After the roaring success of our first Write Night, the BA/MAs will host our second (and now monthly!) Write Night (or afternoon) at Webster’s Bookstore Cafe tomorrow, February 20, from 3-5 pm. All are welcome for this free event. Join a community of student writers for our next night (ok, afternoon) designed to invigorate your writing life — burst into spontaneous writing, share your writing with friendly ears, get constructive feedback, discuss publishing opportunities, and more. The second in our series of writer gatherings designed to build an even more encouraging student writing community in State College. Sponsored by the Penn State English Department and run by BA/MA creative writing students. Meet in the backroom, where you’ll find food/drink, sparkling wit, direction and ideas. Once again, this event is free and open for all!

Photo of Cathleen Miller and Charlotte Holmes from Author Cathleen Miller’s Facebook page.

PSU MFA Alum Cathleen Miller visited Penn State on January 29 to give a talk on her life as a writer and her experiences at Penn State and beyond, as well as to read several segments from books she has published and books she is working on. Cathleen also held a Q&A session in the class of Toby Thompson, one of her former advisers, where she offered advice on pursuing travel writing and the importance of persistence and aggression when it comes to getting published.

Among other texts, Cathleen read from The Birdhouse Chronicles, her published MFA thesis, which described the life she found when she moved from her competitive advertising job in San Fransisco to live in rural Pennsylvania with her husband. She has a keen eye for detail and her writing is just as funny and fresh as it is exalting and beautiful.  Cathleen also read from her book Desert Flower, the incredible true story of a nomad turned supermodel turned United Nations activist, which has sold over 11 million copies.

Image courtesy of PSU IAH

Before Thanksgiving break, Margaret Atwood gave a hilarious and exciting reading from her newest collection of short stories, Stone Mattress, at the State Theater downtown after accepting the Institute for the Arts and Humanities’s annual Medal for Distinguished Achievement. Past winners have included Patti Smith, Marilynne Robinson, and J.M. Coetzee. The BAMAs took advantage of this campus event, as usual, and we had a great time.

As the semester is wrapping up, we’ve been working hard to finish the last of our projects–nonfiction and fiction pieces, as well as our final art book projects. Keep an eye out for samples of the work we’ve done in the past few months!

Image by Kevin Kelley for The Daily Collegian

Our most recent visitor as part of the Mary E. Rollings Reading Series was Penn State alumna Chinelo Okparanta. She completed her undergraduate degree at Penn State and even took English 212, an introductory fiction workshop, with our own Charlotte Holmes. She went on to receive an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and publish a book of short stories titled Happiness, Like Water, which was an Editors’ Choice in the New York Times Book Review and was listed in The Guardians’ Best African Fiction of 2013.

In addition to the reading, students were fortunate enough to have a Q&A with Chinelo, during which she discussed the process by which she writes and how she found herself with a book contract and then with a wildly successful book, her struggles with titles, and how her real world experiences shaped, inspired, and influenced the stories that became her first published collection. It was such a treat to get to meet someone who has graduated from our university and found such success, and she absolutely deserves every bit of it. She is an incredibly talented writer and a smart and fantastic person to talk with, and we are all so happy that she came back to visit her alma mater.

This year’s Emily Dickinson Lecture, a part of the Mary E. Rollings Reading Series, featured renowned poet Marilyn Nelson, who gave a reading that was at once hilarious, engrossing, and moving this past Thursday evening. A full crowd gathered in the library’s Foster Auditorium.

Marilyn Nelson read poems from several collections of poetry, ranging from lighthearted accounts of meeting fellow American travelers while abroad with her siblings and suspecting that they might be members of the CIA, to a frightening retelling of the true story of Preserved Porter, a doctor who dissected the body of his late slave, Fortune, in the name of science. Marilyn’s reading, like her poetry, was spirited and spellbinding, at once classic and refreshing. With a bit of time leftover for some questions, Marilyn spoke with the audience about her preference for form and her poetic process. It was a wonderful evening of remarkable poetry, and we are so lucky to have had Marilyn visit with us!

The BAMAs enrolled in English 497A, taught by Charlotte Holmes and Jean Sanders, were lucky enough to take a trip to New York last weekend to attend the NY Art Books Fair at MOMA PS 1. The trip served as inspiration for the art books the students will be making in class.

MOMA PS 1.

Some of the many art books.

“I’d rather be reading.”

BAMAs enjoying the shade in Central Park.

This trip was inspirational and so much fun. We are so grateful for the opportunity!

On Wednesday, September 24, author Seamus McGraw visited Penn State University as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series.  McGraw’s 2011 book The End of Country, a memoir/journalistic investigation, explored natural-gas drilling in McGraw’s hometown in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania.  But before McGraw read from Country and his upcoming book, due for release in Spring 2015, he asked the audience in Palmer Auditorium a simple question: “what is fracking?”

A girl tentatively raised her hand, offered an answer about wells, water and chemicals blasted into the underlying shale, and gas migrating upward because of the intense pressure.

McGraw nodded, clasped his hands, and proceeded to make an important distinction.  One misconception people have about fracking, he said, is they think fracking fractures the ground, forcing shale to move upward through the breaks it creates.  In reality, fracking exploits existing fractures within the ground, monopolizing on cracks that have always lurked underfoot.  To McGraw, this metaphor summarizes the entire fracking industry: it doesn’t fracture the towns and communities that live over the shale deposits—it just exacerbates problems that have always hidden there, below the surface.  He continued to explain that there’s no black-and-white morality when it comes to fracking.  Fracking is a process that garners enormous benefits, and one that carries heavy costs.  It’s a process about which McGraw hopes American can hold a conversation, a genuine one that embraces the gray area surrounding the social, political, and economic consequences of drilling for natural gas.

Writer Ito Romo came to Penn State last week to kick off the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. He’s pictured here at a Q&A in Bill Cobb’s graduate fiction workshop, where he discussed his writing and technique: he talked about the influence of setting, the importance of knowing where to end a story. His book The Border is Burning is a collection of very short stories, all of which take place in southern Texas, right on the Mexican border, and all of which, in Ito’s own words, are pretty depressing. Ito said that he chose to write the stories the way that he did to present people who are marginalized because of their social or economic classes or because of the drug trade in south Texas as very real and very human. He said people often tell him that his stories elicit physical pain, and this was evident when he gave his spirited, jarring reading on Thursday night. His stories are gripping and impossible to forget. We are so lucky to have had such a talented and gracious writer come speak with us!

Hello, all, and welcome to the 2014-2015 school year! We think it’ll be a good one.

Remember to check out our blog throughout the year for events, exciting news, and other updates!