FRONTMATTER

Poet and Professor Ruben Quesada Talks To Us About Journals, Translating Cernuda, And Neck Tattoos

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On the right side of his neck, just below his ear, poet and professor Ruben Quesada has a tattoo of the Chinese character 晨, which he tells me means, “early light.” Quesada was born on an early morning in a late summer day in August. “I feel that idea of light embodies who I am and my personality,” he said. Quesada (MFA, PhD) grew up in the Los Angeles area. His mother emigrated from Costa Rica just before he was born. Next door was a Chinese family that had come from Nicaragua, and…

An Evening With Ruben Quesada

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Visiting poet Ruben Quesada was the star of our third reading, a solo act. He read three poems from his upcoming and still-untitled collection, though they aren't entirely poems, per se: they are disparate ideas split up into numbered sections that convey themes of religion, desire, and surviving the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. When the collection goes to print next year, these poems will be arranged into squares: devoid of punctuation, interspersed by translations of Luis Cernuda. Quesada…

Hula-Hooping While Reading Is 2017's Hot New Workout Fad

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Multitasking, that's what it is, really—says Cammie Finch, an avid combination reader and hula-hooper, usually both at the same time. A first-year student at VCFA's MFA in Writing & Publishing program, she has been frequently sighted outside of the dorms, holding up a (lightweight) book and simultaneously hooping it up. It might seem silly, sure, but there's nothing to it: once you get moving, the motion takes up almost no effort or concentration—which leaves the sunshine-warmed hooper…

VCFA's Second Reading: Trinie Dalton, Sherwin Bitsui

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We kept our second reading of the year short, and to the point: poet Sherwin Bitsui, reading from his current work as well as a preview of his third book of poetry, joined onstage our very own Trinie Dalton, Faculty in the MFA in Writing & Publishing program. "I've kinda been in a mood lately," said Trinie, just as she launched into two pieces, one entitled "Women's Art Prison," a dark and fragile story of women forbidden from making art, who secretly create in prison. Sherwin, visiting…

Sherman Bitsui coming to VCFA

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Sherwin Bitsui’s Flood Song, the poet’s second book, is a hike through the desert at sunset when you don’t know where you’re going. It is equal parts disorienting, beautiful, and full of misdirection: surreal and bordering on the nonsensical, but with enough glimmers of the familiar to bring you back. You follow Bitsui to “a cornfield at the bottom of a sandstone canyon,” into the past, “a blurry splotch of red crosshatched with neon light,” while “black ants drift through the throats…

Lewis "Buddy" Nordan, "Owls"

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Lewis Nordan, whose nickname was “Buddy,” stood in the same Southern Gothic cathedral as Faulkner and O’Connor. Over the course of his life he wrote four novels, three short story collections, and one “fictional memoir” before his death in 2012. Nordan played with expectations in unique ways: his uniqueness was magical realism by way of small-town Mississippi, deep in the Delta, his native home. Lyrical tales of singing llamas and ghosts and a dead boy’s sentient eyeball—a reference…

The Dinner Club

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Spend your first few weeks wandering around a dorm, and eventually a dinner party will break out. Says W&P student Lauren Lang (posting to the program's Facebook page): “having a meal at a table is much better with friends when being away from family.” Five W&P students, gathering in the kitchen to concoct various meals (rice, squash, steamed vegetables and shrimp, pasta, a single egg), before sitting down to take stock of what brought them together: it's a thing of beauty. We writers…

A Nice Night For Our First Reading

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This past Friday, after a long day of class, the students and faculty of the Writing & Publishing program gathered in Cafe Anna to hear three professors give a reading, the first of the year for us in the MFA program. It was a fine showing, and the little cafe downstairs was packed. Below are scenes from a Friday afternoon at VCFA. Mary Ruefle, above, has written 11 collections of poetry, and she read from her latest work, 2016's My Private Property. For the past two weeks, she has been conducting…

What I’ve Learned About Montpelier, After Being Here for a Total of Three Weeks

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Montpelier is a tiny blip of a town, just one sign on the freeway; blink on Interstate 89, barreling toward Montreal, and you’ll miss your exit. Its charming brick-façade downtown could fold up and fit in a cardboard box. It maintains all the vitals to a functioning society: a Thai restaurant, a dimly-lit coffee shop, a hip brunch place with bottomless mimosas, a tiny pet store with a trio of dreadlocked Bergamasco sheepdogs that loaf around like sentient low-energy mops. All the Subaru drivers…

AWP

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This year, all of us MFA W&P students got to go down to DC and take over a train car, an Air BnB, and eventually a city block-sized convention center. Some highlights include: a panel on women of color's responses to Emily Dickinson that made me cry, Sam Sax casually walking by while I was in line for a coffee, seeing poet friends from undergrad, and seeing some pretty famous writers completely sloshed. In this spirit, I offer some alternatives for what AWP may stand for: AWP: Anxious…