Friday, October 30, 2009
Jenn Monroe Published
“Ceasefire” and “Chocolate Sampler,” two poems by Chester College professor of writing and literature Jenn Monroe, will appear in the fall issue of Off the Coast magazine. The food-themed issue will be available in November. A third poem, “For a Moment,” will appear in the inaugural issue of Organs of Vision and Speech Magazine in December, and be included in a special printed issue of OVS slated for Summer 2010.
Fred Lynch Comes to Chester College
Illustrator Fred Lynch will be visiting Chester College on November 3rd as part of the Visiting Artist Symposium, giving a lecture in the Wadleigh Confrence Room from 2:30 to 4:00.
Having grown up in Cumberland, Rhode Island, Lynch graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1986. Since that time he has been creating illustrations for numerous clients and earned recognition from The Society of Illustrators, American Illustration Magazine, Communication Arts Magazine and Print Magazine. His work looks to combine the ordinary with the extraordinary, sketching from imagination and painting from reality.
Senior Shows Start Sunday
Starting this Sunday November 1 Chester College graduating Seniors will be showing their Senior Shows. Each of the students presenting have been working on these projects since January of this year. Their Gallery reception starts on Wednesday November 4th at 7 pm in the Wadleigh Library. The students who are presenting their work are Ashley Hin with “Fresh & Blue: a study of renewable energy”, Dustin Potter with “In Reverentia”, Gayle Lee and Tyler Moran with “Sideshow”.
Rachelle Beaudoin Featured in GirlDrive
Chester College media arts instructor Rachelle Beaudoin is featured in the book GirlDrive by Nona Willis Aronowitz and Emma Bee Bernstein. It is out in stores and available online now.
What do young women care about? What are their hopes, worries, and ambitions? Have they heard of feminism, and do they relate to it?
These are just a few of the questions journalist Nona Willis Aronowitz and photographer Emma Bee Bernstein set out to answer in Girldrive. In October 2007, Aronowitz and Bernstein took a cross-country road trip to meet with the 127 women profiled in this book, ranging from well-known feminists like Kathleen Hanna, Laura Kipnis, Erica Jong, and Michele Wallace, to women who don’t relate to feminism at all. The result of these interviews, Girldrive is a regional chronicle of the struggles, concerns, successes, and insights of young women who are grappling—just as hard as their mothers and grandmothers did—to find, define, and fight for gender equity.
Co-author Nona Willis Aronowitz was interviewed by ELLE about the book. Aronowitz will also be on NHPR’s Word of Mouth Wednesday (10/28) at noon. Beaudoin will join her to share her own experience participating with the project.
Chester Faculty Gallery Opening
Chester College faculty members Megan McNaught and Christina Pitsch will be showing their work at Fort Point Art Community starting November 6th, with the opening reception taking place on November 13th at 5:30. This event is free and open to the public.The show, Patterned Tactic(s), brings together the work of Megan McNaught, abstract painter, and Christina Pitsch, sculptor. Both artists are linked by their use of pattern and repetition both in the process of making and in the finished imagery of the work. The show consists of free hanging life size clear deer sculptures surrounded by large-scale geometric net drawings. Both bodies of work are striking in their combination of inherent complexity with results that are quiet and deceivingly minimal in nature.
Pitsch’s technique of ‘mapping’ objects through the use of sewing patterns allows for the recreation of multiples in alternate materials and scales. The process of fabricating the sculptures begins with the actual drafting of sewing patterns from life size deer models. Through this process of breaking an object down and translating from 3 dimensional form to 2 dimensional parts there is a relationship that begins between object and artist. It is not only the method by which they are made but a meditation in repetition. Through a process of repetitively recreating each deer, piece-by-piece, the maker becomes intimate with the subject further developing the relationship between artist and iconography. By creating these animals in clear vinyl, cast plastic and acrylic sheet Pitsch speaks not only to what is there but what is not there. It is the skin, the shell, that is recreated, they do not, nor are they meant to stand solid as the original buck did. Instead they draw attention to that which is absent. In some ways these objects are both there and not there, speaking of absence and presence in one breath.
McNaught‘s work is focused on a process of accumulation, formal issues of image making, and the development of complexity through repetition of mark and shape. This work demonstrates a dynamic optical activity and illusion and explores the possibilities that exist by trying variations of single or limited elements and forms. The drawings are rigorous and measured with specific strategies of variation and planned patterning that often employ a division of the picture plane to set up field for a game. Slight differences within the drawings can snare the eye into a compare and contrast situation. In the Net paintings and drawings, the geometry takes on a life of it’s own, expanding and contracting across the surface using a simple solid geometric shape. The variation in the pattern that occurs is a result of a loose control of the artist’s hand.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Getting Below the Surface :An Interview with Elizabeth Graver
Elizabeth Graver will visit Chester College of New England on Wednesday, October 28. SO Good/Compass Rose staffer Alan Ferland had the opportunity to speak to her.
Alan Ferland: At what point in your life did you want to become a writer?
Elizabeth Graver: I grew up in a house full of books, and no television, so I was an avid reader from an early age, and also a kid with a very intense and elaborate fantasy life. As a girl, I played imaginary games, wrote, and drew pictures in nearly equal measure. I expressed a desire to be a writer from a very young age, around six, I think. I began writing more seriously when I became a teenager and playing with dolls was a terrible embarrassment; the life of my imagination shifted more intensely into writing then. After that, it was a slow, gradual process that involved many steps--writing for the self, writing in school, eventually writing toward publication. The context kept (and keeps) shifting. But the act itself--the writing, the making up of stories--has been part of how I make sense of the world for as long as I can remember.
AF: What do you consider to be inspiration for your writing?
EG: My inspiration comes, for individual pieces, from many different places: photographs, newspaper clippings, dreams, a voice, an image, sometimes (though not often) an event in real life. In a wider way, writing is most centrally about two things for me: words, which I adore--their sounds, their poetry, the way they can be braided into narrative; and emotion and psychology, getting below the surface. The act of writing itself is, I suppose, what generates the inspiration, the words as things I love to put together, and that lead me to new places.
AF: I read your short story, "The Mourning Door" in my Speculative Fiction class and was very much interested in the story's content. Have you always been a fiction writer, or do you stick more so with non-fiction?
EG: I mostly write fiction, and I mostly write fairly realistic, psychological fiction, but that story is one of my stranger ones, playing as it does with the surreal. I could not have written that story as an essay, even though many of the things it engages with--infertility, modern medicine, science, biology, loss--are things an essay could take up. But I wanted a world whose strangeness could be signaled by, saying, the central character finding a little baby ear under the swing-set. I wanted to show the strangeness of reproduction and reproductive technology. Fiction that played with the borders of realism felt like the best way to do that.
AF: Is it ever possible for a story to be considered "done" on the first draft? Do you let your students workshop your own work?
EG: A story for me is never done on the first draft, though some of my stories come out closer to being finished than others. Sometimes it's a question of tweaking, editing, tightening. Other times, it's a question of knocking the house down to rebuilt it again. I often free-write with my students and share some work with them, but I've never had them workshop my own work; we are much too busy trying to fit in their work, and they
AF: In your short story collection, Have You Seen Me?, a few of your stories have maternal undertones. Did you draw from experience to create these pieces?
EG: Not in any direct, autobiographical way. I am a parent now, but my first daughter was born in 2000, my second in 2002, and Have You Seen Me? was written many years before that, in my early to mid-twenties. I love children; I baby-sat a lot; I have a mother; I am a daughter. So I guess that's experience in a way, but mostly, for me, writing is not about recording my own experience--it's about imagining, crossing thresholds into the experiences of my characters. I have to be interested in an urgent way, but I do not have to have, for example, been pregnant in order to write a story about a pregnant woman. If I need to know more, I do research. I make a lot of things up. I feel quite strongly that writers should not limit themselves to the autobiographical. Whose life is interesting enough? Not mine!
AF: What challenges do you face in both teaching and writing? How do you balance such a lifestyle?
EG: My life pulls me in many different directions, with writing, teaching, and parenting young kids all at the center. I love all those things. Sometimes they energize each other. Sometimes I need to put one aside to pay more attention to the other. I need to be patient, let the work develop slowly. Nothing is ever quite in balance, so for me it is more about learning to live with the disequilibrium and know that each thing will return, and that I need to do things to make that happen. A few examples: I left my family twice last year to go to Artists' Retreats for five days and do nothing but write; I left my writing this summer to spend seven weeks with my kids in Switzerland and do nothing but be with them and my husband, as a family, in a foreign place. When I was off writing, I missed my family, and when I was off with my family, I missed my writing, but the purity of not being divided in both those situations made it entirely worth it, and when I came back from my writing retreats, the kids were fine, and when I came back from Switzerland, my novel had not up and run away.
AF: Can you tell me a little more about your current project "Plants and their Children?"
EG: It's a strange sort of hybrid--a series of linked novellas or stories, I suppose, all set on the same small spit of land in Buzzards Bay, but spanning half a century and told from multiple points of view: that of a Scottish nanny caring for a child whose family spends summers on this Point; that of a wealthy young mother in the 50s; of her troubled son in 1970. It's about land, and ownership, and social class, and family as made up of bloodlines and caretakers and in-laws. It's probably the hardest book I've ever written in that what I am trying to capture is quite complicated, as is the relationship of the parts to the whole. It's taking me a long time, but I'm not in a rush and just hoping to get it right.
AF: What advice do you have for up and coming writers?
EG: Read, read, read.`12 Identify what conditions you need in order for your work to flourish (solitude or a cafe, a writers group, an MFA program, a cabin in the woods), and do what you can to create them. Be patient. Go out into the world and have adventures and crossings-over in which you enlarge your sense of the world and yourself.
Don't feel limited to just writing what you know (learn more, know more, imagine). Allow yourself to play--and then allow yourself to go back and revise, revise. E.L. Doctorow once wrote that "writing is like driving at night. You can only see as far as the headlights shine, but you can make the whole trip that way."
Alan Ferland: At what point in your life did you want to become a writer?
Elizabeth Graver: I grew up in a house full of books, and no television, so I was an avid reader from an early age, and also a kid with a very intense and elaborate fantasy life. As a girl, I played imaginary games, wrote, and drew pictures in nearly equal measure. I expressed a desire to be a writer from a very young age, around six, I think. I began writing more seriously when I became a teenager and playing with dolls was a terrible embarrassment; the life of my imagination shifted more intensely into writing then. After that, it was a slow, gradual process that involved many steps--writing for the self, writing in school, eventually writing toward publication. The context kept (and keeps) shifting. But the act itself--the writing, the making up of stories--has been part of how I make sense of the world for as long as I can remember.
AF: What do you consider to be inspiration for your writing?
EG: My inspiration comes, for individual pieces, from many different places: photographs, newspaper clippings, dreams, a voice, an image, sometimes (though not often) an event in real life. In a wider way, writing is most centrally about two things for me: words, which I adore--their sounds, their poetry, the way they can be braided into narrative; and emotion and psychology, getting below the surface. The act of writing itself is, I suppose, what generates the inspiration, the words as things I love to put together, and that lead me to new places.
AF: I read your short story, "The Mourning Door" in my Speculative Fiction class and was very much interested in the story's content. Have you always been a fiction writer, or do you stick more so with non-fiction?
EG: I mostly write fiction, and I mostly write fairly realistic, psychological fiction, but that story is one of my stranger ones, playing as it does with the surreal. I could not have written that story as an essay, even though many of the things it engages with--infertility, modern medicine, science, biology, loss--are things an essay could take up. But I wanted a world whose strangeness could be signaled by, saying, the central character finding a little baby ear under the swing-set. I wanted to show the strangeness of reproduction and reproductive technology. Fiction that played with the borders of realism felt like the best way to do that.
AF: Is it ever possible for a story to be considered "done" on the first draft? Do you let your students workshop your own work?
EG: A story for me is never done on the first draft, though some of my stories come out closer to being finished than others. Sometimes it's a question of tweaking, editing, tightening. Other times, it's a question of knocking the house down to rebuilt it again. I often free-write with my students and share some work with them, but I've never had them workshop my own work; we are much too busy trying to fit in their work, and they
AF: In your short story collection, Have You Seen Me?, a few of your stories have maternal undertones. Did you draw from experience to create these pieces?
EG: Not in any direct, autobiographical way. I am a parent now, but my first daughter was born in 2000, my second in 2002, and Have You Seen Me? was written many years before that, in my early to mid-twenties. I love children; I baby-sat a lot; I have a mother; I am a daughter. So I guess that's experience in a way, but mostly, for me, writing is not about recording my own experience--it's about imagining, crossing thresholds into the experiences of my characters. I have to be interested in an urgent way, but I do not have to have, for example, been pregnant in order to write a story about a pregnant woman. If I need to know more, I do research. I make a lot of things up. I feel quite strongly that writers should not limit themselves to the autobiographical. Whose life is interesting enough? Not mine!
AF: What challenges do you face in both teaching and writing? How do you balance such a lifestyle?
EG: My life pulls me in many different directions, with writing, teaching, and parenting young kids all at the center. I love all those things. Sometimes they energize each other. Sometimes I need to put one aside to pay more attention to the other. I need to be patient, let the work develop slowly. Nothing is ever quite in balance, so for me it is more about learning to live with the disequilibrium and know that each thing will return, and that I need to do things to make that happen. A few examples: I left my family twice last year to go to Artists' Retreats for five days and do nothing but write; I left my writing this summer to spend seven weeks with my kids in Switzerland and do nothing but be with them and my husband, as a family, in a foreign place. When I was off writing, I missed my family, and when I was off with my family, I missed my writing, but the purity of not being divided in both those situations made it entirely worth it, and when I came back from my writing retreats, the kids were fine, and when I came back from Switzerland, my novel had not up and run away.
AF: Can you tell me a little more about your current project "Plants and their Children?"
EG: It's a strange sort of hybrid--a series of linked novellas or stories, I suppose, all set on the same small spit of land in Buzzards Bay, but spanning half a century and told from multiple points of view: that of a Scottish nanny caring for a child whose family spends summers on this Point; that of a wealthy young mother in the 50s; of her troubled son in 1970. It's about land, and ownership, and social class, and family as made up of bloodlines and caretakers and in-laws. It's probably the hardest book I've ever written in that what I am trying to capture is quite complicated, as is the relationship of the parts to the whole. It's taking me a long time, but I'm not in a rush and just hoping to get it right.
AF: What advice do you have for up and coming writers?
EG: Read, read, read.`12 Identify what conditions you need in order for your work to flourish (solitude or a cafe, a writers group, an MFA program, a cabin in the woods), and do what you can to create them. Be patient. Go out into the world and have adventures and crossings-over in which you enlarge your sense of the world and yourself.
Don't feel limited to just writing what you know (learn more, know more, imagine). Allow yourself to play--and then allow yourself to go back and revise, revise. E.L. Doctorow once wrote that "writing is like driving at night. You can only see as far as the headlights shine, but you can make the whole trip that way."
Author Elizabeth Graver Visits Chester College
The next writer in Chester College of New England's Visiting Writers Series is Elizabeth Graver. She will be holding a question and answer session with students from 2- 3 p.m. in Powers 29 on October 28. Later that evening, she will give a reading at 6 p.m., also in Powers 29. Chester College's own Tim Horvath, a member of the Writing and Literature faculty, will open. The reading is free and open to the public.
Graver was born in Los Angeles, California in 1964. She has written three novels, as well as a short story collection, titled Have You Seen Me?, which won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize in 1991. Much of her work has been seen in several anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Best American Essays. One of her stories, “The Mourning Door,” won her the Cohen Prize from the Ploughshare Magazine. She currently is at Boston College, teaching Creative Writing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)