Wash. U. Summer Writers Institute 2010

Please let every writer know that applications will be available shortly for:

The15th annual Washington University Summer Writers Institute, in St. Louis June 14-25, 2010. Workshops will include fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and the Young Writers Institute (for high-school sophomores, juniors and seniors). See the Writers Institute website, or telephone (314) 935-6720.

Instructors for 2010 are: Poetry, Sally Van Doren

Fiction, Rebecca Rasmusssen

Creative Nonfiction, Kathleen Finneran

Young Writers Institute, Mathew Smith.

The keynote speaker will be poet and SLU professor Devin Johnston.

Read what Summer Writers Institute Alumni from past years have been publishing, winning, and so forth.

The Young Writers Institute is a workshop for high-school sophomores, juniors and seniors who write poetry or creative prose.

Adult and youth writers meet in group workshop sessions, held Mondays through Fridays in the mornings. In the afternoons accomplished writers and editors from Missouri and Illinois read from their work and discuss writing and publishing. Participants have weekends free for writing. Traditionally, Institute participants finish up the two weeks with an open-mike reading of their own work. Tuition this year is $845 noncredit or $1795 to earn three college credits. Is that a lot? I guarantee it won't get any cheaper! Maybe this is your year!

Yes, I Knew Derek Walcott

Poet Derek Walcott is in the news, the NYT reporting 30-year-old charges of sexual harassment forcing him out of a professorship at Oxford. He was the Hurst professor I studied with at Wash U. This was 1989, before his Nobel Prize.

How gruff Walcott was. Students had to go to his special visiting-professor apartment to meet with him. He answered the door reluctantly. He said some snappish thing as I walked in. I stopped, looked him in the face and said, "You're a tyrant."

He did a double take. Immediately he dropped the tyrant act, and we had a productive discussion. Later he told me my poetry was "damn good."

Normally I wouldn't have faced down Derek Walcott, except coincidentally he shares my birthday, 23 January, and I felt as if that were a key to his personality. What else I remember: his light-blue eyes. His white girlfriend. His urge to level things. I wrote a poem that made fun of a Hawaiian bar. He urged me to rewrite it, have yet more fun, and "destroy Hawaii!"Now circumstances conspire to level him. What goes around comes around.

The Literary Life

See the slam poet Copacetic Soul if you can. I imagined he'd be profane and hateful -- but he was funny, energetic, explosive, a rainbow of emotions, talking poetry about being an insatiable Kiss fan and wanting to paint his face up like Kiss for Halloween and his mom gently reminding him, "Son, you're black. . . " Small audience Tues eve at Pudd'nhead books, but intense listeners, including some bookstore shoppers amazed to hear actually interesting poetry. People are surprised when suit-and-heels me reads and relishes strange, frank, risque poems.

I also met event organizer and editor of the print/online mag Literal Chaos. Their next issue' theme is "Fire." Send in your fire poem or story or essay.

Wed evening the Wash U University College (evening school) students read from their work, a really nice event. Of 11 participants, 5 were my students in '08-'09. For all of them it was their first time reading to an audience. I am so proud.

Yusef Komunyakaa: A Question of Taste

Yusef Komunyakaa is a presence: tall and rangy, very dark-skinned, with white hair now, and a beautiful warm voice. Saw and heard him read poems last night at Wash U. as a special guest of the Callalloo conference.

I went so I could try once more to appreciate his work as others do. Komunyakaa's poetry is eclectic but no component of it fully engages me. These components include jazz, blues, vernacular speech, maleness, blackness, the segregated Deep South, and service in Vietnam. He read a poem about off-duty GIs segregating themselves in different bars, but having the same women, whose brothers it is their job to kill. Another poem described a black GI throwing himself on a grenade, thereby saving the rest of his company. Komunyakaa said such an event happened at least 14 or 15 times that he knows of, and the poem asks why. In the poem, and probably in real life, the self-martyred soldier takes over, forever after, the inner lives of those he has saved.

Komunyakaa is highly honored -- Pulitzer Prize, Chancellorship at the Academy of American Poets, and countless other awards -- but the full enjoyment of his poetry requires steps up for me that I had not prepared myself to take. Is that what taste is?

WU Summer Writers Institute

Word has it that novelist Saher Alam read great stuff at Duff's on Monday evening. Fortunately, she's also an instructor in this summer's annual Washington University Summer Writers Institute (SWI). This is two weeks of full-time, intensive work on your creative writing, held every June. This year, June 15 to 26.

I've been involved in SWI for 13 years now, either as a workshop instructor (poetry; creative nonfiction) or guest speaker. The Institute changes people radically. Lackadaisical writers become committed writers; pre-professionals solidify their skills and learn about markets; timid writers gain confidence; procrastinators get kick-started; lonely post-MFAs enjoy workshop feedback again; people make friends; editors give priceless information on publishing. It's a volcanic and exhausting two weeks -- but hardly anyone has ever dropped out. If it sounds as if you need this, I recommend that you apply.

Saher Alam will lead the Literary Fiction workshop. Other instructors this year: Kathleen Finneran for creative nonfiction/memoir; Suzann Ledbetter for popular and genre fiction; Kerri Webster for poetry; and Richard Newman for the Young Writers Institute -- which is for high-school juniors and seniors who write poetry or creative prose. The Institute can be taken on a non-credit basis or for 3 college credits.

Here's the website with details: ucollege.wustl.edu/SWI. Tell 'em I sent ya. I also have insider information if you want it.

Spring Course in Advanced Creative Nonfiction

If you're working on nonfiction and need a workshop, I'm teaching an evening workshop called Nonfiction Seminar at University College, Washington University, this spring. It's a 3-credit workshop course for memoir, essay, biography, travelogues, and nature writing; or narrative, as-told-to and other forms of creative nonfiction. The course emphasizes professionalism and publishability.

The course meets Tuesdays, 6:00-8:30 p.m., begins January 13 and ends May 5. I am happy
to answer any questions. Please pass the word. Thank you.

To register, go to ucollege.wustl.edu and click "Courses and Registration" The
course number is U11 313, under English Composition, and tuition is $1495.

I'm also teaching a course Thursday evenings, same place, U11 323, called The Art of the
Personal Essay.