Julianna Baggott contains a seemingly endless fount of energy when it comes to the art form. She has written over 20 books (not including what she’s co-authored), teaches at VCFA and at Florida State University, regularly pitches stories to Hollywood, and is raising four children. Still, she took the time to read with Caitlin Leffel at VCFA’s Café Anna. Before she went in front of the audience, MFA candidate Sarah Leamy introduced her. “She has done so much, and it’s so inspiring,” she said. And to prove this, she helped unfurl a poster on the wall that illustrated Julianna’s accomplishments: every single work of fiction, collection of poetry, and young adult series diagrammed in permanent marker, revolving around a single bubble that is Julianna Baggott. “This, my friend, is your life,” said Sarah.

“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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Three of our faculty have either recently introduced books or are releasing them soon. They include a novel about returning home, a heartbreaking memoir of overcoming illness, and a collection of groundbreaking poetry. Why not collect them all?

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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Our second reading featured author James Scott and faculty members Julia Shipley and Jericho Parms, a triumvirate hereby known forever as “The Three Js.”

First: James Scott, whose debut novel The Kept is an unyieldingly bleak tale of revenge set in the cold of western New York in the late 1800s. Featuring a mother with a mysterious secret and a boy too young to exact vengeance, Scott told us the story took him eight years to write.

He then read from his second novel, as yet unreleased, which he joked would be less bleak: “This book is just about drowning.” This time, Scott took us to 1990s Burlington, Vermont, a city experiencing gentrification pains familiar to all U.S. cities from that time forward. Here, a volunteer diver for the state police goes into a lake to find a body; on the way up, he meets a mysterious woman—the wife of the man who disappeared. Scott attended nearby Middlebury College for undergrad, so we have reason to trust his intimate familiarity with the Vermont landscape. The story was funny and blessedly awkward, a departure from his late 1800s revenge story, yet both stories captured a great feeling of loss. 

Julia Shipley read next. Shipley, Visiting Faculty at VCFA, is also a book reviewer, journalist, and travel writer who lives and works on a farm in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. In 2014, her prose and poetry collection Adam’s Mark: Writing from the Ox-House was one of The Boston Globe’s Best Books, while her subsequent book, The Academy of Hay won the Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize.

Shipley dove into a pair of essays, about 200 words each, that she wrote for the Old Farmer’s Almanac: the first woman to write calendar essays for the publication in its 226-year history. The essays deal with January and April, respectively. More specifically, she discusses the magic of pulling a shimmering lake trout through thick ice and a lakeside carnival in Danville, Vermont that celebrates when winter finally ends.

Then came a series of poems, her specialty, each with titles like, “The Archaeologists,” “The Porcupine,” and “The Observable Edge of the Universe,” which she called “a very fancy name for a very local poem.” She briefly showed us the paper she was reading from so that we could see each poem took on the form its title reflected: tall and skinny for “The Archaeologists,” short and plump and as spiky as text would allow for “The Porcupine.”

Lastly was Visiting Faculty Jericho Parms. Parms is teaching a course on creative nonfiction this semester called “Mountains and Molehills.” She is the author of  the essay collection, Lost Wax, which The Rumpus called “part meditation, part lyric, part inquiry on topics such as art, love, loss, identity, memory, and coming of age.” The essay, she explained, is not so much an end product of thought but thought itself.  The essay she read that evening, “Practice,” flows between topics: the smallest objects expand to fill the space of an old house.

In this old house, Parms studies paint chips from the hardware store, recites their names out loud to no one in particular, luxuriates over them. Simultaneously, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a man steals a Stradivarius violin known as the “Lipinski.” When Jericho reads about the story it reminds her of her own upbringing, practicing violin as a child and learning to appreciate the tone and softness of an old instrument, though—to be fair—hers was not as old and rare as Antonio Stradivari’s creation, last estimated at a cool $6 million.

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It was a crowded evening for the first reading of 2018. Local bookstore Bear Pond Books was onsite hawking our readers’ works, and we had two wonderful faculty members sharing from their books: Miciah Bay Gault and Robin MacArthur.

We in VCFA’s Writing and Publishing program know Miciah Bay Gault as the Program Director, professor in our Publishing and Fieldwork program, editor of Hunger Mountain, the leader of our cohorts, a fellowship director, a devoted mother, and a kindred spirit. She has been published in Tin House, The Southern Review, Agni, and The Sun. She’s a “Super Woman,” as Cammie Finch introduced her, adding: “what really intrigues me about Miciah is the way she can transform the world we think we know into wholly original and unexpected stories.”

But while we interact with her on a near-daily basis, most of us had never heard her work. Last Friday, she changed that with a reading from her novel-in-progress, which she attests is “days away” from being finished. It is August, late summer, in a New England tourist island, and 28-year-old Lydia yearns to leave the place where she always grew up. It is the kind of place where everyone knows each other and where people stay in place, slowly sinking into the sand. “I was an expert on tourists,” Gault’s character says. “They didn’t know me, but I knew them.”

Gault grew up on Cape Cod, making her uniquely qualified to bring such a place to life. It is a vivid, contemporary portrait of a place we only think we’re familiar with. Needless to say, we’re looking forward to when Bear Pond Books will stock her work.

Next was Robin MacArthur reading from her debut novel, Heart Spring Mountain. We first-year students are fortunate to have MacArthur teaching a workshop with us this semester. “I’ll come out and say that I’m a little jealous,” said Jad Yassine, the 2nd-year student who introduced her.

MacArthur is a Vermont native who lives on the same farm in Marlboro, Vermont where she was born, in a home that she built with her family. Last year, her debut collection of stories, Half Wild, won the PEN New England Award for fiction; she was a finalist for both the Vermont and New England Book Awards; and she is a VCFA alumnus herself.

Heart Spring Mountain is the story of Vale, a woman who returns to her native Vermont to search for her addict mother, lost in 2011’s Tropical Storm Irene. Written from the perspective of three generations of women, it is a story about returning home, finding hope in the dark, and family secrets more shocking than Vale could ever imagine.

Combining themes of personal tragedy, communal strength, climate change, and the dark side of Vermont’s supposed tranquility—the eugenics movement of the 1920s and 1930s—it is “nuanced, poetic, and evocative,” according to Publishers Weekly, which continues to say “MacArthur empathetically depicts each of her characters in their wounded but hopeful glory.” At her alma mater and in front of her new students, MacArthur read a selection from this uniquely powerful work, one that is grounded in place.

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