The latest update from Ryan Sanford Smith, graduate of IU South Bend and MFA student in poetry at Notre Dame:

In my last post I talked about a couple of things I had learned so far in my first term in an MFA program, and now I’d like to get to one of the more troubling things I haven’t quite learned yet—when do we do that writing stuff?

This isn’t to say that I’m not writing, but it is accurate to say that looking back on my workshopped poems over the term now coming to a close, I’m mostly at a loss to recall when I wrote a single one of them.  At a glance the class load seems light, or at least manageable—9 total credit hours per term spread over a workshop, a literature course, and ‘thesis direction’, which is exactly what you might think it is. To be fair, thesis direction in the first time (and well into the second) is generally considered a kind of ‘filler’, as first years don’t tend to even have picked an advisor much less done too much thinking or writing on their creative thesis, which is a book-length volume of poems on the Poetry side of the program.

But time fills in quickly—literature courses at the grad. level are, as expected, fairly taxing. When I think about ‘my writing’, mentally I conjure every hour spent researching and writing academic papers for my lit. class this term, not my poetry. So, time goes. There are meetings with professors, readings and lunches with guest authors, social engagements (your socially-inept correspondent mentions this mostly in a theoretical sense), and everyone has a job of some kind, whether working in some manner for the program, teaching (if any dear IUSB readers know Professor Waterman or Professor Stockdale, they are comrades, so be nice!), and so on.

In speaking with my fellow first years, this all resolves into a question we weren’t expecting to ask: when do we write? Not research papers for lit. courses that feel, to put it nicely, not all that pointedly geared in our direction—but the ‘art’ we came here to have time to work on. The joke of course quickly becomes ‘time management is the art!’ which is sad, funny, and absolutely true.

None of us seems to have it figured out yet, though week after week workshop submissions seem to appear from us, almost magically. Pressure can work wonders, enforcing a sort of discipline artists of all walks aren’t usually known for, and perhaps this is one of the real lessons of an MFA—teaching writers within a kind of meta-lesson how to create and keep the time needed to write when it seems next to impossible to do so.

Please stop by for the opening reception of an exhibit of student art from four different courses in Art, Aesthetics, and Creativty (ENG-A190/A399).

Art, Aesthetics, & Creativity
English Department
STUDENT ART EXHIBIT

November 30 and December 1
3rd Floor Faculty Lounge (3001) Wiekamp Hall

Opening Reception: Monday, November 30
3:30 – 5:30 p.m.

Courses

A399 Narrative Collage (Prof. Kelcey Parker)

A190 The Dramatic Art of Not-So-Instant Messaging (Prof. Jessica Chalmers)

A190 The Magic of Image (Prof. Nancy Botkin)

A190 Contemporary Art Practices (Prof Linda Wilson)

The exhibit will feature

photography (self-portraits, urban/rural, Holga)
student-produced videos
handmade and self-published books
Surrealist dream collages
handmade postcards from South Bend

Blanqui Martini, altered recipe-book pages

Michael Telschow, altered book page

Dan Crowder, "Ghetto Rose" altered book collage

Chris McFarland, altered book page

Garrett Martin, altered book page

Justine Amos, altered book collage

‘Transparency’ reading at IUSB

ARTS

SOUTH BEND — Indiana University South Bend’s creative writing program presents a reading and signing by Frances Hwang at 7:30 p.m. Monday on the third-floor “bridge” of Wiekamp Hall as part of IUSB’s Fall Fiction Series.

A professor of English who teaches creative writing at Saint Mary’s College, Hwang is the author of the short story collection “Transparency.”

“Transparency” received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and a PEN/Beyond Margins Award. Hwang is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and has held fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and Colgate University. Her work has been read as part of the Selected Shorts series at Symphony Space and has appeared in Best New American Voices, Glimmer Train, Tin House, AGNI Online, and Subtropics.

A book-signing and light refreshments will follow the reading. The event is free and open to the public.

For more information, visit the Web site iusbcreativewriting.wordpress. com.
http://www.southbendtribune.com/article/20091121/INTHEBEND/911219974

From the IUSB Preface, 11/17/09:

Author of Transparency to speak at IUSB

By REBECCA GIBSON

IU South Bend professor of English, Kelcey Parker, could not be more thrilled to have author Frances Hwang speak to IUSB on Hwang’s book, Transparency.

“I am teaching the book to my graduate literature class,” said Parker.

Transparency is a book of short stories, characterized by the realism and clarity of Hwang’s writing. She is an assistant professor of English at St. Mary’s College, and has distinguished herself with awards such as the American Academy for the Arts and Letters’ Sue Kauffman Prize for First Fiction and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award.

“Her stories are not really invested in dramatic plots, but are lyrical and impressionistic,” said Parker.

Parker enjoys using the book in her class to show an example of the realist tradition of writing.

“I assign my students three different narrative traditions, realist, formulist, and fabulist,” said Parker.

Hwang uses multi-sensory descriptions such as smell, taste and touch within her stories, according to Parker.

“This can put just the right detail on a character and make it real to the reader,” said Parker.

Hwang will be speaking about the book on campus on Nov. 23, at 7:30 p.m. on the third floor bridge in Wiekamp Hall.

http://www.iusbpreface.com/news/author-of-transparency-to-speak-at-iusb-1.933853

Frances Hwang, author of Transparency
Monday, 11/23 at 7:30 p.m. at IUSB
Third Floor Bridge of Wiekamp Hall

A message from Lily Hoang at St. Mary’s College:

Please come to hear the excellent Joshua Cohen read from his novels this Wednesday, Nov. 11, at 8pm at Saint Mary’s College, Student Center, Early Meeting Rm. E.

For those free, Lily Hoang will be having a public conversation with him about reading, writing, & publishing at noon, Wed. Nov. 11, at SMC, Spes Unica Hall, Rm. 212.

Joshua Cohen is the author of four books: A Heaven of Others (Starcherone Books, 2007), Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto (Fugue State Press, 2007), The Quorum (Twisted Spoon, 2005), and Aleph-Bet: An Alphabet for the Perplexed (Six Gallery, 2007). His epic novel Witz is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive (2010). Born in 1980, he lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Cohen is one of the most exciting, innovative, and smart writers today. Please come & enjoy his reading!

David Dodd Lee’s latest poetry manuscript, Orphan, Indiana, will be published by the University of Akron Press in 2010. His book, The Nervous Filaments, will be published by Four Way Books in April 2010. His poem, “Who But I, O Reckless Death,” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Barn Owl Review.

Kelcey Parker is Artist of the Month for November 2009 at Image Journal.

Clayton Michaels’s poems “eleemosynary” and “hexagram” have been accepted for publication by The Prism Review.

Mark your calendars and please join us for this event – free and open to the public!

Frances Hwang

Frances Hwang, author of Transparency
Monday, 11/23 at 7:30 p.m. at IUSB

Frances Hwang’s story collection, Transparency (Back Bay Books/Little, Brown & Company, 2007), received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and a PEN/Beyond Margins Award.  She is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and has held fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Colgate University.  Her work has been read as part of the Selected Shorts series at Symphony Space and has appeared in Best New American Voices, Glimmer Train, Tin House, AGNI Online, and Subtropics.  She teaches at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.

IUSB English Dept alum and former Wolfson Award fiction and poetry winner Steve Henn has a new chapbook out from Boneworld Publishing. The chap, Subvert the Dominant Paradigm!, is Henn’s 3rd. It includes death-defyingly subversive poetry such as “Dine n Dash with Abraham Lincoln” and “I saw this male pornstar driving a reliable car.”

Henn has been publishing in the small press since just after his graduation from IUSB, including appearances in 5AM, the New York Quarterly, Quercus Review, Nerve Cowboy, Pearl, the late, great Staplegun, the Chiron Review, and a bunch of other places. The chap is available for $5 from Boneworld Publishing, 3700 County Route 24, Russell, NY, 13684. They will eventually have info up at www.boneworldpublishing.com, but not as of 10.19.09. The chap can also be purchased direct from the author – if that’s your preference, email him at stephenthenn@aim.com for ordering information.