But the graduating students led hermit-like existences while finishing their theses. And our cohort was divided into separate workshops. Hence, we might have not seen each other’s work. For some, the reading affirmed their thesis projects, while for others, it was a chance to try something new.

It had been too long. The reading was so well-attended that we had no choice but to move from Cafe Anna, where all of our readings went down, to the Chapel, already set up for graduation. Under the warm lights, we were all stars.

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Your humble chronicler got the chance to photograph the play as well as backstage. Suffice to say, nobody broke an actual leg.

Students Cammie Finch, Brianna Stallings, Jeremy Wolf, and Michael Demyan all had starring roles, with Tierney Ray reading stage directions. Plus, Captain Nemo guest-starred as a slice of pizza.

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It was illuminating to visit the places where we might pursue publication of our own work. But after a long winter in Vermont, it was also illuminating to see Boston in the spring: we visited bookstores. We visited the Museum of Fine Arts. We visited restaurants whipping up cuisine we’ve missed.

I asked everyone what they really liked about the trip. Some illuminating answers:

Our hip Airbnb in Dorchester

Hangin’ out with Laura and Mariah! Photo by Blake Z. Rong.

Mariah Hopkins: Aside from it being very spacious and luxurious, it was a nice big area for all of us to hang out in and watch movies and K-dramas. The record collection was great! It had that Pat Benatar album with the song “Hell Is For Children” in it. I love that song.

AGNI

Samuel Kolawole: I just liked the fact that the two editors had this kind of working relationship, rapport, that is interesting in the sense that they definitely know their tastes. One of them could have made a decision for the other. Maybe because they were working together for years. So that was one of the things that was fascinating. Also I think that is a nice space.

Harvard Review

Laura Kujawa: It was a delight. It was a bonding experience, and it was a chance to learn so many things. It was inspirational to talk to editor Christina Thompson.

Ma’ayan D’Antonio: I loved meeting the Harvard Review editor. I kept on asking questions. I liked the fact that she asked people what they were writing. The fact that she was in Australia—I thought, to do this in Australia would be wicked! I loved how she was willing to help people, especially if they’re contributing something. She sounded very invested in the literary community and the people who are contributing to her. For now, personally, I’d be happy being a reader for the magazine.

Black Ocean Press

Lennie Decerce: You know how we had to watch that TED Talk about the why of selling products, you’re selling the why, you’re not selling the actual product? Janaka to me was that. He was the embodiment of love and passion for poetry. I find it incredibly inspirational and heartwarming that someone takes that love and puts it out there like that.

GrubStreet

Paul Acciavatti: The feeling of community and that there’s so much excitement around people learning to write. The idea of a community hub. It wasn’t just for classes; it was a chill spot; there are readings. Samuel and I are going to build one for Montpelier, and we’re looking forward to it.

The Museum of Fine Arts

Samuel Kolawole in front of a Yorua statue at the MFA. Photo by Paul Acciavatti.

Paul Acciavatti: It was awesome to be close to actual Monets and the sketches that Escher made while working on a lot of his most famous pieces. I took a picture of cool vases in a mirror box. I don’t know who did them or what their relevance is. But they’re cool. Samuel was like a toddler and wanted to leave after an hour and a half…

Historic bookstores

Staring at Balzacs inside Brattle Book Shop’s rare book room. Photo by Cammie Finch.

Cammie Finch: I loved the Brattle Book Shop and its rare book room and the murals outside. I loved that there was a space outside for books to live, every day—it feels accessible, but it also feels like a secret. The Harvard Book Shop feels like a sacred book spot. We saw the poet Sarah Kay read: the event was so crowded that the event space was full, and so Lennie and I sat in the poetry section, listening to the event while reading other poetry books. The bookstore was crowded with Harvard students—it was awesome to see so many students there on a Thursday night.

Boston, where everybody knows your name

Lauren Lang, Laura Kujawa, Christa Guild, and Kayleigh Martinelli. Photo by Cammie Finch.

Christa Guild: We saw the Cheers bar, and an albino squirrel in the Boston Common. We walked around the harbor and saw the USS Constitution, which was really neat. We made it over to Fenway Park. We had a cool dim sum experience! It was just really good food all around. I met Cammie’s dad.

Captain Nemo, the official mascot of VCFA

O Captain, My Captain. Photo by Blake Z. Rong.

Bianca Vinas: Nemo was just so happy to get to the Airbnb; he was sniffing it all out. And then I put him on the queen bed, and he felt the need to undo it completely, tear up the sheets and throw the pillows around and go, “ahh, I feel good.” He was mostly in my backpack. There were a few people who told me, “your dog has one eye” and I was like, “oh, not this again.” When we were walking, he would go up the steps of every house thinking, “we’re home!”

Blake Z. Rong: He did bite my face once. I’m ok.

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First up, Matthew Dickman—Oregon Book Award winner and Guggenheim Fellow, reading from his latest collection of poetry, Wonderland. It is one of the three books you should read before you perish from this earth. It is a collection “charged with raw beauty and heartbreak,” said fellow poet and MFA candidate Jad Yassine, introducing him. “He talks about poetry like he’s just discovered how great it is.”

“I promised certain family members I wouldn’t embarrass myself for saying ridiculous shit,” said Dickman just before he began, adding, “but you know, it’s unavoidable.”

In describing his childhood, Dickman writes with spare and honest language: in one poem,  “Transubstantiation,” he describes a trip to the supermarket and an encounter with a strange man. In “The Order of Things,” he questions his superiors (nuns at a Catholic school, aka “Gods’ adults”) and their brutal punishments. In “Teenage Riot” he talks of “flipping off cops and skinheads,” doing teenage stuff, and eventually swirling down into acts of violence. He read: “The man, startled, sat down, right there on the asphalt, / right in the middle of his new consciousness, / kind of looking around.”

It ends without exaggeration—something Dickman has drilled into our minds through his craft course. “Don’t exaggerate,” he told us. When writing about lived (and dramatic) events, his message is: do not romanticize, stay anchored in the occurrence of violence.

Melissa Febos read next. Febos, who in a TED Talk extolls the virtues of revealing your secrets, wrote the 2010 memoir Whip Smart, where she reveals her secret life as a dominatrix. Last year, her book Abandon Me debuted: a collection of essays related to her search for her bioloical father. She teaches at Monmouth University and has earned fellowships from MacDowell Colony as well as awards from Prairie Schooner.

To give us a preview of what she would read, she told a story: before a recent reading in another city, she asked a friend, “should I read an essay about how much I love hickies or how much I cried as a kid?”

“Is Portland more of a hickie city or a crying city?” her friend responded.

In unison, the two decided: “crying.”

That night, at the podium, she observed: “colleges are hotbeds of both hickies and crying.”

The essay she read concerned both. In it, Febos and a lover journey to West Texas, listen to the train horns echo across the desert, and stop at the World’s Largest Rattlesnake Exhibit—which is a real place. She read, “When a human makes such a sound, it expresses only a few things: Terrible grief, earth-shattering climax, triumph, or pain…that kind of sound is all body, all heart, out of mind.”

Then she stopped. “How do you guys feel about emotional needs?”

“Yes,” said Donika. Matthew gave a thumbs up.

“Then this is not for you.”

She continued with the essay.

Donika Kelly was our final reader that evening. Kelly, described by the New York Times as “a descendant of Sylvia Plath by way of the wintry Louise Glück,” just debuted with Gray Wolf Press her first-ever collection of poetry: Bestiary. In the slim volume, she encounters wild and mythical beasts alike: whales and centaurs, hermit thrushes and chimeras. (Hey, Everyday Chimeras!)

Before reading “Love Poem: Chimera,” she described the creature: “Body of a lion, tail of a snake. Middle of the back is a goat’s head. Just so we’re on the same page.” Then, she read:

What clamor

we made in the birthing. What hiss and rumble

at the splitting, at the horns and beard,

at the glottal beat. What bridges our back.

 

What strong neck, what bright eye. What menagerie

are we. What we’re made of ourselves.

In Kelly’s poetry, Perseus cuts off Medusa’s head; from the wound springs a horse with wings, “foaled, fully grown, from my mother’s neck…my first cry, a beating of wings.” With a hint of sarcasm, Kelly calls out the misogyny that ancient Greeks never had to answer for, writing:

What beast

will your blade free next? What call will you loose

from another woman’s throat?

Kelly describes her family, her brothers, her father as a winged boar, her childhood in the 1990s when “her parents still loved one another,” and of the summer in 2011 when she was in Nashville at the same time a 17-year old brood of cicadas emerged from their hidden places, their little exoskeletons clinging to everything in sight.

This is what you pay attention to when you’re a poet, or when you’re in love, or both.

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The Vermont College of Fine Arts is a proud Poem City sponsor. On April 5^th, five days into the month-long celebration, poets Partridge Boswell and Peter Money descended upon Café Anna to host Los Lorcas: Poetry in Concert—a celebration of the legendary Spanish poet Federico García Lorca.

Boswell, whose debut collection Some Far Country won the Grolier Poetry Prize, hails from Woodstock, Vermont, about an hour south of Café Anna. Money, who has already displayed his musical talents at VCFA, runs Harbor Mountain Press in nearby White River Junction, also an hour away. The two, both talented musicians in their own right, were joined by guitarist Nat Williams.

MFA Candidate in Writing and Publishing Bianca Viňas attended the concert, while fellow classmate Jad Yassine took photos. For Poem City’s blog, Bianca wrote:

The first song brought the Café to a thoughtful and resonant silence, an Andalusian serenade inspired by Lorca’s original poetry. It was followed by a rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne, a song that captured the attention of the audience. The people sitting at my table, in a section of the Café facing the college’s frozen basketball court, was taken with the next performance, a melodious version of W.B. Yeats The Lake Isle of Innisfree. The rest of the audience was taken by an indie folk eulogy to Evil Knievel.

Of all the songs dedicated, none were more passionately unified in their inspiration than the original ballads that followed. Produced by the band and performed by Peter Money, these songs represented storytelling and an emotional lyricism that could only be reckoned by all three artists and their individual attention to performance: Boswell’s ocean-like vowel intonation, Williams’ calm out-stare to certain integral notes and Money’s sing-song of dramatized poetry.

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“Just to be clear,” said Julianna as she stepped up to the podium, “I have more books than that.”

Whenever anyone asks Julianna why she writes, especially why she writes so much, she is fond of saying: “It’s how I breathe.”

“Apparently you breathe really fast,” Sarah quipped from the audience.

Julianna read poems about strong women and childhood, nursing and piano tuners, death threats and masculinity (“lewd opalescence, it’s unwieldy pep”). When she finished, she checked out the poster. She loved it. “Now that I’ve gotten up close,” she said, “it’s very funny and smart.”

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Rizzoli Press specializes in illustrated books, aka “coffee table books,” covering topics from art to fashion, cooking to wristwatches. Leffel ran through the steps of how a book is born: from the agent’s pitch, to the editor’s book proposal, to setting the price and determining profit margins, to mocking up titles and cover art. We asked questions. We looked at the proposed covers for a celebrity chef’s cookbook across myriad permutations and drastic title changes. Then, we wrote our own book proposals for our own imaginary books. Maybe we’ll see them on a coffee table someday. We’re publishin’ here!

Later that evening, alongside Julianna Baggott, she read from an introduction she wrote for one such book: a collection of photographs by the German photographer Bernhard Hartmann, of (where else?) New York City. Hartmann casts his artist’s gaze across the city’s geometric forms, from day into night, from the sky to ground level. And Leffel’s introduction is a love letter to the city: from buildings to pigeons, bodegas to billboards, circles to triangles, Guggenheim to Grand Central, she writes: “geometry makes the city.”Running sports | Nike

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Robin MacArthur, Visiting Faculty in Fiction, introduced her short story collection, Half Wild, in 2016. In January 2018, she released her first novel: Heart Spring Mountain, from which she read just a few weeks ago.

Published by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, Heart Spring Mountain is themed around the idea of returning home—in this case, to rural Vermont in search of a missing mother possibly swept away in 2011’s Tropical Storm Irene. From this starting point, an entire family tree blooms that encompasses hippie grandmothers, commune dwellers, and part-time strippers. “MacArthur ably sustains multiple narrative threads and voices while sympathetically exploring more than four generations’ worth of hard times,” says Kirkus Reviews, ultimately calling it “a fecund and contemplative feminist family saga.” Oprah’s Book Club deems it one of 4 Books to Read Over a Winter Weekend, calling it “a novel of compassion,” while the Harvard Crimson states that it “beautifully intertwines generational connections.”

Faculty in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction, Porochista Khakpour has an upcoming memoir, Sick, that’s been years in the making. She was diagnosed with Lyme disease in late 2012, but she also endured “all the years of hell where I did not know what was wrong with me,” she said in an interview with Lithub. Addictions, hospitalizations, misdiagnosis, and crushing hospital bills ensued. The resulting work spans two continents and a decade. As publisher HarperPerennial states, Khakpour “meditates on both the physical and psychological impacts of uncertainty…with candor and grace.” Already the book has made it onto dozens of eagerly-anticipated lists, including: Buzzfeed, The Boston Globe, The Rumpus, and Electric Literature—each stating how much their editors look forward to June 5th, the day the book goes on sale.

The cover is unusual, especially from a personal standpoint: in a hospital bed with a tube up her nose, it’s a selfie of Khakpour in the least flattering place to take a selfie. “It’s a lot to imagine your face at book stores and all over the internet for ages to come, but especially your face associated with a word like ‘sick!’”Khakpour said. “Then it seemed to make sense to me, when I remembered how many selfies—before they were called ‘selfies!’—I had taken during my sickest years. There was often not much more to do.”

Lastly: Poetry Faculty member Matthew Dickman debuted his fourth collection earlier this month. In Wonderland, Dickman reflects upon the neighborhood in southeastern Portland, Oregon, where he grew up. In a Portland before Portlandia, he endures a childhood filled with: “ambient violence, well-intentioned but warped family relations, [and] confining definitions of identity.” Dickman introduces a series marked by the hour, beginning at 1am and going on to midnight the next day. The “deprivation of this particular Portland neighborhood in the 1980s,” according to publisher W.W. Norton, reflects the changing face of a city beset by the forces of gentrification. Fittingly, Portlandia star Carrie Brownstein gave it kudos, calling the collection “deft and sparkling.”

Dickman’s youth is marked by booze, addiction, skinheads and punk shows. There are plenty of stories to tell here, but for him, poetry is something more than a straightforward narrative: “poetry doesn’t come from storytelling,” he said in an interview with Hunger Mountain. “It comes from prayer. I think there’s something in our DNA as human beings that feels there’s something sacred about poems.”

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For over 15,000 attendees, the AWP Conference & Bookfair is the literary event in America: four straight days of books, book deals, interacting with editors from Big 5 publishing houses and tiny literary magazines alike, networking, lectures, readings, and parties. For the Vermont College of Fine Arts, it was the ideal place to launch Everyday Chimeras, the latest issue of Hunger Mountain. For the students of VCFA who could attend, it was a too-brief respite from the endless winter. And for student Cammie Finch, it was an eye-opening festival of wonder—a place where everyone could geek out over writing and reading.

In a post on her personal blog, Cammie extols the joys of being surrounded by literary geeks, reflects on how AWP impacted her own goals, and shows off some cool swag. She writes:

I loved AWP. Really. Really really loved it. It’s hard to fully imagine the conference without experiencing it. But let me try my best. It’s 15,000 writers and teachers and students and editors and publishers and logophiles and bibliophiles, all geeking out over writing and reading. It’s getting the nerve to go up to the Paris Review or Guernica or [insert prestigious journal here], shake hands with the editor, and have confidence in your own work. It’s about breathing in the same room with the poets and writers you read online or follow on Twitter or whose likeness you’ve taped to the walls of your bedroom. It’s about finding a community of people who understand why you do what you do. It’s about supporting yourself and others and literature itself.

Melissa Febos and Donika Kelly (our Hunger Mountain guest editors) IN REAL LIFE!

Yes, the conference was chaotic and a total sensory overload and exhausting and the food wasn’t great and was very overpriced,  but it was worth it to work at the book fair all day long…

…so I could attend panels and craft lectures on the things that are important to me: “The Next Step: Teaching & Writing at a Literary Center“, “Work Work Balance: When a Day Job Pays More Than the Bills,” “Writing Bad Ass and Nasty Women,”  and “The Real Mother of All Bombs: Reconsidering John Hersey’s Hiroshima.”

…so I could see dear writing mentors of mine again (Robert James Russell, Allegra Hyde, Alex McElroy, Amelia Martens, Britton Shurley, to name a few)

…so I could leave my footprints on the dry Tampa sidewalks.

I’ve decided that I will attend AWP every year from this day forward until I can no longer travel or walk.

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About ten years ago, she co-founded May Day Press with two artist friends here in Montpelier, Vermont. The 1st of May is her birthday—but it is also Beltane, the Gaelic May Day festival. “I’m not a real birthday person,” she said, “but in Celtic folklore, it’s the day when the fairies come out to dance.”

At May Day Press, McMahon designs wedding invitations, business cards, letterheads and envelopes, as well as the occasional concert poster. (Behind the rows of cabinets is a room full of musical instruments; local bands rehearse in the space on weekends.) She hosts events for the community to illuminate the art of letterpress. For the past three years, students from VCFA’s Writing and Publishing program have interned with her; this past year, Program Director Miciah Bay Gault reached out to McMahon and asked if she would be interested in teaching a course for the Spring 2018 semester.

So far, she’s enjoyed spreading the art form. Seven VCFA students took the course, and they read about artist’s books, studied the typography of the printed word, and dove into the form and function of intricate machinery. They even carved rubber stamps to learn relief printmaking. When I visited, they were finishing up a book sample and about to start on their final project: a class chapbook.

According to McMahon, there is a thriving printmaking culture in New England; in Western Massachusetts there is a clearinghouse, run by a former printmaker himself, who takes in old equipment when print shops close. He refurbishes them and sells them for what McMahon calls “a functional price tag.” That’s how she was able to acquire her Chandler & Price press, made in 1911 in Cleveland, Ohio, which she has owned since the studio was founded; with two hands free, one can print small pieces quickly. “Not a beginner press,” she said. For larger works, up to 14×18 inches, there’s the newest machine in the shop: a Vandercook proof press, built in 1968. With multiple rollers, she said, it provides plenty of coverage across these larger surfaces. And it’s much easier for beginners to get into the ink.

To dive into the ink is a tactile experience. Behind are racks and racks of cabinets, each cabinet holding cases, each case holding type, each type containing not just letters but also dingbats, ellipses, blackletters, and fun symbols. They are meticulously organized: some in baby food jars, most in soft wooden wooden drawers that squeak when you open them. Their metal is cool to the touch, tarnished by ink and the oil from one’s fingertips. The metal clanks together in the machine, and when the worn metal lever is pulled, actual, shiny wet ink is laid down on the paper right before your eyes. For a class that usually types on computers and merely hits “Print,” this is what McMahon was eager to show us: the text, made tangible.

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