Zuravleff next visiting writer

Mary Kay Zuravleff visits Butler University as part of the Vivian Delbrook Visiting Writer's series.Butler’s next visiting writer is author Mary Kay Zuravleff. She’ll be giving a reading Wednesday, October 23 at 7:30 PM in the Eidson-Duckwall recital hall. Zuravleff has taught at Johns Hopkins, George Mason, and American University, and serves on the PEN/Faulkner Foundation board. She has been nominated for an Orange Prize, received the American Academy’s Rosenthal Award, and won the James Jones First Novel Award for The Frequency of Souls.

Yeah, that’s all impressive, but I’m really here to tell you about how awesome Zuravleff’s new novel Man Alive! is. Ready for it? It’s a novel about a struggling family. Are you sold? Continue reading

Butler’s first annual Writer’s Harvest

Slim profile version of Writer's Harvest promo flyer, which will appear in Nuvo.The third event in our Conversations@Efroymson series, which also happens to be our most exciting yet, is Butler’s first annual Writer’s Harvest. On Tuesday October 29, 7:30 PM at Clowes Memorial Hall, Indiana-based fiction powerhouses John Green, Ben Winters and Susan Neville will be giving readings– but that’s just the “writer” part. The “harvest” part is where you come in. We will be collecting your donations of dried pasta and white rice on behalf of Indy non-profit community kitchen Second Helpings. The event is, as always, free and open to the public.

While they do cook and deliver about 3,500 meals (about 150 pounds of pasta and rice!) every day, eliminating hunger is only one half of what Second Helpings does. The company also provides culinary job training to unemployed and underemployed adults. Their mission statement reads: “We’re not just teaching people to cook – we’re providing an avenue for people to transform their own lives. We don’t just collect food – we rescue food because we can’t stand to see it go to waste when others have none.” Naturally, your donation will be much appreciated. But we plan to make it worth your while; allow me to introduce our readers: Continue reading

A talk with Elisabeth Giffin on Talking With…

Elizabeth Giffin plays Moira in Jane Martin's Talking With... at the Carmel TheaterTomorrow night, 7:30PM at the Carmel Community Playhouse, first-year MFA student, actress and theatre buff Elisabeth Giffin will take to the stage as part of Jane Martin‘s American Theatre Critics Association Award-winning play Talking With…. The play opens Thursday, October 17 but will run Thursday through Sunday (2:30PM matinee) this week and next.

Composed of eleven monologues delivered by a sundry cast of women including a baton twirler, a fundamentalist snake handler, and an ex-rodeo rider, Talking With… promises to “amuse, move and frighten.” Giffin opens the show with “15 Minutes” as Moira, an actress about to take the stage.

Because playwrights are in such short supply in our program, instead of my usual teaser I thought I’d ask Miss Giffin to share some insight into the genre and the monologue form. It turns out she’s basically a friendly encyclopedia. Read further if secret pseudonyms and a brief history of the monologue makes you salivate. Continue reading

A talk with Elisabeth Giffin on Talking With…

Elizabeth Giffin plays Moira in Jane Martin's Talking With... at the Carmel TheaterTomorrow night, 7:30PM at the Carmel Community Playhouse, first-year MFA student, actress and theatre buff Elisabeth Giffin will take to the stage as part of Jane Martin‘s American Theatre Critics Association Award-winning play Talking With…. The play opens Thursday, October 17 but will run Thursday through Sunday (2:30PM matinee) this week and next.

Composed of eleven monologues delivered by a sundry cast of women including a baton twirler, a fundamentalist snake handler, and an ex-rodeo rider, Talking With… promises to “amuse, move and frighten.” Giffin opens the show with “15 Minutes” as Moira, an actress about to take the stage.

Because playwrights are in such short supply in our program, instead of my usual teaser I thought I’d ask Miss Giffin to share some insight into the genre and the monologue form. It turns out she’s basically a friendly encyclopedia. Read further if secret pseudonyms and a brief history of the monologue makes you salivate. Continue reading

Chamonix Memorixs: Part II

The Butler MFA program is growing faster than ever, and in the early summer that growth paid dividends to a handful of students who got to spend three weeks in writerly nirvana, attending intensive workshops in Chamonix, France. Part graduate workshop, part scenic vacation, part mad-science experiment, the first Chamonix Summer Writing Program was a resounding success– so much so that it is being offered again, now a permanent offering to Butler students.

But you absolutely shouldn’t take my word for it. You should, however, take part-time action hero and mountain-summiteer Farhad Anwarzai‘s word for it. On top of pounding out a respectable hillock of pages during his time in France, Farhad carped the diem like there was no tomorrow. After some gentle coaxing, prodding, and friendly threats, I got him to put one of his adventures to paper– so to speak. Continue reading

Chamonix Memorixs: Part II

The Butler MFA program is growing faster than ever, and in the early summer that growth paid dividends to a handful of students who got to spend three weeks in writerly nirvana, attending intensive workshops in Chamonix, France. Part graduate workshop, part scenic vacation, part mad-science experiment, the first Chamonix Summer Writing Program was a resounding success– so much so that it is being offered again, now a permanent offering to Butler students.

But you absolutely shouldn’t take my word for it. You should, however, take part-time action hero and mountain-summiteer Farhad Anwarzai‘s word for it. On top of pounding out a respectable hillock of pages during his time in France, Farhad carped the diem like there was no tomorrow. After some gentle coaxing, prodding, and friendly threats, I got him to put one of his adventures to paper– so to speak. Continue reading