5 X Friday: Regents Professor Madelon Sprengnether

Twenty years ago, Regents Professor Madelon Sprengnether wrote and shepherded the proposal for the MFA in Creative Writing through various levels of University approval so the Program could begin granting the degree in 1996. What about the MFA Program is she most proud of? "The accomplishments of our graduates," she answers quickly. "The proof is in the pudding." The growing number of alumnae/i publications parallels the feverish output of Creative Writing Program faculty: This spring, Professor Sprengnether publishes (and reads from--see listing below) both a memoir, Great River Road (New Rivers), and a prose poetry collection, Near Solstice (Holy Cow!). What does this all have to do with lab research on memory? Read on.

5 X Friday: Assistant Professor Kim Todd

Her work has been called "spellbinding" (by The New Yorker) and "beautifully written" (by Outside magazine). A big welcome to Kim Todd, a new creative nonfiction addition to the Creative Writing Program faculty roster. Todd has written one book about that vagabond Sparrow, another about a female naturalist who, in 1699, voyaged from Amsterdam to South America to study insect metamorphosis (Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis), and her self-explanatory first, Tinkering with Eden: A Natural History of Exotics in America. It's no surprise she holds masters in both environmental studies and creative writing (from the University of Montana). What led her there? Read on.

5 X Friday: Professor Julie Schumacher

Intent on figuring out how to construct solid plots, Professor Julie Schumacher wrote her first book for younger readers in 2004, a decade before young adult fiction became so popular it spawned an abstinence movement. Schumacher's third such effort, The Book of One Hundred Truths (2006), won a Minnesota Book Award for Young Adult Fiction. This summer she shows off her plot chops with the adult comic novel Dear Committee Members, a book consisting only of fictional letters of recommendation--from a single imagined Creative Writing professor--that nevertheless contains classic (and compelling) exposition, conflict, climax, and denouement. Indeed, as an admiring Slate review points out, what finally happens in the tale "turn[s] the book's theme upside down," revealing the moral weight beneath the undeniably funny characterizations. For Schumacher's favorite novel-in-letters and other revelations, read on.

5 X Friday: Associate Professor Peter Campion

The new director of our nationally ranked Creative Writing Program this month published his third collection of poetry with the University of Chicago Press, El Dorado. (You can hear him read the title poem at Slate.) Professor Campion launches the book at the Sixth Annual Hunger Relief Benefit Reading 7 pm Tuesday, October 29, at McNamara Alumni Center. He will be joined by Graywolf Press novelist Robert Boswell, who has a new book himself, Tumbledown. (Plus, of course, host Charles Baxter.) "I wanted to get more voices into these newer poems," Campion relates of El Dorado; "some of them are more ventriloquial than previous poems of mine." For more about the rewards and challenges of directing and teaching Creative Writing, why he doesn't tweet, and the impact of technology on poetry criticism, read on.

1. As the new director of the Creative Writing Program, what are your goals for your three-year term? What are the best features of our program, and what are its challenges?
I think the fundamental strength of our graduate program is our ability to support and guide emerging writers through a crucial time in their writing lives. We're able to fund our MFA students for three whole years--without a "tiered," competitive system--and that makes a big difference. There's a wonderful community spirit among students and faculty here. I learn a lot myself from my colleagues, from talking with them, and of course from reading their books.
My main goal as director is simply to keep this already impressive machine in good order. I want our students to thrive. It's actually enlightened self-interest: It makes us as faculty feel great to see our students publishing and garnering awards and, most important, growing as writers.
One challenge, I think, has to do with our [graduate student-produced] magazine, dislocate. For ten years now, it's bumped along from issue to issue--nobly so. But I'd really like to see it become a more prominent magazine. I'm heartened that the English Department realizes the nature of the situation and is committed to putting more energy and "umph" behind the magazine. I hope that in the next year, we'll have a "re-launch" and really start to make a mark. We certainly have first-rate student editors on the job.
2. You are a regular (and award-winning) reviewer of other people's poetry (for the Los Angeles Times, Poetry, etc.). When the online world was abuzz over a Slate essay about writers reviewing other writers too generously (in part because of the identification of the writer with her writing brought about by Twitter) I thought of you, as you have not been afraid to be critical in reviews. What's your philosophy of reviewing, in terms of being willing to be thumbs down as well as up? Do you tweet, and why or why not?
I think the main rule for reviewers should be an obvious one: tell the truth. I also wouldn't want to review a book that I had absolutely nothing good to say about. What's more, when I'm writing a review or critical essay, I want to present my thinking and feeling about a book and not simply the gavel-clack of judgment. As someone suggested to me, it's like the old directions on math homework: show your work. More important to me than, say, Randall Jarrell's judgments on the poetry he reviewed or George Bernard Shaw's judgments on music--and, of course, their judgments are important--was the actual experience of reading them, of seeing these incredible minds in motion.
I don't tweet. My attention span is compromised enough by raising two little kids. I have a lover's quarrel with facebook. I love seeing pictures of my high school friends' children, hearing what people are up to, etc. It provides a wonderful way to stay in touch. But I dislike feeling zapped by the screen--scrolling randomly because my attention span's too shot to read a novel or even a good magazine. I'm not sure about how social media affects literary criticism. I do think that, as technology has moved undeniably forward, popular literary criticism has actually taken a step or two backward. There are so many fewer venues now, so many fewer opportunities to get paid for it than there were even ten years ago. There's a lot of free content out there, but it's not always as good as it should be; it's often not even edited. At a certain point, I hope, people will realize that they need to pay for quality, whether online or not. That's my grumpy opinion of the moment, anyhow.
3. You're teaching an advanced poetry seminar right now--is there any one thing you're encouraging your students to learn?
One thing I do in that class is present seven key formal elements of poems--action, voice, sentence, phrase, line, sound, and metaphor--in order to give the students a better feeling for how these elements work together at any given moment in a poem, how they combine and separate, much like the modes of a musical scale. There's no set method, no doctrine, not even any real rules. But these formal elements are some of the major facets of the big diamond of poetry. Other than that, I just encourage them to read, read, read--and to read mostly poems that were not written last week. Of course, as graduate students, they're already working on a high level, so I try also to attend to each of their specific ambitions.
4. You led the effort to bring poets Daisy Fried and Josh Weiner to campus for a reading on November 7. What excites you about their work?
One thing I love about both of their work is the formal range--they write all different kinds of poems; they're adventurous writers. And they both, in their different ways, let the world rub through the page. That is, their poems have real texture, flavor. They're also both superb teachers, so I'm looking forward to bringing them into class and relaxing while they work their magic.
5.What are you reading or what have you read lately that you think is great?
I've been reading poems from the Oxford anthologies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry. Incredible. There's nothing like Andrew Marvell at the end of a long day, I tell you!

5 X Friday: MFA Alum Kevin Fenton

In his new memoir, Leaving Rollingstone, Kevin Fenton (MFA 2005) offers a summary of his story of growing up in a village outside Winona: "I liked those humans. I am sad they are gone." But of course the book covers so much more: the impact of pop culture in the 1960s and '70s (he's the little brother of dancing fiends); the unique nurturance of a Catholic education for rural kids not drawn to farming; the richness of families (nuclear and affective); the tricky weight of inheritance; and the discovery of vocation. In Fenton's case, it's clear the latter is writing--which he's committed to as both a creative writer and an advertising creative. He'll be launching the memoir with the help of local literati Sept 12 at Common Good Books; for now he's got answers to our five questions. . . .

Baxter Receives Rea Award, "Best Novelist" Recognition

Edelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing Charles Baxter has won the 2011 Rea Award for the Short Story, given annually to a living American or Canadian writer whose published work has made a "significant contribution in the discipline of the short story as an art form." The Rea Award honors writers "for originality and influence on the genre," rather than any one collection or story. Baxter receives $30,000 and joins a list of acclaimed honorees including Alice Munro, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, and John Updike. The jurors this year were Lorrie Moore, Stuart Dybeck, and Bill Henderson. Baxter's latest book, the 2011 Gryphon: New & Selected Stories, was noted in the jurors' citation, which reads in part: "Charles Baxter is a writer of elegant sentences, an expert in the mechanics of dramatic narration, and a master of psychological exile, which is the unexotic but special terrain of the short story." Meanwhile, the Star Tribune named him "Best Novelist" in its May 16 Best of Minnesota section. (The Star Tribune also named MA alumna Erin Hart Best Mystery Writer and BA/MA/PhD alumna Joyce Sutphen runner-up to Robert Bly for Best Poet.) Congratulations!