How Famous is Greg Ames?

Here's something:

A few weeks ago, the DWC hosted Greg Ames as a visiting author, along with Bertha Rogers. Recently, The Believer polled readers on the best works of fiction published in 2009.

Who's at the top of the list?

Greg Ames, that's who.

Scroll down to discover who he beat out: Colum McCann, Lorrie Moore, and Thomas Pynchon, just to name a few.

Now, if you missed Greg's reading, you can officially start kicking yourself.

Visiting Author Lynn Levin Reviewed at Gently Read Lit

Check out the February issue of Gently Read Lit, in which Michelle Moore offers a fabulous review of Lynn Levin's Fair Creatures of an Hour. If you don't already subscribe to Gently Read Lit, do yourself a favor, and stroll around the grounds a bit.

Between the Ordinary & the Ecstatic: Michelle Moore on Lynn Levin’s Fair Creatures of an Hour

See you tomorrow night for Lynn's reading. 7pm!

Interview with Lynn Levin

Writer, poet and translator, Lynn Levin, whose third book of poems, Fair Creatures of an Hour was released from Loonfeather Press in 2009, reads at the DWC on Friday, May 7th at 7:00.

Read part one of The Examiner interview with Levin here.

In this part, Levin answers the Keats question, when she became a poet, and who else (besides Keats) has influenced her.

. . . and in part two, confesses her own obsession with poems.

See you downtown!

Two Reminders

Spring classes begin next week with offerings in poetry, fiction, drama and non-fiction -- and there's still room in every workshop. Please check out the schedule and sign up soon!

Wondering where to park when you come to the DWC? You're not alone. Parking is probably our second most asked question. Here's the run down of where and how:

Street parking. There are plenty of meters on Montgomery Street, starting at Washington Street (near City Hall and L'Adour) all the way to where Montgomery ends at Jefferson Street. There are also meters on Jefferson, Warren, and around Columbus Circle -- in front of the Cathedral and the Court House, and down East Onondaga Street. Meters are free after 6:00.

Open paid lots. There are two open lots near the Downtown YMCA. One at the corner of Montgomery and Fayette, across from St. Paul's Cathedral, and one on East Onondaga, across from the Syracuse Diocese Offices.

Parking garages. The parking garage directly behind the YMCA on Warren Street has a walk through entrance to the Y. Please note that this entrance will be closed the first week of classes, and if you choose to park in this garage, you will need to walk around the block to the front entrance of the Y on Montgomery St. After May 2nd, renovations to the back entrance will be complete, and you may use the walk through again. There is also a garage on the corner of Fayette and Montgomery (with an entrance on Fayette).

And one last reminder . . . Please join us Friday April 23rd at 7pm for poets DeLana Dameron and Jane Springer. Now that you know where to park, you can't use that excuse.

See you downtown!

Steve Almond on AWP

While you're waiting for the DWC roundup on AWP in Denver last week, please check out visiting author Steve Almond's reflections on Things to Do in Denver When You're Braindead, via The Rumpus.

Bright Hill Press

The DWC invites you to check out Bright Hill Press and Literary Center's workshops, readings, books and special programs, including their awesome NYS Literary Website and Map:

Bright Hill Press is a not-for-profit literary organization and press in Treadwell dedicated to literary excellence through its programs—Word Thursdays, the Catskill reading series, now in its 13th year; Share the Words High-School Poetry Competition and Mentoring Program, 10 years; Radio by Writers, 11 years; the all-new Bright Hill Library and Internet Wing, featuring literary prose and poetry, art, and children's books.

Please join us next week for a reading by Bertha Rogers -- Bright Hill Press's founder and executive director!

In the meantime, stay tuned for DWC dispatches from this year's AWP conference in Denver, CO!

Fooling around with the Practice of Poetry

April is National Poetry Month!

Please join the DWC along with The Zen Center of Syracuse and Syracuse University Graduate Student Organization and Student Buddhist Association for a reading by Chase Twichell tomorrow at 7:30 in the Hall of Languages. Here the DWC brings you one of Chase's favorite writing exercises, from her book The Practice of Poetry:

Twenty Little Poetry Projects

by Jim Simmerman

1. Begin the poem with a metaphor.
2. Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
3. Use at least one image for each of the five sense, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
4. Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).
5. Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
6. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
7. Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
8. Use a word (slang?) you've never seen in a poem.
9. Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
10. Use a piece of "talk" you've actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don't understand).
11. Create a metaphor using the following construction: "The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun) . . . "
12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
13. Make the persona or character in the poem do something he/she could not do in "real life."
14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
15. Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
16. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
17. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.
18. Use a phrase from a language other than English.
19. Make a nonhuman object say or do something human (personification).
20. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that "echoes" an image from earlier in the poem.

Open the poem with the first project and close it with the last. Otherwise use the projects in whatever order you like, giving each project at least one line. Try to use all twenty projects. Feel free to repeat those you like. Fool around. Enjoy.

The Practice of Poetry, Robin Behn and Chase Twichell, eds. c. 1992. Used by permission of the author.

The Imaginarium of Matt Hart

by Georgia Popoff

Reading Matt Hart’s poetry, I find myself negotiating undercurrents of a “normal life:” the job, the baby, the wife, the dog who definitely wants to move faster than her human, the confusion of a morning started too early; all of the elements of a life reaching middle stages, all its trappings but no ordinary observations wending into typical narrative form here.

Matt Hart agrees to let us witness the Venn Diagram of his inner thoughts, where his love of language meets his rock-n-roll heart. Coffee and the paper are not enough. I am reminded that there is a period of rock-n-roll I missed. Matt has archived that era for himself, and the blare of punk seeps through as he wanders an interior landscape, where the topography is constructed of fanciful images and the orchestration of the poet’s daily query to establish place, create meaning, dispel wonder. He is also bold enough to resurrect the poetic “O” and get away with it.

He risks our meddling. His reader has a spyglass of Matt’s specifications to witness the confusion a man feels when suddenly he looks around at his own trappings to see a world he created and, at the same time, stumbled into without realizing. Take, for instance, these lines:

Tonight the sun is shining, and I am joyful,
but why? The world is weird wired
and white as hydrangeas. I am joyful
in my blue plaid mind, even as I think
terrible thoughts against my wife,
my daughter, the leaders of my country.
There is no end to my terrible joy.
I am like a wolf with an egg in its mouth,
the yolk running over its mad lip curling.

The poet is not about to stray from his family’s routine but still there is a dark foreboding. He is at ease in his station as professor yet I hear a challenge in his poems, a slow rumbling of “Why are you listening to ME?” In the midst of this ongoing questioning of the universe, the magic realism never ceases to amaze Matt.

His is a world influenced by the masters who have gone before him, not just the sparse Zen of Philip Whelan or the angst of Johnny Rotten, but the singsong of Dr. Seuss, the acid touch of Lewis Carroll. There is the craft of the finest and the storm of a summer night. The Bootsy bassline and the order of a Wordsworth garden. Every poem gives me reason to stop, read it phrase by phrase, question the song of wind chime in late winter, challenge my own poetry to a duel of fascination.

As I sit in a seeming silence, the timer for the living room light to fool the potential interlopers ticking a frantic pulse, the late winter breeze outside creating a random etude, my coffee growing cold too quickly in my cup, I think maybe, just perhaps, I get it. Matt will let me know on Friday, as he breathes these words into air.

Don't miss Matt Hart and Nate Pritts at the DWC Friday night, 7 pm.

Georgia Popoff is a well-traveled teaching artist, community poet and currently serves as interim managing editor for Comstock Review. She is definitely someone you should know.

Calm Poem

by visiting author, Matt Hart, who can also be found here.

1.

Several years ago I was in a poetry workshop with Tony Hoagland. During a one-on-one meeting about my work, he noted all the noise and disruption in my poems—all the feedback and chaos—and said “Here’s what I want you to do: write a calm poem and call it “Calm Poem.” Make every line a line of clarity and tranquility.” He said that, or something like it... Anyway, his point was that I was garbling what I wanted/needed to say, clouding the issues in a lot of unnecessary roughness—sabotaging myself with fireworks—which are maybe thrilling for a few minutes, but don’t last very long. Somehow I needed to find a way to keep the lights on in my work, even if what it illuminated was completely weird and chaotic.

Here’s the poem I wrote:

Calm Poem

Of all the calm poems I've written

This calm poem

is definitely my favorite.

It came at the end of a calamitous day—

I couldn’t remember what to say

during a lecture.

I cried while reading

a philosophical preface.

When I looked in the mirror

I saw pieces of a bluejay

and the world turned

my stomach

in the gathering dust.

Forget it, said the poem.

Now you’re safe at home.

Many people love you.

No need to create a scene.

No need to punctuate

the roar of the page.

Go to sleep and dream

you’re a giant paper snowflake.

There is nothing to be afraid of.

2.

What’s interesting to me is that traveling around giving readings and teaching workshops, I often hear people expressing a desire to make their poems wilder, stranger, more surprising and dynamic. Almost never have I heard someone wishing to make their poems calm down and behave. And yet, aren’t there occasions when staying calm is the most surprising and weird thing of all? As a result of this exercise, I have come to believe, even though I’m not always capable of acting on it, that to say a thing plainly and deliberately with clarity—with calm—is among the most poetic (i.e. surprising, strange and depth-charged) ways of saying anything.

With this in mind, I’ve adapted Tony’s assignment to me as one I sometimes use with my own students, especially when they’re being weird for weird’s sake and seem to have more on their minds than mere weirdness. This is how I put it to them:

Write a Calm Poem. In fact, use Calm Poem as the title, so that when we gather round the table next week we can survey the varieties and vagaries of calmness. Is calm merely the opposite of calamity? Is it a warm bath? Is it listening to Coltrane (the early stuff) with the lights down low? Is it chicken soup and sickness and clouds overhead? For some of you it may be soccer, and for others, a Sunday Stroll. For still others, what’s calm is a hardcore band for breakfast. I don’t have any particular designs on calmness (I’m barely calm at all). I’m looking for the truth; I’m looking for a world to kick back in, some place to have myself a bottle of wine, some place with a view of the ocean. Remember, too, that what’s calm in a poem may have nothing to do with its content. Calmness may be the result of purely formal maneuvers—the lengths of your lines, the kinds of stanzas you use, the way you arrange the words (and the white spaces) on the page. Pacing may be everything. What does calmness mean to you and/or how does it go down in language? Be steady, breathe easy, take yourselves away. Nobody panic. Stay as steady and calm as you possibly can. There are a million emergencies to contend with, and someone has to feel at home in them.

TWO MORE CALM EXAMPLES

Here’s one by my friend Nate Pritts that’s incredible for its steadfast attentiveness to the moment and also for the way it manages chaos—that’s what calm is in a sense managing chaos in the moment:

Calm Poem

It’s November 15th, 2009, & I’ve never been

Nate Pritts today. I’m 35 with about two months

tacked on & I’m taking your advice. Early

morning & there’s a halo of helicopters

harrowing the blue, sending word through the

static about the crowded intersections—

all that crosstown traffic—& I stepped

right in front of the car. I knew the speed.

I don’t care if it’s calm. It’s okay if it’s calamity.

Early morning & the buzz is circling my head

like a certainty. Three or four times a day,

I feel like I’m about to get shot out of myself,

like there’s a vibration approaching catastrophe

& I need to run. I’m thinking of language

like it’s something delicate I can hold in my hand.

I’m worried this might break. Early morning

& I don’t care if it’s starless. It’s okay that it’s

endless but full of endings. It’s November 15th,

it’s 2009, it’s me taking your advice because I’m

left without my normal faith in talk, that I could

fill a room with voice & tip the scales.

So hard to get through to you isn’t something

I’m saying but something I feel & the you isn’t

you. I don’t care if it’s indeterminate. It’s okay

that it’s not referential. Early morning & sun

gathers slowly in the clouds. November 15th

& I’m Nate Pritts right now more than ever &

the trees are already empty. It’s not fall

in Syracuse. It’s not fall; it’s fell. It’s exquisitely

dark. It’s this terrible. It’s this fierce destructive.

It’s the end of my favorite season ever & the beginning

of my dark poetry & I don’t care if it’s dark

as long as there’s light. It’s okay that I’m on my knees

to restart the fire as the damp wind whips

tumultuous & elegant. My faith is that more & more

will outweigh the less & less, that an I & a you

accumulates. I’m trying to be calm with the bomb

in my hand because it seems right to pretend

I don’t hear it counting down to one from two.

And this one’s by a former student of mine, Scott Dennis, who of course found a way through the assignment to something marvelously SCOTT DENNIS:

Calm

These are the tricks that make us calm:

The last bits of light

burn images of peace

into my skin.

I dream of dream-catchers

and of things salvaged.

I dream of things primitive

and of communication.

Ritual stimulates

me to my grave,

where the shaman takes me

and helps me survey the wreckage,

where my hands will not reach

my weaponry and my

face melts off my skull.

The only thing you have to lose in an exercise like this is pretense and the chains of expectation, but what you have to gain is something clearly and radiantly yourself.

Matt Hart is the author of two full length books of poetry, Who’s Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006) and You Are Mist (Moor Books, forth coming), as well as numerous chapbooks. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety, Matt teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

This Brand New Treasure: Nate Pritts' Wonderfull Yeare

by Jack Davis

Yesterday, in an delicate box, perhaps a hundred years old, I found a copy of a book called The Wonderfull Yeare – A Shepherd’s Calendar by Nate Pritts. I may not have given it a second thought, but it was a book of poems.

And, as I thumbed through the leaves, the poet Pritts took me to another place; one of Chaplinesque nimbleness, dusky form and shadowed structures. Mr. Pritts sculpted golems of transitive vision with pinched flesh on bent knees in quiet prayer. And these prayers cast seed of private virtue and personal need to secluded places warm and moist.

He traced the cracks of reason and mercy with a voice as articulate as his perspective. Some poems, like the “Sonnets for the fall,” left lasting impressions in mourning mud. Nate proclaims that even the thinning light finds cricket sounds, but no leaves.

I must say it was a real pleasure to find this brand new treasure in that delicate old box. As the last several years have left us all on the cusp of some dangerously poor poetry, it is a delight that Nate Pritts has saved us a few pages of real art.

The Wonderfull Yeare by Nate Pritts has found print because it had a choice. Nate is going places, but don’t fool yourself, this book is about where he’s been.

Jack Davis is a DWC student, poet, and all around cool guy.

Greg Ames Reading Friday CANCELLED

DWC Fans,

Have you noticed the snow?

Unfortunately, the heavy snow and wind up and down the east coast has made travel between NYC, Binghamton and Syracuse near impossible. We're sorry to announce that the Greg Ames reading scheduled for Friday, 2/26 at 7 pm has been cancelled.

As we hope to reschedule, we'll keep you posted on any developments.

In the meantime, stay in, stay warm, read a good book. Might we recommend Buffalo Lockjaw?

Rust Wire Interview with Greg Ames

Please join us Friday, February 26th at 7pm for a reading by award-winning novelist Greg Ames.

And in the meantime, check out this interview with Greg for Rust Wire.

See you downtown!

Word Replacement

by Santee Frazier : http://santeefrazier.com

This morning the DWC blog brings you an exclusive writing exercise from visiting author, Santee Frazier. Please join us on Friday for Santee's reading, 7pm at the DWC!

When I find myself not moved by voice, memory, or music, instead of staring at the computer screen, I type out one of my favorite poems. The act of typing accomplishes two things: you get to know the formal considerations of the poet (how they navigated the page), and you gain an intimate relationship with the text. After I have typed the poem I look for artistry, meter, phrasing, etc.... I really don't spend much time deciphering the poem being that interpretation plays little or no role in how this exercise conducts itself. From there I find all of the nouns in the poem, writing out a list, then I pull out my dictionary and begin replacing only the nouns (I usually don't replace the verbs being that I want to keep the structure of the poem).

This exercise will yield varying results depending on how much effort goes in the act of replacing the nouns. I find the best results come when I spend a great deal of time researching then replacing the nouns, rather than using the first word that pops into my head (usually a synonym pops up, boring). For instance using words related to anthropology will drastically change the poem’s meter and tone.

First start out with a short poem, and then slowly build up to something longer (the longest I have tried was Jorie Graham's "What the End is For"). Most of the poems will not be keepers, but the exercise helps build skill set and sharpens your abilities to glean poetry for reasons other than explication.

Rather than becoming frustrated and abandoning your daily writing ritual you can practice this exercise. After a few tries you will notice interesting things happening when the words juxtaposeand begin creating language.

Santee Frazier is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. He holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Syracuse University. His poems have appeared in American Poet, Narrative Magazine, Ontario Review, and other literary journals. His first collection of poems Dark Thirty was released by the University of Arizona Press in the spring of 2009.

A Dark Thirty Review

Please join us this Friday, Feb. 5th as the Downtown Writer's Center welcomes poet Santee Frazier, who will read from his debut collection Dark Thirty.

Today the DWC blog features a review of Dark Thirty, written by poet Shin Yu, for Southwestern American Literature.

You can access that review via Shin Yu's blog here.

Tune in again tomorrow & Thursday for more features from Santee Frazier, including an exclusive writing prompt & a conversation between Santee & the DWC's own Georgia Popoff.

5 Questions for Derek Pollard

by Jennifer Pashley : www.jenniferpashley.com

Another new feature on the DWC blog: writers in conversation with other writers. This week, I asked Derek Pollard some questions about art, about music and collaboration. Derek brings his l'autre to the DWC this Friday, Jan 29th, at 7:00 pm, to read from their collaboratively written, Inconsequentia.

Jennifer Pashley: Tell me your top 3 films. Not necessarily the world's top 3; what's good for Pollard?

Derek Pollard: I can never adequately answer questions having to do with lists, particularly when those lists are culturally orientated. In this case, I simply adore film. My favorites begin with the Lumiere brothers and extend through Chaplin and Keaton to Sofia Coppola and Wes Anderson by way of the various international New Waves and independent experimental cinema. If hard pressed, I would say that Casablanca remains the one film I return to with feverish insistence. Films I have recently watched (in some cases for the umpteenth time): Redland, Divorce Italian Style, The Matador, Something's Gotta Give, The Darjeeling Limited, and Lost in Translation.

JP: What visual art moves you?

DP: I am not sure what you mean by "moves" in this case.

JP: I mean what really hits you in the gut, but maybe that's not what visual art does for you. (It's often what it does for me.)

DP: I am interested in any visual artwork that invites me to reconsider myself (or selves) and the world in which I live in light of that artwork's existence, even if that existence is necessarily limited or deliberately ephemeral. I am most attracted to visual artwork that provokes a sense of dislocation, that confronts the viewer with a potential "newness." I suppose, too, that I look for (or, if I am less generous and more accurate, I attempt to impose) analogues between visual artwork and writing, between the various "artistic" media or forms of creative expression, in order to facilitate such productive dislocation.

JP: Tell me (briefly) about your fascination with Dadaism.

DP: Dada is silly. Dada is serious. Dada is seriously silly and sillily serious. If nothing else, Dada is elusive, illusive, allusive, and the like. I like Dada like Dada likes me. We are silly and serious and silly-serious, it and me. Dada, my dear, is a frilly tree.

JP: What are you listening to these days? How important is sound?

DP: Sound is an integral event, space, object, field. I am listening all the time, guided in different directions at different times by its fascinating multiplicities. As for music and organized sound, I have been listening with great joy to Jonathan Schwartz's Saturday and Sunday shows on WNYC, Garrison Keilor's A Prairie Home Companion, Joe Puleo's Air Power, Regina Specktor's album Begin to Hope, a great deal of Muddy Waters, far too many Smiths albums, My Bloody Valentine's album Loveless (on cassette in my car as I drive along the Jersey Shore to and from work), Sir Alec Guniness reading Eliot's "The Wasteland" (also on cassette, also in my car), and all of Galaxy 500's albums.

JP: You're a proponent of collaboration in a vastly solitary field. Why?

DP: I find collaboration to be an interesting and fecund way to disorient myself, to interrupt and refashion my own compositional (or recording?) strategies. It provides opportunities for interventions that might not arise if I were merely writing individually - if one can ever be said to write "individually," that is. I like the explicit acknowledgment of the confusion between the singular and the plural during the collaborative process, between the "I" and the "we." For instance, I am very much intrigued by the fact that in several cases in the "22 23" section of Inconsequentia, Henderson and I can no longer remember who authored which poem. In those cases, the poem itself has displaced us as individual authors, insisting that we set aside such distinctions in favor of other, perhaps more productive, considerations.

Jennifer Pashley is a fiction instructor and the workshops coordinator for The Downtown Writer's Center. She is the author of the story collection States, and has had stories appear in Mississippi Review, Los Angeles Review and SWINK.

Cento

This morning, the DWC brings you the first of its Wednesday writing prompts and exercises. Everyone's got their favorites — prompts that produce a surprising piece of writing — and we've asked our instructors, our visiting authors and our students to share what's worked for them, what really gets the pen moving. This week, we're featuring the Cento, a favorite of DWC instructor and visiting author, Derek Pollard.

Over the years and at all levels of teaching — from primary school to advanced creative writing workshops — I have had tremendous success with the cento as a simultaneous reading and writing exercise that helps define and contextualize "authorship," collaboration, and self-reflexive creative praxis. Below is the definition of cento as it appears on The Academy of American Poets website:

From the Latin word for "patchwork," the cento is a poetic form made up of lines from poems by other poets. Though poets often borrow lines from other writers and mix them in with their own, a true cento is composed entirely of lines from other sources. Early examples can be found in the work of Homer and Virgil.

Generally, I will invite a group of students to contribute a single line from a text of their choosing (the texts need not be "literary" nor do they need belong to one particular genre) to add to a line I have selected at random from a text. This new collaborative text expands until all the "authors" agree to end the project. In some cases, no order of contributors is observed; in other cases, no "author" can contribute two consecutive lines. The constraints vary depending on the course and the students. As one example, for a cento begun as part of my DWC course last winter, I myself would add lines only from texts written by female authors. I did not impose this constraint on the other "authors," but I suspect that each of us was bringing one or more of these independently determined constraints to the project. The one rule that must be followed in all cases is this: the "authors" cannot include any writing original to themselves or to their collaborators, and all lines must be documented so that we have a record of the source texts. Lines can be selected at random, based on numerical or mathematical formulae, etc. The texts generated in this way pose many critically productive challenges to the concepts mentioned above ("authorship," collaboration, reading-writing) that we discuss in relation to the text itself.

Derek Pollard's work has appeared in American Book Review, Colorado Review, Pleiades, Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak, and Zoland Poetry. He is Managing Editor of Barrow Street Press, and co-author with Derek Henderson of the poetry collection, Inconsequentia (BlazeVOX 2009).

FISH! On Working with Derek Pollard

by Daniel Reinhold: www.danielreinhold.com

The DWC's very own Derek Pollard will return for a reading with Derek Henderson this Friday. Derek Pollard received his MFA from the University of Utah, and has twenty-seven muses: a practice common in that state. He is a student of the experimental and has widely diverse influences from John Cage to Lao Tsu from the Italian futurists to Brian Eno. He is interested in random composition. He has been known to throw things out of windows. Cut up pieces of old letters, severed fish heads, and once after a long night of alleged inebriation, his jockey shorts. He later named them Ode to Fruit of the Loom.

Derek’s poetry is clean, poignant, and sparse. It is often accessible. A term he clearly despises.

He has performed experimental readings previously at the DWC, once having three poets read simultaneously. Another time he orchestrated five poets reading randomly from texts. One poet read off book and intermittently shouted the word “fish.” Reportedly the poet was in the throes of a two-week ether binge. Pollard, reeking of chemicals, denied any such allegations.

Derek is returning to Syracuse after having been imprisoned in New Jersey. A condition clearly preferable to living freely in New Jersey. He spends his time hanging out in shopping malls watching girls with big hair, and drinking Orange Julius’s.

His return to Syracuse has raised ardent protest from the Daughters of the American Revolution for undisclosed reasons. The reading is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served. Wine, cheese and fresh severed fish heads.

Daniel Reinhold's work has appeared in several galleries throughout Maryland and New York. He is currently a DWC PRO student in poetry. He lives in Ithaca, NY with his dog Zelda, in a tree-surrounded studio within sight of Cayuga Lake.

Short Bursts of Brilliance: Course Spotlight on Visiting Authors

by Elizabeth Twiddy : www.elizabethtwiddy.com

I’m thrilled to be teaching the DWC’s first Visiting Authors course this Winter Term. We, the DWC faculty, put our heads together and decided that a course like this, taught each term by a different instructor, would greatly benefit ourselves and our students, alike. So, what is it? Why’s it so great?

The authors that come to read for our DWC series are among the best in the country and the world. We want to maximize what we take from these gems—these short bursts of brilliance that share a room with us once in a while.

We realized that it’s not always easy to grasp what an author is saying when he or she reads aloud: creative works of writing are dense, and they’re not usually 100% accessible the first time around, especially when they’re only heard and not seen. We want to be right there with our Visiting Authors when they come to read their fabulous works at the DWC—we want to get the maximum possible out of those special readings. That’s where the Visiting Authors course comes in: before each reading, our class will meet for an hour to discuss a sampling of that author’s work so that we can all better benefit from the reading.

I’m honored and excited to be teaching the first round of the Visiting Authors course. We have a fabulous line-up this term: poets Derek Pollard and Derek Henderson will read from their co-authored collection; Santee Frazier will read from highly acclaimed his first book of poems; Steve Almond will read from his fiction and nonfiction; Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon will read from her collections of poetry; Greg Ames will read from his new award-winning novel; and poets Nate Pritts and Matt Hart will read together from their various and respective books of poems.

Classes begin next week, and there’s still room left in the course: sign up now!

See you at the DWC!

Elizabeth Twiddy’s first collection of poems is Love-Noise (Standing Stone Books, 2010). She has a chapbook, Zoo Animals in the Rain (Turtle Ink Press, 2009), and her poems have appeared in many journals, including Barrow Street, POOL, The Alembic, Two Rivers Review, and the Australian journal Skive.

Drenched in Lightning Bugs

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. ~Mark Twain

Welcome to The Downtown Writer's Center blog . . . our home away from the official YMCA website and your source for news & updates on classes, book reviews of visiting authors, craft essays & writing prompts.

If you're new to the Downtown Writer's Center, click over to party central for the scoop on this season's classes, our Friday Night Reading Series & all the other brouhaha we have in store.

If you're on Facebook, consider clicking over & becoming a "fan" of our erstwhile dream factory.

Thinking of taking a winter workshop? There's still time to register!

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. ~Hart Crane

Classes begin Jan. 25th, and feature a full range of workshops, from beginning right up to advanced. Be sure to check out our newest classes: Visiting Authors, which meets each Friday night before readings at the DWC, from Jan. 29 thru March 6. And don't miss out on Silence in the Snowy Fields: Writing About Weather & Place with Nate Pritts. We have to live here . . . we might as well write about it.

Stay tuned for more faculty spotlights, book reviews and writing prompts.

Write more. Write better. Write here. Write now.