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AWP 2009, and a Happy Ending from an AWP 2008 Rejection

by Erika Dreifus on
2

I know: It’s an exciting day here in the USA. But whatever happens at the polls, life will go on. Which means, among other things, that the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) will continue to hold conferences, and writers will continue to need work. (Keep reading–you’ll see the connections soon enough.)

AWP has recently posted the schedule for its next conference, slated for February 2009 in Chicago. I’m actually going to take a raincheck (or snowcheck, as the case may be) and skip the festivities this year. But it’s always interesting to see which proposals survived to the final program, and which writers will be participating.

Since the start the twenty-first century, I’ve been a part of three “successful” panel proposals— and more than three that AWP turned down. For last winter’s 2008 conference, which was held in New York, my would-be co-panelists and I thought we had come up with a terrific idea: a panel on nonteaching job opportunities for writers in colleges and universities. The five of us, all MFA grads, are employed in postsecondary institutions in writing-intensive positions. AWP says that it’s interested in conference proposals on “career advancement,” including “jobs within and outside academe,” and we thought we had a fresh and useful take on the subject.

Well, the AWP Conference powers-that-were must have seen it differently. They rejected our proposal. That’s when Stubborn Erika (“The Taurus”), supported by the others, decided to take the idea elsewhere.

I approached my editors at The Writer magazine with an article pitch. You may have seen the result, “MFA Grads Find Nonteaching Jobs on Campus,” in the November 2008 issue. The article is (if I may say so myself) chock full of insights from Matt O’Donnell (MFA in poetry, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro; currently associate editor, Bowdoin Magazine); Gregg Rosenblum (MFA in fiction, Emerson College; currently editor, Office of Career Services, Harvard University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences); Margaret von Steinen (MFA in poetry, Western Michigan University; currently Prague Summer Program coordinator and communications officer for WMU’s Diether H. Haenicke Institute for Global Education); and Gabriel Welsch (MFA in fiction, The Pennsylvania State University; currently assistant vice president for marketing, Juniata College).

And if you haven’t caught the article in The Writer, well, today is your lucky day! You can now find the text on my Web site as well. Just click here and scroll down to the “MFA Grads Find Nonteaching Jobs on Campus” link. Enjoy!

Paris Note #2: Word Games

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

As I’ve mentioned already, I spent last week participating in the Paris Writers Workshop. Not only was I lucky enough to receive a Patricia Painton Scholarship to help with that nasty exchange rate, but I also won a prize in another conference-related event!

Last Friday night we celebrated the close of the week, and the 20th year of the conference, and 10 years of co-director Marcia Lèbre’s service to the program (Marcia is pictured to the left), with a “Surrealist Dinner” on the rue Racine. And in keeping with the evening’s theme, we all joined in a game of “Cadavres exquis” (“Exquisite corpse”).

I wish I still had the directions that we received, but since I don’t, I’ll rely on Wikipedia to provide a decent enough substitute:

Exquisite corpse (also known as “exquisite cadaver” or “rotating corpse”) is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled, the result being known as the exquisite corpse or cadavre exquis in French. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. “The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun”) or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed.

and

The technique was invented by Surrealists in 1925, and is similar to an old parlour game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Henry Miller often partook of the game to pass time in French cafes during the 1930s.

It’s a lot like Mad Libs, just without the intervening printed words. You come up with ALL the words yourselves. The first team member might be told to write down a pronoun. The folded paper goes to the next person, who is instructed to come up with an adjective. And so on.

At our table, my new friends (and workshop classmates) Jill and Karen formed one team; Jill’s husband and I made up another. Jill and Karen’s exquisite creation (“Our fertile kidneys festered like clockwork”) captured first prize; the one that emerged from my collaboration with Mr. Jill (“Her French mustache jumps where no one else could see”) was the first runner-up!

It was an amusing and appropriate way to end a week at the Paris Writers Workshop!

The prizes: books (bien sûr!).

Paris Note #1: (Un)Assigned Reading

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

So, as you know, I spent last week in Paris, attending the Paris Writers Workshop. It was a wonderful week on so many levels: revisiting my beloved city; catching up with a dear friend who happened to be there at the same time; focusing on the possibility of turning something that hasn’t quite worked as a short story into a novel; and establishing what promise to be a couple of long-lasting friendships with others in my workshop.

That workshop, billed as a “Master Class” in the novel, also included discussion of two assigned novels: Andrei Makine’s Dreams of My Russian Summers, and James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime. Before I left New York I expected that after my return I might write here about one (or both) of those books, and the workshop analyses of them. But rather than write about either of those fine works of fiction, I want to tell you instead about the essay collection I read while I was away: William Styron’s Havanas in Camelot. Because, quite simply, I loved it.

Actually, I’ve mentioned this book here before. And it’s doubtful that I can do as good a job of writing about it as “Oronte” already has.

So all I’ll say is this: I found it nearly impossible to put this book down (and fortunately, due to its slender size, I didn’t need to do so very often). Its appeal wasn’t, I think, simply a matter of my longtime admiration for the author of Sophie’s Choice, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Darkness Visible. In many ways, Styron was a witness to history, and his accounts of everything from his presence at “what turned out to be possibly the most memorable social event of the Kennedy presidency” to the culture of censorship that surrounded his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (finished, writes Styron, “about two hundred years ago—it was 1951, to be exact”), will capture and hold the attention of any reader remotely interested in the social and cultural history of the United States from World War II forward.

And then, as the mention of his first novel may suggest, the elements of this book based in Styron’s experience as an author among authors proved irresistible for this practicing writer. See especially the pieces grounded in Styron’s friendships with Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Terry Southern (the account of a special VIP tour of the Cook County Jail that Styron and his wife enjoyed in Southern’s company, thanks to the efforts of their Chicago host, Nelson Algren, is unforgettable).

I finished reading Havanas in Camelot early in my Paris week, sad that I’d reached the final page. And sad, once again, that Styron is no longer with us.

(More “Paris Notes” to follow.)

Friday Find: Vacation!

by Erika Dreifus on
1

For the first time since I began working at my full-time “desk job” 17 months ago, I am going on vacation! What’s more, I am going back to one of my all-time favorite cities in the world: PARIS. Even better, I will be attending the Paris Writers Workshop, hopefully jumpstarting a novel from a failed short story (and the icing on the gâteau is that I’ve won a conference scholarship).

I don’t expect to post while I’m away, but I will be sure to report back once I’m home. You can count on our regular posting schedule to resume on Monday, July 14. Meantime, Happy 4th of July to all the American practicing writers out there. À bientôt!

P.S. If you’re looking for more writing/publishing opportunities in my absence, don’t forget that July is SALE MONTH for The Practicing Writer’s Guide to No-Cost Literary Contests and Competitions. Get your copy for a mere $4.95 (50% off the regular price!).

The Wednesday Web Browser: Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, New Munro in the New Yorker, and My Latest CUNY Profile

by Erika Dreifus on
2

If you’ve ever wondered what the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop in Gambier, Ohio, might be like, you’ll want to read these posts by 2008 attendee Kirsten Ogden.
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Not that I’ve had a chance to read it yet, but there’s a new Alice Munro story in the current New Yorker. Any new story by Alice Munro merits mention here!
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Finally, as you may remember, I do get to do some fun feature writing in my job-that-pays-the-bills. Here’s the latest published piece, a profile of James Oakes, a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York and winner of the prestigious Lincoln Prize for his latest book, The Radical and The Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (Norton, 2007).