The NYU Creative Writing Program's Undergraduate Literary Journal
A huge thank you to all who submitted applications for positions on the West 10th editorial board! We are very excited to start reading all your applications. As this is a big task, and we want to give each application its due, please be patient in waiting for our responses. We hope to announce the new roster by mid to late June. If you have any additional questions or concerns, please contact us at west10th.submissions@gmail.com.
West 10th has extended the deadline for editorial board applications, now due May 13th. The following positions are available:Poetry EditorAssistant Poetry EditorProse EditorAssistant Prose EditorThe prose and poetry boards are responsible for reading all the submissions over winter break. We will then meet to discuss the submissions and decide which pieces to publish. Members will also be expected to help with distribution, calls for submissions, and blog writing. You do not need to have taken any creative writing classes to apply for these positions! Feel free to attach a brief writing sample of up to 3 poems and 3,000 words of prose with your application. Download the application here.Art Editor–We are looking for 2-3 visual artists to help judge our art submissions. You may submit a portfolio of up to 6 images with your application. Download the application here.Copy-Editor –We are looking to add a team of dedicated copyeditors to the editorial board. This group of editors will be responsible for reading through the entire magazine before we send it off to press. Applicants should download and complete the brief copy-editing test and send it in with their applications. *Copyediting applications deadline isMay 14th*Copyediting TestCopyediting Application Feel free to apply to as many positions as you want! Applications should be sent towest10th.submissions@gmail.com by/on May 13th! Please contact us if you have any questions.N.B. Please do not apply to the editorial board if you will be graduating in December 2012. This is a full-year commitment.Some people have been asking “I’m studying abroad for a semester next year, can I still apply?!” To which our response is “Yes!” – Keep the applications coming!
Don't forget to send in your applications for the 2012-2013 editorial board by May 6th! More information here. Questions? email us: west10th.submissions@gmail.comIf you're looking for inspiration while you write your application—or a way to procrastinate instead of studying for finals—check out this literary-themed community art project. Naomi Chasse, a student in NYU's photography department, is making one thousand red paper cranes with quotes from the writing of Francesca Lia Block. Naomi has been handing the cranes out all over New York, asking people to upload pictures of them to her tumblr. We're loving the simple words of wisdom on each crane, and the immaginative pictures people have come up with.
West 10th is now accepting applications for its 2012-2013 editorial board! The following positions are available:Poetry EditorAssistant Poetry EditorProse EditorAssistant Prose EditorThe prose and poetry boards are responsible for reading all the submissions over winter break. We will then meet to discuss the submissions and decide which pieces to publish. Members will also be expected to help with distribution, calls for submissions, and blog writing. You do not need to have taken any creative writing classes to apply for these positions! Feel free to attach a brief writing sample of up to 3 poems and 3,000 words of prose with your application. Download the application here. Art Editor--We are looking for 2-3 visual artists to help judge our art submissions. You may submit a portfolio of up to 6 images with your application. Download the application here.Copy-Editor --We are looking to add a team of dedicated copyeditors to the editorial board. This group of editors will be responsible for reading through the entire magazine before we send it off to press. Applicants should download and complete the brief copy-editing test and send it in with their applications. *Copyediting applications deadline is May 14th*Copyediting TestCopyediting Application Feel free to apply to as many positions as you want! Applications should be sent to west10th.submissions@gmail.com by/on May 6th! Please contact us if you have any questions.N.B. Please do not apply to the editorial board if you will be graduating in December 2012. This is a full-year commitment.Some people have been asking "I'm studying abroad for a semester next year, can I still apply?!" To which our response is "Yes!" -- Keep the applications coming!
Have you ever felt that, even in this brave new world of online sharing, you are lacking in options for online creative writing communities? Where is the Flickr of poetry? Writer's Bloq seems poised to fill this niche. The Bloq is an online community for MFA and Undergraduate Writing, English, and Comparative Literature students, professors, and alumni to share work, connect with peers, discover new writing, and uncover the literary events. Students, alumni, and professors from top programs such as Austin, Brooklyn, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, New School, Stanford, and Syracuse have already joined in creating a modern platform for writers.Writer’s Bloq is hosting its first event, “Unsolicited: MFA Mingle”, at the Strand on May 3rd. “Unsolicited” will feature the top writers from the site. To learn more about the event, check www.unsolicited.eventbrite.com. Interested in reading at the event, discovering the work of fellow writers, or showcasing your own skills? Join the Bloq today at writersbloq.com. Because writer's block isn't always a bad thing.
"For once, you could be rewarded for your extreme crappiness."Thanks to fellow NYU student Jennifer Mills at The L Magazine for this article on how you can be rewarded for truly awful writing!via Can You Write The World's Worst Opening Line?.
Thanks to James Kelleher at the Washington Square News for putting together this lovely video of the event last Friday.[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/39616070 w=400&h=225]'West 10th' Launches Fifth Edition from Washington Square News on Vimeo.
Congratulations to the 2011-2012 recipients of the West 10th Editors' Awards! The recipients were selected by our executive editors, Matthew Rohrer and Darin Strauss.Editors' Award in Poetry: Jade Conlee, for "Illinois"Editors' Award in Prose: Nick Chrastil, for "Fish Tacos"Thanks to all who submitted, and to everyone for coming to the release party to support our writers! Stay tuned for applications for the 2012-2013 editorial board!Copies of the new issue can be picked up at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House at 58 West 10th Street. Ask for Joanna Yas or Jessica Flynn.
Thank you to everyone who submitted their work to the 2011-2012 print edition of West 10th! We will be reviewing the submissions over winter break. Expect to hear from us regarding your submissions in February!On a side note, we noticed that Joan Didion is discussing her new book Blue Nights at Symphony Space tonight at 7:30. From their website: "Didion discusses her deeply moving new memoir about her daughter, and her own fears and thoughts about growing old, in her first book since the National Book Award-winning The Year of Magical Thinking. As with that memoir, in her new one, Didion confides and confronts her fears, frailties, and sorrows about her life as she looks back and forward. In conversation with her nephew Griffin Dunne (After Hours).""Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember."—Blue NightsTickets and information here
G.C. Waldrep and John Gallagher’s collaboration, YOUR FATHER ON THE TRAIN OF GHOSTS reads how an air vacuum surrounding one passing vehicle feels: the poetry can suspend time, steal breath from your lungs. Whether or not this effect is sustained across the collection’s 221-paged sprawl is debatable and depends entirely on the reader’s willingness, their ability to be surprised afresh with each variation of certain stock devices that appear throughout.Bridges, trains, windows and flames are some of the many, often revisited tropes that bind the collection together. These images serve as metaphors for many different things in turn: Bridges symbolize people; trains are relationships, weather, music. Windows are a very complex structural element that we’d prefer not to go into for brevity’s sake, and flames are what happens when you’re not paying attention. Bridges, trains, windows, flames; such reiteration establishes a rhythm like wheels on a track, signals an essential unchangingness even as the composition moves forward through varied landscapes.And to where, toward what end, are Waldrep and Gallagher driving? Nowhere, really. They’re less interested in a destination for YOUR FATHER ON THE TRAIN OF GHOSTS than in developing a concept: there’s art in “confusion / of desire and location, trust / and vector.” It’s a prettily wrought, if purportedly aimless trip that the poets invite us on. I’ll Decorate My House With You encapsulates this in its last couplet, the penultimate followed by an extended final line, “And then we invent something / for the dashboard that replicates the horizon, and we go for a drive.”
Lauren Kuhn on Neuropsychology, writing process, and the Walls and Bridges lecture series.As Joan Didion wrote years ago, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” It’s not often that I go into an essay or a short story knowing exactly what it is I want to accomplish. More often, my writing, at least initially, stems from confusion, a feeling that I have something to say but I’m not quite sure what it is. Writing begins with a sentence I don’t yet understand, and my last sentence is a thought I didn’t know I had. But where did it come from? How did I know it was there? How did the process of writing lead me to it?These were just a few of the questions that writer Siri Hustvedt and neuroscientist Lionel Naccache explored in their discussion of “Conscious and Unconscious Narrative — Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience” last week as part of the Walls and Bridges series of lectures and performances designed to bring together French and American figures from social science, the arts, and philosophy. As someone who “heard voices” as a child and still does occasionally in the minutes before she drifts off to sleep, Hustvedt—who has written a book of poetry, five novels, a memoir, and essays on topics from art and literature to neuroscience—has always been interested in our unconscious lives.She describes herself as “a medical object" to herself, and believes that writing and storytelling can be used as a tool to develop our understanding of the nature of subjectivity. “We are all confabulators,” she said, and what interests her is that “confabulation is not arbitrary.”An avid reader of studies in neuroscience and psychiatry, she is particularly interested in the narratives told by patients with mental disorders and brain damage in order to use “pathologies as clues to nonpathological states.” “Our stories make sense because we’re not brain-damaged,” said Hustvedt, but because we don’t have brain disorders, we are, in a sense, constrained by plausibility. On the other hand, the unconstrained state of those who have brain damage allows their stories to be much less bound by reality, perhaps allowing us to better understand why their confabulations are not arbitrary.To Hustvedt, writing fiction is like “remembering something that never happened”; she can feel when she has finished writing a piece because she has the feeling that she has reached emotional (rather than literal) truth, much as those with brain disorders and brain damage explain events as they believe them to be true, even when all literal evidence points to the contrary. She cited a condition whereby patients might recognize a significant other but think that that person is not actually their significant other; they become convinced that the person is a double that looks, sounds, and behaves exactly like their significant other, but is not. Naccache offered an explanation for this experience, describing the way in which certain neurons fire to recognize a person (physically) whereas other neurons fire to recognize our emotional attachment. Thus, in such a condition, neurons might fire to recognize the figure, but the neurons that register emotional attachment might not. Similarly, Naccache explained déjà vu as a misfiring of our neurons that register an emotional sense of familiarity, even when it is not tied to the situation or physical stimuli.In a sense, the relationship that Hustvedt and Naccache posited between the nature of the narratives of mental disorder and the nature of writing suggests a symbiotic relationship between neuroscience and creative writing. Naccache suggested that we cannot separate the unconscious from conscious, subjective experience, and writing allows us to better understand our subjectivity by making us aware of it. Hustvedt felt that studies of neuroscience could be used to better understand the mysterious, unconscious side of writing. While studies have shown the impact of our subconscious experience on our conscious knowledge and behavior (implicit association tests have shown that words flashed too quickly to be consciously recognized show up in our conscious behavior), there are still myriad questions to be answered about exactly what in this unconscious experience renders the “emotional truth”—the sense of having “gotten it right”—that Hustvedt describes.It may be interesting from a perspective of scientific inquiry to study what goes on in writing and how, perhaps, the unconscious is rendered conscious, but I think there is something to be said for the mystery of the writing process. The sense that there is something that exists to be uncovered, an unrealized emotional truth that exists other from us and is as yet unable to be completely explained by scientific processes, may merely be evidence that more scientific research is needed to understand where exactly what we write comes from. But is it not that sense of mystery, that feeling that there is an emotional truth which we do not yet understand, which moves us to write and to create? If knowledge is power, perhaps the strongest, most alluring knowledge is the knowledge that we do not know.Lauren Kuhn, Prose Editor
Eric Kim reviews Matthea Harvey's "adult-children's book" Of Lamb, a new erasure put out by McSweeney's.In their new release, Of Lamb (McSweeney’s, 2011), poet Matthea Harvey and painter Amy Jean Porter collaborate on a story that haunts, delights and surprises all at the same time. Through vibrant paintings that complement a dark, tilted narrative, Harvey and Porter have concocted, as Rae Armantrout calls it, an “adult-children’s book [...] each page like a Valentine’s Day chocolate with one drop of arsenic.”Inspired by Jen Bervin’s Nets and Tom Phillips’s A Humument, Harvey’s erasure of David Cecil’s A Portrait of Charles Lamb is eerie yet coherent, foreign yet familiar—in her own words, “an irreverent and warped retelling of the nursery rhyme.” Mary, essentially, had a little lamb, but they did more than just go to school together: “They pin’d and hungr’d after bodily joy/ Lamb and Mary met in whatever room happened to be closest/ Who would not be curious to see the pictures?” Carefully balancing abstract nuances undoubtedly facilitated by the erasure process (“Vacillating Lamb owed everything, owed nothing to love”) with concrete plot points that tie the whole thing together into a narrative (“Lamb found Mary crying in the hedge”), Harvey showcases through Of Lamb the innovative, subtle capabilities of erasure poetry to mutate the original for the better.The point here is mutation: it is not the mere recreation of the nursery rhyme that spellbinds readers; it is those remnants of the familiar story that have been warped in the most disturbing sense, from children’s song to bestial tragedy, from linear narrative to disjointed, kaleidoscopic experience—those moments are what make Harvey’s erasure a complete success, a modern chronicle of change through the seasons to an eventual coda: “He could not stop the clouds or the sun/ Lamb thought conclusions were all alike.” The process of whiting out, of erasing significant portions of the original text in order to understand a different kind of narrative, simulates not only Lamb’s snowballing physical and mental disintegration by the end (“Lamb’s mind struggling, forgetting [...] His figure had grown dim”), but also Mary and Lamb’s mercurial relationship, the fragmental shift from love to loss.Porter’s paintings often highlight this mercuriality: Lamb is a different color in each drawing. His fleece is not “white as snow,” but shades of burgundy, indigo and emerald, each reflexive of the mood of that specific page. But the most curious moments in the book are when Porter’s paintings instead complicate Harvey’s text. For example, to “Mary shut his eyes to the future and ardently turned to animal satisfactions,” Porter paints Mary devouring a piece of flesh behind Lamb’s back. Meat eating, a strident motif in the book, is at first Porter’s interpretation of Harvey’s text: “animal satisfactions” does not seem to point to meat eating so readily. But later, Lamb in fact reveals, “Should I tell you I watched her eating a bit of cold mutton in our kitchen?” Porter’s accompanying painting illustrates Mary licking a pink lamb popsicle, then three pages later, lamb licking from the ground that very popsicle melted. Harvey’s coupled text at this point is less obvious: “Year by year he appeared fatter, but Lamb was not full of fun.” Such an impact of Porter’s paintings on Harvey’s seemingly abstract words, and vice versa, suggests the need to read Of Lamb not as a mere poem with accompanying illustrations, but as a collaboration of the two mediums, each as much a part of the narrative as the other.This duality makes it difficult to define what Of Lamb is about—because semantically the words say one thing while the paintings say another. But they certainly work together, as Harvey puts it, “like a game of telephone, or an archeological site, each layer taking something from the layer before and transforming it.” Harvey’s textual mutation interacts with Porter’s illustrations in a way that resists meaning-making and facilitates encountering, unexpectedly experiencing Mary and Lamb page by page. Perhaps the point here, then, is not to inject meaning into Harvey and Porter’s chocolate, but rather to taste the injected arsenic, to enjoy the mutation as the drug it is.Eric Kim, Poetry Editor
Conor Burnett defends literature from its egghead stigma, recommends books that entertain."Odds are, if you're on this blog you like reading and writing a lot. This post is not for you. Though you totally can still read it. Please read it."Odds are, if you're on this blog you like reading and writing a lot. This post is not for you. Though you totally can still read it. Please read it.I read. I read well. But I'm not well-read. I can power through a million books a month, but I still have trouble getting interested in the books that are generally perceived to be important, or intelligent. I read a lot, not to absorb information, or to enlighten myself, or to show off. I read because books are a form of entertainment. And people don't seem to remember that.Books are good. There is nothing wrong with books. But dozens of my friends haven't read a book since high school. Hell, one of my friends hasn't read a book since 9th grade, and he managed to stay in Honors English for the entire rest of high schoolNow, to me, the stigma involved with books stems from the fact that we use them so often in classrooms, and libraries, that they catch a bad reputation by association. People associate books with being forced to sit down, and choke through a terrible one for a class you don't want to be a part of in the first place. Teachers cramming books into your brainhole day in and day out, 6 or 7 periods a day, is draining. What people forget is that being force-fed anything sucks. Doing something against your will is the absolute worst. Plenty of times I quit things I genuinely liked because my life was over-saturated with it. I used to absolutely love playing basketball. After a year of playing Junior Varsity, on a team that won two games (they were our first two games, we thought we were going to be unbeatable) and for a coach that made us practice every day, even over winter break, I no longer enjoyed basketball. So I joined the school play, because I liked to perform for people too. Except the exact same thing happened: they drilled acting and performing into us literally 7 days a week, and it made me absolutely hate the school plays.Now, with some distance between me and my days as the starting center on an absolutely terrible JV team, I can safely say that once again I enjoy basketball. Mr. Steeves is no longer riding me to get plays right, and to "not to be afraid to use my body when grabbing a board."This is all a huge round about way of saying this: just because we were force-fed books for years, doesn't mean that they're something that we should permanently ditch when we can. Your crappy high school English teacher made you read 5 books a marking period, and set all these crazy deadlines, and assigned unimaginative projects. I swear, I won't do that.The cliche goes that "high school was like a jail." My blog posts are going to be the halfway house between said jail and the Real World. I'm going to suggest books that shoot the gap between entertaining and intelligent. And remain calm: there aren't any dead-lines, you don't have to write a paper, you don't have to do anything other than sit back and read. I don't expect anything out of you, friend. No pressure.Short stories are the perfect starting point for what I am trying to accomplish, here. I'm treating you as a skittish animal. I'm trying to lure you over to my side, and if I make any large sudden movements or chuck "War and Peace" at you, this entire thing will be for naught.That said, the book I suggest you read is CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. Rather than subject you to a long diatribe as to why I think it's brilliant, I'll sum things up fairly quickly. George Saunders wrote a book of short stories. Because George Saunders is good at what he does, this book is simultaneously intelligent, funny, and easy to read. And above all, the stories are entertaining.
I didn't hear about this book through a literary magazine, or a book reading, or from an English Professor. I read an interview with Ben Stiller where he talks about how he's been fighting for years to adapt the titular story into a movie. If you can't trust me, trust Ben Stiller. If you can't trust Ben Stiller, may God have mercy on your soul.
Michelle Chen reviews Elevator Repair Service's performance (and reading) of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.In the late nineteenth century, Tolstoy proclaimed the inherent diversity of unhappiness—the unfathomable multiplicity of individual suffering. The Sun Also Rises presents a rather different interpretation.Discontent in Sun is universal, quotidian, even banal. On occasion a character may be ephemerally “happy”, is often “sore”, or sometimes in a tearful state of despair simply termed “so unhappy”. To top it off, they are usually “tight”—drunk. Other mental states are rarely specified. Hemingway’s portrayal of a Lost Generation leaves little room for musings upon the individual experience of sadness: the nuances, say, of Mike Campbell’s feeling of abandonment versus Robert Cohn’s or even Jake’s. We hear that happy families are all alike, but Sun has shown that unhappiness too, can be indistinctive. Our characters pivot towards one of three emotions—joy, annoyance, or dejection—all the while attempting to maintain what seems to be expatriate homeostasis: a moderately unhealthy to near-lethal level of drunkenness. Narration in Sun is not preoccupied with the adjectival or even linguistic expression of complex individual psychologies. A strange fit for theater adaptation.Rendering Sun on stage is a daunting endeavor for any theater troupe, the Elevator Repair Service included. Confining drama to Hemingway’s paucity of explicit emotional narrative for a little more than three hours (while simultaneously attempting to convey a state of perpetual inebriation) is sure to make for a messy play tainted by an overall performative dullness. After all, what we deem literary ambiguity or economy of style in one form often becomes bad acting in the other. And yet The Select illustrates complexity of character well. Lucy Taylor, for example, presents an uninterrupted dialogue of polarities: charming and rude; helpless and impressive; beautiful and perverse. Her Brett is a tragic blend of masculine sexuality and feminine romanticism brimming with an aristocratic ennui. Mike Iveson brings to Jake both the solemnity of his damned biblical namesake and the insouciance of a wine-drinker with a seemingly endless bank account. Rarely does Matt Tierney truly occupy his stage space, often remaining a bit of a backdrop and giving to Robert Cohn the impression of a painfully self-aware adolescent unsure of how to inhabit an adult body. Each character is parsed, and then reassembled before our eyes. “The Select” illustrates their passions, tempers, fears, and vulnerabilities with a vividness that only theatrical experience can bring.And that is precisely the problem. Whether we credit Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory or not, Sun undoubtedly has a knack for the suggestion of deeper consciousness through the revelatory triviality of an icy tip. By this I mean that the obvious inadequacy (and sometimes, unoriginality) of certain sentences in Sun is often a means of suggesting either a significant omission or a profound understatement. Jake’s narration is a rhetoric of suppression and self-deception, a linguistic rejection of complex sentiment even during moments of despair. He cries, “then after a while it was better”. Yet the emotional deficiency with which he sheaths the topic of his impotence, for example, is so markedly unnatural as to become unbelievable. “I was bored enough,” Jake says, and we cannot help but to doubt his reliability: tragic genital wounds that thwart love are not exactly boring. Such absurd meiosis actually serves to insinuate an affected narrative restraint—an active resistance against the recognition of emotional trauma. While our view of characters’ interiority is severely limited by Jake’s repressive perspective, it is exactly this narrative façade of emotional simplicity that implicitly expresses—perhaps more successfully than any sentence could—psychologies that are simultaneously unspecified and complex.Such nuance is lost in the transition from novel to play. Transplanting the first-person unreliable narrator from prose to theater is an impossible task, for drama does not consent to such mediation. When Jake states that Georgette touches him, the lack of details in his narration creates ambiguity: where exactly does she touch him? As readers we can make a fairly educated guess, yet our knowledge of what actually occurs is based solely upon what Jake decides to tell us and how. An attempt to filter the audiences’ experience of theatrical action through the discriminating lens of a first-person narrator would result in drama’s generic rejection of the foreign, novelistic contaminate (see episode 15 of Joyce’s Ulysses for proof of such unstagable chaos): the nature of theater requires the presentation of “objective” action. We see precisely where and how Georgette touches Jake; we feel the weight of a lag in conversation when the truth about San Sebastian is revealed: social tensions and individual emotions are all infuriatingly on display. What lovers of Sun get from “The Select,” then, is a set of characters and actions depicted with uncomfortably meticulous detail and lacking the protean nature of a true Hemingway creation. By no means is “The Select” a bad play, but it can only do so much: the nature of the experiment dooms adaptation to failure.
—Michelle Chen, Assistant Prose Editor
In an article on literary magazines at NYU, NYU Local recently praised West 10th, calling us "solid" and "universally recognized" as NYU's official literary magazine.It is a lovely article, one in which I'm pleased to be included. It is also a short article, though, and quotes culled from long conversation (it was) will always leave things out, understandably—I worry slightly, for example, that we might get a flood of poems in mimetic homage to Donne, Shakespeare, and Dickinson; also that our submitters will think that all we're interested in is sound; don't think these things. But good work, Olivia Loving and NYU Local, and thank you.Keep an eye out for further interaction with the NYU Community—especially the forthcoming announcement about a collaboration with Citywide, one of WNYU's arts-focussed lenses.Until then, keep writing—and submitting!Phillip Polefrone, Editor-in-Chief
We are pleased to announce the editorial board for the coming year’s issue of West 10th, selected from a very competitive group of applicants:
Apply to the West 10th Editorial Board! Applications can be downloaded here. Send applications to west10th.submissions@gmail.com.Available positions are: Poetry Editor, Assistant Poetry Editor, Prose Editors, Assistant Prose Editors, Head of Community Board, Community Board.Poetry and prose editors/assistant editors will be mainly involved in the reading/vetting of all 2011-2012 submissions. You will read the submissions on your own and then the poetry and prose groups will meet several times to discuss the submissions and arrive at a final group to be published in the magazine. Community board members are involved in the planning and organizing of West 10th events, as well as spreading the word about West 10th across campus. All masthead member are welcome to post on the blog.
more information at the creative writing website.Questions? Email me at lcs331@nyu.edu.
Hello there West Tenthers! Forgive my inexcusable absence these past weeks. In my defense, I am deep in preparations for finals and my summer abroad in Madrid. Yes, you read that right...I know, I know, I'm excited to. In the vein of so many great American writers I hope to find some inspiration among all those classy Europeans and...their very old buildings.I'd love to hear about your summer plans--what's crackin with you kids? Summer reading lists anyone?And before the semester draws to a close I want to clue you guys into yet another exciting event (if you can forgive the shameless self-promotion). Tomorrow night at 7:00, the NYU Bookstore will feature poetry readings from Deborah Landau, Kevin Prufner, Joni Wallace, and Tom Healy. Deborah is not only the director of the Creative Writing Program, but also a not-too-shabby poet. I highly recommend it! And if you see a pretty fly looking dude in his purple apron scurrying to and fro in the bookstore tomorrow night, stop to say "hey." Y'all know I love some recognition.
Let's call this the "dedication" prompt.Write a poem/story that begins with: To the one who...To the one who (brilliance brilliance brilliance)To the one who (youaresuchagoodwriteryouaresuchagoodwriter)etc.Let the anaphora of the phrase take you where you want to go.
