The Creative Writing Program is one of Notre Dame's best-kept secrets. People toss the phrase "best kept secret" around a lot, but I'm not being casual here. It's almost as well kept a secret as our screenwriting, dance, education and culinary programs, our medical and nursing schools and our open-mindedness towards alternative lifestyles. The only difference being that our Creative Writing Program really does exist!
There is no reason for our Creative Writing Program to be such a secret, it is as exclusive and competitive as the rest of our school and is surely a program to be proud of. I attribute its secrecy to its small size - there are only seven professors and 20 total students, about 10 per class. We have talented writers with successful careers ahead of them, and I'd like to believe we as a student body are interested in talented writing, so why haven't you gone to a reading yet?
Don't fret, there is one last chance to hear this year's graduating class of M.F.A. Students in Creative Writing read their work, before they set off on their way to become famous writers. This Friday night at DPAC at 7:00 p.m., you can hear excerpts from all nine members of the class of 2013, meaning half poets and half prose writers. And tickets are free! You know how cool it is when you hear a song on the radio that you remember hearing in concert? It will feel just like that, but be 10 times cooler when you walk out of Barnes & Noble someday with a book you have already heard parts of read aloud to you before by the author. There are a bunch of Notre Dame grads out there bragging to their adolescent daughters about going to college with Nicholas Sparks. Don't you want to be able to do that too?
Here is a little about each student, where they get their inspiration and what we should expect on Friday night.
Prose
Evan Bryson
Evan Bryson writes fiction that "gets pulled in a lot of directions" - he's interested in literary history, especially that of 19th Century writers. He's interested in documenting the present, especially the War on Terror. He likes contemporary art, status anxiety, ghost stories and somehow he tries to put these disparate elements in conversation with one another.
Steve Owen
Steve Owen is interested in the damages and fees incurred by discursive productions on a fractal, paper brain. He believes the fat, ugly, handsome, crumpled paper sheet wants us to taste the hemorrhaging ink of a divided, stapled body.
Margaret Emma Brandl
Emma's writing comes from a place where Japanese anime intersects with Whitmanesque lyricism to explore trauma and post-trauma, where fiction and nonfiction blend together. Her characters live in the modern world or otherwise hundreds of years in the past; they connect to God or they aren't sure which god to believe in.
Katie Lattari
Katie will be reading from her novel manuscript "All of the Everything," a project which owes its existence in large part to cheap beer, Bruce Springsteen, the Atlantic Ocean and her wildly talented and earnestly neurotic musician friends, whose visages she wishes to etch into fine porcelain plates in an effort to preserve them unto eternity.
Poetry
ThadeCorrea
"Realistic and surrealistic, contemplative and musical," ThadeCorrea's poetry explores what he describes as "the natural world, memory, consciousness, love, transcendence versus 'descendence' and the nature of poetic making itself." He will be reading poems from his recent collection entitled "THE FALLING LIGHT," several of his own translations of recent poems by the great French poet Yves Bonnefoy as well as selections from his new manuscript, "UNTIL SILENCE HAS A NAME," inspired by the artwork of Joseph Cornell.
Lauro Vazquez Rueda
When asked about his work, Rueda cited Hans Koning in writing of the conquest of the America's states. Koning wrote, "The children of conquerors and slaves are the only achievements of the conquest, the only wealth it [the conquest] produced."Lauro's poetry is interested in celebrating those children that are a product of that conquest.
Megan Elise
Megan is interested in "sound and soundplay, repetition [and] how the text operates beyond the page."
Her thesis is focused on childhood projection of disturbances in a domesticized space, and the reality of play through fantasy.
Beth Towle
Beth's poetry finds its roots in the "language and voices of northern Indiana." She will be reading from her thesis, Huckleberry Queen, a collection of poems about a northern Indiana folk heroine from the 1870s. She used a lot of archives and found texts to write poems that play with the ideas of narrative, history and research.
Drew Kalbach
Drew is a well-established voice in the world of online poetry and has published two chapbooks. He will probably read some nonsensical, confusedly erotic, funny poetry in a very nonchalant manner at a very fast clip.
The M.F.A. Reading is at 7:00 p.m. on Friday, April 26, in DPAC.
Contact Emilie Terhaar at eterhaar@nd.edu
The views in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The
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