See Cheryl Strayed tonight at Clowes

strayed 2I don’t need to tell you about Cheryl Strayed’s reading at 7:30 tonight on Butler’s biggest stage, the Clowes Memorial Hall auditorium. (You’ll be arriving early to make sure you get a good seat.)

I don’t need to tell you about her 2012 memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which reached No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list. (You devoured it in a day. Then read it again. And again. Then you bought the same pair of REI boots that grace the cover.)

I don’t need to tell you that Oprah Winfrey loved Wild so much that she rebooted her Book Club. (Your consciousness is constantly attune with Oprah’s tastes, as all humans beings’ are.)

I don’t need to tell you that Wild has been optioned as a feature film starring Reese Witherspoon, set for release later this year. (You’ll be there for the midnight showing wearing an 80-pound backpack.)

I don’t need to tell you that Cheryl Strayed anonymously penned the colossal Dear Sugar advice column for The Rumpus before revealing her identity on Valentine’s Day two years ago. (You knew it all along, you beautiful gumshoe.)

I don’t need to tell you that she once told an interviewer “the most important thing for aspiring writers is for them to give themselves permission to be brave on the page, to write in the presence of fear.” (You’ve got her sage advice tattooed on the palm of your writing hand. Such big hands you have.)

I don’t need to tell you that she inspired world-famous Write Like A Motherfucker coffee mug, the preeminent swag at AWP two years running. (You use your’s so often it just says rite like a otherfucker now, but you roll with it.)

I don’t need to tell you Cheryl Strayed will be leading a workshop in the French Alps this June as part of Butler’s Chamonix Summer Writing Program. (You’re already signed up for her now-full class, or you are unable to leave the United States because of your nefarious past–in either case, you have told everyone you know to register for Chamonix sessions with Butler’s other kickass faculty members: Lynda Barry, Ann Hood, Terrance Hayes, Dan Chaon, Erin Belieu, and Michael Dahlie.)

I don’t need to tell you anything because some promos write themselves. (You humored me anyway because you’re bored at work.)

Hear D. Nurkse’s poetry tonight

nurkse 2If you’ve been by the Efroymson Center since the arrival of poet D. Nurkse yesterday, you may have noticed a different sound emanating from the house, one far more musical than the typical coffee pot gurgle or the clamor of students in between classes.

Since I’ve assumed by current position at Butler, spending most of my hours at the ECCW, I’ve bumped into several of the visiting writers on the job, or at least noticed their presence in the apartment while passing through the kitchen or working downstairs.

Nurkse’s time in the apartment has been impossible to ignore (and I mean this in the best way possible), as he spent his downtime yesterday in the apartment playing the flute. Though perhaps not intended for an audience, it was something easily appreciated, as it was not only an enjoyable listen, but also a sonorous reminder that the esteemed writers who visit are real people with real hobbies.

Nurkse will entertain in a different capacity this evening, reading at the Robertson Hall Johnson Room at 7:30 p.m. as part of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series.

The Brooklyn-based poet has penned 10 collections of poetry, including A Night in Brooklyn (2012), The Border Kingdom (2008), The Fall (2003), and The Rules of Paradise (2001). Throughout his career, he’s racked up numerous awards and prizes for his work, including the Literature Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim poetry fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships.

If the publication and awards don’t grab your attention, like say the sound of a flute would, Nurkse’s craft certainly speaks volumes. It seems appropriate that he has made the most of the lulls in his schedule here at Butler, since he pays great attention to the breaks and pauses in between his words and stanzas. As Nurkse told an interviewer after the release of The Fall, “As a poet you enjoy a line break, which, between stanzas, is like a double check in chess: it comes at you from different sides and has a great deal of resonance, and the hope is to be able to put the narrative elements in those spaces between the stanzas.”

Besides being the smartest thing I’ve heard all day, Nurkse’s insight has enhanced my reading of a poem of his that has remained with me since I received it in a workshop packet from Dana Roeser. “Treasures of the Cove” captures one of the final moments Nurkse spent with his father, who at the time “had a week to live.” Nurkse doesn’t editorialize or insert emotion; he simply describes his surroundings and lets the silence fill in the elegy.

Each pebble glinted
with the sea’s life.

Amazing, my father said,
but he kept his eyes on Drummond Rock.

If I had dared
I would have showed him
my empty hand and let him murmur
how beautiful.

The movement between stanzas is nothing short of stirring. The reader is left sensing the amazement of life, but also the power of what is not seen or enacted–a dying father who can’t help but stare off at the distance, a son who can’t summon the strength to show him an empty hand.

After several short stanzas, the poem ends with a deep breath, a long look at finality.

His strides were colossal.
I ran in his shadow
but gingerly, so the shells
in my pocket wouldn’t shatter:
whelks, spiral staircases
into nothing, mother-of-pearl shards
like broken sunsets, a clamshell
found an hour ago, now dry, gray,
useless except to hear
my own ocean.

Pay attention to what happens when Nurkse pauses in between stanzas and poems tonight. Sometimes the moments away from the focus are the ones that have the most to say.

Exchanging Stories and Beer

stories and beer 2Dialogue, our proactive band of literary innovators, has dreamed up a new reading exchange that launches at 7 p.m.  Saturday, March 22, at Indy Reads Books with an event refreshingly dubbed “Stories and Beer.”

Butler MFA candidate Tracy Mishkin (whose forthcoming poetry chapbook will be featured on the blog next week) will join Indianapolis author Sarah Layden and three readers from Champaign, Illinois, Letitia Moffitt, Nafissa Thompson, and Matthew Minuccci.

Importing and exporting readers from other MFA programs, literary journals, and writing hotspots for cross-pollination on the same stage is something that Dialogue hopes to continue facilitating in the coming months and years. Don’t miss the chance to see the start of an exchange that promises to crack open new doors like cold cans of beer.

The Theme of Tonight’s Party…

is community. Poetic excellence. Celebrating grand accomplishments. The awesomeness of Butler’s MFA program.

Though all these themes apply, what really matters is making the most of tonight’s party at the ECCW, a Conversations @ reading at 7:30 p.m. starring two Butler MFA faculty members on the poetry side, Dana Roeser and Chris Forhan.

Permit me to use first names since I was privileged enough to have both Dana and Chris for workshop during my final year in the MFA program. Each are remarkably different poets and professors, and I mean this in the most complimentary way possible. Both have mastered a style and approach that suits their respective personalities.

roeserOne of the chief causes for celebration tonight is the recent publication of Dana’s new collection The Theme of Tonight’s Party Has Been Changed, which won the prestigious Juniper Prize for Poetry, presented by the University of Massachusetts Press. Her two previous books of poetry, Beautiful Motion and In the Truth Room, both received the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize.

In her expansive poems, which tend to be confessional, domestic, and spiritual all at once, Dana’s verse exemplifies the book’s title, following her stream of consciousness as it zigs and zags its way to vital truths, often flipping themes at the drop of a line.

In one of my favorite poems from the collection, “A Fan, A Hair Dryer, An Air Conditioner: Feast of the Pentecost at Target Supercenter,” the form captures the unstoppable kinetic energy of Dana’s brain, which processes mortality and the existential comforts of Target simultaneously.

I can’t stand—

I mean I really can’t

abide—death. Target stays

sparkling clean and perky, at least

the part I can see,

and I try not to remember

the freight cars I saw

before coming

in here, at dusk. One by

one lined up

like huge white

refrigerators on their sides, or,

as has often been

said, coffins. Fired up

and headed to their

destiny, the trees

above, boiling

in the stiff wind,

their green tongues

of flame wagging.

forhanThough Chris has collected poetry prizes for his three collections (his own Samuel French Morse, in addition to the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the Bakeless Prize), he spent his fall semester on sabbatical working on a memoir that promises to illuminate a moving life story.

I am unsure whether Chris will be reading from his new project or even his new chapbook of old poems Ransack and Dance, released in September by Silver Birch Press (read more about it here). The theme of tonight’s party is surprise.

The theme of Chris Forhan’s work is curiosity, compactness, density. I’m partial to his 2003 collection The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars. Unlike Dana’s sweeping lines that bend towards profundity, check out the cohesion and concision of Chris’ poem “The Fidgeting,” in which every syllable seems irrevocable:

Easy to make prayers to the darkness, to break bread
with the inconceivable. Harder to love

the moon—dusty dead-white relic
in the star museum, bald and obvious

as a drunken uncle. Hard to find worth
in the crooked pine that creaks

outside the kitchen window, every twig
a wagging finger as it lectures

on the miracle of the physical world.

The theme of tonight’s party is whatever you make it. Consider this your formal invitation.

The Theme of Tonight’s Party…

is community. Poetic excellence. Celebrating grand accomplishments. The awesomeness of Butler’s MFA program.

Though all these themes apply, what really matters is making the most of tonight’s party at the ECCW, a Conversations @ reading at 7:30 p.m. starring two Butler MFA faculty members on the poetry side, Dana Roeser and Chris Forhan.

Permit me to use first names since I was privileged enough to have both Dana and Chris for workshop during my final year in the MFA program. Each are remarkably different poets and professors, and I mean this in the most complimentary way possible. Both have mastered a style and approach that suits their respective personalities.

roeserOne of the chief causes for celebration tonight is the recent publication of Dana’s new collection The Theme of Tonight’s Party Has Been Changed, which won the prestigious Juniper Prize for Poetry, presented by the University of Massachusetts Press. Her two previous books of poetry, Beautiful Motion and In the Truth Room, both received the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize.

In her expansive poems, which tend to be confessional, domestic, and spiritual all at once, Dana’s verse exemplifies the book’s title, following her stream of consciousness as it zigs and zags its way to vital truths, often flipping themes at the drop of a line.

In one of my favorite poems from the collection, “A Fan, A Hair Dryer, An Air Conditioner: Feast of the Pentecost at Target Supercenter,” the form captures the unstoppable kinetic energy of Dana’s brain, which processes mortality and the existential comforts of Target simultaneously.

I can’t stand—

I mean I really can’t

abide—death. Target stays

sparkling clean and perky, at least

the part I can see,

and I try not to remember

the freight cars I saw

before coming

in here, at dusk. One by

one lined up

like huge white

refrigerators on their sides, or,

as has often been

said, coffins. Fired up

and headed to their

destiny, the trees

above, boiling

in the stiff wind,

their green tongues

of flame wagging.

forhanThough Chris has collected poetry prizes for his three collections (his own Samuel French Morse, in addition to the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the Bakeless Prize), he spent his fall semester on sabbatical working on a memoir that promises to illuminate a moving life story.

I am unsure whether Chris will be reading from his new project or even his new chapbook of old poems Ransack and Dance, released in September by Silver Birch Press (read more about it here). The theme of tonight’s party is surprise.

The theme of Chris Forhan’s work is curiosity, compactness, density. I’m partial to his 2003 collection The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars. Unlike Dana’s sweeping lines that bend towards profundity, check out the cohesion and concision of Chris’ poem “The Fidgeting,” in which every syllable seems irrevocable:

Easy to make prayers to the darkness, to break bread
with the inconceivable. Harder to love

the moon—dusty dead-white relic
in the star museum, bald and obvious

as a drunken uncle. Hard to find worth
in the crooked pine that creaks

outside the kitchen window, every twig
a wagging finger as it lectures

on the miracle of the physical world.

The theme of tonight’s party is whatever you make it. Consider this your formal invitation.

Tim O’Brien reads tonight

Author and veteran Tim O’Brien will be at the Butler University Reilly Room tonight at 7:30 p.m. You will be there. I will be there. We all will be there because it’s Tim O’Brien.

obrien mugAnd as much as I look forward to tonight, I’m even more intrigued by the promise of what will happen a year after today, then five years, then ten years, maybe twenty. I will bump into you somewhere, and for whatever reason, we both will be thinking about Tim O’Brien’s reading, and I’ll tell you what happened, and you’ll tell me what happened, and our stories won’t match. There will be this beautiful human moment where I will start to doubt my own recollection, and you will question your own memory, and our minds will assimilate a shared experience, to the degree that when we discuss the reading again even further removed, neither of us will be certain how we as individuals actually perceived today, but we will have stories to share that more accurately represent what it was like to be there.

Normally in this space, I’d mention that Tim O’Brien won the 1979 National Book Award for Going After Cacciato, and that he is also the author of The Things They Carried, In the Lake of the Woods, Tomcat in Love, If I Die in a Combat Zone, and July, July. But those are facts that have no real bearing on where my Tim O’Brien story starts.

I first read Tim O’Brien in the first class I ever took in Butler MFA’s program. Mike Dahlie had our workshop group read “How to Tell a True War Story” from The Things They Carried. I don’t know remember why we would have read it, and I have not recently verified this with Mike or my classmates, because it doesn’t matter.

What matters is that before getting into the MFA program and taking the class and reading Tim O’Brien, I was a writer of facts exclusively, having worked as a small-town newspaper reporter for the previous three years. I dabbled in fiction and poetry as an undergraduate and returned to creative writing on a whim, without any concrete notions of why it mattered to me or the world.

That is, until I read “How to Tell a True War Story,” and I was introduced to the way that the truth and fiction interact, the idea of verisimilitude. I bracketed and starred the following paragraphs in the xeroxed copy of the story Mike gave me:

You can tell a true story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let’s say, and afterward you ask, “Is it true?” and if the answer matters, you’ve got your answer.

For example, we’ve all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his tree buddies.

Is it true?

The answer matters.

You’d feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen—and maybe it did, anything’s possible—even then you know it can’t be true, because a true war story does not depend on that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant.  A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, “The fuck you do that for?” and the jumper says, “Story of my life, man,” and the other guy starts to smile but he’s dead. That’s a true story that never happened.

And I thought, that’s it. That’s why I want to write fiction. There is a truth in every lie, and a lie in every truth. And that’s why and how writing is the art of life.