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.

Do you remember Remembering Places? The blog we share with De Montfort University (UK) and St. Peter’s College (NJ)? We’re working to begin again with posts, musings, reflections, poems, etc. on anything “place.”

To show how loose our interpretation of place is, I’ve posted surrealist collages from today’s A399 Narrative Collage course at the Remembering Places blog: http://rememberingplacesblog.blogspot.com/

Please also feel free to join the Facebook group cleverly titled “Remembering Places.”

Here are a couple sample collages:

Hello,

My name is Mitch Robinson and I am the 2010 editor of Analecta, an annual
 award-winning magazine at IU South Bend that accepts written and visual
 art submissions from the IU South Bend campus.  We consider submissions 
from both graduate and undergraduate students from any majors.

There is an early submission deadline for special consideration on December 18, 2009 and a late submission deadline on January 18, 2010.

Analecta Submission Rules:

1. For special consideration, manuscripts must be e-mailed by Friday, December 18, 2009. ALL manuscripts must be e-mailed by Monday, January 18, 2010.

2. Manuscript preparation:

A. Word-processed manuscript, double spaced, 12 point font, and Times New Roman.

B. The author’s name, student ID number, and e-mail address
 must appear on the first page ONLY of each manuscript.

C. Please use IUSB email address

D. Manuscripts MUST be submitted as an attachment and not within the body of the e-mail.

3. Students should retain original copies of their work. Manuscripts 
are not returned.

4. Please use, Analecta Submission, as the e-mail subject/title header.

Genre Rules

Poetry: 1 to 3 poems, maximum of 6 pages

Short Fiction: 1 story, maximum of 5,000 words.*

Drama: 1 one-act or 1 full-length play (no musicals)*

Non-fiction Prose: 1 work of non-fiction, maximum of 5,000 words*

Visual Art: 3-7 maximum.

Comics: 3-7 *

*Works accepted may be excerpted.

Please send all submission to analecta@iusb.edu or to anrichmo@iusb.edu

Any manuscripts submitted are automatically considered by the staff of
Analecta, IU south Bend’s student-edited and student-written inter-arts
 magazine, for publication in its annual spring issue as well as the English Department’s Student Writing Awards.

Thank you,

Mitch Robinson

October Sunset (photo: Jeff Tatay)

Thanks to all who came out for Darrin Doyle’s reading!

As I mentioned in my introduction, Darrin visited my A399 Narrative Collage class, where we got a sneak peek at his forthcoming novel, The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo. I forgot to take a picture in the class, but here are photos from dinner, the reading, and afterwards at the Oaken Bucket.

Thanks to Jeff Tatay for sharing his photos. Look for his article on the event in next week’s Preface!

Darrin Doyle (photo: Jeff Tatay)

Darrin Doyle signs a book for Robert White (photo: Jeff Tatay)

Dinner

Bree Jacobs, Austin Farrar, Sarah Boes

Book signing

Revenge of the Teacher's Pet: A Love Story

Darrin Doyle & Kelcey Parker

The Bucket

The Creative Writing Program’s first fiction reading of the year is next Tuesday! Please join us!

Darrin Doyle, author of Revenge of the Teacher’s Pet: A Love Story
Tuesday, October 13 at 7:00 p.m.
Third-floor Bridge of Wiekamp
Light refreshments and book-signing to follow. (Books will be for sale, and are currently available at IUSB’s book store.)

Darrin Doyle

Darrin’s novel has been praised by two of our Wolfson Speakers, Brock Clarke and Bonnie Jo Campbell:

“Darrin Doyle’s startling first novel is dirty and sweet, funny and terrifying. But above all else, it’s one of a kind: I’ve never read a book like Revenge of the Teacher’s Pet, one that so daringly and empathetically depicts the sometimes messed up, sometimes beautiful things we do in the name of love”
—Brock Clarke
Author of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England

“This wacky and philosophical story suggests that the secret to a contented life may not be so different than the one employed in education: let’s simply lower our standards. That said, this is also a convincing tale of romantic love.”
—Bonnie Jo Campbell
Author of Q Road

About the Book:
Darrin Doyle’s Revenge of the Teacher’s Pet: A Love Story is a comic novel about love, memory, obesity, adjectives, top-ten lists, fish, and murder. A black comedy in the vein of A Confederacy of Dunces, Revenge follows two middle-agers as they struggle through life.

Doyle’s debut tells the story of Dale Portwit and Mary Ann Tucker, two fragile middle-aged teachers who feel that the peak of life has come and gone. After a failed suicide attempt, Mr. Portwit begins a whirlwind courtship with Mary Ann that leads to wedding bands, a house in the suburbs, and an indulgent love life – but not happiness. Perhaps all that this marriage needs to revitalize itself is a little revenge.

About the Author:
Darrin Doyle’s fiction has appeared in Puerto del Sol, The Long Story, Cottonwood, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other journals. He has received the Border Tuition Scholarship for the New York Summer Writers’ Institute and the Walter E. Dakin Fellowship for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He is an assistant professor of English at Central Michigan University and lives in Mount Pleasant, Michigan with his wife and two sons.

More info about Darrin can be found at: http://www.darrindoyle.com/

kelcey, nancy, david, talia

talia reed reads from this admirable miry clay

Thanks to Jeff Tatay with the IUSB Preface for these additional photos. Check out his coverage of the event in the next Preface!

kelcey parker

And Charmi’s got some good pics at her blog. Thanks to all who came!

photo lifted from the SB Trib - our booth was in front of the red tent (photo by Marcus Marter)

David Dodd Lee

Nancy Botkin

the masses

talia reed

the booth is swamped; we call in extra troops

iusb alums! rebecca gerdes, naoko fujimoto, r. sanford smith, ann weedon

kelcey parker, david dodd lee, ken smith, talia reed

Charmi, Talia, Naoko

Clayton Michaels

merz

Literary Arts Collective table

IUSB Faculty and Alumni writers will sell books and chapbooks at ArtBeat this Saturday, 9/26 in downtown South Bend. We will give short readings between 11:30-12:00 at the Key Bank Plaza, and our booth will be nearby. Look for the Literary Arts Collective.

We are: David Dodd Lee, Nancy Botkin, Talia Reed, Kelcey Parker, and Clayton Michaels.

Hope to see you there!

<<<< poster art by IUSB grad, Naoko Fujimoto!

Tales of an MFA-in-Progress: Exhaustion Sets In

by Ryan Sanford Smith

It’s been over a month now since I first wrote on my experiences heading into an MFA program, and a lot has his transpired—I moved into the Fischer grad. residency on campus, a short and beautiful walk from, you guessed it, the stadium (and some other buildings, I’m told, but who cares?).  I’m living with someone not of my family for the first time, an experience I was dreading but one that has turned out to be far more enjoyable than anyone might have guessed. I’ve begun classes, with all the excitement and megatonic stress that comes with them.

With everything that’s happened, I thought it might be a good time to pause and reflect on a few things I feel like I’ve already learned (and not yet learned) a few weeks into the ND MFA program:

For one thing, everyone is, basically, as busy and frazzled as human beings can conceivably be, myself included.  If you see someone playing Frisbee on the quad, you can rest assured that there’s no way said person is a graduate student. If you see someone sprawled out relaxingly in the grass somewhere among the grad. residency buildings, it is only because they have collapsed from sheer exhaustion while walking back from class, and medical personnel should promptly be alerted. Personally, my reading load is averaging about 2.5 books per week; usually, one book of poetry, one book for my literature class (a very interdisciplinary course with books covering topics from sociology, pedagogical theory, political science, philosophy, and so on), and another 100 or so pages between them of articles and essays provided through the e-reserve system.

With all this in mind, it’s as important as ever to remind yourself that everyone needs time to relax and work off that stress—your faithful correspondent suggests spending your Saturdays standing in the student section screaming like a banshee (see image).

You’ve heard of the Freshman 15? Welcome to what I’ve dubbed the ‘grad-student gourmet 50’; not as nice a ring to it, and I realize my future career in marketing quips is suspect, but stay with me here. If you don’t cook yourself, there seems to be a very good chance most of not everyone else in your program does or will be trying to. I don’t know if this is the result of so many people escaping dorm life where cooking was probably non-existent or what, but the phenomenon is wonderful. If you’re friendly, you’ll probably be turning down dinner invitations on a nightly basis just to get the aforementioned reading done.

Thanks for reading! Over the next couple of posts I’ll continue this little series as well as touch on some things that I feel I’ve yet to learn around here. Meanwhile, have some of Seattle’s Finest at the Courtside Café for me! GO TITANS!