FRONTMATTER

Boston Bound for Books!

Get on the bus; it's field trip time! Students from the MFA in Writing and Publishing program recently spent the weekend in Boston. We met with editors, publishers, and directors: Sven Birkerts and William Pierce of AGNI, Christina Thompson of the Harvard Review, Janaka Stucky of Black Ocean Press, and Christopher Castellani and Dariel Suarez of GrubStreet. 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…

Riots, Rattlesnakes, and Rare Beasts

How time flies: we’re already at our last reading of the semester! And for this one, three extremely accomplished guests brought their finest work. 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…

Poem City: Lorca Comes Alive! At Café Anna

Every April, the city of Montpelier magically transforms into Poem City and comes alive with the art of language. Storefronts downtown tape poems on their windows—local poems by poets hailing from Montpelier, Essex, South Burlington, and other Vermont towns. Elementary school children grow a garden of haikus outside of Hunger Mountain Co-op. Local institutions like Bear Pond Books and the Kellogg-Hubbard Library host readings every week. The Vermont College of Fine Arts is a proud Poem City…

This, My Friend, Is Your Life

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.…

Caitlin Leffel (heart emojis) New York

It may be safe to say that writer and editor Caitlin Leffel has a thing for New York City: she grew up in Manhattan, works as an editor with Rizzoli Press in the Flatiron District, and wrote a book about falling in love in New York. She is also a VCFA alumnus. A few weeks ago, she made the five-hour journey north—or 45 minutes from LaGuardia—back to Montpelier to discuss with our class her fascinating career in publishing. Rizzoli Press specializes in illustrated books, aka “coffee table…

Three New Books From Our Faculty That You Must Read Before You Die

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…

The Unbearable Lightness of AWP

Earlier this month, the Association of Writers and Publishers hosted its annual conference in Tampa, Florida. 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…

A Visit to May Day Press, Your Friendly Neighborhood Letterpress Studio

Kelly McMahon first fell in love with the fine art of letterpress when she was in San Francisco attending the California College of the Arts for Creative Writing. She had set out to work on her poetry, but this centuries-old craft—once a necessity for the printed word, now an art form—called to her. "I was lucky enough to choose an art school that had an established printmaking program,” she said. “The grad programs were all interdisciplinary. I took a seminar on book arts and loved printing.…

A Stolen Violin And a Missing Person In a Lake

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,…

Second-Year Students Reflect On Their Thesis Projects Before Their Ever-Looming Graduation

Over the past year, the second-year students in VCFA's MFA in Writing & Publishing program have been diligently, quietly plugging away at their thesis projects. This is their last semester to complete them. For such a close community of writers, this looming graduation date brings equal parts panic, relief, and sadness. Right now, they’ll be in the thick of crunch time. Soon, they’ll finish something they’ve dreamed of. They will graduate. And eventually, they will miss this place. Jennifer…