MFA Creative Writing

Welcome back to our series of interviews with Alumni!

This edition features our dear Renee D’Aoust (’06) (with special appearance by her dachshund Tootsie). Renee came to visit us in February 2013 and read from her memoir Body of a Dancer and shared some of her life and advice with our grad students, but now she’s sharing her knowledge with everyone in this lovely interview!

Read on!

Why did you want to become a writer?

I consciously became a writer because I had been a dancer. As a dancer, I experienced the ephemeral retreating experience of live performance and the spiraling decay of the human body. As such, I wanted to create something bound and physical that would last. I wanted to create a lasting gift, something written and made with glue, which could be held in your hands.

I unconsciously became a writer because my mom was a writer, and in my family we were all, all of us, always writing, always reading, always editing. We left notes for each other. We left notes for our dog. And now, we still edit everything—dinner, poems, conversation, e-mails, the garden, and essays. So the process of writing, of reading, of editing is very much in my family legacy.

Who influenced you and helped your development and how?

My mom. She said, “Butt in chair. Pen in hand. Write.” She was my greatest champion.

What advice do you offer aspiring writers?

Oh dear, forgive me; I have a lot of advice. My husband calls them, “Buzzy’s Helpful Tips.” (Buzzy is my nickname.) Here goes:

It’s your choice to be a writer, so don’t complain. (I’ve recently read that Margaret Atwood says this, too.) Don’t be a jerk. Be professional. Send thank you notes. Practice humility. Practice gratitude.

Buy books from independent bookstores. Buy books from independent presses. Subscribe to literary journals. Always give books as gifts.

Eat a lot of dark chocolate.

Rescue a dog and go on lots of walks. (You’ll need these walks after sitting so long and after eating all the chocolate needed to write a book. You’ll need the fur therapy and companionship a dog offers).

What my mom taught me: “You wouldn’t be late to a job where someone else hired you. Don’t be late to your page.”

Don’t take yourself or your process too seriously. On the other hand, do take everything very seriously. Words matter. Stories matter. You matter.

Do good work. Carry on. Be generous.

Choose one, two, or three of your books and discuss how the idea originated for the finished book.

photo credit: Frank Dina

Body of a Dancer, published by Etruscan Press, started out as a poem (written back in 1997).

I wrote Body of a Dancer because I wanted to record the voices and stories of anonymous, accomplished, unknown dancers, including myself.

If your book was film optioned, which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

God willing! I’d love Body of a Dancer to be film optioned. Fingers crossed. I don’t care who appears, just to get it optioned, then made into a script, and then made into a movie… I mean, zowie.

How long did it take to complete your first draft of your manuscript?

A long time. A very long time.

Discuss genre, where does your writing fit, or not?

If my writing reaches one person, my writing fits.

Thanks very much to Renee (and Tootsie) for granting us this interview, and for you, dear reader, for stopping by. For more on Renee, trot on over to her website and definitely toot on down to Etruscan Press and buy her book! Perhaps most importantly, check out little Tootsie’s blog, Bicontinental Dachshund for updates on Tootsie’s global adventures!

In our second installment of our interview series catching up with Notre Dame Creative Writing Program alums,  Marcela Sulak (’92) gives us the skinny on her inspirations, advice for young writers, and her latest projects. Let’s see what she had to say!

Why did you want to become a writer? Briefly describe how you became one.

I grew up on a rice farm five miles outside of a town of about 250 (it was not incorporated). I started out as a playwright at age 9 or 10, creating funny westerns which my cousins and I acted out in the summers, using an abandoned two-story barn as the stage. I was not the eldest cousin, so I had to write plays that were seductive to my older two cousins to get them to play. But mostly, I read like mad. My father and my uncles, with whom he farmed rice, were tireless story tellers. My maternal grandfather, a cotton farmer, was, too. They were bilingual. I grew up with Czech stories and conversations flying over my head at all times. This situation, in a sense, paralleled the sense I had reading books, which depicted such exotic things as snow, sky scrapers, leaves changing color: there was an entire world that had nothing to do with the one I inhabited. That the world I inhabited was, in a sense, formless and young. It didn’t have its own stories yet. I started to make the stories, eventually. Though at first, of course, I simply wrote about myself in the most embarrassing way.

Who influenced you and helped your development and how?

Mrs. Winkler, in fifth grade, who introduced me to my first “real poet,” Mickey Huffstutler. Mrs. Huffstutler took me seriously; gave me a workbook in prosody, sent my work to outside readers who came back with true but dispiriting advice: frame narratives; show don’t tell, etc.

Later the Notre Dame faculty–particularly John Matthias, Sonia Gernes and Jacqueline Brogan, were of immense help when I did the MFA.

At the University of Texas, where I did my Ph.D. in literature, I studied and workshopped with Tom Cable, Khaled Mattawa, and David Wevil, who were incredibly helpful and influential, as well as colleagues who were in the Michener Program: Steve Gehrke, Carrie Fountain, Phil Pardi, and so forth.

What advice do you offer aspiring writers?

READ. Widely and in genres and styles that are not instinctively appealing to you.

Choose one, two, or three of your books and discuss how the idea originated for the finished book.

Immigrant began as a history of fruits and vegetables in iambic pentameter. Specifically, I planned to write sonnets out of my system (Black Lawrence Press, 2010)

A Ladies’ Guide to Hebrew (circulating; every poem in it is published), originally titled “The Mistress’s Manual of Politeness and Etiquette,” or “The Kept and the Unkempt,” uses 19th century manuals of politeness and etiquette (in which rulers and the ruled were often divided by language and culture) to contextualize “difficult women” poised between two cultures and languages: La Malinche, Jezebel, Esther. It also looks at daily life in the Middle East.

Discuss genre, where does your writing fit, or not?

I work with poetry, and lately, creative nonfiction. The two blend powerfully. I’ve also been experimenting with the prose poem.

If your book was film optioned, which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Immigrant: Carmen Miranda ?

A Ladies’ Guide to Hebrew. (Let me get back to you)

How long did it take to complete your first draft of your manuscript.

Immigrant took two years to create a first draft, and another two years to create the final draft.

A Ladies’ Guide to Hebrew about 3 years total (first draft a year).

Give a one sentence synopsis of your book?

Immigrant: A brief history of human relationships with the earth and one another through the history of fruits and vegetables.

Ladies’ Guide to Hebrew–women straddling linguistic, cultural, religious and social divides throughout history, particularly in the Middle East.

Discuss your latest enterprise?

I have just signed a book contract to edit, with Jacqueline Kolosov-Wenthe, Family Resemblances: A Field Guide to Hybrid Literatures. This project grew out of my own experimentation with hybrids such as documentary poetry and lyrical essay, as well as my own research on hybrid literature and self-described hyphenated Americans.

Mystery 10th question! What’s on your bedside table/what are you reading?

Books on my bedside table at present include tens of books I am currently
reviewing for inclusion in The Field Guide to Hybrid Literatures, called Family Resemblances,” which I am co-editing with Jacqueline Kolosov Wenthe. Those are most of my reading these days. Before I sleep, I am currently reading Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem, the biography, Daisy Fried’s Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, and G. Matthew Jenkin’s Poetic Obligation. Ethics in Experimental American Poetry after 1945. I read simultaneously, depending on what I’m thinking about during the day, so I’m halfway through each of them. I’m translating the Israeli Poet Orit Gidali, and am on her second book, Smichut, which I render as “Construction State.”

Wow, such an interesting and open approach to both reading and writing! It’s no wonder Marcela has had such success. Her book, Immigrant, is purchasable here and selections from Ladies’ Guide to Hebrew are ready for your perusal here and here.  For more information about Marcela, her forthcoming work, translations, and more, take a look at her website.

Dearest Friends and Relations,

I am tickled to announce that The Powers, the first novel to feature Dorothy Day, Joe DiMaggio, and Walker Evans in close proximity, is now available between covers.

I am almost as tickled to announce my own debut as shameless self-promoter on YouTube at: http://youtu.be/BX2XkHp0l80

I would be forever grateful if you were kind enough to click the link.  And I would be more grateful still if you were inclined to tweet, tumble, or even–saints preserve us–like it on your Facebook page.

The video’s the work of the world’s most patient, generous, and multi-talented husband, Christian Jara, who is also the artist behind the book’s photography design.

Yours, more than a little abashedly,

Valerie

The first victim in our series of interviews with Creative Writing Program Alumni, Tony D’Souza (’00) answers our questions about becoming a writer, the writing process, and the realities of life as a writer.

Why did you want to become a writer? Briefly describe how you became one.

I’m mid-career as a writer and can hardly remember any longer. I suppose I will just be honest. I enjoyed reading great books and romanticized the lives of the people who wrote them. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, etc. I wanted to be that cool and live a life out of the ordinary. Pretty quickly once I started writing, it became less about being and living like them and more about the love of words, the intoxication of being lost in a scene, and overcoming the personal challenge that writing is for me.

Who influenced you and helped your development and how?

I had a mentor as an undergrad, a writer-in-residence at my small liberal arts college. She had been published a few times in the New Yorker; we ended up doing three independent studies in fiction together, reading really great short stories–Welty, Carver, Dubus, Gaitskill– smoking cigarettes together, and she’d read my work. I worked hard and listened to her. I was very much in lust with her. It made me want to work toward a ‘reward’. It gave me the foundations of what my career has been: unusual drive and discipline all aimed at getting a reward.

What advice do you offer aspiring writers?

You cannot have any real sense of what hard work is yet. Whatever discipline you might have, multiply it by what you cannot even imagine and get to work. The two most important things a writer must do are read and write.

Choose one, two, or three of your books and discuss how the idea originated for the finished book.

I always start with a blank page and my life experiences. I sit down and put down a line trying to get into a memory. If it goes well, the jumping off point quickly falls away into the unexpected. But it has always been counting on my life experiences to give me a place to start. Blank page, no plan. It’s turned into a body of work.

Discuss genre, where does your writing fit, or not?

My work is literary realism. I have a few stories that experiment and my last novel might be called “commercial-ish.” But I am literary to a T. That doesn’t mean dry or that it doesn’t sell any copies. It means that it doesn’t have any of the cheap, two-dimensional affects of genre. I’ll never understand why crappy genre books sell so many more copies than literary. Never. Just don’t get it at all.

If your book was film optioned, which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

My last book was optioned by Warner Bros. I do not care at all who plays any of the characters or if they mangle the script or whatever. I would just like to see it made so that I get paid and will have more time to write other books. Writing that book was hard enough. It’s my past and I hope I have a future.

How long did it take to complete your first draft of your manuscript?

It takes me six months to write a novel. But it takes me between two and five years of writing out a bunch of crap before the Muse finally decides to stop destroying me and actually gives me a first line that then sets off a frantic six month period of writing a novel. Life between writing novels is miserable hell.

Give a one sentence synopsis of your book?

Drug mule argues with boss and kills him.

Discuss your latest enterprise?

A few deleted drafts of garbage and a lot of cigarette butts, fear and depression.

“Mystery” 10th Question: Do you regret your decision to forego a stable career and become a writer?

No.

All excellent answers, especially that last one! It’s good to know that for many of our graduates, the risk involved in a career as a writer is worth the reward. 

Tony’s most recent book, Mule, is available for purchase here—-for more information about Tony and his other publications, check out his website!

March 6 at 6:00pm until March 9 at 9:00pm

• Please join us for these events by friends, faculty, and alums of ND! It’s sure to be a great time.  And don’t forget to stop by our table in the bookfair!  And don’t forget to stop by Action Books’ table, too! Wednesday, March 6 Johannes Gorannson & Joyelle McSweeney Action/Argos/Dusie/Fence/Futurepoem/Litmus/Nightboat present: An Editors’ Reading 7:00pm Mobius 55 Norfolk St Cambridge, MA 02139 Thursday, March 7 Cornelius Eady Book of Hooks: Readings and Music, Presented by Kattywompus Press 10:30-11:45am Alice Hoffman Bookfair Stage, Exhibit Hall D, Level 2 Ed Falco Fiction: What’s Up With That? 12:00-1:15pm Room 206, Level 2 Beth Ann Fennelly Five Years of Normal: Anniversary Reading for the Normal School 1:30-2:45pm Room 107, Plaza Level Francisco Aragon Breaking the Glass Ceiling 1:30-2:45pm Room 110, Plaza Level Cornelius Eady Plays Well With Others: Nonprofit Arts Collaboration 3:00-4:15pm Room 306, Level 3 Marcela Sulak Sentenced to Death: Translating Resistence and Liberation 4:30-5:45pm Room 107, Plaza Level Steve Tomasula Lyricist Maximus: Maximalism and the Lyric Essay 4:30-5:45pm Room 110, Plaza Level Johannes Gorannson (reading the work of Aase Berg) & Monica Mody NO THOUSANDS, Part 1! 6:00-8:00pm Middle East Restaurant and Nightclub – Upstairs 472 Mass. Ave. Cambridge Friday, March 8 Marcela Sulak The Poet Magician: Writing Out of Single Motherhood 12:00-1:15pm Room 109, Plaza Level Orlando Ricardo Menes Reading of Contemporary Caribbean Poetry 3:00-4:15pm Room 310, Level 3 Valerie Sayers TriQuarterly Books Reading 6:00pm Sherrill Library Lesley University 99 Brattle Street Cambridge, MA Carina Finn I’m So Tired 6-7:30pm Trident Booksellers and Cafe 338 Newbury St Saturday, March 9 Toni Margarita Plummer Women in Crime 10:30-11:45am Room 110, Plaza Level Francisco Aragon Sons of Boston: Tino Vallanueva and Don Share 10:30-11:45am Room 206, Level 2 Luisa A. Igloria Career Suicide 12:00-1:15am Room 102, Plaza Level Beth Ann Fennelly Courting the Love Poem: Challenges of Sincerity and Sentimentality 12:00-1:15pm Room 110, Plaza Level Susan Blackwell Ramsey From the University of Nebraska Press: Readings from the Prairie Schooner Book Prize Anniversary Reader 12:00-1:15pm Room 209, Level 2 Ed Falco Reading by Grand Central Authors 12:00-1:15pm Room 306, Level 3 Carina Finn Birds of Lace and Dancing Girl Press Present: Dancing Birds Brunch — The Answer to Your Saturday AWP Hangover 12:00pm Sheraton Boston (Room TBA) Rebecca Hazelton Embracing Echo, Rediscovering the Self: Teaching Strategies of Repetition in the Undergraduate Poetry Workshop 1:30-2:45pm Patricia Olson Bookfair Stage Exhibit Hall A, Plaza Level Cornelius Eady Come Celebrate With with Us: The Multiple Legacies of Lucille Clifton 3:00-4:45pm Room 210, Level 2 Please post any other AWP events not listed here featuring ND faculty, alums, and friends in the comments of this events page or on the group wall! We’d love for our AWP-goers to be able to come out and support you.

Hynes Convention Center

900 Boylston Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02115

View Map · Get Directions

I quote our stunning faculty member, Joyelle McSweeney,

“Fun as football is for all of us poets, can we maybe discard the idea that MFA programs are rivals trying to push each other out of the rankings, rather than allies trying to make as much space in this lousy world for writing and art as we can? Why let the rankings system (which serves only list-makers and list-publishers) make us fight like rats in a cage against each other when we should be fighting in tandem, and futiley, against the CAGE? (cue the smashing pumpkins here)”

Thanks, Professor!

Dear friends and family,

I’m pleased to announce my little chapbook of 19 poems, which is being brought out by Finishing Line Press in Louisville, Kentucky.  Joe kindly provided the cover photograph.  These poems look at animals, weather, and other aspects of the natural world.  From the amusing to the sad, from the beautiful to the threatening, the poems reflect nature’s complexities.

The book costs $14, plus $1.99 shipping, and it’s now available for pre-publication ordering.  You may receive a postcard announcement.  For convenience, there is a hot link to the web site at the bottom of this email (in my signature).  If you enjoy poetry, or would like to have me “virtually” join the other books on your shelves, I hope you’ll order a copy.  I appreciate your consideration and goodwill!

Jayne

Advance copy / prepublication sales Nov. 13 – Dec. 28

Release date (this is the week the books will be mailed): Feb. 23, 2013

Please visit Finishing Line Press at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product_info.php?products_id=1579 to view and purchase my new chapbook, Imposition of Form on the Natural World.  Preorders help the print run, so please order now.  Shipping date is Feb. 23, 2013.

It’s all about the sample, the writing sample is what we focus on. Make sure you do, too.

It’s not the complete picture. See our FAQs: http://english.nd.edu/creative-writing/faq/

What qualifications do I need to be accepted? Admission to the Creative Writing Program is based primarily on the writing sample and letters of recommendation. All writing professors consider the writing samples from all applications for their particular genre. It is by far the most important part of the application. However, you must also be accepted by the University of Notre Dame Graduate School, which requires a minimum GPA of 3.0. Exceptions can be made for outstanding writing samples.

WRITE  WRITE WRITE….right?

Sam Hazo will be on campus to root for the boys against Wake Forest. He’ll be in 119 O’Shaughnessy Hall on Friday, November 16 at 3 pm. reciting selections of his poetry.

A few cookies and some coffee to share, as well.

His extended bio is here: http://samuelhazoauthor.com/

An amazing mind, shares his imagery.

Sponsored by the Deans Office, College of Arts & Letters

Daring, wicked, funny, INTENSE. You be da judge. These writers deserve your ears. Send feedback. We can take it.

Thursday, Nov 15 @ 7:30p

Carey Auditorium, Hesburgh Library.

popcorn bannned…..