Recommended Reading- December 2016

Starting this month, the Ashland MFA will share books recommended by our program’s faculty. We're including instructional guides, anthologies, and classics of the craft, all meant to be helpful tools for developing writers. Listed below are this month’s recommendations.

Creative Nonfiction

The Art of the Personal Essay, ed. by Phillip Lopate

Recommended by Steve Harvey

This is by far the most influential and extensive collection of personal essays in English. It contains work from antiquity and from Europe in translation as well as classic works by English and American Essayists. Lopate’s choices are judicious and representative and, read as a whole, give a sense of scope of this new and, before him, largely unchartered genre.

Poetry

The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them by Stephen Burt

Recommended by Angela Estes

This book was just published and offers a terrific introduction to the varied kinds of poetry of the late 20th and early 21st centuries by devoting 2-3 page essays to each poem, examining how and why the poem works. It's a great way, too, for students to expand their reading.

Fiction

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Recommended by our fiction instructors, Erika Krouse, E.J. Levy, and William Haywood Henderson

This novel is remarkable for having the ultimate unreliable narrator and antihero as well as its powerful narrative voice and style.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Recommended by the fiction instructors, Erika Krause, E.J. Levy, and William Haywood Henderson

Readers should pay special attention to this novel’s use of setting and theme.

* Photo at top of page is "Book and Glass" by Pasi Mämmelä, used courtesy of Creative Commons license via Flickr

Alum Publishes Chapbook with Finishing Line Press

Jen Kindbom, Ashland University MFA class of 2009, has had her chapbook, A Note on the Door , accepted for publication by Finishing Line Press. It will be published in the spring of 2011. Advance sale copies may be purchased on Finishing Line Press's website. About A Note on the Door , Kathryn Winograd has the following to say: " A Note on the Door sparkles in the best tradition of American poetry: the ordinary world made new through the simple vernacular and cadences of American speech. Jen Kindbom is the fay spirit sprinkling our dirty porches, crying babies, and noxious beetles with her magic dust. These are the poems I'll pin to my neighbors' doors."

Interview with Kyle Winkler

After talking to Lisa Nik, it only seemed right to keep the good juju going and interview one of our newest fiction faculty members, Kyle Winkler. You can learn everything you ever wanted to know about Kyle from this interview and from his website . Thanks to our lovely and talented intern, Angela Manasieva for preparing this interview. 1. Where are you from and how do you use your surroundings to write? I'm from southwest Indiana originally. Rolling hills, farmland, corn, wheat. LOTS of corn and wheat. My landscapes have affected me heavily in my writing. All that tall crop and the sometimes isolating farmland in the autumn during sunset can do a lot to make one feel...creeped out? Hah. I've tried to use my small town upbringing to good effect, as well. I grew up most of life in a working class to middle-class home in the rust belt. So I'm often trying to evoke the experiences and attitudes of the sorts of folks I grew up around and with. And those experiences were, to so...

Alum Valerie Due Wins Strayed/VIDA Memoir Scholarship

Valerie Due, graduate of the Ashland University MFA Program in 2009, is the winner of the Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat Cheryl Strayed/VIDA Memoir Scholarship. Valerie was one of 95 scholarship applicants considered for the full scholarship to attend the Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat March 13-15. Congratulations, Valerie! Full press release is available here .

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