A brief note from new Director of Creative Writing, Glenn Taylor:
The MFA Soirée, 2018 edition, was a fine affair. Folks got fed, and they imbibed a little and listened to good music and made a little music of their own. There was driveway basketball, ping pong, and cornhole on the back lawn. After the sun dropped, the artificial lighting game was on point, exceedingly mellow. The soundtrack to orchestrate our evening was a six-hour playlist of stripped-down Dub.
The new group continues to reveal themselves as a truly excellent cohort. The ones who’ve been here a year or two are equally squared-away.
Not all of our MFA Squad could make it, and I failed in having our picture made at an interval of the night’s highest attendance, but the photo below is what we looked like around 10:00 p.m.
Let’s draw a clockwise circle from bottom-middle. I continue to be a bald man. On the left, just behind Dave on guitar, are two more faculty members: Amy Alvarez and new poet Jenny Johnson. Filling out the pictured roster are MFAs Kacey, Jacob, Evan, Ellen, Emilie, Sarah, Steph, Christl, Matt D., Vincent, Cameron, Kenneth, Jordan, Kanza, Matt S., Gabe, and back to Dave on guitar.
Let’s consider the photograph, and let’s close with a quote that may or may not be a good caption for our team picture, and then let’s be done with it and move on to the work we’re here for.
From Kwame Dawes:
“They are writers living in this world, and they never lose sight of it. And here and there, we find these gems, these glittering gems of pure delight in the art, and they remind us of why we do this work, why we keep coming back to make this art that we do, why we keep trying. Each of these writers will agree that what we are doing is re-saying what others have said, and perhaps even better than we could say it. But what we bring is our own distinctive history, our own narrative of struggle and triumph in the making of our art, and our satchels full of wisdom and empathy that other writers have given to us."