Some Non-SIR Related News

Yesterday was the launch party for this year's issue of the Aerie, USI's student literary and art magazine. Jenni, Nicole, and I, as well as the rest of the members of the Student Writers Union (SWU) and the Aerie editors worked really hard on this event and were so pleased with the turnout. Basically we booked a room in the Liberal Arts Center, ordered food and a cake, and asked all of the writers and artists to attend to read their works or see them displayed on a continuous PowerPoint. Quite a few contributors were in attendance and I would say we had about thirty students show up. It was a very professional and well-done event, if I do say so myself.

Also, yesterday was the last day for turning in contest entries for SWU's first annual Write Away Hunger Poetry and Short Short Fiction Contest. Instead of entry fees for the contest we had writers pay us in pop-top canned goods and foods easily cooked by children. These foods will go to the local food back for their Backpacks for Kids program. The program puts food in a backpack and distributes the bags to area children who are at risk for having no food at home to eat over the weekend. We had a really great response to the contest and are confident that next year we will have even more entries.

I would also like to announce that I have ten papers due in the next few weeks. I can't even really comprehend it. Oh, Lord...

Registration

This week I have been working on a poetry chapbook for Miss Melanie Jordan. Issues with images have me held up, but otherwise it's a fairly fun task. [Oh the alliteration...] I'll update more when I have more to say about that.

While everybody around is concerned about registering for classes for the Spring Term, I have the fun of simply attempting to register to the school. I have respect for full transfer students, because this process is horribly inefficient. With work, this internship, and the class I am taking as a guest student, I have very little time during "work hours" to request my transcripts from my previous school, which of course is in a different time zone which adds just a little more chaos to the process. And requesting transcripts costs money, because apparently college students aren't quite poor enough on their own. I am looking forward to becoming a full-time student though. ^_^ When you see a transfer student, remember to give them a smile. They probably need it after the ordeal they went through trying to register.

Midterm Blues

The semester's half over. Doesn't really seem possible, but it's gone by so fast.

I've been working on a flyer detailing submission guidelines. I was feeling pretty good about it until I realized that the color scheme is reminiscent of the interior design of a Long John Silvers restaraunt. Not good. I'll be changing that one soon.

So, it's my goal to get my MFA in creative writing and because of this, I will be subjected to the horror known as the GRE. I'll be taking this on November 1st (oddly enough, four years to the day since I took my SAT). I'm not sure how ready I am. I studied for it all summer but since the semester started I've had a bit of trouble finding time to work on it in between homework, classes, etc. I decided not to worry about the quantitative section at all and I'm putting all my focus on the verbal. Oh, flashcards, I hate you already.

Last Reading...Until Next Year!

The Fall 2008 RopeWalk Reading Series has successfully come to an end, and if I may say so myself, it went out with a BAM! this year. Gary Fincke shared his techniques, ideas, stories, and his life with a rapt audience last night (October 14). I personally, along with a fellow creative writing student, had the privilege of picking him up from the airport and bringing him to USI to attend a couple classes before his reading. He joined my Child Narrative Techniques class and as a group we discussed his style and technique and his process in developing a story, most frequently beginning with character and voice. I’m impressed by his multi-genre capabilities and his success in all areas. I could see his characters. I believed their lives. I felt their shame and desire.

It was interesting to pick at his brain as he did not hesitate to share everything with the class. He read Piecework for the open reading, but I also had the chance to read his Rip His Head Off and Sorry I Worried You. His reading was wonderful and left the audience wanting more.

I lucky enough to join our guest and his wife, along with the creative writing faculty, for dinner, where I learned that Fincke’s son is a member of one of my favorite bands, Breaking Benjamin. So it was exciting to talk to him about the band, an experience which Fincke wrote about in his nonfiction piece, Amp’d. After dinner, my classmate and I dropped our guests off at their hotel, thanked them for sharing an eventful evening with us, and bid them a safe drive home.

Second RopeWalk Reading

Hello, and welcome to another week of the Southern Indiana Review blog. It has been such a busy week and weekend here. We all spent a lot of time logging submissions and sending out rejection letters, which is not the most fun part of the job, but it definitely needs to be done. Editing brochures, creating posters, and even occasionally reading over submissions to see if we can offer any constructive criticism are by far my favorite (and the most educational) parts of my internship here. And it’s also fun to learn how to focus with the ever-looming sounds of bulldozing going on right outside our door.

And much more importantly, tonight is the second RopeWalk Reading Series event. Today’s featured reader is the 2007 Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award winner, Kristine Anderson. I’m sure I’ll be able to update this later in the week with photos and stories from the reading, and hopefully there will be a good turnout. We’re all really looking forward to seeing this amazing poet read her work. I had the job of working on the poster advertising this reading, which was really a lot of fun to work on. (I chose to go with a "skin" theme, since that was the title of her award-winning poem.) I really like when my job doesn’t feel like a job at all because I get to have so much fun with it.

First RopeWalk Reading of the Semester

So I’ve had almost four official weeks of SIR interning. I’ve learned how to log submissions, make posters, and how not to make a program. And now I’m writing my first blog. It’s all been rather exciting and educational. I look forward to seeing what the rest of the semester brings.

We had the first installment of our RopeWalk Reading Series, one Holly Goddard Jones, author of the upcoming Girl Trouble from Harper Perennial last Thursday. An interesting turn of events (read illness) led to Jones teaching my Techniques of Creative Writing: Child Narrator class and it was one of the best experience of the rare "college substitute teacher day" that I’ve had. Fresh from her car trip all the way here, she jumped right in and led a great discussion about the importance of point of view and voice. It was excellent. Not only did we get to attend a reception to hear her talk about her writing and go to her reading later on, we also got the added pleasure of seeing how she teaches. Overall, I’d say it was a great way to start out the reading series.

Hacked by Dickens!

I'm taking advantage of the fact that I still have blog access, a fact that Mitchell (aka RM, according to some of his recent blog activity) has inadvertently pointed out to me by asking for my blog help, and which I'm not 100% certain he wants me taking advantage of. But what's he gonna do, fire me?

Exactly.

I'm here in Greensboro, mid-semester or not quite, getting into the groove of MFA life at UNCG. To anyone interested in applying to the program here, know that it's a good one to get things done in. The program is really set up in a way that allows one time to sit around reading and writing and thinking and searching with a metal detector for abandoned Confederate gold, or at least that's the case for me, and in this particular semester. I do know other first years who have RAs (that's Research Assistantships to you noobs) doing horrible things like answering the incessantly ringing phones in the graduate office or grading papers for classes of like four thousand students--but who cares about them. I've got this cush job in the English office where occasionally the phone rings and I have the option of ignoring it if I'm really doing some hard thinking, or of picking it up to see what department they were actually trying to call (in many cases, they are actually trying to reach the Greensboro unemployment office. Go figure that one out.). The remainder is updating the MFA and Greensboro Review web sites, because someone leaked to them that I have some experience in that area.

I'm taking a class on Publishing, as well as Structure of Fiction and Fiction Workshop--all great classes that take place in the same building on the same floor and two of which are even in the same room at roughly the same time, so it's tough to get confused, though I have managed it.

But there are also nights when you will still be up at 3am dealing with a cast of characters of your own creation who need to do something other than stand in a circle on a street talking to each other.

UPDATE: Ron hacked my hack and posted this before I was finished writing/editing it. Foiled again!