Work Hard, Play Hard

Butler’s MFA classes officially start today. However, the fun has already begun. Here at the Butler MFA, we like to work hard, play hard, and write best. We aim to build a community of writers who will support students for life, not just three years.

Last Saturday, the Efroymson Center for Creative Writing was packed with faculty and staff, new and returning students, and alums for the annual Welcome Back Celebration. Delicious food, drinks, and conversation were enjoyed by all.

mfaparty

Monday, Booth held its annual kick-off meeting at the ECCW with a pizza party and orientation session for new readers. The turnout was fantastic, and all the editors and readers are excited for a great year.

IMG_0972

Tuesday, a feisty bunch gathered a few miles off campus at the Broadripple Brew Pub for Trivia Night. Poets, fiction and nonfiction writers, along with a few professors and spouses, united to create two powerhouse trivia teams. Although neither team won the grand prize, one team did out perform the other earning major bragging rights. There was talk about making Trivia Night a regular gathering. Look for notices on the MFA facebook page.

Trivia night

Fall 2015 Visiting Writers Series

An award-winning group of writers is coming to Butler University this fall as part of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series.

The events begin with National Book Award-winning poet Nikky Finney on September 14, followed by prose writer Joyce Carol Oates (September 28), poets Gerald Stern and Anne Marie Macari (October 6), novelist Laila Lalami (October 13), novelist Denis Johnson (November 11), and poet Dean Young (November 17).

Oates, Stern, Lalami, and Young have been Pulitzer Prize finalists. Finney, Macari, and Johnson are National Book Award winners.

All events in the series are free and open to the public without tickets. Both of the September readings are part of Butler’s Writer’s Harvest. Please support us in the fight against hunger by bringing a donation of dried pasta or rice to the Finney and Oats readings to support Second Helpings. In addition to accepting donations at the readings, we will have collection boxes at the Efroymson Center for Creative Writing and the English Department, JH308, for the entire month of September.

For more information, call 317-940-9861.

 

nikkyfinneyNikky Finney
Monday, September 14, 7:30 p.m.
Clowes Memorial Hall, Krannert Room

Writer’s Harvest- This reading is part of Butler’s Writer’s Harvest. Please support us in the fight against hunger by bringing a donation of dried pasta or rice to support Second Helpings.

Nikky Finney has authored four books of poetry: Head Off & Split (2011); The World Is Round (2003); Rice (1995); and On Wings Made of Gauze (1985). The John H. Bennett Jr. Chair in Southern Letters and Literature at the University of South Carolina, Finney also authored Heartwood (1997), a collection of four interrelated stories. She edited The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets. Finney’s fourth book of poetry, Head Off & Split, was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for poetry.

 

imgresJoyce Carol Oates
Monday, September 28, 7:30 p.m.
Clowes Memorial Hall

Writer’s Harvest- This reading is part of Butler’s Writer’s Harvest. Please support us in the fight against hunger by bringing a donation of dried pasta or rice to support Second Helpings.

Over the decades, Joyce Carol Oates has established herself as a highly prolific scribe, who has written dozens of books including novels, short story collections, young adult fiction, plays, poetry, and essays. Her first published book, the 1963 story collection By the North Gate, was followed by her debut novel, With Shuddering Fall, in 1964.

Other notable works among many include National Book Award winner, Them (1969), a layered chronicling of urban life that was part of Oates’ Wonderland Quartet series, and her 26th novel, We Were the Mulvaneys (1996),  an Oprah Winfrey Book Club selection about an unraveling family. The novels The Falls (2004) and The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007) were both New York Times bestsellers. 2012’s Patricide was published as an e-book novella. Oates has also written suspense novels under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.

Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1978, Oates has won scores of awards over the course of her career, including the Prix Femina Etranger and the Pushcart Prize. Her story collection Lovely, Dark, Deep—tales told from many rungs of the social ladder and distinguished by their intelligence, language, and technique—was a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year.

17707975-largeGerald Stern and Anne Marie Macari
Tuesday, October 6, 7:30 pm
Howard L. Schrott Center for the Arts

Gerald Stern’s books of poetry include Divine Nothingness: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2014); In Beauty Bright: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2012); Early Collected Poems: 1965–1992 (W. W. Norton, 2010); Save the Last Dance: Poems (2008); Everything Is Burning (2005); American Sonnets (2002); Last Blue: Poems (2000); This Time: New and Selected Poems (1998), which won the National Book Award; Odd Mercy (1995); and Bread Without Sugar (1992), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. His honors include the Paris Review’s Bernard F. Conners Award, the Bess Hokin Award from Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Prize, four National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Pennsylvania Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2005, Stern was selected to receive the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry.

Anne Marie Macari is the author of four books of poetry, including Red Deer in 2015. Some of the poems in Red Deer are about Macari’s experiences in the painted Ice Age caves in France and Spain. Her book Ivory Cradle won the APR/Honickman First Book Prize in 2000. Her second book, Gloryland (2005), was followed by She Heads Into the Wilderness (Autumn House, 2008). Macari’s poems and essays have appeared in many magazines and anthologies. She founded the Drew MFA Program in Poetry & Poetry in Translation and has been on the board of Alice James Books since 2004. She won the James Dickey Prize for Poetry from Five Points magazine in 2005 and the MacDowell Fellowship in 2010.

imgres-1Laila Lalami
Tuesday, October 13, 7:30 p.m.
Atherton Union, Reilly Room

Laila Lalami is the author of the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; Secret Son, which was on the Orange Prize longlist, and The Moor’s Account, which was a New York Times Notable Book, a Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year, a nominee for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Guardian, The New York Times, and in many anthologies. Her work has been translated into 10 languages. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship. Lalami is a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside.

imgres-1Denis Johnson
Wednesday, November 11, 7:30 p.m.
Atherton Union, Reilly Room

An award-winning novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, Denis Johnson is the author of numerous novels, including Fiskadoro (1985); Tree of Smoke, winner of the 2007 National Book Award; and Nobody Move (2009). Jesus’ Son (1992), his collection of short stories, was made into a movie of the same name. Johnson’s latest novel, The Laughing Monsters, was released in November.

Johnson, who typically writes about people on the margins of society, published his first collection of poems, The Man Among the Seals (1969), at the age of 20. Subsequent collections include Inner Weather (1976), The Incognito Lounge and Other Poems (1982), and The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New (1995). He has received a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction and a Whiting Writers’ Award.

imgres-2Dean Young
Monday, November 16, 7:30 pm
Robertson Hall, Johnson Board Room

Poet Dean Young, who earned his MFA from Indiana University, is recognized as one of the most energetic, influential poets writing today. His numerous collections of poetry include Strike Anywhere (1995), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry; Skid (2002), finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Elegy on Toy Piano (2005), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Primitive Mentor (2008), shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. He has also written a book on poetics, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction (2010).

Young’s awards include the Academy Award in Literature, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His poems have been featured in Best American Poetry numerous times.

Fall 2015 Visiting Writers Series

An award-winning group of writers is coming to Butler University this fall as part of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series.

The events begin with National Book Award-winning poet Nikky Finney on September 14, followed by prose writer Joyce Carol Oates (September 28), poets Gerald Stern and Anne Marie Macari (October 6), novelist Laila Lalami (October 13), novelist Denis Johnson (November 11), and poet Dean Young (November 17).

Oates, Stern, Lalami, and Young have been Pulitzer Prize finalists. Finney, Macari, and Johnson are National Book Award winners.

All events in the series are free and open to the public without tickets. Both of the September readings are part of Butler’s Writer’s Harvest. Please support us in the fight against hunger by bringing a donation of dried pasta or rice to the Finney and Oats readings to support Second Helpings. In addition to accepting donations at the readings, we will have collection boxes at the Efroymson Center for Creative Writing and the English Department, JH308, for the entire month of September.

For more information, call 317-940-9861.

 

nikkyfinneyNikky Finney
Monday, September 14, 7:30 p.m.
Clowes Memorial Hall, Krannert Room

Writer’s Harvest- This reading is part of Butler’s Writer’s Harvest. Please support us in the fight against hunger by bringing a donation of dried pasta or rice to support Second Helpings.

Nikky Finney has authored four books of poetry: Head Off & Split (2011); The World Is Round (2003); Rice (1995); and On Wings Made of Gauze (1985). The John H. Bennett Jr. Chair in Southern Letters and Literature at the University of South Carolina, Finney also authored Heartwood (1997), a collection of four interrelated stories. She edited The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets. Finney’s fourth book of poetry, Head Off & Split, was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for poetry.

 

imgresJoyce Carol Oates
Monday, September 28, 7:30 p.m.
Clowes Memorial Hall

Writer’s Harvest- This reading is part of Butler’s Writer’s Harvest. Please support us in the fight against hunger by bringing a donation of dried pasta or rice to support Second Helpings.

Over the decades, Joyce Carol Oates has established herself as a highly prolific scribe, who has written dozens of books including novels, short story collections, young adult fiction, plays, poetry, and essays. Her first published book, the 1963 story collection By the North Gate, was followed by her debut novel, With Shuddering Fall, in 1964.

Other notable works among many include National Book Award winner, Them (1969), a layered chronicling of urban life that was part of Oates’ Wonderland Quartet series, and her 26th novel, We Were the Mulvaneys (1996),  an Oprah Winfrey Book Club selection about an unraveling family. The novels The Falls (2004) and The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007) were both New York Times bestsellers. 2012’s Patricide was published as an e-book novella. Oates has also written suspense novels under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.

Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1978, Oates has won scores of awards over the course of her career, including the Prix Femina Etranger and the Pushcart Prize. Her story collection Lovely, Dark, Deep—tales told from many rungs of the social ladder and distinguished by their intelligence, language, and technique—was a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year.

17707975-largeGerald Stern and Anne Marie Macari
Tuesday, October 6, 7:30 pm
Howard L. Schrott Center for the Arts

Gerald Stern’s books of poetry include Divine Nothingness: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2014); In Beauty Bright: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2012); Early Collected Poems: 1965–1992 (W. W. Norton, 2010); Save the Last Dance: Poems (2008); Everything Is Burning (2005); American Sonnets (2002); Last Blue: Poems (2000); This Time: New and Selected Poems (1998), which won the National Book Award; Odd Mercy (1995); and Bread Without Sugar (1992), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. His honors include the Paris Review’s Bernard F. Conners Award, the Bess Hokin Award from Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Prize, four National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Pennsylvania Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2005, Stern was selected to receive the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry.

Anne Marie Macari is the author of four books of poetry, including Red Deer in 2015. Some of the poems in Red Deer are about Macari’s experiences in the painted Ice Age caves in France and Spain. Her book Ivory Cradle won the APR/Honickman First Book Prize in 2000. Her second book, Gloryland (2005), was followed by She Heads Into the Wilderness (Autumn House, 2008). Macari’s poems and essays have appeared in many magazines and anthologies. She founded the Drew MFA Program in Poetry & Poetry in Translation and has been on the board of Alice James Books since 2004. She won the James Dickey Prize for Poetry from Five Points magazine in 2005 and the MacDowell Fellowship in 2010.

imgres-1Laila Lalami
Tuesday, October 13, 7:30 p.m.
Atherton Union, Reilly Room

Laila Lalami is the author of the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; Secret Son, which was on the Orange Prize longlist, and The Moor’s Account, which was a New York Times Notable Book, a Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year, a nominee for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Guardian, The New York Times, and in many anthologies. Her work has been translated into 10 languages. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship. Lalami is a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside.

imgres-1Denis Johnson
Wednesday, November 11, 7:30 p.m.
Atherton Union, Reilly Room

An award-winning novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, Denis Johnson is the author of numerous novels, including Fiskadoro (1985); Tree of Smoke, winner of the 2007 National Book Award; and Nobody Move (2009). Jesus’ Son (1992), his collection of short stories, was made into a movie of the same name. Johnson’s latest novel, The Laughing Monsters, was released in November.

Johnson, who typically writes about people on the margins of society, published his first collection of poems, The Man Among the Seals (1969), at the age of 20. Subsequent collections include Inner Weather (1976), The Incognito Lounge and Other Poems (1982), and The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New (1995). He has received a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction and a Whiting Writers’ Award.

imgres-2Dean Young
Monday, November 16, 7:30 pm
Robertson Hall, Johnson Board Room

Poet Dean Young, who earned his MFA from Indiana University, is recognized as one of the most energetic, influential poets writing today. His numerous collections of poetry include Strike Anywhere (1995), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry; Skid (2002), finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Elegy on Toy Piano (2005), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Primitive Mentor (2008), shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. He has also written a book on poetics, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction (2010).

Young’s awards include the Academy Award in Literature, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His poems have been featured in Best American Poetry numerous times.

Welcome New MFA Students

The MFA program is excited to welcome the newest class of writers to the Butler community. Courses begin Wednesday, August 27th, but as current students will attest, the Butler’s MFA program extends beyond workshops and electives.

The following are a few ways to get involved, connect with the writing community, and get the most from Butler’s MFA experience.

1. Attend the MFA Welcome Back Celebration

This Saturday, August 22nd, join faculty, staff, and all students at the Efroymson Center for Creative Writing. The party is truly a celebration of new students as well as a fun social event to catch up on summer news. Be sure to ask Mike Dahlie and Allison Lynn about the adventures at their Chamonix workshop or ask a student from Dan Barden’s Story Structure class about their victory at the Brew Pub’s Trivia Night this summer. The Welcome Back Celebration is from 3-6 and includes snacks.

2. Attend Visiting Writers Events

Butler’s Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writer’s series is incomparable. Big names in literature, prize-winning poets, and popular writers appear on campus to give public readings. There are usually six writers every semester across all genres. The writers meet with MFA students  at the ECCW for an informal Q&A. Here, you can get writing advice straight from the mouths of our writing heroes. A complete list of dates and times is forthcoming.

3. Read for Booth or Pressgang

Reading for Booth, Butler’s lit mag, or Pressgang, Butler’s small press, gives students the experience of seeing how books are made from the beginning. Learn how submissions are chosen, be a part of the discussion on what makes a work successful, and then bask in the glory of a beautiful book with your name on the inside cover. Round table discussions are once a month. In addition to great debates about good writing, the round tables also involve good food, friendship, and plenty of laughter. Although the application deadline for Booth readers for this year has passed, keep your eye out for special reading periods, Pressgang’s next project, or talk to a current reader or Editor Rob Stapleton to learn how and why to get involved next year.

4. Get Involved with Writing in the Schools

WITS is Butler MFA’s award winning partnership with Indianapolis Public Schools, now housed at Broad Ripple High School, just minutes from campus. WITS seeks to foster the creativity of young writers through mentorship. It is not only an excellent way to gain teaching experience but is also a way to connect with the Indianapolis community and give back. Program director Chris Speckman says, “as a mentor, you are making a difference in the community and in the lives of students. The opportunity to interact with people who come from different backgrounds, to give them the opportunity to succeed in situations where for some students writing is a way to something bigger, something better – to be able to contribute to that journey is the ultimate reward.”

An independent auditor who visited Butler last year touted WITS as a gem of the program. He said that kind of experience is invaluable and makes Butler’s MFA program stand out. Do not miss this opportunity. Visit the WITS website or contact Chris Speckman for more information on how you can get involved.

5. Attend Poetry Luncheons

Designed for poetry readers of all levels, the poetry luncheons are a great way to connect with others in the MFA community and share a common passion – the discussion of words. Our beloved MFA administrator, Mindy Dunn, welcomes all to the casual poetry discussion held twice a month in the ECCW. Mindy will email you the selected poems, provide lunch, and guide the discussion that makes even rookie poetry readers appreciate the beauty of the poems. The first luncheon is Friday, September 11th at 12:30. Please email Mindy Dunn to RSVP.