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The Last GRS for 2011-2012: The Curator’s Reading

Posted by Emily Neeves on April 16, 2012 No comments

It’s a longstanding tradition (ahem.. 2 years…) for the GRS curators to host a final reading for the year in which they hand-pick an all star line up of 4 special guest readers, and then read themselves. And so, without further ado, we present to you the line up for this year’s Curator’s Reading. The reading will be held on Friday April 20th in Walker 230 at 7pm.

Amber McBride is a second year MFA Poetry student!! She enjoys baby unicorns, baby puffins and babyShiloh, her puppy. She also likes birds and men with long hair and beards. Next semester she will beinterning at the Furious Flower Poetry Center in Harrisonburg Virginia while writing her thesis . Here shewill be meeting and working with Joanne Gabbin, Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou. Sheis very excited about this opportunity to bribe one of them into writing the intro to her first collection ofpoetry. Just kidding…kinda.

Born under the big Montana sky, Demetra Perros has retired from her days of ropin’ doggies and howlin’ at the moon… for now. She set out east to see what the big hoopla was about. Life among them city slickers sure is different, but at least she’s found some wells to wet her pen. She’s layin’ down her saddle and spurs to deliver to you the prose of a prairie pioneer.

Before bartending in Copenhagen but after working in a psychiatrist’s office, Ben Lobpries sold Oriental rugs in downtown Chicago. He started teaching to support his writing habit and ended up liking it, so now he does that instead. He has a “professional” CV, but the unofficial one is way more interesting. You should buy him a drink and ask him about it. For tonight, Ben will be reading fiction.

Aaron Krol writes poetry with all the vibrant and varied splendor of his favorite colors: beige, taupe, paste, oatmeal and carpet. Prepare to experience scorching red fury, fathomless blue sorrow and verdant green envy – or at least eraser-red mild irritation, sleet-blue downcast ennui, and chewing-gum-green “oh, that was nice.” Shannon Wagner studies cat-having at Emerson, where she pursues her MFA in having-a-cat, curates the GRS, and has a cat. Her fellow curator has rejected her repeated requests to devote her fifteen minutes to performative feline possession, so she will be reading poetry. Reluctantly.

Things you might not know about Emily Neeves: she has a blue belt in karate. She likes holding chainsaws. It would take her one hour and 4 minutes to become infected from a zombie bite. Her first short story was accepted for publication in the print journalSalamander this spring and will be out in June. She hasn’t decided what she wants to read to you all yet, but there’s a good likelihood it will be fiction, nonfiction, or poetry.

Superstitiously Fun: GRS on Friday the 13th

Posted by Emily Neeves on April 9, 2012 No comments

Friday the 13th is upon us. Where will you go to make sure all that bad luck stays far far away? The GRS! We’re returning to the Beard Room for our penultimate reading of the year. Shannon will be attending a wedding, so in her stead you’ll find Emerson’s very own Redivider EIC David Snyder. The reading will be packed with the usual munchies and feature the stellar prose and/or poetic stylings of the following Emersonians.

Donald Vincent is the only African-American male in the MFA program at Emerson. He is in his fourth semester and will be reading poetry.

Poet, dachshund enthusiast, legal resident of New York, prankster, unicorn with glittered hooves. You can call Charlotte Seley whatever you want but don’t call her cupcake. She is the poetry editor of Redivider and has published work online in Chronogram, InDigest Magazine, inter|rupture, and others.

Miranda Roberson hails from Fargo, where the people there look for any excuse to elongate their o’s, dooontchaknooow. She’ll be reading nonfiction and poetry, both without long o’s, so don’t get your hopes up.

A long time ago, Amy Lester was asked, “Have you ever heard the phrase ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’?” Well, of course she had, but she happily disregarded it. And she has continued to disregard the sentiment ever since. In fact, two years ago, she decided to try and add “writing” to her list of trades by pursuing an MFA in creative nonfiction. So her former piano teacher (may she rest in peace) can take THAT!

Abby Travis has gotten a bit bored with standard bio notes, so she’ll save you the trouble. She’s from just outside the Twin Cities of Minnesota, right at a place of flux and change, where the suburbs give way to the prairie. Lately she’s been thinking a lot about expectations–why we expect certain things in our experience to be a certain way or follow certain patterns or rules. You should know that on Friday she’ll be reading nonfiction, and it probably won’t be what you expect to hear.

Miranda Moody is a mystery.

Get the Paddy Wagon Ready–It’s the GRS!

Posted by Emily Neeves on March 12, 2012 No comments

We assume you’re all recovering from a wild Spring Break in Cancun, but don’t bother nursing those hangovers just yet: It’s a special St. Patty’s Day edition of the GRS! We haven’t seen many of you since you left for AWP, and we have a lot of catching up to do. We’ve got snacks. We’ve got caffine. We’re in our beloved Beard Room. And we’ve got a kickass reader line-up. Check out their bios below.

Paige Towers is a writer who has a large white dog, minimal amounts of money and a scar on her upper lip. She may or may not be famous one day.

Ashley Alexander is a first year nonfictionalist, poet, and barback. Once, while studying in London, she smoked a cigarette with Jude Law. It was not as sensual an experience as it sounds.

Sarah Chaves is a nonfiction writer from Revere, MA. She is also Portuguese. People seem to really like this about her, especially when she gets angry and yells in Portuguese. Mais sangria!

Shannon LeBlanc is a first year MFA nonfiction student who is accepting suggestions for a thesis. For ideas, here are her current interests: yoga, running, cuddling, chips, and humus. She lives in Somerville with her best friend from childhood and their two terrorist cats.

Martin C. Hansen is the author of an influential instruction manual for the idle rich entitled Shop Yourself Stupid!, an uplifting self-improvement book for shut-ins called Shop Yourself, Stupid!, and the best-selling satirical bodice-ripper, Then the Bride Said ‘Surprise!’ His future plans include writing a travel guide to the penny mines of the future, inventing a condom that not only prevents but actually cures STDs, endorsing a pro-model pogo stick, marketing a shoehorn for removing one’s foot from one’s mouth and pillaging an MFA in Nonfiction from Emerson College, among other get-rich-slow schemes.

John Fantin was born about 3 seconds ago, and that’s why he has no biography.

GRS Reading 3/2

Posted by Emily Neeves on February 27, 2012 No comments

Not going to AWP? That’s right–because the party’s happening right here in Boston! The GRS is hosting its third reading installment of the semester, and we’ve got 5 fantabulous readers plus food and a special guest appearance by Liz Pashley as co-curator (since Emily is going to be stressed out, broke, and frozen in Chicago).

Get ready to kick your spring breaks off with some good times!

Here are your readers:

Kevin Cutrer was raised in the American South, has lived in South America, and writes poems and stories about both. He’s a first year poetry student whose work has appeared in various publications in the US, Canada, and the UK, including, most recently, The Hudson Review, The Cimarron Review, and the anthology A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry edited by Stacey Lynn Brown and Oliver de la Paz. He and his wife live in Arlington.

Jensen Toperzer spends time traveling in a blue police box and dragging people off on adventures. Often, time is lost track of, as are trains of thought; where and when one is becomes extremely muddled.

Sarah Addison is a second-year MFA student who is interested in playwriting, screenwriting, novel writing, and short story writing, especially of the linked variety. She recently had a story published in the first issue of “Words Apart,” an online literary magazine started by Emerson College graduate students in writing and publishing. Sarah is a fan of 19th century British literature, not only for the love stories, meandering plots, stock characters, and irony, but for their goals of social consciousness and social betterment. She will be reading fiction at Friday’s GRS.

Adam Hanover is the rarest of endangered species: a poet who still writes sonnets. You probably know me better as the barista who slings your lattes next door in a crooked Phillies cap while singing Justin Bieber songs a capella.

Sarah Banse is the old woman you see on the 10th floor or at Ploughshares and you think to yourself, There is no way she is student-but alas you are wrong. She writes fiction when she is not overwhelmed from being an old woman.

Look at those smiling faces! So eager to read for you all!

GRS Readers for 2/17

Posted by Emily Neeves on February 13, 2012 No comments

Looking for something to do this Friday? Come to the Graduate Reading Series! (7PM, Beard Room). Here’s who’s reading this week.

Susannah Clark is doing the E Street Shuffle.

Elizabeth Christensen likes the word cacophony and eating whole avocados with a spoon. She’ll be reading fiction.

Thea Engst hails from Fabius, New York. She grew up on her father’s dairy farm but hates cheese. She’s currently working on her thesis, writing poems about family, travel, current events but never about cheese.

Luke M. Jones is a jack of all trades and not quite a master of any of them. So avant garde it’s just plain weird? Improbably ’80s sci fi? 10 pages about a lampshade? Don’t put anything past Luke. Well, maybe not the lampshade…

Jon McConnell writes fiction, and then he reads it.

Elizabeth Pashley is a second year MFA student in fiction, though perhaps she is better known for her gut tickling non-fiction and Vogonesque poetry. When she is not saving kittens from trees or serenading the homeless with her ukulele, she contemplates the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, since she has yet to find the question. Elizabeth will be reading fiction. Probably.

Readers for 2/17!

Photos from WLP Party

Posted by Peter Jurmu on May 9, 2011 No comments

Last Monday, everybody in the WLP graduate programs was invited to gather at Sweetwater to drink, reconnect, find out who won WLP Graduate Writing/Dean’s/American Academy of Poets Awards, and afterward spill out of the bar to eat the city. All pictures courtesy Pam Painter’s camera–if you would like your name attached to your image, send an email to vernacularlit@gmail.com.

There Is No Year by Blake Butler Hits Your Face

Posted by Brooks Sterritt on April 5, 2011 No comments

There Is No Year by Blake Butler comes out today. (ze publisher)
powell’s
amazon.666
“indie”bound

KIRKUS: Love him, hate him or feign indifference: There’s really no other way to react to the work of writer/postmodernist/multi-hyphenate Butler (Ever, 2009, etc). For those who like their prose fresh out of a cleaner and more traditional wellspring, Blake’s writing can prove tedious at best and arduous at worst. But for those who lean toward writing that is more visceral, taxing or outright demanding of the reader, this might be the right cup of tea—see Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), to which this novel owes some debt. The book concerns a family of doppelgängers so featureless that Butler doesn’t bother to give them names (or more accurately, likely purposefully washes them out to their elementary characteristics). So, the father, the mother and the son live in a house, just like the carbon copy father, mother and son had done before them. The father stares at a computer screen. The mother stares at her lined face in mirrors and thinks protective thoughts about her son, who suffers from a disease that nearly ended his life. The son goes to school, makes a friend and watches television with his family. It’s all presented in hushed, monochrome language that gives the whole enterprise a sense of menace from the beginning, even before Butler introduces the father’s paranoia that things in the house are changing without his knowledge. And then things do start changing.

BOOKFORUM: In an interview published in the winter 2010 issue of the Paris Review, Jonathan Franzen said to Stephen Burn, “I’ve never felt less self-consciously preoccupied with language than I did when I was writing Freedom. Over and over again, as I was producing chapters, I said to myself, ‘This feels nothing like the writing I did for twenty years—this just feels transparent.’” Franzen added that this struck him as “a good sign”—an indication that he was “pressing language more completely into the service of providing transparent access to the stories I was telling and to the characters in those stories.”

Blake Butler is the opposite of that.

James Franco options Eunoia by Christian Bök

Posted by Brooks Sterritt on April 1, 2011 No comments

James Franco has acquired the film rights to Eunoia, a work by experimental poet Christian Bök in which each chapter uses only one vowel. (via Quill and Quire)

AHEM

Posted by Brooks Sterritt on March 23, 2011 2 comments

“Thanks for sending the stats of Ezra’s rantings. He is obviously crazy…He deserves punishment and disgrace but what he really deserves most is ridicule…It is impossible to believe anyone in his right mind could utter the vile, absolutely idiotic drivel he has broadcast…His friends who knew him and who watched the warping and twisting and decay of his mind and his judgement should defend him and explain him on that basis.”