Recommended Reading for April 2017

Our Ashland MFA faculty were asked to recommend books for developing writers. We're including instructional guides, anthologies, and classics of the craft, all meant to be helpful tools for your writing. Listed below are this month’s recommendations.

Creative Nonfiction

Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

Recommended by Steve Harvey

Walden is the finest and most influential collection of essays by an American writer. It created an American voice for the personal essay and took on issues such as nature and personal responsibility that continue to be explored by American essayists who have followed such as Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire. Norton has a fine critical edition which combines Walden with another extremely influential essay, “Civil Disobedience.”

Poetry

The Resistance to Poetry by James Longenbach

Recommended by Angela Estes

This book is one of the best I know of about what poems are, why we write them, and why people read them. It also includes most of Longenbach's very useful THE ART OF THE POETIC LINE.

Fiction

Let the Bead Bury their Dead by Randall Kenan

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

This is a good example of the linked-story cycle, illustrating a range of literary modes from magical realism to meta-narration, as it builds across races and centuries.

* 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...

AU Ranked in Poets & Writers MFA Index

The annual MFA issue of Poets & Writers is out, and Ashland University's MFA program is listed among the 26 low-residency programs featured. Of the 47 low-residency MFA programs currently available in the United States (Association of Writers and Writing Programs), AU ranks second in job placement, fourth in fellowship placement, and 11th in selectivity. While the program did not place in a six-year popularity survey, it placed 19th in the popularity survey for 2011. We'll take post-graduate successes over applicant popularity any day. The 26 programs that Poets & Writers chose to feature "are those that either placed in the first 25 in a popularity survey taken over six years by a total of 302 applicants to low-residency programs or appear in the first 25 in at least two of the following three categories: selectivity (how selective they are in accepting applicants), fellowship placement (which had the most graduates receive any of forty-two creative wr...

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