By Katy Yocom, Spalding School of Writing Associate Director for Communications and Alumni Relations
Last week, I wrote up all the details we could announce about our Paris residency, July 6-16, 2020. This week I’m back with final details, including travel costs and an innovative new workshop focused on professional writing.
Continue reading “Summer Residency in Paris: The Rest of the Details!”
By Katy Yocom, Spalding School of Writing Associate Director of Communications and Alumni Relations
This is the time of year when students and alums start sending me GIFs of impatient cats, with captions like “Me watching my email for news about Paris.”
I know you’re eager to make your plans. I swear we’re not holding out on you; we’re just putting the final touches on the residency. And in that spirit, even though final details are still in progress, here’s what I can tell you.
Continue reading “Summer Residency in Paris: (Most of) The Details You’ve Been Waiting For”
By Roy Hoffman, Spalding MFA Fiction and Creative Nonfiction Faculty
When you pack your bags for your next trip, whether a few hours from home or as far away, to an American traveler, as Buenos Aires, Rome, or Edinburgh, take along your travel writer’s sensibility. You’ll already have the tools in place—pen and paper, laptop and camera—so making a record of where you go, what you see, eat, and learn, is not a practical but perceptual challenge. Our senses become heightened by the excitement of travel, the allure of different landscapes, languages and foods. As writers we note it all in colorful detail in our journals and e-mails home. But how can we shape this material into articles or personal essays for a larger audience? Here are some tips—and questions—to keep in mind. Travel writing ranges from the service end—how to get there, where to find it, how to buy it—to lyrical musings about place. Travel writing also incorporates stories about interesting individuals in far-off locales. If you’ve got a publication in mind for your travel story, figure out what it’s about, who its audience is. Write for that reader alongside you, shepherding him or her along.
Continue reading “REFLECTIONS ON TRAVEL WRITING”
By Greg Pape, Spalding MFA Poetry Faculty
Outside the New Miyako Hotel cicadas’ voices ricochet off the doors of waiting taxis. It is going to be another really hot day. We cross the street to Kyoto Station, following our guides Yuko and Kuniko to the boarding platforms where we will wait for the bullet train to Hiroshima. We have been warned: when the train arrives the doors will open and remain open for two minutes, then they close and the train is off with or without you.
Continue reading “A Day in Hiroshima”
By Jeremy Paden, Spalding Low-Residency MFA Poetry (Translation) Faculty
While it is true that Chile has a long list of novelists worthy of attention, the literary truism about the nation is that “Chile is a country of poets.” Indeed, though not all the novelists start out as a poets, many do.
Continue reading “So You’re Going to Chile… An Incomplete List of Writers to Know Part III: Poetry”
By Jeremy Paden, Spalding Low-Residency MFA Poetry (Translation) Faculty
When readers and writers travel to another country, the question is always one of triaging the reading: what to read before, what to take with you? Do you, like Paul Theroux in Old Patagonian Express, take mostly reading unrelated to your travels, supplemented by a generically famous Latin American poet? Do you, like a historian friend of mine, refuse to read travel literature about the country you are visiting because you want to see the world with fresh eyes? If, instead, you are one who wants to read up on a country, where do you start? When considering the classics, do you focus on Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral, the two Nobel Prize-winning poets from Chile? When considering contemporary writers, do you go with the recently deceased critical darling, the novelist Roberto Bolaño, or someone less well-celebrated?
Continue reading “So You’re Going to Chile… An Incomplete List of Writers to Know Part 1: Memoir and Travel Writing”
By Katy Yocom, Spalding Low-Residency MFA Associate Director
Each summer, the Spalding MFA in Writing program travels overseas to study creative writing while exploring literature and art across cultures. In July 2019, our residency takes us to Santiago, Chile.
In the current era where arts and humanities programs are threatened with a hard shove to the sidelines, The Southern Festival of Books: A Celebration of the Written Word is a bold and bright voice booming atop the Nashville landscape. For three days in October, the SFB gathers together book lovers and the nation’s and region’s prominent writers, offering dozens of panels on the writing arts in downtown Nashville. Spalding will debut a booth this year with program advocacy and honoring our writers in mind, including faculty member Silas House and his recent novel, Southernmost, and alum Charles Dodd White with In the House of Wilderness, both featured on the main program, as well as faculty member Jeanie Thompson and alum Juyanne James, who are featured in panel sessions. Continue reading “Join Spalding at the Southern Festival of Books, Nashville, Oct. 12-14”
So many of you I did not get to hug and squeeze whom I wished to thank for your thanks, at SenaFest, the marvelous surprise occasion, conceived by my partner-in-crime Karen Mann to mark my retirement as Founding Program Director! Continue reading “From Sena, with Love”
Even in Kyoto—
Hearing the cuckoo’s cry—
I long for Kyoto.
Matsuo Basho
Each summer, the Spalding MFA in Writing program travels overseas to study creative writing while exploring literature and art across cultures. Our Summer 2018 residency takes place in Kyoto.
Continue reading “MFA SUMMER RESIDENCY in KYOTO, JAPAN July 12-23, 2018”
