Bennington College Writing Seminars

May 2008

TO: Writing Seminars Faculty & Students
FROM: Sven Birkerts, Director

Dear Bennington Community,

Greetings to all of you, ongoing and incoming. While the eyes of the nation have been on Indiana and North Carolina, my eyes have been on stacks of printed out e-mails and the roughed-out version of what we call the residency “box schedule.” One month from now the great convergence will be underway, each of you with your shorts and t-shirts stacked, your sleep aids zipped up in your traveling kits…It’s time for an update.

First: A big welcome to the new class, 12 in fiction, 9 in poetry, and 7 in nonfiction. I had the pleasure of making the ‘cold calls’ and Victoria was heroic in follow-ups, and we agree that we have a very exciting and talented group coming in. Liam liked to list the various places, points of origin, but I will spare you that, observing only that we have a wonderful mix, from red states and blue, and that we have a slightly younger demographic—or is it simply that I’m reaching that age when everyone seems younger? The watchword here is energy. So start getting in shape!

Preparing a residency is not unlike planning a menu, thinking of needs, tastes, dietary restrictions, and I won’t extend the trope beyond this. Except to say that we have caloric as well as nutrient-rich offerings—and nothing at all for the weight-conscious. Sorry. Visiting writers include: Sinan Antoon, Lucie Brock-Broido, Elizabeth Cox, Lyndall Gordon, Donald Hall, Wyatt Mason, Francine Prose, and our own alums Charles Bock and Fiona Maazel, who will give a joint reading and speak about the first-book experience. Biographies of all confirmed guests come later in this letter.

You have already received word on new Core Faculty—Bret Anthony Johnston, Nick Montemarano, and Brian Morton in fiction, and Dinah Lenney in nonfiction—but I want to re-state my delight about their signing on.

Ed Ochester will be speaking on behalf of faculty and Athena Fliakos will be speaking on behalf of the graduating students at the graduation dinner. Elizabeth (Betsy) Cox will be giving the Commencement talk.

Farewells and welcomes: Alice Mattison and April Bernard are each taking a well-deserved term off, as is Doug Bauer, though he is merely on an alternating semester rotation (but yes, he deserves his break, too). After many years of dedicated and irrepressible service as night-readings host, Joe Ann Hart is passing her spiral notebook and ferrule to Cat Parnell, who in moving from the grad-readings coordinator passes her duties on to alumna Anne Doolittle. Another alumna, Christine Simek, has volunteered to serve as Student Life Coordinator. Christine will be sending a letter soon, introducing herself and her range of services—and thereby giving you a foretaste of some of the felicities of the June residency: e.g. the annual “E. Ethelbert Miller” softball game, the men’s’ wet t-shirt contest, nude racquetball…

One of the delights of this residency will be a return to the newly renovated Deane Carriage Barn for afternoon and evening readings. To me the Carriage Barn is memory Mecca—our own Carnegie Hall—and I can’t wait to sit in my folding chair front-left (if you’re looking from the back) to listen to every last reading. Not to short-shrift Tishman, where we will get to hear the grad lectures, the Visiting Writers, and faculty talks by Major Jackson, Sheila Kohler, and Tim Liu.

On the subject of faculty, here are some bits of faculty news.

Doug Bauer is making it mandatory to subscribe to Tin House, with his essay “Iowa Wine” in the current issue and “What We Hunger For,” the full version of the piece he read to us in January (about M.F.K. Fisher) coming in the Summer issue. Doug’s memoir, Prairie City, Iowa, with added update, will be published this Fall by the University of Iowa Press.

Michael Burkard’s Envelope of Night (with selected and uncollected poems, 1966-1990) has recently been published by Nightboat Books. Michael received a Guggenheim Fellowship this past April.

Martha Cooley has a story, “Bad Acts,” forthcoming in the Bellevue Literary Review, and her essay on Italo Calvino (based on a lecture she gave at Bennington) is in the current issue of the AWP Writer’s Chronicle.

Bernard Cooper has scored his fifth (!) inclusion in the Best American Essays series, this time in the 2008 edition edited by Adam Gopnik.

Amy Gerstler has poems forthcoming in the American Poetry Review and the Brooklyn Review; her next book of poems is scheduled for publication by Penguin in the Fall of 2009.

Amy Hempel will be the Special Guest at the Bear River Writer’s Conference, and will appear, bare-fisted, with Chuck Palahniuk at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square (that’s in New York City) on June 2.

Susan Kinsolving will be Poetry Fellow at Hawthorden Castle in Scotland in July.

Sheila Kohler has new stories in Boulevard and what will be, sadly, the last issue of The Ontario Review. Her story “The Transitional Object” will be included in the 2008 O’ Henry Awards volume. Sheila also has an essay called “Grief” forthcoming in Salmagundi—the piece is in part about Liam Rector.

Dinah Lenney has been reviewing for the L.A. Times and appearing on various panels, including one at the L.A. Times Book Festival and another (with Bernard Cooper) in Palm Springs. She will be keynote speaker at the Sacramento Writer’s Conference in August.

Phillip Lopate’s pair of novellas, Two Marriages, will be published by Other Press in September, and his Notes on Sontag will appear in 2009 from the Princeton University Press.

Alice Mattison is scheduled to teach a fiction workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in July. Her novel, Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn (her best title since Men Giving Money, Women Yelling), will be out in September. She has essays forthcoming in The New York Times and The Writer’s Chronicle.

Martha Southgate will publish an essay in an anthology entitled Behind the Bedroom Door in January 2009, and the following June will publish an essay in Heavy Rotation: Writers on the Album that Changed Their Lives. She and Major Jackson will read together in the Ordinary Evening reading series in November.

Next November’s election is far away. Closer to hand is the residency. Before giving you the biographies of our Visiting Writers, I would like to say that we will be remembering and celebrating Jason Shinder on Saturday, June 21. Jason was a joyous fighter, and his spirit is carried on in the memories of all who knew him. He gave a great deal to the Seminars.

Visiting Writer Biographies:

Sinan Antoon is an Iraqi-born poet, novelist, and translator. He studied English literature at Baghdad University before moving to the United States after the 1991 Gulf War. He did his graduate studies at Georgetown and Harvard where he earned a doctorate in Arabic literature. His poems and essays (in Arabic and English) have appeared in various journals and publications in the Arab world, including as-Safir, an-Nahar, al-Adab, and Masharef, as well as The Nation, World Literature Today, Middle East Report, al-Ahram Weekly, Banipal and the Journal of Palestine Studies. He has published a collection of poems, The Baghdad Blues (Harbor Mountain Press, 2007) and a novel I`jam: An Iraqi Rhapsody, which was published in April 2007 by City Lights Books and is forthcoming in German, Italian, Portuguese, and Norwegian. His poetry was anthologized in Iraqi Poetry Today and Inclined to Speak: Arab-American Poetry. He has also contributed numerous translations of Arabic poetry into English. His co-translation of Mahmud Darwish’s poetry was nominated for the PEN Prize for translation in 2004.

Antoon returned to his native Baghdad in 2003 as a member of InCounter Productions to co-direct/produce a documentary, About Baghad, about the lives of Iraqis in a post-Saddam occupied Iraq. He is a senior editor with the Arab Studies Journal, a member of Pen America, a contributing editor to Banipal and a member of the editorial committee of Middle East Report. Antoon is currently an Assistant Professor at New York University.

Charles Bock was born in Las Vegas, Nevada. He has an MFA from Bennington College and has received fellowships from Yaddo, UCross, and the Vermont Studio Center. His novel Beautiful Children was a New York Times and national bestseller. Visit him at beautifulchildren.net. He lives in New York City.

Lucie Brock-Broido received her BA and her MA from Johns Hopkins University, and her MFA from Columbia University. Her books of poetry include Trouble in Mind (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), The Master Letters (1995), and A Hunger (1988). Her awards and honors include the Witter-Bynner prize of Poetry from the Academy of American Arts and Letters, the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, the Harvard-Danforth Award for Distinction in Teaching, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a Guggenheim fellowship. She is Director of Poetry in the School of the Arts at Columbia University and lives in New York City and in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Elizabeth Cox has published four novels: The Slow Moon (Random House, 2006), Night Talk (Graywolf, 1997), The Ragged Way People Fall Out of Love (North Point, 1991), and Familiar Ground (Atheneum, 1984). In 2001, Random House published a book of short stories, Bargains in the Real World. A recipient of the O. Henry Award, Ms. Cox has also received the Lillian Smith Award for work that encourages civil rights and promotes harmony between the races. Ms. Cox has published poems in Southern Poetry Review, Kentucky Poetry Review, and The Atlantic Monthly. Her essays have appeared in Ms. Magazine, Lear's, and elsewhere. She has taught at the University of Michigan, Boston University, Duke University, and MIT. She was recently the Jack Kerouac Writer in Residence at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Ms. Cox taught on our core faculty for many years and she is currently teaching at Wofford College. She lives in South Carolina.

Lyndall Gordon did her doctorate at Columbia University, and has since written five biographies, including T.S.Eliot: An Imperfect Life (British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize), Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life (James Tait Black Prize for biography), and Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life (Cheltenham Prize for literature). She has also written Shared Lives, a memoir of women's friendship in her native South Africa. Gordon is currently approaching Emily Dickinson by way of a family feud over adultery, which became a literary and publishing feud. She lives in Oxford, England.

Donald Hall writes poems, essays, short stories, memoirs, plays, biographies, textbooks, and children’s books, and has worked as an anthologist and an editor. He has published fourteen books of poems, including White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006 (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), The Painted Bed, Without, The Old Life, The Museum of Clear Ideas, The One Day, The Happy Man, and Kicking the Leaves. His books of prose include Principle Products of Portugal, String Too Short to Be Saved, Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, Eagle Pond, Poetry and Ambition, and many others. In September, he will publish a memoir, Unpacking the Boxes. His children’s book, The Ox Cart Man, won the Caldecott Award for 1980. He has been awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for The One Day, and he has received Guggenheim fellowships, the Lamont Prize, and numerous other awards for his work. In June 2006, Hall was appointed the Library of Congress's fourteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. He makes his home in Wilmot, New Hampshire.

Fiona Maazel’s first novel, Last, Last Chance, was published by FSG in March. She graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2002. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Wyatt Mason is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine. He has also written for The New Yorker, The New Republic, The London Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Slate, and The New York Times Magazine. Modern Library publishes his translations of the works of Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud Complete and I Promise to be Good. A 2004 fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Mason received the 2005 Nona Balakian Citation for excellence in reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. His reviews and criticism for Harper's Magazine earned him a National Magazine Award in 2006 for his exhibiting “endless erudition and a singular, tireless focus on quality.” He lives in New Hampshire.

Francine Prose is the author of The New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, as well as fourteen books of fiction, including A Changed Man, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel, a finalist for the National Book Award. A distinguished critic and essayist, she has taught literature and writing for more than twenty years at major universities. She is President of P.E.N. and lives in New York City.

Until very soon,

Sven