Creative Writing in the Community: A Ball State Student’s Experience

Graduate School for Creative Writers

This post contains a transcript of the meeting, wherein different writers & teachers were asked to give advice on grad school opportunities. There’s a lot of really solid stuff in here!

Who’s Ear?

In lieu of updating this website in a meaningful manner, I’ve been working with these guys to start a literary collective. We’re independently-run, we get together and workshop and take turns reading, and we seek to provide a writing community for anyone looking to write–and provide content to read for anyone looking to read. We are The Bureau.

Two weeks from now on the 30th, over at the Folly Moon, we’re putting on a reading. We’re also seeking to outreach to any interested writers to work with us. Information can be found on the events page, and a more descriptive event description–as well as information about The Bureau, our endeavors & goals, etc.–will follow.

So if anyone wants to brain-grub on some raw readings, head out this way!

Trust in the Dirt

Philip Raisor reading at Minnetrista

(Yes, I’m aware this event is taking place right now, but this post also serves to promote a really talented poet & author native to our own Middletown.)

Today at 7PM at Minnetrista, Philip Raisor will be reading off his new poetry collection, Swimming in the Shallow End. Taken from his website:

Philip Raisor is the author of three books of poetry, nonfiction, and criticism, as well as numerous scholarly articles, essays, reviews, and interviews in such journals as The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, The Writer’s Chronicle, Studies in English Literature, and Contemporary Literature. In his teen years, he played on the losing team in the state championship game in Indiana that inspired Hoosiers, and was a freshman on the team with Wilt Chamberlain that lost a national championship in triple-overtime. Raisor received his B.A. and M.A. from Louisiana State University and a Ph.D. from Kent State. He taught at various universities and is now professor emeritus of English at Old Dominion University, where he initiated the creative writing program, a visiting writers series, and the annual literary festival. He lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia, with his wife, Juanita.

This man has clearly seen & done a lot, from states all around the Midwest & South, and from the perspective of a guy who was raised in Muncie. Also from his website: Muncie and sports had a strong impact on his emotional upbringing and nineteenth and twentieth century literature had a major influence on his critical thinking. Please visit his website and read him for yourself. This is a writer who is doing exactly what a writer should do with regionally-inspired work: rich, haunting, historical.

Stop to See if I’m Alive

A Man Reflected in the Eye of God

Reading tomorrow with Indiana Poet Laureate

Holy diver it’s freakin’ April. Did you know that April is National Poetry Month? (I definitely did not, nor did I realize poetry had a month.) To kick it off, Muncie’s welcoming two Indiana poets to Vera Mae’s downtown: Karen Kovacik and Mark Neely. Taken from the vid description:

Karen Kovacik, Indiana’s Poet Laureate, is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Metropolis Burning and Beyond the Velvet Curtain. Her work as a poet and translator has received numerous honors, including the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum, a fellowship in literary translation from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Fulbright Research Grant to Poland for her translations of contemporary Polish poetry.

Mark Neely’s first book, Beasts of the Hill, won the FIELD Poetry Prize and was published by Oberlin College Press in early 2012. He is also the author of a chapbook, Four of a Kind, winner of the Concrete Wolf chapbook contest. His poems have appeared in Boulevard, Indiana Review, Salt Hill, FIELD, North American Review, Columbia Poetry Review and elsewhere.

Maybe Enough to Kill Me

I crack the shell against the edge of the flecked counter top, drip it into the pan. The pool of oil blisters the delicate flesh, pops and splits. I use a nylon spatula to break the surface tension of the whites so that it creeps towards the edge. Wait for about a minute and a half, scoop it out onto a piece of toast, crack another. Huevos fritos. Spanish for fried egg. Drop ‘em in hot oil, they cook up quick. It leaves the whites fully cooked, even crispy on the edges. The yolk remains smooth and savory. Bit of pepper, bit of basil.

There’s a knock on the door. By the time I get there all I see is the brown uniformed delivery driver getting back in his truck and driving off. I open the door and look down, on the mat is a large box addressed to me. The return address is somewhere in West Virginia. I’ve not been to West Virginia in thirteen years.

I open the parcel, resting on top of the packing peanuts is a plain white letter envelope with my name on it. The letter inside tells me that my great aunt June has passed, and that she’s left the contained items to me in her will. I barely even remember the woman, met her when I was nine. But I remember liking her. No one told me she had died. There was no funeral invitation. Just a box of things on my doorstep.

Looking through the box, I find various little trinkets, mementos. A silver necklace with an angel pendant. A rubber band stretched to straining with old post cards addressed to and from a military base in Vietnam. Stuff like that.

But at the bottom of the box is a black jar, almost weightless in my hands. I turn on the overhead light to get a better look and I see that it’s full of bugs, still alive. Crawling all over each other. Legs over wings over legs over wings. I wonder how long they’ve been in there. I wonder if I should let them out. For now, I put it back in the box. I’ve got eggs to eat and errands to run.

I dream of the jar that night. I take it outside, follow the steps until there are no steps and I’m standing on a sidewalk that stretches forever in two directions. I unscrew the lid, hold the jar firmly between my palms. The insects fly out in a storm, except the thunder is soft and doesn’t stop. They linger for a moment and then fly off, leaving me alone. I wonder if I’m stuck now, too. Maybe the sidewalk wraps back around on itself like the inside wall of the glass jar in my hands. I wonder if someone will open the lid for me.

My alarm goes off and the first thing I do is go to the box. I take a closer look at the jar, hold it up to the light. The bugs are wasps. The realization is too much, at first. A jar full of wasps. In my hands. I bet I’m the only person in the state of Indiana – hell, maybe even the whole world – holding a jar of wasps right now. This time, when I put the jar down, I put it on the shelf. For some reason I just want to be able to look at it.

It’s become a staple of my decor, it goes well with my unshaded light fixtures and my cat piss couch. I pick the jar up and I roll it around in my hands. After a week, it finally seems real. And now that it’s real, it’s striking. Beautiful. I wonder why my aunt left it to me, and I know that no one can answer that question. But I know there’s a reason. One does not gift a jar of wasps without a reason.

I dream of the wasps again. I walk down the steps until there are no steps. I take my place at the center of a square of concrete, one of many on the path that may or may not feed into itself. Ouroboros. Maybe I’m Tutankhamen. Maybe I’m stuck behind a face, facade in gold. My heart in terracotta. I try to open the jar, but it doesn’t let me. I’m lost in Duat. I smash the glass down, the wasps pour out and over me. They sting my skin until there is no skin. I was wrong. I am not a dead king, but a dying fool.

I wake up. I take the jar in my hands. I watch them for a bit, legs over wings over legs over wings. I can see the beauty behind the thick glass. A thousand little lives, a thousand little stories nested against my flesh. No, I can’t see the beauty. Only that there is beauty. I press my ear to it and hear the light buzzing of wings, muffled. I want it.

I watch them, and I know they watch me. I want their beauty. There’s a pain in there, too. A poison. Maybe enough to kill me, and they want to share it with me. I know they do. It’s in their nature. I’ve shaken their home. I’ve scared them. I want that beauty, but the pain is part of it. If I’m going to want it, I’m going to have to want it all. Not deal with it. Not endure it. Want it. I decide that it’s time.

My feet stick to the hot sidewalk, someone bikes past. I hold the jar up to the sun. I wonder if they know how close to freedom they are. I wonder if they understand. I wonder which of my dreams are to be true. Will they scatter, leave me alone on the sidewalk? Will they kill me? I wrap my fingers around the lid and turn.

Nothing. The jar doesn’t open. I briefly consider smashing it down, but no. Not like this.   I wonder if it won’t open because they don’t want it to.

I wonder how long they’ll last in there. I wonder how long I’ll last out here.

Maybe we’ll all die together. Maybe they’ll put my ashes in the jar.

-Stack Lee

March 22nd! FUCK WHAT YA HEARD.

Eyyo a friendly reminder to come to our bad-mad-rad underground reading. Bring a poem, or a short story, or a guitar or a uke or whatever.