff member during the spring of 2015: Jehanne Dubrow (series editor), Lindsay Lusby (assistant editor), Owen Bailey (sales & marketing), and Nicolas Anstett (2015 Literary House Press Intern).
The next step was to fold and collate all of the printed pages and endpapers into their chronological signatures in preparation for shipping them off to the Campbell-Logan Bindery in Minneapolis to be hand bound in hard cover. Once all parts arrived there, the binders sewed together our folded and collated signatures. They wrapped our printed cover papers around stiff book board and glued them into place, then wrapped and glued the spine cloth around them. Worth Our Breath by James Magruder was stamped onto the newly assembled covers in brass foil. Lastly the sewn books are glued into finished covers and kept under weight in a book press to flatten as they dry.
Just a couple of weeks ago, two big, heavy boxes arrived at the Rose O'Neill Literary House. When we unpacked them, with the help of our 2015 Summer Interns Aliya Merhi and Ryan Manning, we discovered our beautiful, finished books in careful, even stacks. We have just completed the final design for the offset paperback edition of Worth Our Breath and sent it off to the printers. We should get those back in about a month.
At its heart, Worth Our Breath is a love letter to the city of Baltimore from author James Magruder. The Literary House Press was so honored and thrilled to be able to bring this love into the world of print. To celebrate this book-birth, we will be holding an official book launch on Tuesday, October 6, 2015 at 4:30 p.m. at the Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. James will join us to read from the book, and this reading will be followed by a book sale and signing, as well as delicious refreshments. Please mark your calendars for this special occasion and join us for the release of the new letterpress chapbook from the Literary House Press!
July 3
The editorial staff of Cherry Tree share the top book titles on their summer reading lists for 2015, before they all get back to reading submissions for issue 2 in August.
1. Made in Detroit (poetry), by Marge Piercy
2. Shells (poetry), by Craig Arnold
3. The Scent of Desire (nonfiction), by Rachel Herz
1. Hausfrau (fiction), by Jill Alexander Essbaum
2. She Has a Name (poetry), by Kamilah Aisha Moon
3. Bone Map (poetry), by Sara Eliza Johnson
1. The Argonauts (nonfiction/autotheory), by Maggie Nelson
2. How To Be Drawn (poetry), by Terrance Hayes
3. Appetite (poetry), by Aaron Smith
1. The Goldfinch (fiction), by Donna Tartt
2. Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century (nonfiction/scholarship), edited by Alexandra Peary & Tom C. Hunley
3. Butch Geography (poetry), by Stacey Waite
1. Invisible Man (fiction), by Ralph Ellison
2. The Color of Magic (fiction), by Terry Pratchett
3. The Planets (nonfiction), by Dava Sobel
1. Mr. West (poetry), by Sarah Blake
2. The Bone and the Body (poetry), by Laura Kochman
3. It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides (fiction), by Jessica Lee Richardson
1. Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me (poetry), by Stanley Plumly
2. Two Men Fighting with a Knife (poetry), by John Poch
3. Lodgings, Selected Poems (poetry/translation), by Andrzej Sosnowski (translated by Benjamin Paloff)
July 2
2015 Literary House Summer Intern Aliya Merhi '16 writes about her experiences so far in field literary arts administration.
When I was 17, I stumbled upon Christa Desir's Twitter account. She was a publicist at the time, and I began following her blog and sharing my interest in YA books with her. As she began writing her own YA novels, I became one of her teen beta readers. I was homeschooled at the time, and the focus of my life became reading and reviewing books. After meeting Christa and the rest of the book blogging community, I decided that I wanted to enter the field of publishing. I shared her excitement when she was picked up by an agent, and then when she signed to Simon Pulse. She is now a romance editor and has published Fault Line and Blood Like Me, and her newest book, Other Broken Things,is coming out in January 2016.
As the Summer Literary House Intern, I have the opportunity to plan an event with my fellow intern Ryan Manning. I began thinking about my interests and what type of talk I would like to hear given at the Literary House this year, and I realized that I could invite the writer who first introduced me to the field that I am centering my life around to give a talk and hear her insights on navigating the industry.
Her immediate reply, "Yes!" to our invitation quickly set the planning stage in motion. One of the first considerations of planning the event was the focus of the talk. As a YA author, romance editor, rape victim activist, and podcaster, there is an array of topics she could center her talk around. But The Oral History Podcast that she does with Carrie Mesrobian that is focused on sex and YA books gave me and Ryan the idea of asking her to talk about how to bridge the traditionally uncomfortable gap between young adults and sexuality in YA novels.
My responsibilities this summer include preparing for the event on February 25th include collecting the information and paperwork as well as submitting event requests. I am learning about the preparation necessary to host an event and even have the opportunity to perform those tasks that produce the events that I have been attending each semester. Not only am I performing literary administrative work, but the work I am doing is centered on an event of my choosing where I have been able to invite an author that has inspired me and encouraged my love for books and publishing which led me to apply for this internship.
So mark your calendars for this exciting event:
June 24
2015 Literary House Summer Intern Aliya Merhi '16 writes about the many ways that Maureen Jacoby's generous endowment has helped to create student opportunities in writing, editing, and publishing at the Rose O'Neill Literary House.
In spring 2015, The Rose O'Neill Literary House hung a new plaque in its library in honor of Maureen Jacoby and the generous endowment she left to be administered by the Literary House. This fund is the reason I am able to write this post today while I am working as a Literary House Summer Intern. My internship this summer is entirely paid for by the Maureen Jacoby Fund and is the reason I have the opportunity to learn and to gain experience in the field of literary arts administration at Washington College before beginning my senior year.
The Maureen Jacoby Fund's mission is to support student internships, professional endeavors, and individually created projects in the fields of publishing, editing, and writing. The resources for English majors at Washington are the primary reason I chose to attend this school, and the Maureen Jacoby Fund supports an incredibly large portion of the opportunities at the Literary House.
The fund supports the Literary House Summer Internships, the Literary House Press Internship, and the Cherry Tree Production Internship. In addition, there are the Jacoby Endowment Grants that, each academic year, are awarded to 2-3 students for up to $1000 each in support of individual projects in writing, editing, and publishing. Recently, this grant program was expanded to offer funding assistance for graduating students as they pay fees for MFA and MA applications. The operation of the Print Shop is supported by the fund and is the way you might have taken the free letterpress and book arts workshops taught by Mike Kaylor at the Print Shop on Tuesday and Thursday nights each semester. This is where the annual broadside series and the yearly budget for printing and bookmaking supplies come from. My copies of Cherry Tree and The Book of Scented Things as well as other publishing and book projects are made possible by the fund that covers the printing costs. Each of these projects also involves multiple opportunities for student participation in professional literary editing and publishing at each step of the process.
The array of opportunities for students available at the Literary House is encouraged and made possible by the Maureen Jacoby Fund. Today I have the chance to plan a literary event of my choice and invite an author and publisher that I have admired to give a talk at Washington College. Today there is a new plaque in the Literary House in honor of the financial assistance that the Maureen Jacoby Fund provides that allows students to pursue their passions in the literary field.
May 15
The Stump is a new feature of the Cherry Tree website, where you can listen to audio recordings of contributors reading their work aloud.
Earlier this spring, we decided to ask our inaugural issue contributors to record themselves reading their pieces from the issue for us to post on the Cherry Tree website. Since we are a print-only publication, our editor thought that this would be a wonderful way to share free samples of the issue and for readers to experience that work in a different light. You get to hear the writer's voice. You get to hear how the writer intended the work to be read. You get feel closer to the writer whose work you admire.
The Stump is a platform where our fantastic contributors can stand to read their work to a wider web audience. Right now, our Stump line-up is Juliana Gray, Laura Madeline Wiseman, Matthew Lippman, and Pamela Hart. We will add even more recordings in the months to come. Maybe, if you are intrigued enough by the pieces you hear, you will even decide to subscribe to Cherry Tree.
So grab a seat by the stump. Dig your toes into the warm grass. Close your eyes. Listen up.
May 1
The Rose O'Neill Literary House has named the winner of the 2016 Mary Wood Fellowship, poet Nicky Beer.
In April 2016, we will host poet Nicky Beer for a 3-day residency as our 2016 Mary Wood Fellow. The Mary Wood Fellowship is a nationwide competition and Nicky was selected from a pool of more than 60 outstanding applicants. As part of her duties while in-residence, Nicky will hold one-on-one meetings with a select group of female student-poets. She will also participate in two public events, giving a craft talk and a reading from her poetry.
April 24
At the 2015 Senior Reading, the Rose O'Neill Literary House announced this year's winners of three annual student creative writing prizes: The Literary House Genre Fiction Prize, The William W. Warner Prize for Creative Writing on Nature and the Environment, and The Jude & Miriam Pfister Poetry Prize.
The Literary House Genre Fiction Prize is a prize awarded to a Washington College undergraduate for the best work of science fiction, fantasy, mystery, or horror. The winner receives a cash prize of $500.
The William W. Warner Prize is awarded to the Washington College undergraduate who shows the greatest aptitude for writing about nature and the environment. This prize is named for, and was endowed in the honor of, William W. Warner, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay, based on his experiences living and working among crab fishermen on the Chesapeake. According to Mr. Warner's wishes, the judges will give preference to—but will in no way limit their consideration to—students who write about the natural history of our Atlantic Littoral, from the Canadian Arctic to the Gulf of Florida. The winner receives a cash prize of $1,000.
The Jude & Miriam Pfister Poetry Prize was created through the Academy of American Poets, one of the nation's most influential poetry organizations, and is administered through the Washington College Department of English and the Rose O'Neill Literary House. The prize is awarded to a Washington College undergraduate for a single poem and the winner receives a cash prize of $100 and a certificate from the Academy of American Poets.
We offer our most sincere congratulations to this year's prize winners for their fine writing!
The Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College serves as one of the cultural centers of campus, bringing together students, faculty, alumni, and local community members from across the disciplines. Our literary programming provides access to a wide variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, scholarly prose, playwriting, and hybrid forms; our letterpress studio and Literary House Press introduce participants both to old and new technologies. We are dedicated to promoting the articulated word and to supporting students through professional, on-the-job training.
April 6
The Rose O'Neill Literary House has awarded this year's Cave Canem Residency to Kamilah Aisha Moon.
In June 2015, the Rose O'Neill Literary House will welcome Kamilah to Chestertown for a month-long writer's retreat. She was selected from this year's pool of applicants as the winner of the Literary House's 2015 Cave Canem Summer Residency.
While most of her time will be spent working on her own writing projects and quietly exploring the town, Kamilah will also be a part of our second Summer Poetry Salon on Tuesday, June 23 at 4:30PM, sharing the stage with poet Vandana Khanna.
A recipient of fellowships to the Cave Canem Foundation, the Prague Summer Writing Institute, the Fine Arts Work Center Walker Fellowship and the Vermont Studio Center, Kamilah Aisha Moon's work has been featured widely, including in Harvard Review, jubilat, Poem-A-Day for the Academy of American Poets,Oxford American, Callaloo, Villanelles,and Gathering Ground. A Pushcart Prize winner, she was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Audre Lorde Award from the Publishing Triangle. Moon holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and is the author of She Has a Name (Four Way Books).
The Cave Canem Summer Residency at The Rose O'Neill Literary House is a partnership with Cave Canem, the nation's preeminent organization for young African American poets. Cave Canem's mission is to serve as "a home for the many voices of African American poetry and is committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of African American poets." Our Cave Canem Summer Residency is a month-long Chestertown retreat offered annually to one outstanding former Cave Canem Fellow. Previous Summer Residents include poets Yona Harvey in 2013, Kevin Vaughn in 2012, and Arisa White in 2011.
The Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College serves as one of the cultural centers of campus, bringing together students, faculty, alumni, and local community members from across the disciplines. Our literary programming provides access to a wide variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, scholarly prose, playwriting, and hybrid forms; our letterpress studio and Literary House Press introduce participants both to old and new technologies. We are dedicated to promoting the articulated word and to supporting students through professional, on-the-job training.
March 30
2015 Literary House Press Intern Nicolas Anstett describes his struggle as a writer with dysgraphia and how that struggle came to a head in his work with the Literary House Press.
I think there is a point in almost every young writer's life where they attempt some form of transcendentalism. They trudge into the local woods, bushwhacking their way through low hanging branches and curling vines, and plop themselves down beneath an aging oak or elm with a pad of paper and a pen. There's an inner romantic within most emerging poets or writers and what better way to find it? I was no different. I made several attempts to live this adolescent creative fantasy, but instead often trudged back with a notebook filled with unintelligible scribbles.
I was diagnosed with dysgraphia in second grade. At the time the learning disorder, which affects fine motor skills (handwriting in particular), did not seem to be a huge encroachment upon my life. In hindsight, I have the utmost respect for my elementary school teachers who likely had to decipher what was the equivalent of foreign calligraphy. Now as a student actively pursuing a future in the creative written word, dysgraphia looms over me like an annoying pet monkey. The onset of digital typing software has softened the blow, but my hopes of achieving true transcendentalism may have to wait.
With my experience at the Literary House Press intern, I try to remain in high spirits and approach things with a sense of humor. I recognize that my clumsy attempts to apply packing tape and wrapping paper to outgoing books often seems like it's been applied by a hyperactive five year old. It's good to laugh at yourself especially if you accidentally cover your own hands in packing tape. However, nothing could have described my abject horror to discovering that I would have to spend a full week of my time here applying water colors to the upcoming letterpress book Worth Our Breath. Worth Our Breath, due out for release this October, features an original short story by fiction writer, playwright, and translator James Magruder and original pen-and-ink illustrations by Stuart Cawley. Like all of the Press's original letterpress books, this book is a gorgeous work of handcrafted book making. The thought of my lending watercolors to these works of art triggered memories of soaked and paint blended grade school art class projects.
However, as I sat down and began to apply strokes of muted brown to the tops of urban Baltimore rooftops, hair bands, and stained mattresses everything soon melted away. While I won't say that my work was immaculate, I found the repetition of minimalistic art oddly soothing and even entrancing. Despite my fears, I was able to add a tangible contribution each book. It's the handcrafted randomness that ultimately makes Worth Our Breath and the rest of the Press's letterpress books and broadsides such valuable productions. Every volume is unique in its own way. In one I mixed the brown too softly and it's a barely visible transition from color into its absence. In another the contrast is clear and dynamic, and I may have even over done it. What began as a task that frightened evolved into an inner dialogue of self-competition to try and find that "Goldilocks zone" of color and art.
Sometimes we forget that there is more to transcendental theory than sitting beneath an aging tree with a notebook and a fountain pen. In its most basic sense it's an embracing of the sensations in simple human experience. It's the moment of quiet tranquility in bypassing the mental roadblocks between thought and hand to help create something beautiful. Even if that something is applying dabs of brown water color to a stained mattress somewhere in a forgotten apartment in the streets of Baltimore.
March 26
Cherry Tree and the Literary House Press are counting down to the 2015 AWP Conference & Bookfair, which this year will be held in Minneapolis, Minnesota from April 8-11. We will be at the Rose O'Neill Literary House table in the Bookfair: table 1724.
Last year at this time, we were still in the planning stages for our brand-new national literary journal Cherry Tree. We brought flyers with us to the 2014 Conference in Seattle that we handed out at the Rose O'Neill Literary House table in the Bookfair, detailing our mission statement and when we would open for our first round of general submissions. Cherry Tree was just an idea then, with no tangible presence.
But this year will be a big one for us at the AWP Conference. This year Cherry Tree is a real thing. This year we have shelves full of gorgeous copies of our Inaugural Issue. This year we have a pretty and practical Cherry Tree tote bag for accessorizing swag. And this is a hefty tote bag. Planning to buy 100 pounds of books during the Bookfair? You can fit 38 copies of Cherry Tree's inaugural issue in this beautiful canvas tote (seriously, I just checked).
At table 1724 in the AWP Bookfair in the Minneapolis Convention Center, we will have the following special Conference-only offers:
We will also have all of our other Literary House Press book and broadside publications, including the new perfume-inspired poetry anthology The Book of Scented Things.
But the cherry on top of this year's Conference will be the official Cherry Tree Launch Party we are hosting on Thursday, April 9 at 7:00PM at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis, 1300 Nicollet Mall. We will be celebrating the release of the inaugural issue of our brand-new literary journal in style with readings by contributors Juliana Gray, Dore Kiesselbach, Bruce Snider, and Laura Madeline Wiseman! There will also be a generous spread of tasty refreshments (including an open bar), a sale & signing of the issue, and good literary conversation. We would like to invite all of you to join us for this very special event, if you can make it! If you can, please RSVP to me at email@example.com.
We are gearing up for an incredible AWP Conference in Minneapolis. Please come out to see us and say hello!
March 17
He reads from his work and talks about his translations of Polish poetry when he visits the Literary House on March 17.
CHESTERTOWN, MD— The poet and translator Benjamin Paloff will give a reading and talk at Washington College on Tuesday, March 17, as part of the series, "What's Found in Translation." The event begins at 4:30 p.m. at the Rose O'Neill Literary House, 407 Washington Avenue, and is free and open to the public.
Paloff's forthcoming collection of original poems, And His Orchestra, will be published soon by Carnegie Mellon University Press. He published his first collection, The Politics: Poems, in 2011. His most recent translations include Lodgings by Andrzej Sosnowski (2011) and Transparent by Marek Bienczyk (2012).
In an interview for the California Journal of Poetics, he said with characteristic humor, "I have to admit that I do sometimes find myself delighting in a particular verbal gesture that will pose a special problem to someone translating it into another language … Perhaps this is how translators stick it to their friends."
Paloff earned a Ph.D. in Slavic Language and Literature from Harvard University and a M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Michigan, where he now teaches. He also serves as poetry editor of Boston Review and writes about the craft of poetry for The Nation Magazine. He has received fellowships from Poland's Book Institute (2010), the National Endowment for the Arts (2009-2010), and the Michigan Society of Fellows (2007-2010).
The Literary House Press will publish a commemorative broadside to celebrate Paloff's visit. Copies of the broadside and his work will be available for sale and signing after the reading.
March 16
2015 Literary House Press Intern Nick Anstett writes about the intersection of creative writing and business in the world of literary editing and publishing.
If you drew up a classic grade-school-style Venn diagram of qualities possessed by both Washington College's English and Business departments the one aspect you would find resting in the center of the overlap is applicability. While you may be reading Faulkner or a case study on the international business efforts of Heineken, what both programs are truly seeking to instill in students is real world applicability of critical thinking and skill.
As an English Major with a double minor in Creative Writing and Business, I've been on a collision course with the world of publishing for much of my academic career. The world of literary publications draws upon numerous skills that I've learned through business courses such as marketing, but also allows for a ground-level view of the evolution of a new era of literature.
Through the Literary Editing and Publishing special topics class taught by Jehanne Dubrow, Director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House and founding editor of Cherry Tree, I was first able to dabble in the merging of both fields. Literary Editing and Publishing brought the contemporary market into perspective in a way that was both comprehensive and intriguing.
Now through my position as the Literary House Press Intern, I have taken my first plunge in. I could not have picked a better time to do so. Fresh off the release of their first trade paperback, The Book of Scented Things, and just a week away from releasing the inaugural issue of the national literary magazine Cherry Tree, Literary House Press was a bustle of excitement and activity. It wasn't long before I found myself in direct correspondence with Best American selected poets and writers and found myself working through the trials and tribulations of a small independent press.
After the fervor and excitement of Cherry Tree's launch, I found myself working more and more in attempts to help market the magazine to be the most successful that it can be. Many of these projects involved extensive research and forced me to explore creative new outlets to create notice for what I believe is a truly exceptional grouping of literature. (Which I also had the pleasure of critiquing in an original critical essay for the Literary House blog.)
The Literary House Press has given me an invaluable experience that has allowed me to use the skills and talents that I have honed through my education at Washington College in a professional setting. Whether it's through organization of new marketing projects for the press's books, running different aspects of social media, corresponding with established writers, or simply carrying boxes filled with journals hot off the presses, I am getting my hands dirty in a way that is both entertaining and informative. I cannot wait to see what the rest of my semester brings.
March 2
First to fill the semester long residency will be fiction writer Roy Kesey, a 1991 alumnus of Washington College.
CHESTERTOWN, MD—Fiction writer Roy Kesey '91 will spend the fall semester on the Washington College campus as the first Sophie Kerr/Rose O'Neill Literary House Writer-in-Residence. He will teach a class in creative writing, hold office hours at the Literary House to mentor students, and offer a public reading and a public talk about the writer's art and craft.
In announcing the new Writer-in-Residence program, Literary House Director Jehanne Dubrow explained that it will host a writer once every three years, always in the fall semester. "This new residency will offer students more opportunities to engage with an established creative writer in a sustained and meaningful way," she said. "It will add diversity to the creative writing offerings and bring additional points of view to the literary conversation taking place on our campus"
When Kesey launches the Sophie Kerr/Rose O'Neill Literary House Writer-in-Residence program this fall, he will teach a special topics course titled "Creative Writing Workshop: Non/Fiction." English Department Chair Kathryn Moncrief says the course will use both classic and contemporary texts to study "the borderlands between fiction and nonfiction, an area inhabited by writers as varied as Thucydides, Cervantes, Virginia Woolf and Mary Karr," and that students will explore the ways in which "fiction can steal tricks from nonfiction, and vice-versa."
The residency is funded by the Sophie Kerr endowment, the Rose O'Neill Literary House and the office of the Provost. There is no application process; writers will be selected by the Department of English and the director of the Literary House.
Roy Kesey is author, most recently, of the short story collection Any Deadly Thing (Dzanc Books 2013) and the novel Pacazo (Dzanc Books 2011/Jonathan Cape 2012). His other books include the short story collection All Over, the novella Nothing in the World, and a historical guidebook to the city of Nanjing. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship, the Paula Anderson Book Award, and the Bullfight Media Little Book Award. His short stories, essays, translations and poems have appeared in more than a hundred magazines and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and New Sudden Fiction. Kesey earned his bachelor's degree in English from Washington College in 1991.
February 23
RESCHEDULED for Monday, February 23. The Rose O'Neill Literary House hosts Danielle Corsetto to talk about the art and business of web comics.
CHESTERTOWN, MD—The creator of the online comic series Girls with Slingshots visits the Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College Monday, February 23, to talk about the art and business of web comics. Danielle Corsetto, who has entertained hundreds of thousands of readers online since 2004, will speak at 4:30 p.m. at the Lit House, 407 Washington Avenue. The event, originally scheduled for February 17 but rescheduled because of weather, is free and open to the public.
Danielle Corsetto's love of cartoon strips was nurtured early on when her grandfather read "Garfield" and "Peanuts" to her. She started writing her own strips at age 8. After graduating from Shepherd College with a BFA in photography and digital imaging, she started Girls with Slingshots as a black-and-white comic published twice a week. A decade later, the strip appears in color five times a week and is compiled in books published by TopatoCo.
Girls With Slingshots revolves around two twenty-something women, Hazel and Jamie, and their adventures with friends, including a cactus named McPedro. The web-comic series focuses on ideas of romance, career struggles, friendships, and sexuality. Corsetto says the style of Girls with Slingshots is "more realistic and less stereotypical. All the characters have these unusual relationships, both romantic and platonic … that are not what you would find in, say, a sitcom, but it's written like a sitcom. I'm trying to normalize these things that are taboo."
More than 100,000 people visit www.girlswithslingshots.com on a daily basis to read the latest installment. Corsetto has also written several books and original graphic novels (OGNs). Her fifth OGN for Adventure Time will be published this March.
This event was organized by Rose O'Neill Literary House 2014 summer interns Julie Armstrong '15 and Ryan Manning '17. Already fans of Corsetto's webcomic, they were eager to bring her to campus to share her quick wit and humor. For more information about this lecture and other Rose O'Neill Literary House events and programs, call (410) 778-7899 or email email@example.com.
– Kaitlyn Fowler '17
February 13
Literary House Press Intern, Nicolas Anstett, takes an analytical look at the inaugural issue of Cherry Tree: A National Literary Journal @ Washington College. The issue will be released on February 15, 2015.
George Washington stares blankly back at you through the cover of the inaugural issue of Cherry Tree. Trapped within the confines of a crinkled one-dollar bill, Washington sits captured in American iconography. It is hard to think of a more fitting cover for Cherry Tree's first foray into the national literary landscape. It simultaneously captures the many elements that make this magazine and inaugural issue so unique: a commitment to history, creation and evolution of the American myth, the mundane and personal, but also the lyrically beautiful. Through the works of an eclectic grouping of writers Cherry Tree has created something personal, but also carries with it the weight of truth and myth.
Cherry Tree's inaugural issue almost reads like a three act play, separating itself into interconnected but thematically different acts. It begins with a celebration of past and text. Leslie Harrison, Christine Stewart-Nuñez, and Moira Egan structure lyric ekphrastic poems engaged with the writings of Emily Dickinson and a watercolor painting by Madeline Ritz, illuminated manuscripts, and the paintings of Suzanne Valadon. Similarly, Anna Journey constructs her lyric nonfiction essay "On the Back of a Flying Fish, Dear Sister" as an examination of found text, in this case a postcard shared between two women. Like the dollar it adorns on its cover, Cherry Tree begins with an exchange of artifacts that allow for a human examination of the past and the emotions hidden in words and image.
From here, Cherry Tree transitions into its second act: a formation of the American myth through pop culture and contemporary pathos. It slices its way into the proceedings with Gabrielle Hovendon's unnerving piece of magical realist fiction, "When We Were Dissected." Here Phoebe Reeves, Laura Madeline Wiseman, Matthew Lippman, and Bruce Snider intersect ruminations on gender, cultural protest, workplace boredom, and parenthood with images of fast food chains, digitally-rendered monsters, Nicholas Sparks, and sperm banks. John Vanderslice's work of fiction "Something for Dinner" surrounds race, religion, class, and post-colonialism in a disarming local tourist trap that helps further Cherry Tree's regional identity. It's a creation of the contemporary American myth that adds the smudged fingerprints and torn edges to the green paper cover.
Through Betty Jo Buro's nonfiction essay concerning pregnancy and the tribulations of motherhood "The Road from Emmaus," the texts transition into the issue's final act. Here the lyricism of the early works combines with the grit and immediacy of its second act to create a blend of personal but stylistically musical works of nonfiction and poetry. Julie Marie Wade examines the relationship between her mother and her visual impairment in "Lazy Eye." Jericho Brown's "Atlantis" views his experience with gender politics through the lens of New Orleans. In the end, Charlie Clark's "Dead American Christmas Ghazal" closes us out, proclaiming, "It is difficult to picture the dead as nothing / Even this long after they are gone."
Cherry Tree is a socially and lyrically aware furthering of the American myth and follows suit on its mission statement of finding truth. Like currency, it passes its baton through dozens of writers of varying sex, gender, race, class, and literary schooling. The result is something that impresses through craft, emotion, and humanity.
Nicolas Anstett is the 2015 Literary House Press Intern at the Rose O'Neill Literary House. He will be joining the Cherry Tree staff as a student screener for its second issue, beginning in August 2015.
September 18
On October 7, 2014, the Literary House Press will launch its first trade paperback, an anthology of brand-new work called The Book of Scented Things: 100 Contemporary Poems about Perfume, co-edited by Jehanne Dubrow and Lindsay Lusby.
Poets from across the country signed on to participate in this unusual writing experiment. Once each poet agreed, Jehanne, the resident perfumista, chose a specific scent from a designer perfume house, picking a fragrance which seemed compatible with what she knew of that particular writer: personality, writing style, recurring subjects, themes, or motifs. Each contributor was instructed to compose a poem in response to his/her individually selected vial of perfume: "The poem can be an interpretation of the scent, a memory, a series of associations, or some entirely different kind of interaction with the fragrance. You can wear the perfume or sprinkle it on your pillow or just sniff the scent in its glass vial—whatever works best for your process."
In the coming months, the poems that Jehanne and Lindsay received explored the spectrum of human experience and poetic subject matter: ars poeticas, poems about place and childhood, poems about scent and philosophy, poems about love and longing and grief. Instead of collecting poems primarily about perfume, the editors found themselves gathering together a diverse assortment of pieces that used scent as a way into various subjects, narratives waiting to be written, waiting to be triggered by the memory-laden sense of smell.
During the winter and spring months of 2014, Literary House Press Intern Samantha Gross joined the team—working many hours with Jehanne and Lindsay in the designing, proofing, and finalizing of the completed book. This was a labor-intensive and extremely detail-oriented process that, after many drafts, ended with the lush printed book. No, it is not scratch and sniff. Sorry about that. But it has a strikingly stark and beautiful cover designed by Carla Echevarria, a preface essay by Coming to My Senses author Alyssa Harad in which she draws together the various inherent connections between perfume and poetry, and, of course, 100 brand-new poems from accomplished contemporary American poets. In the back of the book is a section of "Contributors' & Matchmaking Notes" in which, following a brief biographical note, each poet's perfume-pairing is listed.
The first critical review of The Book of Scented Things came from poet Claire Trévien at Sabotage Reviews, who herself headed a very similar pair of UK-based perfume-poetry micro-anthologies, Penning Perfumes. Trévien says, "[T]here is no need to convince me on the logic of pairing perfume and poetry, but for anyone in doubt, both the introduction by Dubrow, and the preface by Alyssa Harad tease out the benefits of pairing two art forms some might qualify as niche or irrelevant." Reviews have also begun coming in from some popular perfume blogs, including Bois de Jasmin and independent perfumer Ayala Moriel's Smelly Blog.
Finally, after months of intense anticipation and loving preparation, The Book of Scented Things will be presented to the reading and sniffing world at its home launch party. On October 7 at 4:30 p.m. at the Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College, the Press will release this new poetry anthology with a celebratory reading featuring five regional contributors—Sandra Beasley, Meredith Davies Hadaway, James Allen Hall, Leslie Harrison, and Shara Lessley—and both co-editors, the unveiling of a commemorative letterpress broadside, a raffle for a bottle of Chanel No. 5 Eau Première, and an assortment of black-and-white treats from JoJo's Cupcakes and Cream and bubbly drinks. It should be a dazzling evening for all of your senses. The Press will follow up this special event with an encore presentation in Washington, DC—a second book launch event to be held at the Arts Club of Washington on October 29 at 7:00 p.m.
The Book of Scented Things will be available for purchase in select independent bookstores and online at Small Press Distribution.
July 1
Arisa White was the first Cave Canem Fellow at the Rose O'Neill Literary House back in 2011.
As the Rose O'Neill Literary House says goodbye to the fourth Cave Canem Fellow, Jamaal May, we caught up with our first Cave Canem Fellow Arisa White, who spent a month on campus in the summer of 2011, and has been very busy since.
1) How is life?
Life is crazy busy right now but all in good ways. I got married in January to Samantha Florio and we are planning a honeymoon to Costa Rica—we so very much need it. (This horse year has been a true horse year for me.) In the fall I started working at Goddard in their lo-res BFA Creative Writing Program and I'm happy with the position. I just came back from the Juniper Writing Institute, where I was the poet in residence. I gave a reading with Paul Lisicky and Sabina Murray and facilitated a craft workshop, using mindfulness and somatic-awareness exercises to generate writing—it all went well and felt personally successful. And I just finished curating an essay series for Zora Magazine, called Anger Portraits: A Digital Salon, which I think is going to help move the conversation about black women and anger into a deeper direction.
2) I saw on Facebook that you just last week reached your goal on Kickstarter to fund Post Pardon: The Opera. Congratulations! Please tell me a little bit about this project.
Thank you! We reached and exceeded our goal by $1300! It was my first time running a Kickstarter campaign, so I'm glad we did so well. This project is an adaptation of the poetry collection, Post Pardon , which was inspired by the death of poet Reetika Vazirani. I used the poems to contemplate why a mother would kill her child, then herself. I received a grant from the City of Oakland to write the libretto and create the musical score. For this project I am collaborating with tenor-saxophonist and pianist Jessica Jones, who's based in Brooklyn, NY. We've created something that is experimental, jazzy, and a sound of it's own. As a part of the grant, we will present our first public concert of songs on July 13. We have six vocalists and three musicians on board who have been so very much dedicated to the project—it's truly amazing to see an idea become live before you.
3) So Post Pardon opens on July 13th, but what else are you working on?
I've been working on a series of epistolary poems, addressed to my estranged father. I started this two years ago when my mother asked me if I wanted to write my father, who I haven't seen since I was three years old. I wrote poems instead. He lives in Guyana now, and with a grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, I will take a trip to Guyana to give him a copy of the poems. Prior to my trip to South America in early 2015, I will self-publish the epistolary poems, 100 in total, and give away 95 copies in exchange for letters written to one's estranged father. Later this summer, I will put out a call for letters on my website.
For the month of August I will be in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and there I will work on imagining A Penny Saved as a dance-theater performance in collaboration with choreographer Sonia Dawkins and director Charlotte Tiencken. I'm looking forward to that time to allow my mind to create. Also, this is the first time that I am collaborating in this manner. I haven't worked with Sonia before and I'm looking forward to learning her movement language, how she approaches emotional nuances with her body. I was an intern at Jacob's Pillow when I met Charlotte.We held my interview for the internship while I was studying abroad in Ghana. It was an effort to coordinate the time we would speak … I enjoyed Charlotte's energy and demeanor, and her creative visions were on point. So Charlotte, Sonia, and I are coming together to imagine what can come of a selected batch of poems from A Penny Saved, and I find that this project presents a wonderful tension: bringing movement to a story about a woman held captive in her home.
4) Have you read any good poets lately?
Yes. You Good Thing, by Dara Wier , Proxy by R. Erica Doyle , Jamaal May's Hum , and Allegiance by Francine J. Harris , and Ayiti by Roxane Gay . I have a tower of books in my office that I need more time to sit and read … one day soon.
June 17
Helen by Claire Spaulding
Here's how good it is: I envy you for not having read it yet, because it means you get to read it for the first time.
~ Patrick Ryan Editor-in-Chief
I agree.
After more than 300 submissions to the One Teen Story contest, guest judge Matt de la Peña selected this year's winner: Helen by Claire Spaulding. This is a beautiful story that explores the many different forms and shapes of love, and does so in a way that you won't realize until it hits you like leaving an air conditioned home on a hot humid day. As the second winner of the competition, this is a great follow up from last year's winner, Night Swimming by Nicole Acton.
As Patrick Ryan stated, this is a great story to read for the first time and I want to respect that idea and not write any thoughts that would require spoiler alerts. Instead, I'll leave you with my favorite line from the story and a link, here, to the interview with Claire.
Favorite piece of prose:
the moths swirled about the porch light and danced their own dance, desperate to escape the darkness.
Happy Reading,
The Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College serves as one of the cultural centers of campus, bringing together students, faculty, alumni, and local community members from across the disciplines. Our literary programming provides access to a wide variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, scholarly prose, playwriting, and hybrid forms; our letterpress studio and Literary House Press introduce participants both to old and new technologies. We are dedicated to promoting the articulated word and to supporting students through professional, on-the-job training.
May 21
One Small Step By: Holly Hilliard
I'm cleaning the chicken coop in my mother's five-inch stilettos when I hear a car pull into the driveway.
So many questions from this opening line and I don't know where to start. Like all good opening lines, it makes you want to read more - to find out why someone would be cleaning the chicken coop in their mother's five-inch stilettos - then find out who is pulling into their driveway. To add confusion to the final story before the winner of the One Teen Story contest, here is a video by Editor-in-Chief of OTS, Patrick Ryan.
* Spoilers *
So this story is about a girl, Sam – short for Samantha, who cleans a chicken coop in her mother's stilettos. Easy. Until you read that she is a 17-year-old girl who is freaking out that her younger 14-year-old sister is going to the senior prom with a douchebag, Sam's words – not mine, named Ken. Less easy. Sam has a date, but is only planning on attending so as to keep an eye on her sister, but her date never shows up and so he could also be called a douchebag, again – Sam's words, but he has an excuse that I won't spoil, and you should really read the story. Tricky.
As Holly Hilliard writes in the interview with Patrick Ryan:
I'm from a small town in southern Ohio, so a lot of my friends and classmates had farm animals. We actually used to get a week off from school every September for the county fair, since so many students had livestock. I lived in the middle of town, so I didn't have farm animals, but I have some good memories of hanging out at my friends' farms.
I grew up in a similar setting in Kent County and went to school with a few kids who had to get up in the morning and milk the cows or feed the chickens before going to work or school. This idea might seem foreign in today's world as more people move to cities and suburbs and have nothing to do with farms and where our food comes from. With the fact that this setting and situation might seem foreign, or at the very least different, adds to Sam's isolation and the reader's sympathy for her.
She has to care for animals on a farm no matter the weather, the time of day, her mood, or what else is going on in her life. The animals depend on her as if she were their parent. And it feels real. This story felt as real as the holes in the mud made by those stilettos.
As I mentioned in the first paragraph, this is the 8th and final story before the winner of OTS Volume II is announced. Actually, I am late reading and writing this, and the winner has already been announced. So, if you want to know you can click here to see. If you want to wait, I'll be publishing that article soon.
Happy Reading,
The Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College serves as one of the cultural centers of campus, bringing together students, faculty, alumni, and local community members from across the disciplines. Our literary programming provides access to a wide variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, scholarly prose, playwriting, and hybrid forms; our letterpress studio and Literary House Press introduce participants both to old and new technologies. We are dedicated to promoting the articulated word and to supporting students through professional, on-the-job training.
May 7
With the 2013-2014 academic year in the books, the staff at the Rose O'Neill Literary House turns their attention towards the three upcoming Summer Poetry Salons set to take place on May 27, June 24 and July 22. But before we do, we'd like to revisit some of the highlights of this past year and we begin, naturally, with our Literary Events …
In the fall, the Rose O'Neill Literary House hosted the "Chicano/a and Latino/a Voices" Series, which featured writers Justin Torres and Joy Castro, poet Eduardo C. Corral, and Washington College Professor Crystal Kurzen.
Justin Torres was the opening act of the semester, reading from his book We the Animals, printed in 2011 by Mariner Books. Torres shared with us his writing technique—a language crisp, clean, and lean; and in this style we are able see the beauty in moments when beauty is hard to imagine. In anticipation of his visit, a broadside was made with the opening words to his book, which you can see here.
Joy Castro's reading was powerful. She read from several of her nonfiction works, including Island of Bones and The Truth Book. We saw Joy a few months later at the 2014 AWP Conference in Seattle, where she led a panel of writers, all of whom contributed to Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family. Castro is the editor of this great collection, which was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2013.
At our fall Tea & Talk lecture, Professor Crystal Kurzen presented her work on how contemporary Chicana/o writers revise and expand the genre conventions of autobiography in order to represent themselves and their communities on their own terms. At Washington College, Professor Kurzen teaches courses in literature and composition and in American, Chicana/o, and Latina/o literatures.
To round out the series, the Literary House welcomed poet Eduardo C. Corral. Corral read poems from his collection Slow Lightning, from which one of the poems— "Immigration and Naturalization Service Report #46" —was made into a broadside, which you can see here. We also ran into Corral at AWP, and since then it seems he has been very busy, traveling and giving readings. So keep your eye out—he might be in your area soon.
In the spring, we moved to our "Writing for (and about) Young Adults" Series and opened with fiction writer Cynthia Hand. Hand is the author of Unearthly Series and at her event, she read from the first book in the series as well as a section from her upcoming book, The Last Time We Say Goodbye. Judging from her website, I would say she is fairly happy with the progress. Her new book is to be out in winter 2015.
On March 4th, we welcomed a duo of Washington College professors with Melissa Deckman and Joseph Prud'Homme, whose spring Tea & Talk looked at the debate of teaching religion in schools, in an event titled "Curriculum and the Culture Wars: Debating the Bible's Place in Public Schools." This was a lively debate with more questions than there was time to answer them. Their book of the same title is published by Peter Lang International Academic Publishers. Deckman and Prud'Homme are both faculty members of the Institute for Religion, Politics, and Culture at Washington College.
The next event was scheduled to be Emily Danforth, but Mother Nature and the bitter snows of this past winter had a different plan, and we were forced to move Emily's reading to the end of April, making Meg Kearney our next guest.
Poet Meg Kearney read from The Secret of Me: A Novel in Verse for Young Adults and the sequel, The Girl in the Mirror: A Novel in Poems & Journal Entries, and revealed there was a third book coming down the line. Stay tuned. Her poem, "First Poem Since the World Changed," was printed as a broadside at the Lit House letterpress studio, which can be viewed here.
Then we welcomed Emily Danforth who arrived to town in the pleasant spring weather we missed all month. While at the Lit House, Danforth became intrigued by the curious tradition of turning the posters of poor readings upside down. She asked how she could get her poster upside down, but after a great evening it was clear hers would remain upright.
During her reading, she quoted Tallulah Bankhead, famous actress of the 1940's and 50's, and was thrilled to learn that Bankhead is buried at St. Paul's Church, less than 15 miles from Washington College. We took a trip out to see her grave before Danforth had to catch her train.
And that was how the series ended. But we had one more visitor this year.
Shara Lessley was the 2014 Mary Wood Fellow and first poet to be awarded the Fellowship. Shara spent five days on campus meeting with students, and participating in two events: a craft talk titled "Oh, The Places You'll Go: Writing from Experience," and gave a wonderful poetry reading two days later that told the story of her experiences of living in Jordan for two years. The Mary Wood Fellowship at The Rose O'Neill Literary House is awarded biennially to an emerging female writer—in poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction—who has published a first book. The Fellowship enables female creative writing students at Washington College to work with and learn from successful female writers such as past Fellows Laura van den Berg, Hannah Tinti, and Irina Reyn, who all spent five days on campus. Eastern Shore author Mary Wood, whose support makes the fellowship possible, is a 1968 graduate of the College and a former member of its Board of Visitors and Governors.
The past eight months the Literary House Press produced four new broadsides thanks to the work of Master Printer Mike Kaylor and the design work of Director Jehanne Dubrow and Assistant Director Lindsay Lusby. As mentioned above, the broadsides include an excerpt from Justin Torres' book We the Animals, the poem "Immigration and Naturalization Service Report #46" by Eduardo C. Corral, a poem by Meg Kearney titled "First Poem Since the World Changed," but also the second AWP Commemorative Broadside. This year the Literary House selected poet Nance Van Winckel's piece from Willow Springs, "Because B." All broadsides can be viewed and are for purchase at the Literary House Press website, while supplies last.
Moving on to our students, and speaking of AWP, this year's annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference was in the wonderful city of Seattle, where in late February, the Lit House staff and four students (Harris Allgeier '14, Grace Arenas '14, Todd Cooley '15, and Maddie Zins '15) found more sunshine than the typical Seattle weather, and certainly more than we had back on the Eastern Shore. As our bus driver told us, "Don't tell anyone it's sunny in Seattle. We keep it a secret." (Sorry for giving it away!) The weather held and we were able to enjoy the many hundreds of readings, panel discussions, authors' signings and the famous Pike Place Market, about six blocks from the Convention Center.
Also at the Conference, the Lit House staff presented our beautiful commemorative broadside to poet Nance Van Winckel, who stopped by the Literary House Bookfair table to sign all 75 copies. You can see the making of her broadside, "Because B," in a short film shot and edited by Washington College videographer, Shane Brill '03. In the video you get to see the entire designing process and printing process compressed into 90 fun seconds.
For the third year in a row, students were interviewed and selected to be the Pegasus Media Interns and hired to create an entire online yearbook. This huge task, headed by project manager Jeremy Quintin '14, and interns Ariel Jicha '15 and Eric Siegel '16, began back in September. The 2013- 2014 Pegasus Yearbook will go live in the week before the 2014 Commencement.
This year's Literary House Press Intern was Samantha Gross '14. During the spring semester, Sam worked primarily on the Literary House Press's newest book project, The Book of Scented Things: 100 Contemporary Poems about Perfume—our first trade paperback. Over the past year, the Literary House staff solicited the work of 100 contemporary poets, asking them to write brand-new poems for us inspired by the perfumes selected and sent out by Director Jehanne Dubrow. The book was recently completed and will go on sale at our official Book Launch event on October 7at 4:30 p.m. at the Rose O'Neill Literary House. For more on the making of this book you can read this article and this article by Sam Gross.
For the second summer in a row, the Literary House will have on staff a Summer Intern, and this year there'll be two to help us tackle the growing workload. Julie Armstrong '15 and Ryan Manning '17 will work over the summer to help the Lit House prepare for next year's event schedule, aid in the launch of our new literary journal Cherry Tree, and assist in creating the next Sophie Kerr Prize Anthology.
Aileen Gray was the 2013 Summer Intern and helped organize the Summer Poetry Salons, the completion of Lost Originals, and planned from start to finish an event titled "Literary Publishing from the Inside Out: Advice for Publishing Your Own Work, and the Work of Others," with poet Mary Biddinger, who is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Barn Owl Review and co-editor of The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics (University of Akron Press, 2011). She is Assistant Chair of the English Department at the University of Akron, where she teaches literature, poetry writing, and literary publishing.
For more information about the Literary House Interns Program, visit this page.
Valerie Dunn '15 became the second student to be awarded The Literary House Genre Fiction Prize, with her short story, "The Shoe That Fit." The Prize is awarded to a Washington College undergraduate for the best work of science fiction, fantasy, mystery, or horror. The winning entry receives a cash prize of $500.
Sarah Roy '14, with her piece, "All Saints," took home this year's William W. Warner Prize for Creative Writing on Nature and the Environment. And with such high quality submissions, this year we also awarded an Honorable Mention for the Warner Prize to Reilly Cox '16 for his piece, "The Geladas, the Gazelle, and the Bovine." The Prize is awarded to the Washington College undergraduate who shows the greatest aptitude for writing about nature and the environment. The winning entry receives a cash prize of $1,000.
Alex Stinton '14, one of five 2014 Sophie Kerr Finalists, won The Jude & Miriam Pfister Poetry Prize for his poem "A Mother Remembers." And like the Warner Prize, this year we awarded an Honorable Mention for the Pfister Prize to Valerie Dunn '15 for her poem "Shearing." The Prize is awarded to the Washington College undergraduate for a single poem. The winning entry receives a cash prize of $100 and a certificate from the Academy of American Poets.
The Literary House Press saw another busy year with the completion of our first trade paperback, a poetry anthology called TheBook of Scented Things; as well as the early planning stages for our next book project: a chapbook containing an original short story by fiction writer, playwright, and translator James Magruder, set to be released in fall of 2015. Last year was focused on the chapbook, Lost Originals, a collection of poems by poet Mary Jo Salter, who will be the keynote speaker at this year's Sophie Kerr Prize Event at the Enoch Pratt Free Library's main branch in downtown Baltimore.
And then there is Cherry Tree: A National Literary Journal @ Washington College. In the spring semester, Director of the Lit House, Professor Jehanne Dubrow, taught a class on "Literary Editing & Publishing." In the class, students received hands-on training in the process of editing and publishing a top-tier literary journal. They analyzed literary markets as they learned the challenging process of stewarding work from the nation's most prestigious emerging and established writers into print. Students who have completed this class, which will be taught again each fall semester, are then qualified to become screeners for Cherry Tree, helping us to sort through the delicious pile of slush.
The editorial staff for Cherry Tree will include:founder & editor, Jehanne Dubrow (Literary House Director and Associate Professor of English);managing editor, Lindsay Lusby (Literary House Assistant Director);fiction editor, Kate Kostelnik (Assistant Director of the Writing Center and Lecturer in English);poetry & creative nonfiction editor, James Allen Hall (Associate Professor of English); senior poetry reader, Michele Santamaria (Instructional Coordinator at Washington College's Miller Library); and, senior fiction reader, Owen Bailey (Literary House Administrative Assistant).
Cherry Tree's debut issue is scheduled for release on February 15, 2015. We welcome submissions of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. We read manuscripts between August 15 and October 15, submitted electronically via Submittable.
To keep up with all the happenings at the Literary House, check in with our Lit House Blog and our all new Cherry Tree Blog: Blossom. Over the summer, we will be producing, in collaboration with the Department of English, C.V. Starr Center for the American Experience, and the Center for Environment & Society, the 2014- 2015 Literary Events Brochure.
Until then, come visit us this summer as we host our third annual Summer Poetry Salon Series, beginning Tuesday, May 27 at 4:30 p.m. with poets Carrie Jerrell and Will Schutt, as well as The Pam Ortiz Band. On Tuesday, June 24 at 4:30 p.m. we will have 2014 Cave Canem Fellow Jamaal May, poet Tarfia Faizullah, and musical group Harp & Soul, led by our 2013-2014 Literary House Writer-in-Residence Meredith Davies Hadaway on the Celtic harp. Finally on Tuesday, July 22 at 4:30 p.m., we finish off the season with the Salon of American Jewish poets, featuring Director Jehanne Dubrow, Julie Enszer, Erika Meitner, Mira Rosenthal, Jason Schneiderman, and Yerra Sugarman.
Thanks everyone for such a great year!
The Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College serves as one of the cultural centers of campus, bringing together students, faculty, alumni, and local community members from across the disciplines. Our literary programming provides access to a wide variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, scholarly prose, playwriting, and hybrid forms; our letterpress studio and Literary House Press introduce participants both to old and new technologies. We are dedicated to promoting the articulated word and to supporting students through professional, on-the-job training.
December 4
The following books will be on sale from now until the end of December …
For the Holiday season we are offering these books at a 40% discount until the end of the year.
To order one of these books, or any of our other merchandise please visit our website and contact Owen Bailey at email@example.com or (410) 810-5768.
Happy Holidays!
May 1
2014 Literary House Press Intern, senior Samantha Gross, takes us behind the curtain of the soon-to-be-released poetry anthology, The Book of Scented Things—showing us the work that follows the printing of a new book.
So, you have the freshly published book sitting on the table in front of you and about 500 copies sitting in cardboard boxes that you, your boss, and the unfortunate Pegasus intern have lugged up to said boss's office. All the work is done, and it's time to sit and admire and marvel read and high-five.
Oh, no. I would say publishing the book is maybe the midway point between being "done." The printed book represents the first half of your efforts—those of brainstorming, soliciting, hoping, planning, editing, proofreading, communicating, and creating. However, it also represents cataloging, marketing, publicity, and advertising. And yes, those words spring to mind a certain phrase we often forget about in writing: business. Time to shift from the art of creating a book to the business of making sure those 500 copies don't sit in your boss's office from here unto eternity. A book can be the next best thing in the literary world, but no one is going to hear about it until someone gets the word out there.
So firstly, you've got to handle the little details you wouldn't normally consider. Those little numbers by the barcode on the back? Or the ISBN sign you see on every single book you'll ever read in your life? Those are important. ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number, and every book has its own unique one consisting of 13 digits. Unless you want to keep your book super private, you need an ISBN code. This process involves quite a bit, particularly when there are a little over 100 contributors like we had with The Book of Scented Things. Aforementioned boss had to enter in every single one of those contributors manually.
After you've established that your book is a real book with real intention of distribution, you need to get it copyrighted with the Library of Congress. This will, thankfully, be a little easier than the ISBN documenting, and will take significantly less time. It is, however, still very much necessary in the process of getting your book to market!
After the tricky details, comes the fun part (or at least fun to me since I am a business minor): marketing and advertising! Our first level of marketing is to send out copies of the book to potential reviewers (we won't say who!) in the literary world. The idea is that they will review the book in a formal matter and, in essence, continue spreading the word. We also sent out copies to perfume bloggers and perfume boutiques to add a unique twist to our classic marketing. After all, there are 100 perfumes mentioned and analyzed in this little anthology, plus the cover is both chic and simple. Can't you picture a small selection sitting in a perfume boutique?
Next we brainstormed even more ideas to get more attention to the book. After all, and not to sound too biased, it's a fantastic anthology that has the potential to do incredibly well. Perfume and cologne are reminiscent of everything elegant and chic and classic, and who doesn't love feeling that way? I began listing ways we could publicize online some more. I came up with a list of more perfume and literary blogs while also looking into general beauty blogs.
However, my biggest thing is social media (call it a symptom of my generation!). I love the idea of using Instagram and Facebook to start a hashtag to generate conversation about different topics. I also am a great lover of blogging, so you might just be seeing some upcoming posts to complement the anthology. Maybe more information about a certain perfume that inspired your favorite poem? I know I'm checking out Atelier Cologne and Jo Malone after this… I may or may not have saved a lot of perfume pictures just in case our next intern develops a bit of a perfume interest as I have these past few months.
With that said, this is my ultimate post on my last day as a Literary House Press Intern! It was an amazing experience working with Lindsay and Professor Dubrow (and Lola) and getting to make a little home in the Rose O'Neill Literary House, and I will be eternally grateful for all they've taught me! Any of you English majors near graduating and still here, make sure you stop by and pick up your free copy of The Book of Scented Things!
April 30
The Feather Trick by: Angelica Baker
"I listened for the other details of her afternoon that she wasn't telling me -"
Sometimes, in life, you behave in a way you know you shouldn't, and later, when you remember the moment, you think about how you should have behaved, but in that moment you can't stop yourself. You act your age and with the emotions of said moment.
As I read this story I kept thinking of the word premonition. Indeed, the story is set up to give the reader evidence that something bad has happened or is about to happen – right from the opening line.
"On a spring afternoon during my freshman year of college, my mother called me, said my brother's name once, and began to cry."
In reading this line my mind immediately thought her brother was dead. Wonder what that says about me. Probably that I read a lot of depressing literature, but most good literature is depressing. Just ask Tess of the D'urbervilles. Poor Tess. But it turns out, (spoiler alert) the brother is not dead, just a weird teenager behaving in ways that many teenagers grow up hoping to forget or in today's world hoping those behaviors aren't recorded and placed on some social media platform.
Back to the story, the older sister, thinking she knows what is best for her brother, yet acting in her own interest, is a failure: just kidding. She behaves the way many older siblings behave: as a slightly older child who may have more answers (certainly more opinions), but definitely not all the answers. As the Angelica Baker writes in an interview:
I found myself lingering on the idea of what it means to be an older sibling, to feel so fiercely protective of your younger siblings. And yet as a teenager you're trying to navigate the adult world, and it's hard enough to protect yourself. Let alone someone else. So you naturally end up feeling like a failure, as the eldest.
For siblings two years apart, there is a time span when their adolescence over laps and that seems, at least in this story, to come right before the sister (our narrator) grows out of it, leaving her brother behind as she finds popularity, friends, and a boyfriend. So what of the brother's response? He could have either gone one of two ways: clinging to his big sister hoping their relationship will go back to the way it was, or getting the memo and not clinging. I won't say what happens, but I'll add that I'm hard pressed to decide which is sadder.
Again I refer to the author's words:
I think those are painful moments—when you realize that there was a time when someone needed you, and that you couldn't do it. Often that window closes. You can try to do better in the future, but by then you'll be playing catch up. You've lost the chance to get it right on your first try. And I think it's painful when it happens with family, with friends, with significant others. She hasn't betrayed him, or willfully harmed him, but she was afraid and she withdrew, and now it's too late to reach him in the same way.
Being a younger brother myself, I liked this story. It demonstrates the true behavior and social patterns of siblings while blurring the lines of blame in thick ambiguity, explaining that sometimes what happens is not any one person's fault. Yes, someone might feel hurt more than another, but there is still a future.
For more on this story, read this interview with OTS editor Patrick Ryan and watch the video below. And read it!
The Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College serves as one of the cultural centers of campus, bringing together students, faculty, alumni, and local community members from across the disciplines. Our literary programming provides access to a wide variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, scholarly prose, playwriting, and hybrid forms; our letterpress studio and Literary House Press introduce participants both to old and new technologies. We are dedicated to promoting the articulated word and to supporting students through professional, on-the-job training.
April 24
Gorilla at Large by Robert Voedisch
As you can see from the title and video below, this story is about a gorilla - kind of. It's also about making mistakes as a teenager and why teenagers make stupid mistakes and try to run away from them, but I'll stick to talking about the gorilla and let you read the story to find out about the rest.
This is the first story I've read by Robert Voedisch and I love the way he begins:
"The commercials started in June."
Makes me think of A Christmas Carol, "Marley was dead: to begin with." Later in the first paragraph he writes:
"I assumed it was just another ad but there was only silence. It was strange."
From it's description, it is a strange commercial, a gorilla riding a bicycle with no other information other than the phrase, 'He is Coming.' This beginning hooked my attention as if did the stories main character. This beginning also starts the story off on an unsettled undertone that is echoed by the characters.
Now, in the internet age and digital television, if we see a commercial like the one below, which gives no information other than three words that appear in rapid succession, we can pause, rewind, and freeze each frame, see the words read, 'He is Here.' Still stumped, as I was when I saw this commercial for the first time this spring, we can look it up and learn it is nothing more than a cleaver add for a new show based on "The Strain" series by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan.
But Gorilla at Largetakes place in the age of VCRs, and with no way of searching for the answers, the characters leave to go down to the corner and ask the other kids in the neighborhood if they knew what it was about, leading us to the rest of the story, which circles the idea that nothing is as it appears. People can guess and speculate but only living through life do you get the answers. I believe this is a reminder of what it is like to conjecture and speculate when we have no means of truly learning or understanding.
As the Editor-in-Chrief of One Teen Story writes:
In this story, nothing is exactly how it seems. The gorilla isn't a real gorilla. The gorilla commercials are both homegrown and strange. The quiet, unnoticed girl from long ago comes back as a model. She's selling Halloween makeup, posing for pictures with bruises painted on her face. And the movie starring the gorilla is…kind of a dud.
Like all short stories, there is a lot can can't see that happens on the story's periphery, creating an effective tool that adds to the already mysterious atmosphere of the commercial and the ignorance of the characters.
To learn more, you can read the story by either subscribing to One Teen Story or find it at the Lit House library. You can also check out Robert Voedisch's webpage and read his interview with Kerry Cullen.
The Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College serves as one of the cultural centers of campus, bringing together students, faculty, alumni, and local community members from across the disciplines. Our literary programming provides access to a wide variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, scholarly prose, playwriting, and hybrid forms; our letterpress studio and Literary House Press introduce participants both to old and new technologies. We are dedicated to promoting the articulated word and to supporting students through professional, on-the-job training.
April 7
2014 Literary House Press Intern, senior Samantha Gross, takes us behind the curtain of the soon-to-be-released The Book of Scented Things—talking us through the long, tedious process of editing a poetry anthology before final publication.
Much like the process of selecting perfumes for The Book of Scented Things, there is a sort of art form to good writing. Anyone can be taught to write, but not everyone, particularly in this day and age of character counts and texting shortcuts, understands the beauty of the written word in its correct form. If I had a penny for the each time I have had friends say, "Oh, I thought it was spelled rediculous," I would have already paid off my student loans. The biggest letdown was when the Associated Press changed e - mail to email because it, essentially bowed down to popularity over the former usage or in press release terminology, "it evolved." If you can guess, I refuse to comply.
I know, not everything you write needs a meticulous grammar check. I, for one, am guilty of being a terrible texter who often forgets important articles or punctuation marks. However, when it comes to essays or creative writing, it's important to employ this art of proofreading. How can I take a job offer seriously when it makes so egregious an error as misspelling an institution's name? The world is not spinning so fast that you can't take extra time to scan documents for proper spellings and word placements. When Lindsay and Professor Dubrow talked with me about the job of the Literary House Press Intern for the spring semester, I jumped at the thought of being able to assist in proofreading the anthology. I think I even gushed, saying, "Even if you don't want me as an intern, I can totally help proofread on the side." Hey, if my science friends can get excited over agonists and antagonists in cell terminology, I can get excited when people remember to use the oxford comma.
Anyhow, proofreading as an art does not necessarily take talent so much as it takes consciousness and practice. No one can give you the right sense of smell to differentiate good perfumes or the sense of taste to select the best wine, but everyone can master the art of proofreading. It's a process, really. And since I like lists, I'm going to describe it as so, using The Book of Scented Things as a guide.
So, you get the manuscript in front of you. It's printed in all its 200 page glory, and it sort of feels like a secret Christmas present because, sitting in front of you is a book that is yet unpublished. Imagine how the editors of the Harry Potter series felt! You, as the intern proofreader, are one of the few sets of eyes that are able to read this anthology in its entirety, and you're going to get to do it long before its fall release date. (I'm not going to lie to you when I say this initial phase might just be the reason why I want to go into editing and publishing in the long run. Constant Christmas mornings? Yes, please!)
Let this initial reading be you reading this book for the first time, like a regular reader. Get into the plot of the poems, marvel at that incredible use of an adjective, and do not worry about any proper proofreading just yet. Even if you try to look at this new manuscript with editor glasses you're going to slip into your reader glasses anyway, so enjoy it! Get lost in the descriptions, imagine the scents, and picture the imagery.
Okay, so now that you've gotten the reading-for-pleasure out of your system, it's time to force those proofreading glasses back on. One of the processes that the LHP does, which I absolutely love, is to put together a comprehensive style sheet of all the words or phrases that require a second look. Now, these sheets are not necessarily misspells or misuses of words. They are simply uncommon words or phrases that you will want to double check. For example, we listed every contributor's name and the perfumes on the list simply because they weren't common language. Sometimes this leads to a change in the word (and this is where the hyphen debates arise), other times it simply means nothing but that we took time to look at it twice.
Once you've completed the style sheet, you'll want to send each contributor a list pertaining to their piece and a PDF file of what their poem will ultimately look like. If you found anything in your style sheet reading that would require an explanation, then it is called a "query," and the contributor will reply with their answer or preference. These queries can be the spelling of a word, confusion over a foreign word or name, or the decision to hyphenate or not hyphenate something.
Now is when you get to go crazy with the red pen, marking up any instance that might be questionable. Fix cliche to cliché or add that forgotten comma in its rightful place. I think I've waxed on about the beauty of grammar checking enough, so I'll save you from the additional paragraph.
You're going to want to read this piece so many times that that initial Christmas morning read will seem a distant dream. You're going to read it enough that when you finally say something to Professor Hall, it's going to be, "Oh you wrote 'Not Her Body' for the anthology" without even needing to double check it. This way when you send it to print (in our case, 48 Hour Books in Akron, Ohio, which is a fantastic service that everyone should use because their customer service is so good), you are 100% confident in its perfection.
This reading, which may never repeat itself or which may repeat itself constantly, is the reading you do of the hard copy. The book is printed, it's beautiful, it looks like a work of art, and it is yours now, meant to be placed on your bookshelf. Your job is done, and now you simply can return to the initial reading phase and read it for pleasure when you like, knowing that you contributed the small, but refined art of proofreading and the continuance of literature.
Oh, and you'll get to see your name in print on the inside pages as physical proof. Instagram that page as you like.
January 30
Proper Girls by Lisa Ko
This is perhaps my favorite story so far in the second volume of OTS.
Before, I'd never heard of Lisa Ko. Now I can't wait to read the rest of the stories in this forthcoming collection. "Proper Girls" is about a Chinese-American family that moves from their neighborhood in Queens, New York to an all-white suburb of New Jersey. Cyn, short for Cynthia, is the narrator of the story, a 16-17 year-old student struggling with identity personally, culturally and with in her own family.
As the Patrick Ryan, editor-in-chief of OTS, writes, "I was first drawn to Lisa Ko's "Proper Girls" because of its voice. The narrator in this story is someone you want to spend time with, someone you find both funny and endearing. Someone you want to listen to." Indeed, the narrator takes you in the first two sentences:
At the beginning of my junior year of high school, Lyn lit a garbage can on fire in the science wing bathroom. Things had gotten weird after she shaved her head.
Yes, that is the opening of the story titled "Proper Girls."
(Spoiler Alert!)
It takes place in the 1980's, complete with all the archaic technology we have forgotten about, like payphones. How did high school students communicate before social media and cell phones? They didn't, at least not as often. And in this world with a lack of communication, Cyn misses the most important people in her life - the people whom with she most identified.
After setting fire to the garbage can, her sister Lyn is sent to live with their aunt in Chicago and Cyn misses her for months with only a few phone conversations and one letter that doesn't make it. When Cyn is grounded and can't use the phone, she thinks about how much she misses her boyfriend Kai who lives 45 minutes away in the city, and through out the story is the longing to see her old friends from her old neighborhood and her old high school.
What is so good about this story is how it shapes personal identity or how people shape their identity. Cyn once identified herself with the mostly Chinese neighborhood in Queens, then it was taken away; she identified herself with her sister, going as far to say that some people mistook them for twins, until Lyn shaved her head, set fire to the garbage can and went to live in Chicago for the rest of the school year. After all this she puts her heart out in the world to try and see what happens and gets hurt in the process.
Ryan also writes:
"Cultural identity plays a big part in "Proper Girls." So does sibling affection/rivalry. But perhaps what's most at stake here is identity on a much more personal level. For most of us, there's always something of a disparity between what we see when we look inward and how other people regard us, just as there's a difference between how we picture ourselves and what we see when we look in the mirror."
To end, here is some advise from her interview with Patrick Ryan on writing.
January 29
The power of writing …
January 28
H. G. Wells and Edward Gorey …
I'm not going to lie: I love books and not just because I love reading them. Some are beautifully made: just look at the work we do here at the Literary House Press. Books can be a great place to combine two different forms of art: the written word and the illustrated story, which is was I have you for you today.
But first, classics that are classic for good reason and I try to mix them in when every I can. Many times that comes with a modern book that clearly draws inspiration from a classic. When I come across one of those books, I try to read the inspiration first. It's a lot like reading a book before seeing the movie.
Over the past year I have been catching up on my classical science fiction literature, and more specifically the works of H. G. Wells. This came from my experience in reading The Map of Time by website here). As I was reading, the book made many references to The Time Machine, and I knew I had to read it. Before then, the only Wells book I'd read was The First Men in the Moon, and oh the rules of physics that book breaks. A great read outside of the science class room. Anyway, it was a different narration from what I'm used to, but I liked it. It's how Wells writes., translated by Nick Caistor (
Then I found a beautiful edition of The War of the Worlds when I came across this article by Maria Popova, who is awesome, of Brain Pickings, which is her awesome creation. I had to have book and only $10 dollars later, I did.
The War of the Worlds was published in 1898, one year before Dracula, which Gorey also illustrated. (Click here for that piece of beauty).
I love Edward Gorey (as well as Gustave Doré for the work he did one The Raven and Dante's Inferno) and I love most everything that he did and he did a lot. Here is another article from Brain Pickings that shows the a collection of the classics he illustrated, which include the works of Bernard Shaw, Herman Melville, Marcel Proust, Henry James and Franz Kafka. I was tickled when I saw he illustrated The War of the Worlds, understanding that his signature would work very well with Well's writing.
His illustrations add a pleasant visual element that is not overpowering. They are a delicate piece of art a the beginning of each chapter that lends a hint as to what will happen or what is happening without taking your imagination away from the text. Unlike films that often times pollute your our imagination, replacing the narrator in this book with Tom Cruise (trust Roger Ebert and don't see the film), these 30 illustrations are subtle and thus float on the surface and dissolve in the words, adding to the reading experience.
So read it, see it and enjoy it.
~ Owen Bailey
P.S. Just because this is fun.
January 27
The second in an annual letterpress broadside series from Literary House Press features Nance Van Winckel's poem, "Because B."
For this year's AWP Conference in Seattle, we contacted Willow Springs Editor-in-Chief Sam Ligon to collaborate in the creation of the Literary House Press's second annual commemorative broadside. After careful consideration of a few dozen poems published in the Washington-based literary journal over the last several issues, we decided together upon Nance Van Winckel's piece "Because B," first published in issue 68 of Willow Springs in fall 2011. The brevity and subject matter of the poem were perfectly suited to the medium; and, of course, we loved it!
Over this past year of letterpress broadside design, we've had the fun of experimenting with different paper dimensions. This poem gave us the perfect opportunity to explore the possibilities of a shape we had been secretly wanting to try: a square broadside. The title gave us the main image we would use: a large letter B would keep it simple and typography-based. After this realization, finalizing the design was just a matter of determining how to incorporate this image into the layout of the poem itself in order to create a cohesive and intentional arrangement. Serendipitously, the original poem broke into two clean stanzas of nearly even length. This allowed the text to fit snugly within the loops of our large B, with the title tucked into the pronounced, angular serifs of the Bookman Old Style typeface we chose. And once this puzzle was all pieced together, it formed our desired square. We chose Palatino Linotype for the poem text: a traditional letterpress typeface.
We looked to the poem's subject matter when picking out paper and ink colors. The setting of this piece is icy and gray, but there's a bit of melt and mud in there too. We decided on a very heavy weight paper called Murillo in Light Gray—a shade that is both gray and slightly green, the color of muddy clay. For the large letter B framing the poem: a darker, shinier gray color of ink, almost silver. And finally, for the poem text, title, and colophon: a classic black.
After our custom photopolymer plates arrived from Boxcar Press, Master Printer Mike Kaylor went to work prepping and printing the broadsides with assistance from two of his most dedicated workshop students (and past Literary House interns), Aileen Gray '14 and Ariel Jicha '15. Aileen helped Mike with the first shift: measuring and cutting the paper with the large guillotine blade, planning out which color to print first (printing two colors requires printing twice), and precisely lining up the photopolymer plate(s) on the type-high base that has been locked in the press bed. On the second shift, Ariel assisted Mike with the ink mixing (getting just the right shade of shimmery gray) and printing the broadsides on our Vandercook 4 proof press. It is tedious but rewarding work.
Now that the entire edition of 75 broadsides has been printed and numbered, we have packed them up tight for the flight to Seattle. At the Conference, Nance will sign all 75 broadsides and then we will have them for sale at our Rose O'Neill Literary House table in the AWP Bookfair. After we return from the west coast on March 1, the remaining broadsides will be available for purchase on the Literary House Press web page for $20 each.
We have loved having this opportunity to work with Willow Springs and Nance Van Winckel on this year's AWP commemorative broadside. For the 2015 Conference in Minneapolis, Literary House Press will be teaming up with a Minnesotan literary journal of national reputation. Stay tuned for more details!
—Jehanne Dubrow & Lindsay Lusby
May 1
The Rose O'Neill Literary House has awarded next year's Douglass Wallop Fellowship to New York playwright, Sheri Wilner.
In April 2015, we will host playwright Sheri Wilner for a week-long residency as our 2015 Douglass Wallop Fellow. This is the first year we opened up the Douglass Wallop Fellowship as a nationwide competition and Sheri was selected from a pool of more than 40 outstanding applicants. As part of her duties while in-residence, Sheri will hold one-on-one meetings with a select group of student playwrights. She will also participate in two public events, giving a craft talk and a reading of her work.
Sheri Wilner has twice been a co-winner of the prestigious Heideman Award granted by the Actors Theatre of Louisville: in 1998 for Labor Day, which premiered at the 1999 Humana Festival, and in 2001 for Bake Off, which premiered at the 2002 Humana Festival. Bake Off was heralded by The New York Times for being a "barbed, witty, thoughtful, giggle and snort inducing satire on gender roles" that was "the clear apex" of the festival. Her work has been published in over a dozen anthologies, and Playscripts.com has published twelve of her one-acts, which have received over two hundred productions all over the United States as well as in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Japan, United Kingdom and India. Her playwriting awards include a Howard Foundation Fellowship in Playwriting, a Bush Artist Fellowship and two Playwrights' Center Jerome Fellowships. She attended Cornell University and received her MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University. At Columbia, she was named Assistant to Andrei Serban, who she assisted for two subsequent years, serving as a dramaturg on his productions of Cymbeline in Central Park, Hamlet at the New York Shakespeare Festival, Merchant of Venice at American Repertory Theatre, among others.
The Douglass Wallop Fellowship at The Rose O'Neill Literary House is awarded biennially to a playwright. The Fellowship enables drama students at Washington College to work with and learn from successful playwrights like J.T. Rogers and KJ Sanchez, who spend several days on campus. The Fellowship is named for the American novelist and playwright Douglass Wallop (1920-1985). He was the author of 13 works, the most famous being The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (1954), which went on to be adapted by Wallop and co-writer George Abbott into the Tony Award-winning musical "Damn Yankees." Wallop himself graduated from the University of Maryland and for many years lived on Maryland's Eastern Shore.
The Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College serves as one of the cultural centers of campus, bringing together students, faculty, alumni, and local community members from across the disciplines. Our literary programming provides access to a wide variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, scholarly prose, playwriting, and hybrid forms; our letterpress studio and Literary House Press introduce participants both to old and new technologies. We are dedicated to promoting the articulated word and to supporting students through professional, on-the-job training.
January 16
Phenomenon by: Julie Buntin
This story left a lot unsaid; it worked and I liked it that way.
For me a short story should not answer every question. Often the subject is better left for the reader to decide the fate of the authors' characters and that is what I found at the end of Buntin's story about two newly teenage girls living in Michigan. If done well it is a neat way to make a short story feel like a full life that keeps you guessing, wondering and wanting more but never getting it.
To the story itself: it's not so much about what happens when people grow up but what happens as people grow up and how it sometimes sucks. What happens to your family, your friends, your body, your interests, your school, who you are and who you love and how sometimes you feel like you haven't changed but others have, which in turn changes you or at the very least your world.
Now about the cover: I think it's great. When I first opened the envelope I had no idea what the art represented. Only that it reminded me on an old video game that I use to play on the Atari system back when I was I-don't-want-to-talk-about-it. Once I finished the story I closed the booklet and immediately recognized the cover for what it depicted and saw how it worked. Thank you Stefan Lawrence.
Anyone interested in reading this can find it in the Lit House Library along with the rest of Volume II and the complete Volume I of One Teen Story (OTS). If you'd like to read about them click here, here, here and for last year here.
For more about Julie Buntin visit here, read the OTS interview here, and better yet, read her work.
December 11
Does it have to be a story published in 2013?
When I saw the Book Riot list, Riot Round Best Books of 2013, I realized I have only read one of the books. How very un-literary of me, I know. Oh, well. I've read plenty of good books this year and won't be sorry for that. If I only read books published in the current year I would have nothing to read New Years day when I'm tired and cold and I don't want to leave the house.
Fortunately, the best book I read over the past twelve months, happens to be on this list: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. (NPR Book Review Here) For months, before its release on June 18, day before my birthday, I waited, reading articles online about the book's anticipation, interviews with Neil, and talked to people who love his work as much as I do. When the day came, I bought a copy and though I was surprised by how small it was, I was even more surprised by how good it was.
As Kim Ukura, author of the Book Riot Article, writes:
After I finished this book, I texted my husband to say that I would probably be bursting into tears at the thought of it for the next few days. This actually only happened once. My favorite Gaiman since The Graveyard Book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is, for me, entirely about the mood it evokes and the feelings it has about childhood and memory. Though my life bears little resemblance to the unnamed narrator's (except the part about stealing light from hallways and bright windows to read in bed at night), the nostalgia I felt while reading it was painful. Well done, sir.
That's about how it was for me. Stunned, wanting to read it again yet knowing that other books were calling my name for attention. The story feels like a secret very few people know about, finely crafted and extremely methodical in how it is told. A short novel, it's like seeing a beautifully cut diamond and realizing all of the fine edits that make it so wondrous.
When you first start the book, it's not obvious what the story is or will be. It's hard to tell what is coming around the next turn as the plot, in a very Neil Gaiman way, feels real and–when the magic happens–you know it belongs there, that it too can be real.
Now that I have shared my favorite book, what is yours? What were your favorite books of 2013?
November 26
Soundproof Your Life by: Tara Altebrando
This is the third issue of the second volume of One Teen Story (Volume One and Volume Two). As usual I don't like to give the story away and as always you can stop by the Lit House and find this story in our Library.
A little about Tara Altebrando: She is the author of four young adult novels: The Best Night of Your(Pathetic) Life, Dreamland Social Club (A Kirkus Reviews Best Books for Teens of 2011), What Happens Here, and The Pursuit of Happiness. She is also coauthor with Sara Zarr of Roomies. Her first middle-grade novel, The Battle of Darcy Lane, is forthcoming in Spring 2014. A graduate of Harvard University, Tara lives in Queens, New York, with her husband and two young daughters.
In her interview with Patrick Ryan for One Teen Story, full interview here, he asked her "What is the best bit of advice about writing you have ever received?" To which she replied:
The most influential writing teacher I've had was a fanatic about point of view and he definitely passed that on to me. He really stressed the fact that mastering point of view is essential to good writing, and I became a point-of-view fanatic as a result. Until I had the vocabulary for POV, I wasn't sure why my writing sometimes felt vaguely wonky. Now, one of my greatest joys as a writer is playing around with point of view, manipulating it. Countless students I've had over the years have had some point of view problems, and I've taken a borderline masochistic pleasure in highlighting those problems, and then in watching their writing come into focus when the POV light bulb goes on.
November 20
Violets by: Laura Ender.
I won't say too much about the story itself, only its voice.
It is not often that we find a story written in the second person. Most of what we read whether it be fiction, nonfiction short stories or novels are written in either the 1st or 3rd person. When the 2nd person is used correctly it can be a wonderfully engaging as the odd tone gives the reader a perspective that is very personal, very close. Laura Ender has done a fine job writing this story and it often feels like the narrator is talking to 'you.'
Junot Diaz used this voice his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the National Book Critic Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It appears in one chapter with the mother and sister (Lola) of the novels main character, Oscar. The prize of this voice is the power of the word 'you,' since it is the only word in this voice.
To learn more about the story, you have to read it and then read this interview from the One Teen Story website.
January 18
I love pairing books. Like wine with a good meal some books go really well together. For me, this October has been the continuation of great tales.
It was a couple of years ago when a friend of mine suggested that I read Finn by Jon Clinch, a story about Huckleberry Finn's father. (Quick warning, it's a rough book and not meant for the faint of heart.) When I looked at the book, it seemed like one that should be moved to the front of my endless book queue. But before that, it gave me a chance to revisit a few books other books. It had been a long time since I read either The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. So, I allowed a few more books to cut in line and took the time to read both of them before I read Finn. It was worth it and I must add that Finn is a fantastic book.
Which leads me to this:
I love the name Grimm. How fitting that two brothers credited with gathering these grim fairy tales shared a last name that is one too many m's from a word that, according to Webster, means "ghastly, repellent, or sinister in character," much like many people and creatures that one can meet in the mythical Germanic forests. (I should note that the word came before the name by about 400 years according to the OED.)
Anyone familiar with these original tales knows that many of the characters are ghastly and sinister. Fathers who banish their sons because they are half hedgehog and half boy; parents who promise their children to strangers in the woods in exchange for guidance on how to get out of said woods; and dozens of repellent witches and evil kings that always seem to want to lock away the princess on top of a mountain, sometimes one made of glass. Just ask Christoph Waltz's character, Dr. Shultz, in Django Unchained. "It's a German story. There's always a mountain." (He had my vote for the Oscar.)
Once upon a time, I worked at a great bookstore, may it rest in peace. (It was also the place where I first heard of Finn.) There were always new wonderful books coming into the story each and every week - too many to keep up with. It seemed like every day when I would straighten the shelves I would find new titles that would excite my curiosity. While there one Sunday, working by myself, straightening the shelves in the children's section, I came across this title A Tale Dark and Grimm. Yes, it caught my eye as you can tell.
I thought to myself that it would be fun to pair this book with some of the original tales between chapters. So far I've read about 70 of the 210 tales that fills up the 2 volume set I bought last summer from the also now closed Old Book Company in Chestertown. With one more week before Halloween I think it is time to start. The book received great reviews and though I don't mind writer's borrowing ideas from other books and stories, so long as they make their work original, I think it is important to know the reference, to know the origins of how and why this book came to be made.
And with that, Happy Halloween …
October 18
Last spring the Lit House bought a subscription to the then newly created One Teen Story and we are happy they are back with Volume II.
With that same great One Story look, One Teen Story's first Issue of Volume II is here ready for anyone interested. This first story, Purgatory, is by Alexandra Salerno whose work has also appeared in the Harpur Palate, The Gettysburg Review, Sou'wester, Narrative and in other places.
Here's how the story begins:
Brian met Jack Bianchi during the summer of 1989, when he was 16 and working at Paradise Lanes in Yonkers by the Raceway. It was the summer before his senior year, and he had a stack of college applications on his desk at home for engineering programs in the Midwest. The few friends he had were away for the summer at different beaches on the eastern seaboard while he was stuck in a bowling alley that smelled like hot dogs and feet.
Jack came in at nine o'clock on a weeknight in late July. The alley was empty except for some older guys by the far wall watching two teenaged girls bowl. Brian was behind the snack bar arranging a candy display: Blow-Pops and Bit-O-Honeys and all that. Jack walked by looking like some kind of cowboy; he wore a checkered shirt, tight black jeans, and boots that were all scuffed up—nothing like all the preps Brian went to school with. His hands were stuffed in his pockets and his shoulders stuck up as if he were walking against a cold wind. He had dark hair and olive skin like Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid, but he was older. He threw a nod Brian's way as he headed for the shoe counter.
I won't tell you if this story is fun or has a happy ending, that's for your to read and decide. If you want more it, and the others still to come, will be here at the Lit House in the reading room. Plus, visit the One Teen Story website and read about the awesome work that they do with their awesome writers that contribute to them.
September 24
September 22 - 28
I'll begin by being honest and admit that I had never heard of Banned Books Week until a few years ago, after I graduated from college. What makes this sad is that Banned Books Week is one year older than I am, having been founded in 1982. Even though I had never heard of this week-long celebration of the freedom of speech and ideas, I am happy to write that I have been reading these very books since middle school.
Some of my favorite books are banned: 1984, Fahrenheit 451 (thanks to that book I know how to spell that word), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Giver, Lord of the Flies, The Outsiders, and A Wrinkle in Time. Now there are some books on the list that I won't read, but that is strictly for personal reasons. (For example: I am just not interested and do not care that the Fifty Shades of Grey books are so popular. I would rather read something else.)
To me, the banned books list is pretty close to being the list of the best stories ever told and this year as I look over the list I see that there are many great books that I still need to read such as Franny and Zooey, Doctor Zhivago, A Clockwork Orange, and Call of the Wild.
For me the best way to celebrate Banned Books Week is by reading one of these books. It is a quiet, peaceful protest that I can take part in at my local libraries. Not sure what book I shall read (I'll pick one by the end of the day), but there are many great options thanks to my local public and collegiate libraries.
If you are on campus and in Chestertown, stop by the Kent County Public Library or the Clifton M. Miller Library to check out the Banned Books Exhibit and see what else is happening …
Banned Books Open Mic: Come relax in our cozy banned books lounge all day long, read aloud from different selections, disguise yourself with our props, and use Instagram to commemorate the moment!
Pi Lambda Theta reading: Stop by at 7 p.m. to join our Education Honor Society for a reading and discussion of banned children's books.
Continued exhibit and activities.
Happy reading!
The Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College serves as one of the cultural hubs on campus, bringing together students, faculty, alumni, and local community members from across disciplines. Our annual events provide access to a wide variety of texts, including fiction, poetry, journalism, creative nonfiction, scholarly prose, songwriting, playwriting, and hybrid forms; our letterpress studio and Literary House Press introduce participants both to old and to new technologies. We are dedicated to promoting the articulated word, offering literary programs, classroom spaces, support to student groups, professional training.
September 23
Every year, the Rose O'Neill Literary House awards two $1000 Jacoby Endowment Grants to support undergraduate work in the fields of publishing, writing, and editing.
"While walking the craggy shore of Ennerdale Waters, I realized that this hidden English lake might just be the prettiest in the world if only I wasn't carrying a pack that weighed a third of my bodyweight. My map book indicated that I would soon walk through a "nice, mossy bit" but it was at that section I contemplated ending the trip after just three days of hiking. However, I did not stop and, having since survived and completed my 190-mile hike across Northern England, I now appreciate the difficult necessity of observing a landscape firsthand.
"I kept a detailed travel journal during my hike, initially expecting to write something like Wordsworth that would capture the genteel beauty of the English countryside. The English countryside quickly quelled my assumptions with rain, hail, sideways wind, more rain, and even sun bright enough to burn the backs of my shoulders. Around the same time that my waterproof boots ceased to be waterproof, I accepted that the earth cannot be tamed by poetic notions. I can, however, recreate the way forgotten wisps of sheep wool smell in a pasture of manure or how the moors become quiet when they see rain rushing across the east to them. I have narrowed my poetic focus so as to appreciate the way cottongrass dances on the top of Dent Hill rather than rehash generic portraits of nature. By submitting myself to the environment and living in the landscape about which I wished to write, I allowed the earth to shape me as a poet."
September 3
Podcast from the August 29th event.
A multidisciplinary panel of professors discusses the role of constructive criticism in the creative process here at Washington College. Join Profs. Jehanne Dubrow (Creative Writing), Heather Harvey (Studio Art), John Leupold (Music & Composition), and Michele Volansky (Drama & Playwriting) as they talk about the philosophical and practical purposes served by the traditional workshop and other methods of critical response to creative works.
If you missed the event, you can listen to it below.
August 7
The American Shakespeare Center recovers the joys and accessibility of Shakespeare's theatre, language, and humanity by exploring the English Renaissance stage and its practices through performance and education.
August 6
There's a lot more to planning an event than you might think.
In fact, arts administration itself encompasses more tasks than meet the eye. As the summer intern for the Literary House this year, I had the opportunity to learn about the field of arts administration and to plan an event from start to finish.
During the first half of my internship, I did a lot of brainstorming and a lot of research. I looked through records of old events, evaluated the type of events given in the last couple of years, wandered through the house looking at the older posters for ideas. Then, in the beginning of July, Penguin and Random House merged and I was struck with a thought: there has been no one from the publishing industry in years. Students at Washington College have wonderful writing opportunities and meet many authors, but what about the other side? What about the editors, literary agents, and publishing executives?
I talked to Lindsay about my desire to hold a lecture related to publishing. We talked about the different aspects and decided having by an editor would be best as it would apply to students interested in working in publishing as well as students interested in getting published. We came up with a list of editors to invite, and Mary Biddinger replied immediately.
With the guidance of Lindsay and Jehanne, I went through the steps of putting together the event: evaluating the budget, refining the event topic, issuing a formal invitation, securing the date through Campus Events, and corresponding with Mary on various minor details.
Mary was a joy to correspond with, and within a couple of weeks everything was settled. She will be coming in February 2014 (link to event), and we couldn't be more excited. Mary Biddinger founded a literary magazine, Barn Owl Review, for which she serves as Editor-in-Chief and works as the Series Editor for the Akron Series in Poetry. Plus, she's a published poet and a professor at the University of Akron.
I am excited to meet Mary in February and even more excited to see the event I've planned come together. There is still more work to be done—designing the poster and determining travel details, for instance—which I will get to work on even after my internship ends.
July 22
The Literary House 2013 Fall Series will be Chicano/a & Latino/a Voices and will feature a fiction writer Justin Torres, nonfiction writer Joy Castro, poet Eduardo Corral and Washington College Professor Crystal Kurzen.
All of our events are free and open to the public.
Justin Torres is the author of the novel We the Animals. His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Guardian, Harper's, Tin House and have been featured on NPR. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Torres has received a Rolón Fellowship in literature from United States Artists, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, as well as a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard. We the Animals, a national bestseller, has been translated into fifteen languages. He has worked as a farmhand, a dog-walker, a creative writing teacher, and a bookseller.
Joy Castro is the author of the memoir The Truth Book, the essay collection Island of Bones, and the literary thrillers Hell or HighWater and Nearer Home. She edited the collection Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family, and her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, North American Review, and The New YorkTimes Magazine. An associate professor of English and Ethnic Studies, she teaches literature, creative writing, and Latino studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she also serves as the associate director of the Institute for Ethnic Studies. She was a founding faculty member of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College in Boston, where she taught for three years, and has led classes and workshops at the Macondo Writers' Workshop, the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference, and the University of Iowa MFA in Nonfiction Program.
Eduardo C. Corral is a CantoMundo fellow. He holds degrees from Arizona State University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2012, Beloit Poetry Journal, Huizache, Jubilat, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and Quarterly West. His work has been honored with a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from Poetry, and writing residencies to the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. He has served as the Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and as the Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. Slow Lightning, his first book of poems, was selected by Carl Phillips as the 2011 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, he currently lives in New York City, teaching at Columbia University in the spring 2013.
Crystal M. Kurzen currently holds a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship in the Department of English at Washington College where she is at work on her manuscript, Literary Nepantla: Genre and Method in Contemporary Chicano/a Life Narratives. Her project focuses on how contemporary Chicanos/as relate self and community from the alter-Native spaces of nepantla through multigeneric storytelling techniques based primarily in strategies of reconceptualizing conventional autobiography. Her article on Pat Mora recently appeared in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and her work on Native American women's autobiography is forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literatures. She teaches courses in literature and composition as well as American, Chicano/a, and Latino/a literatures.
July 19
From the makers of One Story …
Two years ago I bought a subscription to One Story, having fallen in love with the look of the single short stories that would arrive at my house every month. Their colorful covers remind me of candy and they are quite a treat. Since then I have read many wonderful stories, most of which are by authors whose names and work I had never before read. This past year I was happy to see that One Story expanded to One Teen Story, a competition for young writers between the age of 14 and 19.
Here's how it worked. It was a nine issue series with the first eight stories being written by experienced writers and the ninth would be the contest winner. Now I did fall behind in my reading, as happens with me and short stories, and had to catch up during my summer vacation, which by the way is a nice way to spend your summer vacation. It turned out to be a great series, featuring Gregory Maguire, the 2012 Mary Wood Fellow Laura van den Berg, Aimee Bender, and Matt de La Pena, who will be the judge for next year's competition.
One Teen Story's first winner was Nicole Acton and her story "Night Swimming." It is an incredible story, certainly worthy of taking home the prize and I'm amazed at the quality of work.
If you are interested in learning more about One Teen Story, check out their website or stop by the Lit House and read all nine stories.
July 18
The Jungle Book
By: Rudyard Kipling
When I read this book a few weeks ago, I already knew a lot about it. I knew it was about a boy who, through some unfortunate events, grows up in the care of jungle animals. I knew about the characters Mowgli, Baloo, Bagheera, and of course Shere Khan. It is a book I think most of us know whether we have read the stories or not. What I did not realize, and I apologize to Rudyard Kipling, was the inspiration that The Jungle Book had on one of my favorite books, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman.
When I think about it now, it is quite obvious. The relation begins in the title and extends to the books main characters: Mowgli and Nobody (Bod). Both of their families are killed moments before their respective stories begin; both were saved in very unlikely ways in worlds that many people consider to be scary and perhaps dangerous (the jungle and the graveyard); both were then raised by a family of sorts (wolves and ghosts); educated in the ways of their worlds (the Law of the Jungle and the Freedom of the Graveyard); kidnapped by vicious creatures (Bandar-log and the Ghouls); and both ended up defending themselves and killing their would-be killers (Shere Kahn and the Man Jack).
The Jungle Book was a lot of fun to read. The old pages of my father's copy smelled of an older world where a boy could be lost and raised in the jungle by a pack of wolves, a bear and a panther. Kipling's world, when Britain ruled the Indian subcontinent. The book, which is a collection of seven stories, shows a rougher world than I expected. I forget sometimes that children's stories use to be more haunting and savage, thinking of Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood and even Rock-a-bye Baby. A good example is in the second chapter, "Kaa's Hunting," when the reader learns that Baloo sometimes beats Mowgli when he is not paying attention to his lessons on the Law of the Jungle.
In an interview that Neil Gaiman did with Stephen Colbert in 2009, Gaiman addressed this issue when Colbert asked him about the opening to The Graveyard Book.
"There was a hand in the darkness and it held a knife."
Colbert made the argument that this was too scary for a child to read. Gaiman countered, explaining that, "children's fiction always had a little bit of darkness in it." Both of these books certainly have their darkness, but always with a light at the end of the final page.
The Jungle Book isn't all about Mowgli and I would say that my two favorite chapters are "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi," I like mongooses, and "Toomai of the Elephants," I like elephants, especially ones that dance.
Earlier I apologized to Rudyard Kipling. I did this because I never realized how his work, his masterpiece, inspired one of my favorite modern day writers. But that is why I take this time, the hot days of summer when no ones feels like being outside unless they have to, when all I want is to sit in a cool chair with an ice tea and a promising book to take me away from the 100 degrees Fahrenheit (I can only spell this work because of Ray Bradbury) and the high humidity.
If you have the chance, read both of these books. A Nobel Prize winner wrote one; the other was the winner of the Newbery Medal.
July 18
To commemorate the 2013 series of Summer Poetry Salons, the Literary House Press at the Rose O'Neill Literary House has designed and printed two beautiful new broadsides featuring work from the two poets reading at the final salon of the summer: Sarah Arvio and Elana Bell.
Sarah Arvio's latest collection night thoughts: 70 dream poems & notes from an analysis is full of vivid, unnerving imagery. These are sonnets whose language shivers and leaps off the page. It was really hard committing to one poem when I liked so many of them and knew that any one would be suited to the medium of letterpress. In the end, I was drawn to "white hat" because of its use of color. Phrases like "splashed with blood," "brightpink blood," and "blood is prettypink" suggested a broadside that would incorporate a color we've been wanting to experiment with here at the Literary House Press. Pink pink pink!
Sarah's use of the verb "splashed" shaped my idea of the design. In the end, I created black splatters of paint. And while these splatters were letterpress-printed with a photopolymer plate, which is an extremely controlled process, the effect was one of spontaneity and chaos.
After reading poet Elana Bell's first collection of poetry Eyes, Stones, I was struck by more than one poem that would be ripe for translation into a letterpress broadside. The poem I eventually chose—"How I Got My Name (Jabotinsky)"—evoked such strong, solid images that I knew it was the one. As crucial as strong images are to any piece of writing, poetry or prose, they are even more essential to one memorialized in broadside form. I was held by phrases in the poem like:
"under the moon's bulging/ eye,"
"one hand/ on her belly,"
"dragging its catch by the rump,"
"the wolves/ gazing with their sleepy, yellowed eyes"
These lines together suggest a fertile sort of roundness echoed in the moon, the belly, the rump, the eyes; but it is a jaundiced sort of fertility. There is danger in this poem and solitude. After a close-reading of the poem, I knew certain things about the broadside design. The image accompanying the poem text had to be a moon, large and looming and printed in metallic gold ink. It should be a photographic representation of the moon, like a satellite image, so we see the lonely, dry craters of its surface. After deciding on the image and ink color, it was also clear that the paper needed to be the dark indigo of an early night sky, when the moon would appear at its largest.
So, after the brainwork of design, comes the fun of the studio. The biggest challenge with Sarah Arvio's broadside turned out to be the first step: cutting the paper with our huge guillotine papercutter. We had chosen a thick, delicious, mouldmade paper from Arches, which takes the ink beautifully and allows for a deep impression of the plates. But the paper proved to be so thick that, by the end, we were practically cutting each sheet individually! We also took care to preserve as many of the deckled edges as possible. The rest of the process went rather smoothly. We especially enjoyed mixing the pink ink with the help of the Pantone Matching System: a few dollops of Warm Red, a generous helping of Rhodamine Red, with a side of Opaque White. We printed the broadside in two passes: one for the pink text, one for the black splatters. It was interesting to see, in the last leg of printing, the black splatters occasionally overlap the "prettypink" text, as if by accident.
We were anxious about printing Elana's broadside because of the challenge associated with printing metallic inks and with printing lighter inks over darker papers. But as it turns out, all of our worrying was for nothing! We had expected to need to make at least three passes on the Vandercook: first, a layer of Transparent or Opaque White for the moon image as a base for the metallic ink; followed by the gold; then, because of the difficulty of getting the registration of two layers of ink exact, we were planning to print the slender text in an entirely different color, one that would require only one pass on the press. One of the pleasures (and pains) of working in letterpress printing is that you never know exactly what will or will not pan out until you get your hands dirty in the studio. So, on a whim, we decided to test the effect of just one layer of ink, printing the gold directly on the paper. And it worked! We got the correct amount of ink distribution and metallic shine in just one go: image and text together. It was a serendipitous turn of events.
A number of people assisted in the production of these broadsides, including Lindsay Lusby, Jehanne Dubrow, Literary House Summer Intern Aileen Gray '14, and Master Printer Mike Kaylor. We will debut these new broadsides at next week's final Summer Poetry Salon. The broadsides will sell for $20 each. They will be available for sale at the Salon and on the Literary House Press website.
And don't forget to check out the new Literary House Press Facebook page! We post lots of behind-the-scenes photos there that you won't get to see anywhere else.
June 27
Literary House Summer Intern Aileen Gray '14 experiences her first Summer Poetry Salon, behind the scenes.
On the first day of my internship, Lindsay and Owen explained how the Salons run, lamented that the May Salon had had a very small turnout, and asked me to work on advertising for upcoming events. I spent the day looking over the advertising methods we were already using and finding more ways to spread the word for the Salons.
Four weeks later, the day of the event arrived. The energy in the house was buzzing as we awaited the arrival of Steve Kistulentz, Yona Harvey, and the members of Sleeper Cell. In a fit of last-minute preparations, I straightened chairs, arranged books on tabletops, and put a sidewalk sign in front of the house to catch the attention of passersby.
At 4:23, the excitement was turning to anxiety. We'd had only a handful of guests trickle through the door. But, as these things always happen, the Lit House filled with people just as 4:30 came and went. We shepherded guests, a few already clutching copies of the poets' books, to the porch. Jehanne gave a lovely introduction and the event began.
I knew how the salon would go and what to expect, but it was still a new experience and a delight to discover. The thing that struck me most about the afternoon was how hearing the poetry aloud changed my perception of it. Before the salon, I had read the collection of poetry from which Yona Harvey read. At the time, I'd chosen certain favorites and found there to be a musical quality in the way she strings words and phrases together. Hearing her read it aloud brought this music to life.
The other thing that I found delightful—as I do at any reading, poetry or prose—was the anecdotal energy that pervaded both readings. A poem's meaning or sound changes not only when you hear it aloud but also when you hear the story behind it. The questions you find yourself asking as you read—What was the author thinking here? Why this word, this phrase? Where does the line fall between author and speaker in this work?—these answers are found only through the explanations and anecdotes of the author.
There was a congenial desire from both the musicians and the poets to share their art with the audience, and somehow the salon was both formal and relaxed. The energy of each set bled into the next and thematic connections carried from the music to the poetry—one of those unplanned aspects that always manage to happen. I absolutely loved the afternoon and cannot wait for the salon in July!
June 18
Literary House Summer Intern Aileen Gray '14 shares a list of some of her favorite literary quotes.
There are always those favorite passages that, once you've read them, stick with you forever. You write them down in your journal or put them on a sticky-note on your desktop or keep them saved in the recesses of your mind to turn to like an old friend when you need a pick-me-up of wit or wisdom, inspiration or commiseration.
Having found myself once again looking through a list of quotes I've kept for myself, I thought I'd share a few of my favorites about writing and about language.
"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind."
—Rudyard Kipling
"You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads."
—Ray Bradbury
"You can make anything by writing."
—C.S. Lewis
"Pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language."
—Muriel Barbery
June 18
Literary House Summer Intern Aileen Gray '14 shares her list of books to read this summer.
Recently, I was struck with the desire to spring clean and organize and, having just gotten a new laptop, my hard drive seemed to be the best place to start. In looking through old documents, I came across a list I made just before I came to WAC: One Hundred Books to Read Before I Graduate College.
It's filled with various classics like Ulysses, Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein, The Grapes of Wrath… And, of course, I've managed to neglect nearly every novel on this list while mentally adding to it over the last three years.
It's rather overwhelming: all of these books I am supposed to have read. I'm an English major, after all, and I should at least have a working knowledge of the classics, right? But between classes, work, internships, travel, there is simply never enough time to read everything I want to, let alone everything I ought to.
What's the solution? Start with a shorter list and a more definite deadline. So, I've decided to follow Owen's lead and put together a manageable summer reading list.
At the moment, I'm reading Americana, the first novel by Don DeLillo. I've recently fallen in love with DeLillo's work—his timely exploration of technology, television, information and misinformation, and his fascination with language. At the 2013 AWP Conference in Boston, I had the absolute pleasure of hearing DeLillo read from his work, and after an excerpt from Americana, I knew I had to read the novel in its entirety.
Next, I plan to read something by Hemingway. I've read a number of his short stories but have somehow never managed to read one of his novels, though both A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises have been sitting on my bookshelf for the last few years.
After Hemingway, I think I'll return to post-modern literature, a genre that has become my new favorite after a course with Professor Mooney last semester. There are dozens of post-modern novels I want to read, but I think I'll begin with Catch-22 so I can finally understand the true genesis of the term.
These four novels, in addition to several books I want to read on the recommendation of friends and professors, the novels I am looking at for my thesis, and several collections of short stories I am working my way through, should keep me pleasantly busy.
June 14
With no classwork to get in the way, summer can be one of the best times to get your creative writing juices simmering. Here are some books I am currently looking to for insight into doing this poetry-writing thing a little bit better.
At the 2013 West Chester University Poetry Conference, I read an essay from this book as part of my craft workshop. "The Moves: Common Maneuvers in Contemporary Poetry" by Elisa Gabbert calls out 21 common and identifiable "moves" used in contemporary poetry, of which we are all guilty. Like the lonelyheart in the bar, always trying the same lines on different mates and hoping that one will eventually believe them to be true. There is nothing inherently wrong with these "moves," Gabbert tells us. But we should know when we're using them and how and to what purpose, to make sure we're not just using them to prop up bad poems with no substance behind them. I can't wait to dig into the other essays in this collection.
Lewis Turco was also an encounter from my time at West Chester. Although I missed his panel discussion, I made sure to pick up this book before leaving. I love a good reference book. And they are especially handy when you don't have a helpful professor around to ask, "Hey, what's a ghazal? How do I write one?" All in all, I feel that this is definitely a useful addition to my home library.
This is a book I stumbled upon a few years ago, but I fell in love with it when I did. Diane Ackerman is a poet, as well as a writer of creative nonfiction. This book is broken down into sections dedicated to each of the five senses, including a sixth section about synesthesia–when the stimulation of one sense produces a reaction in another sense, such as smell producing the sensation of color or taste creating the sensation of sound. Reading this book will give you a deeper sense (excuse the pun) of the specific power your five senses have over your experiences and how to better apply these sensations to your own writing.
June 13
Literary House director Jehanne Dubrow is interviewed for the national series "The Poet and Poem" at the Library of Congress.
June 11
Literary House Summer Intern, Aileen Gray '14 reflects on her experience at the 19th annual West Chester University Poetry Conference with the Rose O'Neill Literary House.
Last week, Bond Richards '13, Alex Stinton '14, Julie Armstrong '15, and I got to attend the West Chester University Poetry Conference with Professor Dubrow and Lindsay Lusby. The West Chester University Poetry Conference is the largest annual poetry conference in the nation, lasting for four days and including professional readings, scholarly panels, and writing workshops on various aspects of poetic form. Bond studied with author and professional critic William Logan, Alex learned about prosody and rhythm from author and professor Tom Cable, Julie explored her love of experimental forms with innovative poet Terri Witek, and I was able to explore my personal preference for story in a workshop on Narrative Poetry taught by David Mason.
When Professor Dubrow had invited me to attend the West Chester University Poetry Conference a few months ago, I agreed nervously, concerned that I would be out of place as a writer primarily of fiction rather than poetry. But I have to say I fit in just fine and my experience far exceeded the expectations I had had. As Lindsay put it, the Conference felt like "summer camp for grown-ups:" our time was divided between workshops and readings, we ate all of our meals together, and we lived together in the University's dorms.
I am usually hard-pressed to pick a favorite anything, but of this experience I can narrow it down to two things. First of all, I had a great time getting to know Julie, Alex, and Bond. As the only college students in attendance, we spent nearly all of our time together, and the Conference was a lot of fun because of that.
And secondly, I loved my workshop on Narrative Poetry. As a writer of prose, I've generally shied away from writing poetry, but David Mason's workshop has given me a way into the poetic form: blending story and verse. Really, Mason pointed out, "verse is the oldest form of story" and "most poems have a tendency toward narrative" anyway, whether explicitly or implicitly. Through the workshop, we not only worked on our own pieces but also examined published narrative poems, starting with a passage from The Odyssey and ending with a somewhat silly but completely delightful ballad by Charles Causley entitled "I saw a jolly hunter." In each example, Mason showed how verse and story work together, and I discovered a new love for writing poetry. Julie said of her workshop that she "definitely left feeling inspired" and I have to say I did as well.
And speaking of feeling inspired, I had the chance to attend several panels and poetry readings. While some panels were not as good as others, the good ones were phenomenal. The Conference's keynote speaker was Julia Alvarez who began her career with the novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and has since written and published various novels and poetry collections, including Homecoming and The Other Side. A splendid reader, Julia Alvarez shared not only her poetry but also insight into the inspiration for her work and her writing process.
Overall, it was extremely encouraging (if also slightly overwhelming) to be surrounded by professional poets who have dedicated their lives to writing. I could not be more grateful for the generosity of the Rose O'Neill Literary House or for Professor Dubrow's commitment to exposing students to the literary world beyond college. The West Chester University Poetry Conference was an amazing experience, and I am very glad to have shared it with Alex, Bond, and Julie.
June 10
As with most summers, I like to make a reading list for myself, to catch up on the many books that I should have read in high school and college, but never did. And this summer, I'll be spending most of my time in the 19th century.
In my mind, there are about fifty books that people say you have to read in high school or college, but most people only get through half of them, if that. With so many new wonderful books being introduced to schools, as they should, some of the classics are being squeezed out due to time constraints, making it inevitable that we miss certain classics. To remedy this problem, every summer I try to catch up so I'm not that-person-working-at-the-Lit-House-who-has-not-read-The-Catcher-in-the-Rye, which happened to be on my list last summer, along with The Maltese Falcon, The Giver, and Ender's Game.
First on the list this year is Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, written in 1899. This title has popped up a lot over the past few years as a book that a great many authors reference in their own work. I hate it when I don't understand a reference in a book. The way this book came to me is from the a limited edition printing by the Chester River Press, which won the Carl Hertzog award in 2010. (I know most of you have never heard of the Carl Hertzog award, unless you are in printing or book design, in which case, it is a very big deal.) It is a beautiful edition that I have admired for years now. My copy of Heart of Darkness was acquired last year while browsing a used bookstore in Chicago. It has sat on my shelf ever since, but that is what good books do: wait to be read.
The next book on my list is The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper, written in 1826. The idea to read this book came to me while reading another book this spring. In March, I went to the AWP Conference in Boston and attended an event with Téa Obreht on a panel with Rebecca Makkai, Alexi Zentner and Lauren Groff. From that panel I learned that I had to read The Monsters of Templeton, which several of my friends vehemently agreed. Like many things that go over my head and escape my knowledge, I had not realized that Lauren Groff actually came to Washington College in March 2008. Anyway, with out any spoilers, the book takes place in the fictional Templeton, NY (aka Cooperstown) and makes many references to James Fenimore Cooper and The Last of the Mohicans. I have seen the film a few times, but never read the book, which I was able to buy at the last Friends of the Kent County Public Library book sale this spring.
The final book, and perhaps the most interesting book on my list is The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, which was first published in 1894. The fact that I haven't read this book got to me this past spring when I read The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht. (I was actually 3/4 of the way through the book when I saw her and Lauren Groff on the panel.) In the story, of which I'll try not to give away any spoils, the main character's grandfather always carries his own copy of The Jungle Book and has since he was a young boy growing up in the Balkans before World War II. At one point, a tiger, which has escaped from the zoo after the city was bombed, comes into her grandfather's village. None of the villagers had ever seen a tiger and think that it is the devil. Armed with knowledge and the illustrations from Kipling's book, her grandfather tries to help protect the tiger.
The book I'll be reading is one I inherited from my father's library. I've had the book for a few years and never really looked at it until I decided to read it this summer and write this article about it. When I picked it up off the shelf I handled it with extreme caution. (You can see pictures of my copy on the right). I opened it to the title page and was shocked to see a left-facing swastika with Rudyard Kipling's signature beneath it.
In my head I knew that that symbol, which has since the 1930s come to represent hatred and oppression, once meant something else entirely different. With some quick research I learned that this ancient symbol once meant good luck and well-being to different people all over the world. I then learned that the backward swastika only appears in copies of Kipling's book prior to the 1920's. As the Nazi Party came to power, Kipling had his engraver remove the swastika from the printing block so he would not be mistaken as a sympathizer. It was not until after I read this that I looked more closely at the title page and realized that this book was printed in 1899. It is a little rough around the edges, but in relatively good shape. I won't be taking it to the beach this summer. I have the last book in the Southern Vampire Mysteries for that.
Now with all my books ready, and since June and the summer heat are here, it is time to read.
Happy Reading,
June 4
Ariel Jicha '15 gives an interns'-eye-view of designing and editing the first-ever Sophie Kerr Prize Anthology.
As Literary House Press Intern, I had the pleasure of creating and editing the Sophie Kerr Prize Anthology, a collection of portfolio excerpts from winners and finalists from the class of 2011 and 2012. This Anthology is the first in a series of mini-anthologies slated to be published every two years and will highlight Sophie Kerr winners and finalists. It was exciting to collaborate on this project with the Lit House staff and to see the process unfold, beginning to end. I am grateful to everyone who gave me guidance and encouragement, especially Owen Bailey, Lindsay Lusby, and Dr. Dubrow.
Before this internship, I didn't know the difference between serif and sans serif fonts, (Hint: serif fonts have the dangly bits on the ends). I'd never been commissioned to create something, and had little concept of proportions and measurements related to pagination. The Sophie Kerr Prize Anthology project has given me insight into the writing world and what it's like to create under different constraints. At first, I was a little nervous to be working at The Rose O'Neill Literary House. I'd held the Lit House in high esteem since visiting as a prospective student; so much so that by the end of freshmen year the Lit House had been transformed in my mind from an old building into a lofty abstraction; a place where novice writers flocked and the mysterious Writing Life took place. With this in mind I applied for the Literary House Press Internship, simultaneously hoping to solve the enigma I'd created and to help the Lit House Press create a new tradition for future Sophie Kerr winners and finalists.
Despite my excitement, I still feared my creative skills were inadequate. Fortunately, I discovered two things, 1) the Lit House atmosphere is pretty much the opposite of the literary Devil-Wears-Prada internship I'd conjured in my head and 2) everyone had as much InDesign experience as I had (that is to say, none). The Lit House staff are some of the warmest people I've ever met. They are funny, easy-going, and above all, they're passionate about writing and bringing great writers to campus to inspire and engage students through lectures, readings, and workshops. Dr. Dubrow, Lindsay Lusby, and Owen Bailey's relentless patience and encouragement gave me confidence to expand my skill set as well as peace of mind on days when InDesign seemed particularly vexing.
Working at the Lit House gave me a sense of what the writing world is like outside of college. When I started in January, Professor Dubrow gave me a rough timeline for the project and I'll admit, the task seemed daunting. I had to solicit portfolio pieces from eleven past winners and finalists, work with the application InDesign and create the book's front cover. Soliciting work wasn't hard, but InDesign and the front cover proved challenging. I learned how to make a book using InDesign without fully understanding the concepts of Bleed or Slug. These words still make me think of metal heads talking about a new band, not an editor carefully measuring margins and lines on a 'Mac. The idea of a Master Page, or template, confused me for weeks until Alissa Vecchio ('13) offered her expertise—skills acquired from her work in the College Relations office.
This internship was a veritable "crash course" in the publishing process; I learned how to solicit work from writers, format using InDesign, and actually print book pages. As someone who takes a laid-back approach to, well, everything in life, the pressure to act now was a much-needed exercise in organization and time management. I learned that keeping up with emails and edits were necessary in order to meet deadlines…who knew?
Over spring break, I was invited to shadow Master Printer Jim Dissette as he printed the pages for a series of Mary Jo Salter books. I learned how to carefully hand-tint artwork on printed pages. Being part of the printing process; seeing each page come together with text and illustrations gave me a different perspective on writing and the key people who help bring a book to life so the final version of a writer's work—the book itself—becomes a tangible, literary object for the reader to enjoy and for the author to find satisfaction in.
The capstone of my internship was attending the Sophie Kerr Prize ceremony at the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore. Between set up and break down for the event, I had the opportunity to experience the energy and excitement of those gathered as we listened to the contemplative and enriching words of presenter Michael Dirda, then cheered for the finalists Bond Richards, Maegan Clearwood, Emily Blackner, Jillian Obermeier, and the winner, Tim Marcin. On a table in the entranceway we had laid out pamphlets and newsletters from WAC along with copies of the first Sophie Kerr Prize Anthology, hot off the press. Realizing all the hours of editing, Photoshopping, InDesign-ing and margin measuring lay concrete before me, in the form of a book that people could actually purchase, brought my entire internship into focus. The slim paperback book is a tangible benchmark and affirmation for WAC's talented writers.
May 31
What happened this year and what is happening this summer?
This was a year of firsts.
It was the first time the Rose O'Neill Literary House hosted two themed semesters, beginning with the Jewish Voices Series in the fall and the Writing in Wartime Series in the spring.
In the fall, we brought four talented artists: Dylan Landis, a short story writer and author of the book Normal People Don't Live Like This. Landis gave a great reading, and with her help, the Lit House was able to link itself to Kevin Bacon (you have to see our "Six Degrees of Francis Bacon" mural if you have not already done so) with only 3 degrees of separation:
1. In 2012, Dylan Landis came to the Lit House at Washington College;
2. in 2013, Dylan was the guest speaker at an event with actress Marin Ireland in Soho;
3. in 2013, Marin Ireland played a serial killer in the show The Following with Kevin Bacon.
Then came novelist Anna Solomon, who, together with singer/songwriter Clare Burson, gave a wonderful performance that combined both of their crafts, telling the story of Solomon's main character from her novel The Little Bride matched with Burson's music. We closed out the semester with poet Idra Novey who shared with us her award-winning poetry from her new collection Exit Civilian. The Lit House also ran into Novey at the AWP Conference in Boston this past spring.
Speaking of spring, this past semester we were visited by four more artists. Beginning with Siobhan Fallon, author of the bestselling short story collection You Know When the Men Are Gone, who told us about what it is like to live on an army base with the spouses of other members of the military, telling us stories about the other side of war. Next we heard from Washington College professor Ryan Kelty, who shared with us his research that examines the effects of war regarding civilian contractors, integration of military personnel, diversity in the military, and the role of military service across the life course. Then came the 2013 Douglass Wallop Playwright Fellow, KJ Sanchez. For five days KJ was on campus, meeting with drama students and talking to them about their craft. While here, KJ led two events: one, a craft talk on her documentarian approach to constructing a play; the second, a student performance of and a discussion on ReEntry, a play that was created from interviews with veterans to share their stories and experiences. Finally, we ended the semester with Anthony Swofford, whose book Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles was a best-selling memoir that was made into a film in 2005.
And we cannot forget the mini series from the early part of the fall semester titled, 'On the Writing Life.' This series featured alumni Michael Duck, editor of Crunchable an online literary magazine, The Faculty Books Reception, as well as Idiots' Books Presents with Robbi Behr and Matthew Swanson.
Moving on from our events and going back to last summer, the Lit House has welcomed some new faces.
First and foremost is Lindsay Lusby '08, the Literary House Assistant Director who began working back in September, making a wonderful addition to the staff. Having been a regular at the Lit House and the print shop as an undergraduate, she brings great artistic talent, experience with letterpress, and a deep love of books. She is also another tea drinker. which means I'm not the only one who doesn't drink coffee.
During this year the Lit House has made many more beautiful broadsides thanks to the experience of Master Printer Mike Kaylor. These new broadsides as well as our old broadsides can be found on the Literary House Press website. This year's broadsides include the work of Dylan Landis, Idra Novey, Beth Bachmann (to commemorate the 2013 AWP Conference in Boston), and Anthony Swofford. We have more planned for next year so stay tuned to our blog to see when they come out.
And speaking of letterpress, this year the Literary House Press has printed a new collection of poetry by Mary Jo Salter from Johns Hopkins University. The collection is called Lost Originals, and believe me when I say that this book involved much time, patience, and rich talent from many different artists. Beginning with LHP series editor Jehanne Dubrow and assistant editor Lindsay Lusby, who managed the project, bringing the different parties together. Washington College alumni and 1971 Sophie Kerr Winner Jim Dissette led the printing project with assistance from Literary House Press Intern Ariel Jicha '15. To help with the project, Lindsay Lusby solicited the work of Abigail Rorer of The Lone Oak Press. Abigail is an award-winning engraver from Massachusetts whose work can be found here. Once the pages were complete and collated, they were shipped to Campbell-Logan Bindery in Minneapolis. The Lit House will be hosting an official Literary House Press book launch when Mary Jo Salter comes to campus on October 8th.
Last summer the Lit House took on the task of switching the College's yearbook, The Pegasus, to an online format. To lead the way, the Lit House hired two students to be the new Media Interns who over the course of 8 weeks completed the 2011 – 2012 yearbook. For the 2012 – 2013 yearbook, Lit House tried a new approach, hiring Media Interns Becky Winterburn '13 and Jeremy Quintin '14 to work on The Pegasus throughout the school year thus spreading out the work on a more manageable scale. The yearbook was completed by the end of this past May and is now up and running.
The Lit House also began a new internship this past spring. The Literary House Press Internship was designed to help with the creation of the new Sophie Kerr Prize Anthology. Ariel Jicha '15 spent the spring semester contacting the finalists and winners from the past two years, soliciting from them excerpts that would go into the anthology. She also contacted Laura Maylene Walter, Sophie Kerr Prize winner from 2003, who was asked to write the introduction to the Anthology. She did and the Anthology came out splendidly. It is for sale at the Literary House Press Website. The Anthology was also completed in time for the 2013 Sophie Kerr Prize Event, which was held at the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, MD. The Sophie Kerr Prize Anthology series will issue a new edition every two years.
And speaking of literary prizes, this past year the Lit House offered two new prizes to go along with the William W. Warner Prize for creative writing on nature and the environment. The first Jude and Miriam Pfister Poetry Prize was awarded to Reilly Cox '16 for his poem "Bibles Printed on Old Girlie Magazines." Parker Macintosh '13 was awarded the first Literary House Genre Fiction Prize for his short story, "A Voice in the Dark."
It was a great year at the Lit House and we would like to thank everyone that made it possible. As we prepare for the next two Summer Poetry Salons we invite you to follow the series of events we have lined up for 2013 – 2014.
Have a great summer,
The Lit House Staff
May 24
Get ready for the 2013 Summer Poetry Salons at the Rose O'Neill Literary House!
If you are asking yourself 'what is a poetry salon,' we would quote the Poetry Center at West Chester University and say that,
"A salon is an informal event hosted by a member of the community. The host invites friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues to enjoy a few hours of good food, lively conversation, and a poetry reading in a home or other location. This up close and personal interaction with a published poet exposes guests to the way poetry was meant to be shared—read aloud."
The Literary House hosted its first salon last July with poet/memoirist Sandra Beasley, Cave Canem Fellow Kevin Vaughn and the Pam Ortiz Band. The event was a success and we hope to replicate that success this summer as we host a trio of salons, which begins next Tuesday, May 28 at 4:30 p.m.
For our first salon we have invited poets Michelle Chan Brown and Ryan Teitman, and we will also have a musical performance by Chester River Runoff. The event kicks off at 4:30 p.m. and we will be serving wine, snacks, and other yummy treats.
On Tuesday, June 25, we will have our second salon with this year's Cave Canem Fellow, Yona Harvey, who will be on campus for the entire month of June. Poet Steve Kistulentz and local musicians Sleeper Cell will join her and we will again be serving wine, snacks and yummy treats.
Our third salon will be held on Tuesday, July 23 with our final gathering of poets and musicians. There you can hear the poetry of Elana Bell, Sarah Arvio and a Classical Violin Duet performance by Nevin Dawson and Merideth Buxton.
For more information on all three Salons, please visit the Rose O'Neill Literary House website and find more information about our guests online.
Hope to see you there,
Lit House Staff
July 1
I love short stories.
Loved them ever since high school when I wrote an essay on Ray Bradbury and had to read many of the stories from The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles. In college, I took two short story classes at the same time, flooding the semester with dozens of stories by dozens of American and Irish authors. Some I knew, some I only knew by their more renowned work like Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Mark Twain. Some I did not know and so was introduced to words Katherine Ann Porter, Seán Ó Faoláin, Frank O'Connor and wonderful Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
I prefer Hemingway's Snows of Kilimanjaro instead of The Old Man and the Sea; I've read most of Ray Bradbury's collections including October Country, The Martian Chronicles and Quicker than the Eye; stories by Lit House guests Hannah Tinti, Laura van den Berg, Siobhan Fallon and Neil Gaiman.
What I enjoy most are the odd acts, the strange perspectives, and the incredible imagination that short stories can bring us. Some ideas are too beautiful for a full length novel. It takes great skill to craft a short story. Like a quick fire challenge on Top Chef, it takes focus to operate in a small window: 5,000 words or an amuse bouche. It begins with an opening sentence that, like a strong scent, will tell you so much about a dish without having seen it or tasted it. One of my favorite opening sentences is from Ambrose Bierce:
A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below.
~ An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Or this one from Ray Bradbury:
Quite suddenly there was no more road.
~ The Scythe
But I often forget to read short stories. Even though I have many collections from Flannery O'Connor, Grace Paley, Stephen King and a subscription to One Story, I forget to trade the novel in for the collection. It is easy to get sucked into novel after novel, long stories that take time to develop characters and plots that demand a certain level of commitment, while also granting the possibility of putting the book down in the middle of the story. Short Stories are a different animal, asking that you sit for the entire duration of the story so you do not lose your way. I don't like to break away in the middle of a short story, even if it is a 40-page short story by Irish author Sheridan le Fanu. Green Tea anyone?
Last summer, when Bradbury died on June 5, I began each weekday with a short story and for nearly six weeks I kept that routine. An early morning mental exercise that threw me into a new world and in a handful of sentences, a few paragraphs of a page or two, I had to find my way and determine who the narrator was where they were taking me. I began with The Machineries of Joy by, yes, Ray Bradbury. Though this book does not get the level of recognition as The Illustrated Man or The Martian Chronicles, it is still full of exciting stories, my favorite of which is "The One Who Waits." After I finished the book, I moved on to a collection of American writers and read stories by Bernard Malmund, Samuel Clemens, and Jack London.
This summer I want to restart that routine and in the process branch out to some more current short story writers from some of the books I bought at AWP. On my short story shelf I have Ploughshares, Tin House, Gargoyle and the stack of unread One Story and One Teen Story booklets that await me.
May 24
Carnegie-Mellon English professor Yona Harvey will be in Chestertown the month of June for the Cave Canem Summer Residency at the Rose O'Neill Literary House.
May 17
Introducing the first edition of the Sophie Kerr Prize Anthology
May 14
Addressing the finalists for the 2013 Sophie Kerr Prize, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book columnist for the Washington Post advised them to be resilient and to remember, "Safety Last."
May 7
To help get to know the five Sophie Kerr Finalist of 2013, we asked them to answer four questions and here is what they wrote.
1) First, would you tell us a little bit about your writing? What do you like to write and where do you draw your inspiration?
2) What was the first book you read and loved?
3) What writer, living or dead, would you like to have a cup of coffee with?
4) What is your favorite word and why?
1) I draw inspiration from the people around me. I'm always amazed by how many talented and unique individuals surround me, especially in such a quiet area like the Eastern Shore. I think that everyone, no matter how famous or successful, has a story to tell, and all of those stories have messages behind them. I love telling those stories, and journalism and creative nonfiction give me the freedom to do just that.
2) I read "A Little Princess" by Frances Hodgoson Burnett dozens of times in elementary school, and it was probably the first book that I didn't just love, but obsessed over. When I reread it now, I recognize how sappy and melodramatic it is – I just can't help myself.
3) Margaret Fuller. She was one of the first American feminists and successful female journalists, someone who is woefully underappreciated in the course of history, I think. She was friends with all the transcendentalists and was a pretty eccentric character. I would love to pick her brain.
4) Disremember. I discovered this word in Dr. Knight's Toni Morrison Class while we studied "Beloved." It's a more active form of forgetting, a really useful and poetic term.
1) I enjoy writing in a lot of different forms, but usually in the same voice, one that jumps between the informal and the lyrical. I draw inspiration from other writers like Hemingway, Salinger or Nick Flynn (some of my favorites). I also draw inspiration from events in my own life and other various sources like songs or news reports.
2) The first book I truly read and loved was To Kill A Mockingbird, which I read for a class with a really great teacher who helped us discover what was really going on in the story.
3) I would probably want to have a cup of coffee with Hemingway. He always wrote about cafes, so he would definitely be a good person to hang out with over coffee.
4) My favorite word is probably "the" because it is the most used and it would be really hard to write anything without it.
1) My writing is purely academic; I submitted only critical essays, and while that sounds pretty dry compared to creative writing I do really enjoy writing it. I think of it as just a different kind of creativity: coming up with an interesting, new, and challenging argument to take on a book that has been read and discussed in different ways for tens or even hundreds of years.
2) The first books I can remember really being obsessed with were the Nancy Drew books by Carolyn Keene. In fact, when I applied to Washington College I had to write an essay about "my hero," and I chose to write about Nancy Drew; she's smart, adventurous, and drives a mustang, what more could a girl want?
3) I think it would be amazing to be able to have a conversation with Victor Hugo. He lived through almost the entire 19th century in France, which was a crazy time, and I think it would be great not only to hear more about his books and poetry, but about what it was like going through all of the changes that the century saw. I would also feel very accomplished if he was able to understand any of my French.
4) Cupcake. I don't think I really need to explain why…
1) I usually end up writing about people who simply can't seem to figure out what it is that's causing them their problems. I try to make it complicated for them, which makes it complicated for me, so that usually, by the end, the resolution, if there is one, looks just as uncomfortable to me as it does to them. It's not always like this, though. Sometimes it's way less conscious.
And it's the same thing when I write poems—let's complicate a situation and see if anything interesting comes out that sort of strings it all together, thematically or whatever. With poems, I generally start with an image or a phrase that looks good on paper and then have pretend faith that something meaningful is actually sitting there behind it. I've found that usually, with enough remodeling, primary images do have something worth pulling from them.
2) I don't remember the first book I ever read. The first book I recall really internalizing was Dr. Seuss's Oh the Places You Go. I had it memorized, completely, from cover to cover. My dad would read it to me before bed. I really only cared about the illustrations and the rhythms of the words, realizing later that it's a truly great, moral story. The first book to show me that fiction could actually change a person was David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which crushed me just as much as it built me up. He's the reason for a lot of nervous second-guessing among today's crop of young writers. Which I think is good. Keeps one honest.
3) I get the sense that Cormac McCarthy is pleasant. Why not.
4) Twerk. It's slang for working one's body, namely the rear, during any loose or unstructured dance number. The physicality of the act gets conveyed in the word, I think, rather nicely.
April 29
Announcing the winners of The Literary House Genre Fiction Prize, The William W. Warner Prize for Creative Writing on Nature and the Environment, and The Jude & Miriam Pfister Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets.
On Tuesday, April 30th the Rose O'Neill Literary House will host its final literary event of the 2012 - 2013 academic year. The Senior Reading has been a long standing tradition at Washington College, dating back to the 1970s before there was a Rose O'Neill Literary House. In fact, one of the first students to participate in the Senior Reading was English Department Professor Kathy Wagner, we have the poster for proof.
On the walls of the Literary House are many volumes of framed posters with the names of the dozens, and now even hundreds, of students who took the opportunity to read their poems and prose to their peers and professors.
A lot of writing talent has come to the Literary House, and in most years the eventual winner of the Sophie Kerr Prize has participated in the Senior Reading. This list includes Brandon Hopkins '97, Stephanie Fowler '01, Tanya Allen '94, Doug Rose '86, Katie Degentesh '95, Peter Turchi '82, Art Bilodeau '78, Dean Herbert '88, Emma Sovich '08, Norman Prentiss '84, Liam Daley '07, Sarah Blackman '02 and last year's winner Katie Manion. It will be interesting to see if this year will stay true to this statement.
One difference for this year's Senior Reading, in addition to announcing the winner of The William W. Warner Prize, is the announcement of the winners of two new prizes, The Jude & Miriam Pfister Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and The Literary House Genre Fiction Prize. All three prizes are given annually. For more information, please visit the Student Opportunities page on the Literary House website.
Please come out for the announcement of the these three prize winners and to support our seniors before they graduate next month.
Best of luck everyone …
April 18
The Rose O'Neill Literary House has named the winner of the 2014 Mary Wood Fellowship, poet Shara Lessley.
In April 2014, we will host poet Shara Lessley for a week-long residency as our 2014 Mary Wood Fellow. This is the first year we opened up the Mary Wood Fellowship as a nationwide competition and Shara was selected from a pool of more than 30 outstanding applicants. As part of her duties while in-residence, Shara will hold one-on-one meetings with a select group of female student-poets. She will also participate in two public events, giving a craft talk and a reading from her poetry.
A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Shara Lessley is the author of Two-Headed Nightingale (New Issues 2012). Her awards include an Artist Fellowship from the State of North Carolina, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Colgate University's O'Connor Fellowship, The Gilman School's Tickner Fellowship, and a "Discovery" / The Nation prize. Shara's poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, and New England Review, among others. A recent resident of the Middle East, Shara is completing a new collection titled The Explosive Expert's Wife.
The Mary Wood Fellowship at The Rose O'Neill Literary House is awarded biennially to an emerging female writer—in poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction—who has published one book. The Fellowship enables female creative writing students at Washington College to work with and learn from successful female writers like Laura van den Berg, Hannah Tinti, and Irina Reyn, who spend five days on campus. Eastern Shore author Mary Wood, whose support makes the fellowship possible, is a '68 graduate of the College and a former member of its Board of Visitors and Governors.
April 17
The Rose O'Neill Literary House has named the winner of the 2013 Cave Canem Summer Residency, Yona Harvey.
In June 2013, the Rose O'Neill Literary House will welcome Yona Harvey to Chestertown for a month-long writer's retreat. Yona was selected from this year's pool of applicants as the winner of the Literary House's 2013 Cave Canem Summer Residency.
While most of her time will be spent working on her own writing projects and quietly exploring the town, Yona will also be a part of our second Summer Poetry Salon on Tuesday, June 25 at 4:30PM, sharing the stage with poet Steve Kistulentz and local band Sleeper Cell.
Yona Harvey lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she is on the faculty of Carnegie-Mellon University in the Department of English. She is the author of the poetry collection, Hemming the Water (Four Way Books, 2013), and the recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation. Her poems can be found in jubilat, Gulf Coast, Callaloo, West Branch, and various journals and anthologies, including A Poet's Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry (Ed. Annie Finch). She lives with her husband and two children not far from where jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams grew up. Williams married the spiritual to the secular in her music, and is a regular muse in Yona's writing.
The Cave Canem Summer Residency at The Rose O'Neill Literary House is a partnership with Cave Canem, the nation's preeminent organization for young African American poets. Cave Canem's mission is to serve as "a home for the many voices of African American poetry and is committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of African American poets." Our Cave Canem Summer Residency is a month-long Chestertown retreat offered annually to one outstanding former Cave Canem Fellow. Previous Summer Residents include poets Kevin Vaughn in 2012 and Arisa White in 2011.
April 12
The first in a new letterpress broadside series from Literary House Press features Beth Bachmann's poem, "(why your room has a door)."
Exactly a year ago, in April 2012, we contacted Ladette Randolph, the Editor-in-Chief of Ploughshares. We had an idea: to create a commemorative, limited-edition broadside series in honor of the annual AWP Conference. The broadside would feature a poem first published in a literary journal connected to the Conference's host city. In 2013, the AWP Conference was scheduled to be held in Boston; Ploughshares—with its more than forty-year Bostonian connection—seemed like the ideal literary journal to feature in this inaugural broadside.
While the Literary House Press had published handmade letterpress broadsides for more than 20 years, celebrating work by visiting authors such as Ted Kooser, Natasha Trethewey, and Daniel Handler, among others, the new AWP broadside series would allow the Rose O'Neill Literary House to collaborate with the best literary journals and magazines around the country.
Happily, Ladette really liked the idea, and the project was soon under way. The Literary House Press selected Beth Bachmann's "(why your room has a door)," which first appeared in Ploughshares Volume 38/1 (spring 2012), an issue that was guest-edited by Nick Flynn.
Then, the design work began. The unusual layout of Beth Bachmann's poem shaped our thinking about how text should interact with image. The poem is only seven-lines-long but double-spaced with frequent caesuras punctuating the sentences. The poem's lines have an elastic quality on the page that mimics the speaker's unsettled emotional state. The speaker addresses an invisible "you," using language that feels both elusive and allusive, hesitant as if she cannot address trauma directly.
In thinking about a decorative element that might accompany the poem, we looked to those places in the text where the language evoked the most powerful images. After spending many hours with Bachmann's words, it became clear that this was the line which seemed to sum up the poem's narrative most fully: "Soldier, you make my body a map" (3). The poem's references to "shore," "ocean," and "water" helped to clarify the kind of image we might use. After several brainstorming sessions, we eventually settled on the idea of incorporating the outlines of a topographic map to define the poem's right-hand margin (or its shoreline).
We used Adobe InDesign to lay out the text and then construct an imaginary topographical ocean system that hugged the edge of the poem. The poem was set in Palatino Linotype, a typeface that gestures toward the lettering of older nautical maps while remaining modern enough to reflect the contemporary voice of Bachmann's work.
The image and text were then converted to a PDF and sent to Boxcar Press, a small business that produces photopolymer plates from digital files. Polymer plates are a modernized form of the older technology—metal plates, metal typefaces—employed in letterpress printing.
We used a heavier stock mouldmade paper of 100% cotton, in a cream that was evocative of antique maps. The paper is described as being "lightly textured" with a nice density that allows for a deep impression when run through the press.
At the Literary House, we generally use our Vandercook 4 Proof Press for bigger projects. The Vandercook's ink drum and rollers are motorized, but the platen is hand-cranked allowing the printer to control the rhythm of the process. We are lucky to have a genuine Master Printer on staff, Mike Kaylor, who has a national reputation for his impeccable and precise work.
Mike printed the broadside in a run of 100. He worked with two shades of blue, a near-black for the poem's text and colophon and a slightly lighter blue for the image. When a broadside contains more than one color, the printer must ink, print, and clean the press before applying the second hue. A printer must work carefully to align the text and image, which often requires minute calculations and a series of trials and errors.
While the conception and design of the broadside took many weeks, the printing was done in two days. Now, the broadsides have been wrapped and wrapped in plastic and bubbles. They will accompany us to the AWP Conference in Boston, from car to train and car again, where they will be signed by Beth. We debuted these limited-edition broadsides at the Rose O'Neill Literary House table in one of the AWP book halls. The broadsides are now for sale on our website.
It has been a tremendous honor and pleasure to work with Ploughshares and with Beth Bachmann on this project. We hope this will be the first of many literary collaborations between the Literary House Press and some of the country's finest journals and magazines.
– Jehanne Dubrow & Lindsay Lusby
We are already planning our 2014 AWP Commemorative Broadside, the second in our new letterpress broadside series. This next broadside will be a collaboration with Washington'sWillow Springs and will debut at 2014 AWP Conference in Seattle.
March 29
During the Spring of 2013, the Literary House staff, with the skills and talent of Sophie Kerr Winner Jim Dissette '71 and artist Abigail Rorer, began assembling a fine press chapbook, a brief collection of poems by Mary Jo Salter.
The purpose of the Literary House Press is to connect the Washington College community with the larger literary world. With its newest letterpress book project, the Literary House Press celebrates the poetry of Mary Jo Salter. This chapbook, Lost Originals, is a series of elegies, beginning in the present day and going back through history to Ancient Egypt.
A poet, editor, essayist, playwright, and lyricist, Mary Jo Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and grew up both in Michigan and in Maryland. She earned degrees from Harvard and Cambridge Universities and is a former editor at Atlantic Monthly, poetry editor at the New Republic, and co-editor of the fourth and fifth editions of the Norton Anthology of Poetry. She is currently teaching at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where she is Chair of the Writing Seminars program in the School of Arts and Sciences.
"Salter's thorough understanding of poetic tradition is clearly evident in her work … Often marrying domestic concerns to exotic locales, Salter's most acclaimed poems are at once formally inventive and speak to her experiences in foreign cultures, including Iceland, Italy, Japan, France, and England." ~ The Poetry Foundation
Part of the project was also bringing to the pages the beautiful work of artist Abigail Rorer. Known for her imaginative and meticulous engravings, Rorer somehow carves the most delicate images in one of the toughest of mediums, Corian. That's right, the same hard-as-stone material used for kitchen countertops. You know it's tough when the artist herself says in a letter, "With Corian, you can bash the hell out of it if you want - it won't hurt it." We did take nice care of her work, but it's good to know when working with something that is so beautiful and appears so fragile.
Abigail Rorer, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, is the proprietor of the Lone Oak Press in Petersham, Massachusetts, which has been in operation since 1989. She was contacted by Literary House Assistant Director, Lindsay Lusby, who saw her work at the nearby Oak Knoll Fest XVII in October 2012 and fell in love with her long-sold-out book of Lewis Carroll-like, imaginary (and sometimes carnivorous) plants, Mimpish Squinnies.
After reading the chapbook manuscript, Rorer began to generate some ideas for possible illustrations, the problem was finding the right one. But in a few short weeks, over the holidays no less, both parties agreed on the image of an unfolding purple iris for the frontispiece, an image that evokes the subtle sense of mingled loss and beauty present in Salter's poems. For the decorative motif, we decided on an Ancient Egyptian harpist, mentioned in the last poem of the book.
The images were made with a technique called relief engraving, which can best be described as removing material from a flat plane so that the image appears to rise out of the surface. This type of engraving is perfect for incorporation in letterpress printing, our specialty here at the Literary House Press. The tricky part, aside from engraving in such a tough material, is getting the height just right. Too low, the image won't print, too high and it will press too hard into the paper.
"My lines are extremely fine and some printers find it a little difficult to print them because of that. The key is to get the ink to just kiss the block and not fill in the lines."
Thanks to the skills and sleight of hand of Jim Dissette, the image came out beautifully. Although we know his name in connection to his literary achievements while a student at Washington College, Dissette is also a journeyman letterpress printer and professional book designer. His recent work on a lush reprinting of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a joint effort of Chester River Press and Deep Wood Press, earned the book and its publishers the 2010 Carl Hertzog Award for Excellence in Book Design. With Dissette's award-winning talent for book design, this whole project is brought elegantly together.
Next, the finished and folded pages will be sent out to be hand-bound at a bookbindery in Minnesota. But be sure to stay tuned! When the finished books return, we will have an official Lost Originals Book Launch hosted at the Rose O'Neill Literary House with a reading by our poet of honor, Mary Jo Salter. You won't want to miss this Literary House Press celebration!
March 4
Volume 1, Issue VI of One Teen Story. Reviewed by Reilly Cox '16.
I guess I picked up "Passing Each Other in Halls" because I was hoping for some sort of self-discovery with it, you know, something artsy and grand that would tie into my oh-so-tragic-college-student existence. Yeah, it's silly, but I figured that the title indicated a greater prevalence to me than, let's say, "The Bearded Girl," or "The Freshwater Mermaid." It was a stupid bias but hey, I was playing the "tortured soul" bit that day and I felt like reading something poetic, and you have to admit that that title is poetic. So, being a snob, I picked that one and, if you should read the story, you'll realize the painful irony in that decision.
You really should read the other stories, though, not to detract from my point. Even if you're not bearded girls or freshwater mermaids, you'll find prevalence in them. Really.
I'm not sure what I was expecting when I started reading Matt de la Peña's story, having never read any of his work before. I probably pictured something dramatic and melancholy, considering the mood I was in, something I could swig a bit of wine to and say, "Ah, yes, yes, of course" (I really apologize for that mood). The cover was relatively unassuming; being composed almost entirely of the title itself, save for a few palm trees, I wasn't getting any hints at what lay beyond. And having been a bit of a classics snob growing up, I did not know what to expect from Mr. de la Peña: perhaps he would be a modern day Victorian; perhaps he would take beauty from a decaying world and give it unto me. Whatever should I picture?
Whatever I had pictured, I did not picture crotches, inebriation, and poverty; smart girls named Holly with unfortunately beautiful legs, and rich and unstable douchebags; shitty girlfriends in Ivy leagues…nor did I expect that I could enjoy such a combination. It's not so much a case of "Come on, you know you like it" as it is a case of "Oh. Well, oh." Now aren't I a wordsmith?
I really do not like "down to earth" writing. Usually it is an excuse for lazy writing and untalented protagonists, or so I had found: what one person thinks of as real, others know as real. Oh, you know a few curses, do you? You happen to be a skater, too? Oh, look at that, you're referencing coitus. Now aren't you talented?
This is in no way how the story reads (really really), but this explains my usual prejudice.
My prejudice stems from a disappointment in the human condition, I suppose you could say. There is something wrong with us, inherently wrong with us, with how we prioritize. We work away our lives for scraps of paper; we get worked up over a bit of coupling and lose even more sleep than originally cost; we create a world of trouble so that we may have trouble. There is something greater for us, there has to be something greater for us, I know it. And I did get assurance of that, I found myself assured, and I found myself assured by a coitus-referencing skateboarder who liked to curse.
I would say that my words taste somewhat lemony right now.
The events of "Passing Each Other in Halls" make little sense if I simply told them to you, yet make perfect sense when told in story. Of course they're making out within the first page, that makes sense. Of course the snob offers closure for his dying father, why wouldn't she? What do you mean you don't know why he runs back towards the cops? The story doesn't make sense through my saying of it because the events of it simply happen, they just come about. There is nothing forced about them and there is nothing artificial about them. These events are natural as natural can be. These events are true to life, strange as they might seem. These events, heck, they're real, man.
Oh, goddammit.
~Reilly Cox '16
Matt de la Peña is the author of four critically-acclaimed young adult novels: Ball Don't Lie, Mexican WhiteBoy, We Were Here,and I Will Save You. De la Peña currently lives in Brooklyn NY. He teaches creative writing and visits high schools and colleges throughout the country.
To learn more about Matt de la Peña, visit his website here and read his work.
March 1
Established through the Academy of American Poets, a new award will recognize one outstanding student poem each year.
February 21
I begin my reaction with a warning, but please, do not get the wrong impression. If you were the kid to pick up newts and bugs, read. If you are going through a rough time and need some humanization, some comfort, read. Or if you're just bored at the Lit House and you happen to see a green, thin book, read. Still, my warning:
If you are a pre-vet, you might or might not want to read.
If you are a vegetarian, you might not want to read.
If you are a vegan, you especially might not want to read.
If you are a vegan pre-vet, run.
Before I give a wrong impression, I do not mean to dissuade any readers from Rachel Furey's story, "The Mud Puppy." Selected for One Teen Story magazine, it's well worth its pages. As an animal lover and (forgive me) vegetarian, I simply feel a need to give warning and reminder to my people; we cannot take offense should someone enjoy a burger.
I was curious about "The Mud Puppy," if only for its earthy title and rich, well-designed cover (if you'd rather not read, you can always just stare at the cover for an hour or so). I wanted to find out what this creature had to do with the story, how it had crawled its way onto the pages and made a name there. I wanted to see what style the author chose, if it would be a grand tale of a mudpuppy knight charging at a komodo dragon, draped in tiny (yet impenetrable) armor, or if it would be a meditation, a metaphor, in which the mudpuppy represents our doomed mortality (why not?), or maybe if it were a magical creature granting wishes, the story told (poorly) through its mud-covered eyes.
It was none of these things, but that's okay.
Instead, the mud puppy is a coming-of-age story (bear with me) told through the second-person narrative. Yes, this narrative can be a bit off-putting at times, we're so used to the first and the third, but for some reason we seem to forget that "you" exists when we write. And the story is all about you (no, really, I'm serious- see for yourself). Still, we've (or I've, or you've) read enough coming-of-age stories to last the next twelve generations of us who come of age, so why bother with one more (and one that might be so frightening to vegan pre-vets, too)?
Because it brings to terms life here at Washington College.
College is great and college sucks; these are the two extremes that make up the college experience. Most people find that their experience is not clear cut in one category but made up of a heterogeneous mixture (pre-vets, still reading?) that works out to somewhere in the middle: my English class is terrible but then again I just had a really cool class with the Tolkien dude; my Friday night was dead but then Saturday I nearly died, heck yeah; I think I just offended my entire friend group but I just found some really cool people who invited me to hang out. We get to a certain point and we decide how good or how bad it really was. Sometimes, however, there are commonalities in the complaints and a lot of them come from the fact that college is a mixture.
College is not a place filled with young adults trying to fulfill themselves, nor is it a place filled with old teenagers trying to lose themselves. College is a place of senior-year middle schoolers and of freshmen-year philosophers, of people shedding skins and of people growing shells. Just as commonly as there are cliques, there are kind strangers befriending us with smiles. You, this you so discovered in "The Mud Puppy," are a true middle schooler stuck in a nursing home a little too much like that middle school. Your friend ruins your day and your tormentor comforts you. Your family is absent and yet a stranger cries with you. Oh, my, hasn't it been a rough time for you? Oh, my, hasn't it been swell?
Furey's story is not great and it doesn't suck. It made me disgusted and it brightened my day. Lest I become formulaic in the contradictions, I'll leave with a thought of mine: I might have misread the story entirely, but I, who am not a middle school girl going through changes, could connect with it. My sister might not be anorexic (I thank the stars that she loves cooking) but I could still think of her adventurous spirit. My mother might be far from aloof but I could still think of times when I could not turn to her. And I might not be a middle schooler volunteering at an old folks home, but I certainly can feel like it some days on this campus- because college is great, and because college sucks.
~ Reilly Cox '16
February 8
From Maryland Public Television comes the story of Kiplin Hall and the history of Maryland
February 5
Following the critical success of his debut collection, All Over, and of his debut novel, Pacazo, Roy Kesey now brings us a new gathering of short stories, Any Deadly Thing.
January 31
Progress on the Pegasus
Working on the Pegasus is not what I originally expected. I knew when I took the job that we would be working entirely online and that sounded really exciting. I'm still excited about what we're working on, but initially it was overwhelming.
Finding out who to contact for various things and then getting a hold of them has definitely been the biggest challenge for me at this point. There is so much that goes on at WAC, and we don't want anything to be left out, so finding out who does what and who is in charge has been exhausting. Tracking people down is probably the hardest part of my job.
It also never occurred to me how long it takes to write emails. I'm starting to consider myself a professional emailer at this point. There is a lot more that goes into sending an effective email than I used to believe. When I'm sending out mass emails to 1,400 people, I have to pay close attention to what I'm writing so that I make sure that all of the necessary information is in that first email. If it isn't, I know I'm going to get several hundred back, all asking the same question.
So far, everyone at WAC - staff, students, faculty - has been really helpful in getting us the information that we need. Our main goal with this is to ensure that anything that anyone could possibly want to remember about this year, any experience had, gets remembered. I'm really grateful, especially for the faculty and college staff, for all the help they've given us. The favors we've had to ask have been a royal pain for some people and I'm sure the Registrar's Office is tired of hearing from us by now, but everyone has truly been fantastic.
I'm most excited to get through the phase of hoarding information so that we can start working on the creative stuff. We're going to try to incorporate the Class of 2013's chosen theme – The Waterfront – into the Pegasus as much as possible. Overall, we really just want to make sure that this year is memorialized the way that it should be.
If anyone has any questions, comments, or information they would like to share, please email us at firstname.lastname@example.com
-Rebecca Winterburn
Editor and Project Manager
Jeremy Quintin
January 16
Eco-Friendly, Soft and Adorable Alpacas at Tag Along Alpacas, LLC in Chestertown, MD
January 9
A review of the new poetry collection from Rose O'Neill Literary House Director, Jehanne Dubrow. Red Army Red from Northwestern University Press, 2012. Reviewed by Lit House Assistant Director, Lindsay Lusby.
Before I begin, I should admit to my biases. I like Jehanne Dubrow. She is a kind and intelligent person with a wonderfully irreverent sense of humor (that is very similar to mine) and I consider her a friend. But I am also a poet, and in this capacity, I have been following Jehanne's work since the release of her first collection, The Hardship Post, in 2009. Each collection of hers is a poetic study, a project. String the poems together and you will see a loose narrative formed there in between.
In Red Army Red, Cold War's Communism appropriates all shiny things for propaganda the way a teenage girl accessorizes. They are magpies at heart. Dubrow, in turn, collects these glimmering metallic details and nests poems in them. Of course, not all of these details are beautiful but they have a certain shine that draws us in anyway. In "Moscow Nights," "rose perfume…smells of piss," and another perfume smells of "pickled beets/ and turpentine." And as in the mind of a teenage girl, all of these details are sex or innuendo, "the romance of objects." Things that Communist dictators would hold just out of reach.
The first section of the book, titled "Cold War," although packed with vivid images is a stark landscape full of old objects. Not just old, but old-world. Something that the speaker has clearly outgrown. Shirts and shoes are two sizes too small and all pleasures are taken in secret.
Section two, "Velvet Revolution," is a rebellious adolescent testing the limits of her own body's dictatorship. Although taken from the actual historical context of nearby then-Czechoslovakia, the phrase taken out of time seems tailor-made to capture the melodrama of teenage rebellion, with another nod toward an adolescent's newfound fashion-consciousness. The poems of this section take the melodrama of an average American teenager and place it within a nation in flux. Let's just triple the anxiety-level. The poems "Five-Year Plan" and "November 1989" capture this juxtaposition best. In the latter, the speaker has locked herself in the bathroom teaching herself to shave her legs and underarms while "Outside our house: Warsaw, avenues/ named for generals…Everything was falling down."
In the last section, "Laissez-faire," our speaker is in the full bloom of her new womanhood. And the world has opened its commercial doors to her (and her parents' credit cards), with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Communism in the Eastern Bloc. This section is populated with satirical poems praising the wonder of merchandise and variety and everything that money can buy: "Bag 'N Save," "Our Free-Market Romance," "Warsaw IKEA," "A History of Shopping," "As Seen on TV." Little Red is all grown up now and flung from starkness into a post-Communist rumspringa. It is overwhelming and disorienting, but there is still the underlying philosophy of sex as commodification. Our speaker is left to navigate her way through this new Poland, flipped like the tornado-thrown bus in Dubrow's "YouTube" poem. Because flinging a nation so quickly and jarringly from one extreme to another cannot come without casualties.
January 3
Back in September of 2012, Michael Duck, editor of Crunchable and graduate of the class of 2002, returned to Washington College to host Crunchable Colloquium, a reading by college alumni.
Crunchable is an online literary magazine started in 2001 by alumni Chris Kilmas. Its name derives from Kilmas's humor at putting -able at the end of any word, which you can see on the site's snackable and archivable pages. Today is it run by Duck who calls the online magazine a "soft place to land" when young writers first graduate and lose the ability to submit their work to the student publications.
What is your favorite memory from your time at Washington College?
The first one that leaps to mind is the experience of my weekly "Elm Night." The newspaper was published every Friday, and that meant I had to have an actual physical disk (remember those?) ready to be delivered to the printer at dawn every Thursday. So every Wednesday night for the year and a half I was The Elm's editor in chief, I didn't sleep – I shepherded the whole darn paper into print, coordinating all the editors' work with the writing, page layout, and photographs while usually also writing an editorial at the last minute. Around 3 or 4 a.m., I'd sit down with the final version and read every word that was about to be published. The final step was to leave the disk at an agreed-upon drop spot and then shamble into the dining hall for breakfast. (It was the only weekday I was ever awake when breakfast was served.)
Even at the time I knew that schedule was insane, but it fueled my sense of purpose and helped define who I was – and who I still am, in a lot of ways. My only regret was the one semester when I had a fascinating history class with T. Clayton Black – at 8:30 a.m. every Thursday, right after my weekly all-nighter and when I was, shall we say, not at my customary levels of alertness.
Dr. Black, if you're reading this: I'm sorry!
And, though you asked for a single favorite memory, the two others I simply must mention here are: (1) The time my Queen Anne's House friends and I threw a nearly spontaneous gathering in formal wear, which we called the "informal formal" and which was nearly broken up by Public Safety, and (2) the time I was with legendary Washington Post journalist Richard Harwood as he committed the act of public urination on campus.
What were some of your favorite events or milestones?
Whenever I get back to campus, I always make a point of stopping by that little garden with the simple fountain beside the Larrabee Art Center. I wrote about that garden's dedication in my first real story for The Elm, within a few weeks of my arrival on campus as a freshman.
That turned out to be the start of a much longer story. I stuck with the paper and worked my way up to editor in chief by my sophomore year. And now I've been a professional journalist for nearly a decade.
What was the first book you read and loved?
I loved a lot of books as a very young reader (Dr. Seuss and the Berenstains were in heavy rotation in my library), but the ones I remember loving best were from a few years later – from around age eight, when I discovered a "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure"-style series of books called "Star Challenge." As the protagonist of each book, you were a young operative for the Network Of Worlds tasked with saving the galaxy, with a little help from your small robot companion. I spun that fictional universe in hundreds of different directions, inventing my own ships and villains and alien races and sidekicks and gear, most of which I built using plastic construction toys or cardboard. It was the most elaborate narrative I have ever created.
The other huge influence was the humor columnist and author Dave Barry. I devoured his weekly syndicated columns in middle school, right up through the day that something funny happened to me in science class and I decided to do what Dave Barry would: I'd write about it and show the story to everyone who'd read it. The response was overwhelming – the first time I could recall doing anything my peers actually enjoyed and respected.
In other words: For my student newspaper years, my whole journalism career, and all my work with Crunchable, I blame Dave Barry.
What is your favorite word?
At the moment, it's "widdershins" – a word I learned just this month from Annie Woodall '01, one of Crunchable's assistant editors. It means to do something in a backwards, counterclockwise, or otherwise contrary direction.
In fact, we liked the word so much that it's going to be the theme for a Crunchable issue in the next year. I'm very eager to see what writers will do with it.
What is it like to be the editor of Crunchable?
Heh. That depends on what part of the production cycle we're in, and whether I'm short or flush with essays to publish.
I volunteered to run this site in 2005 – four years after it got started and three years after my Washington College graduation. It was partly because I knew I needed something like this to keep me writing creatively. It was partly because it was a chance to be an editor,
which is all I've always wanted to be, and because I knew it would help me stay better in touch with my college friends. I was also terrified that the great writing they'd done on Crunchable since 2001 might otherwise wink out of existence, if nobody were here to look after it.
But Crunchable was also an opportunity to learn how all this Web stuff works from the inside out. That fluency with Web design has turned out to be critical to my career, and today I help run the website of the newspaper where I've worked since 2003. In a very real sense, I owe my job to Crunchable.
So, what does all that feel like? Well, it's maddening and stressful a lot of the time. But it feels tremendously important to be the caretaker for all these words, and it's great to have my own sandbox on the Web where I can play with such a great community of friends and writers.
For more about Crunchable Colloquium visit this link.
December 17
Aileen Brenner '09, drama major and creative writing minor, uses her skills acquired as an undergrad at WAC to tackle editing a full-length novel, Terra by Gretchen Powell – the first in a planned trilogy.
As a student, Aileen Brenner worked in the space between theater and literature, between the performance of the text on the stage and the breaking down of the text on the page. In all of this, she fed her enthusiasm for the well-turned sentence. While an undergrad, Aileen was an active participant in Riverside Players and President of Fakespeare, both Shakespeare-inspired, comedic acting troupes. She also served as Editor-In-Chief of the print yearbook The Pegasus from 2007-2009.
These days, Aileen works as an editorial and advertising assistant for Trial Magazine (American Association for Justice) during the day. At night, she has been working as a freelance editor in the wider world of fiction. The first of her edited books has just been released and she is as proud a mother as the author herself. I would describe Aileen's experience working with up-and-coming author Gretchen Powell, but she says it so much better herself:
"I met Gretchen through my sister, who roomed with her their freshman year at JMU, and I got to know her better when she began blogging at Honey I Shrunk the Gretchen. We talked about writing every now and then, and even more so after I began blogging at Army Pants and Flip Flops.
Although our blogs are both nonfiction writing, Gretchen and I share an outside interest in dystopian fiction. She originally sent me just a few chapters of her first draft of Terra. She knew I was a fan of the genre and also a practiced copy editor, and she was hoping for some feedback about the set-up of the world and ideas, and her writing.
From that initial read, I was already hooked on the story and the world Gretchen had created. I gave her feedback in the style I'd learned to give feedback to playwrights working on new plays; having never edited a fiction novel before, I relied heavily on the lessons I learned during my writing workshops and drama classes at WAC, and from working at the PlayPenn New Play Development conference with Professor Michele Volansky. I instantly found that working with a new fiction draft (and a fiction writer) is strikingly similar to working with a playwright on a new play–both must define a foreign but distinct world for a new audience, and both must give us characters who define that world and draw us into it with their urgency. In giving Gretchen my initial feedback, I posed a lot of questions about her world and her characters, and it opened up a good dialogue for us to continue discussing her plot points, her characters, and the development of Terra's story and context.
When Gretchen began writing Terra (her first novel, and also the first novel in a planned trilogy), she decided to self publish. There's still a very real stigma attached to self publishing; it's perceived as something of a last resort for writers who can't get a publisher to sign on for their book idea. And I'll admit that I was a little wary of this at first as well. But Gretchen really did her research about self publishing; she had plans and lists and spreadsheets for everything from marketing, to page layout, to e-book conversions, to registering for an ISBN. Gretchen didn't only write a book–she plunged into the entire publishing process head first, and I'm pretty sure she hasn't slept for more than an hour a night for the last year.
Because Gretchen was self publishing, she was very proactive about seeking the outside help she'd need. After I provided her with initial feedback and we began a discussion about the book, we quickly spiraled into a writer-editor relationship. When she finished her first draft, we went through it together chapter by chapter, and scene by scene, to determine what was currently working, and what needed to be clarified, reworked, or cut completely. Because I was seeing the book with fresh eyes, I was able to point out inconsistencies and plot holes that Gretchen (after having read her book hundreds of times) wasn't able to see on her own. In the first two drafts, I focused mostly on bigger issues like plot, structure, character development, and the chronology of events. I sometimes marked up margins with so much text, that the questions and comments I had were twice as long as the scene they referred to. We spent a lot of time rearranging and reordering scenes, and Gretchen took my suggestions truly to heart; she was learning the pain involved in the editing process, which sometimes meant cutting full scenes and rewriting entire chapters that she'd really grown to love.
Gretchen and I went back and forth; I questioned and scrutinized every passage that lacked detail, every line of dialogue, and every character's motivation. In his Acting I class at WAC, Dale Daigle teaches that, as an actor, you must always be able to answer three questions for your character at any given point in a scene: Who am I? Where am I? and What do I want? Using these questions, Gretchen and I painstakingly accosted each character, in each scene, in her nearly 300-page book, to make sure we could justify every single action and reaction, and what it meant to the book and the story as a whole.
Throughout the editing process, my biggest challenge was to re-read the book for consistency after we'd added, edited, or removed scenes and plot points. Which happened sometimes three or four times a day. By the time Gretchen's third draft rolled around, I knew her world and her characters inside and out. Once we were satisfied with structure and consistency, we began to hone in on tightening up and clarifying her language. Although I had gone into editing her book with an eye for copy editing, I wanted to make sure to devote time to each piece of punctuation and each use of a proper noun to make sure it was telling the story accurately. Gretchen did run her more completed drafts through an outside copy editor, which not only gave her a third pair of eyes, but made sure her language was as defined as possible as well.
I'm so proud of the final product. Gretchen has been overwhelmingly thankful to me, and it has been fun and rewarding to be part of her journey, and Terra's journey. The editing process was often stressful; when deadlines are involved, you start to wonder if taking the time to flesh out all the finer details is really worth the result. Luckily, Gretchen and I reached an understanding early on that we were committed to making this book into the best version of itself, despite what that meant for our sleep schedules and sanity. I'm signed on as editor for the next two books, and I think Terra's readers will be surprised and pleased about what's to come."
December 13
Each semester, we choose one or two of the upcoming visiting writers from The Rose O'Neill Literary House's season of literary events to commemorate in a beautiful letterpress-printed broadside, designed and printed here in the House. In this post, Assistant Director, Lindsay Lusby will tell you how it's done.
What is this thing called a broadside, you ask? My favorite definition comes from the book The Art and Craft of Handmade Books by Shereen LaPlantz:
"A broadside is a single sheet of paper that states an opinion—usually an inflammatory one. Broadsides started out as the last words of condemned prisoners and were posted next to the gallows for one day. During the Revolutionary War in the United States, broadsides were used to promote the Revolution."
Just like many technologies appropriated from the past, including letterpress printing, what once was a tool of necessity now has become an art form. Our letterpress broadsides take an excerpt of a visiting writer's published works and put it to visual music with typographical design and printed images. We have a catalog of antique metal printers' blocks to choose from or we can go ultra-modern: have a custom illustration taken from digital file to letterpress-printable photopolymer plate.
For our latest broadside, a poem by the poet and translator Idra Novey called "A History in Six Couplets," we chose another option—carving a mounted linoleum block. This can also be done with wood, but linoleum is a bit softer (read: easier to carve). The "mounted" bit of that block raises the final relief carving to the height required for printing, which we call "type-high." And who was the lucky girl that got to carve that (extra large) linoleum block? I pulled out my Speedball Lino Cutter and got to work on that 10 x 20" slab of linoleum.
The design we decided on for this poem was simple: a city skyline, broken and gashed, but still standing. It's a stark illustration for a stark poem. The text was to be printed over top of the lino print, with the columnar poem-shape fitting snugly inside the central building silhouette. One thing I needed to be careful with: I had to estimate the width needed to encompass the poem but not let it feel swallowed by the building size. And one thing that just coincidentally fell into place: the large jagged chunk of building I cut out lined up perfectly with the stanza: "And all around, chunks of concrete/ like torn bread."
We chose a tall paper size to emphasize the strong vertical pull of the skyline-buildings and the shape of the poem itself, leaving a generous stretch of empty space at the top. After the linocut was finished, our Master Printer Mike Kaylor, set the type for the poem text, letter by painstaking letter, and got to printing on the beautiful Vandercook 4 Proof Press in our Lit House print shop. First, the linocut is printed and let dry for a day or so. Then the text.
The final result was ghostly—with the image printed in white on a muddy-gray watercolor paper and the text in a dark gray ink over the white—and that was perfectly fitting for this poem.
To see more of the beautiful broadsides made right here in our very own Literary House print shop, check out this page here.
December 13
Today Poetry Daily will feature a poem from the new collection by Professor Jehanne Dubrow, "Red Army Red."
Since the release of Lit House Director Jehanne Dubrow's most recent collection of poetry, Red Army Red has received many great reviews.
"With wit and subtlety, these poems make apparent the parallels between the body and the body politic, between the fulfillment of individual and collective desires."
One poem from the collection, Puberty, as the Character of Gordon Gekko, was the featured poem on Verse Daily. Today, Five Year-Plan, also from Red Army Red will be featured on Poetry Daily.
To read more about Dubrow and Red Army Red,click here.
December 11
Chestertown's first type-in & letter-writing social …
This past Friday, which was also the First Friday of December 2012, Literary House Assistant Director Lindsay Lusby and Kent County Librarian Annie Woodall, both Washington College Alumni, organized Chestertown's first Type-in & Letter Writing Social at Evergrain Bakery.
The Event was a great success as waves of people showed up to type letters to relatives, poems to themselves or what ever they imagined, using traditional typewriters.
As Lusby comments, "I was pleasantly surprised by the enthusiastic turnout we had for this first-ever Chestertown event. Honestly, the whole evening was a blur of typing and gluing and letter-writing. The sound of all of those old keys clacking and carriages dinging was such a fantastic noise. I think, by the end of the night, about 75 people of a wide age range had come through our type-in and letter-writing social. The fact that so many people were excited about this strange thing that we were also excited about had to be the best part."
It was a great scene, watching some re-familiarize themselves with the process of having to really hit the keys. It was somewhat like riding a bike after not riding one for 20 years. Slowly the process and mechanics came out of the deep recesses of people memories. For others, it was their first time using a standard typewriter.
Lusby is a type-writing pro, being quick to teach, lend a hand, and happy to share her art. Many excited questions were asked, many memories were shared, and all had fun.
"For someone who loves books, writing, and letterpress printing, typewriters seemed a natural progression for me. They are such beautiful machines. When you lift up the hood, you might get the sensation that you are looking at the insides of a small piano that plays letters and words instead of notes and chords."
This event was presented by Thread Lock Press & Scribbling Glue
December 10
In the Spring of 2013, the Lit House will be hosting a trio of events dedicated to writing in wartime.
November 28
Some of you may remember Laura van den Berg from her visit to Washington College last spring. Laura was the 2012 Mary Wood Fellow and shared with us some of her incredible work …
Many of you have probably seen that the Lit House has a subscription to One Teen Story, and so far we have received 3 issues. The first issue was "The Deadline" by Gayle Forman; second issue was "The Freshwater Mermaid" by Gregory Maguire, which most people will recognize as the author of Wicked. The third issue is by the 2012 Mary Wood Fellow, Laura van den Berg.
Anyone who has ever read a Laura van den Berg story knows that they are engaging, well written and for lack of a better word, different. My personal favorite story of hers is one titled "Mansion," about a group of three people who live in a house that they call the Mansion. It would be better for you to read it than watch me type about it.
The story featured by One Teen Story is titled "The Greatest Escape" and I'll let you read it rather than tell you about it.
No spoiler alerts needed in this blog post.
If you are interested in learning more about One Teen Story or One Story, click here and here respectively, or watch this video and stop by to read Laura's, Gayle's and Gregory's stories.
November 15
Back at the Crunchable Colloquium, WAC Alumnus Kevin Brotzman read a short story about "Sprickets." Yes, sprickets, those awful ready-to-jump-and-land-on-you Camel Crickets that look like spiders.
It was a great short story and I think everyone has had some kind of run-in with Sprickets.
Recently I found out about a study being conducted at NC State called Camel Cricket Census. It turns about that the camel cricket that most of us have seen in creepy basements, dark closets, and quiet garden sheds, is actually a species that was brought over from Japan. Turns out that the Japanese cricket (with stripes) is much more common than the American cricket (without stripes).
So yourwildlife.org is
"Calling all eagle-eyed observers of wild life. Get ye too to your basements, crawl spaces, sheds, garages and other dark, damp corners of your home — We want you to join us on the hunt for camel crickets!"
Over the Christmas break, the Lit House will be participating in this study and donating the sprickets from our basement.
If you would like to participate and "donate" crickets in the name of science, please visit the links about and join the effort.
November 12
Idra Novey sat down with NPR's Robert Siegel to talk about her day at All Things Considered.
Novey sat in on the daily meetings for Digital News and All Things Considered, and listened to editors and producers debate the day's news. For Novey, some of the news discussed hit close to home. One of the stories covered gas rationing in New York City, which Brooklyn-based Novey had witnessed on her doorstep that morning. "There was a long line for gas at the gas station near where I live," she said. "It was really strange to have seen something outside my own building, and then come here and see it discussed at the news table."
To listen to her poem and to read the entire article, click on the link here.
December 7
Sorry deck dwellers, the Deck at the Lit House is now off limits to smoking …
It is a policy at Washington College smoking is prohibited with in 25 feet of all buildings. Using a standard tape measure shows that the entire Lit House deck is with in that 25 feet smoke-free zone. Due to this new information, the cigarette receptacle has been removed and this rule will now be enforced.
Please respect this policy.