Greetings from Gainesville, which has been going through some changes by which those of you who haven’t been here in awhile might be surprised. Thanks to a mini tech boom, we have several gleaming new buldings as well as a host of new restaurants. Luckily what Padgett Powell and I called, in our one collaboration as writers, the distinctive “note of funk” that the city’s “vestigial hippie presence” lends to the downtown area has not been eradicated. Lillian’s continues to thrive. The note of funk, rather, has been supplemented by a note of techbro, with the result that if you eavesdrop while sitting at Maude’s, you are likely to hear more conversations about platforms and coding than you might have in, say, 2002.
The program has also been going through some changes. The biggest change is Padgett’s retirement—we miss him—and the almost simultaneous arrival of our two new faculty members, Uwem Akpan and Camille Bordas. Uwem and Camille have brought youth and vigor and fresh perspectives to the program. We could not be happier to have them with us.
In other news, Jill Ciment’s new novel, The Body in Question, is on the brink of publication. Read it. Jackson Armstrong (fiction, 2021) raised the bar for Friskily Bogus Introductions to a stratospheric level with a performance on behalf of Gardner Mounce (fiction, 2020) that included a barbershop quartet. And as long as we’re on the topic of Gardner, let me take this opportunity to thank him for doing such a great job as assistant to the directors and for designing, in collaboration with his wife, Kendyl, our new website—which, by the way, is still a work-in-progress, so if you have any suggestions for how it might be improved, please let us know. Starting in the fall, August Lah (fiction, 2021) will take over for Gardner. Expect to hear more from and of her.
We had a great Writers Festival in October, with readings and talks from the poets Henri Cole and Cynthia Zarin and the prose writers Rebecca Curtis and John Jeremiah Sullivan. We also had a lively and fun editors weekend, at which we entertained and were edified by the Two Adams (Ross of The Sewanee Review and our own Vines of Birmingham Poetry Review), Jacqueline Ko for the Wylie Agency, and Steve Woodward of Graywolf Press.
The roster for the fall writers festival, which will run from October 24th to October 26th, is now fixed, and it is stellar: the poets Devin Johnston and Ada Limón and the fiction writers Donald Antrim, Deborah Levy, and Yiyun Li.
Finally, let me welcome, in advance, the members of the MFA@FLA class of 2022: in poetry Elizabeth Agans, Anna Egeland, Olivia Ivings, John Markland, and Sarina Redzinski; in fiction Ryan Bedsaul, Angie Bell, Patrick Duane, Cassie Fancher, Mitchell Galloway, and Victor Imko.
Solidarity forever!
David Leavitt
In Memoriam: Les Murray
The great Australian poet Less Murray died on April 29th, 2019 at the age of eighty. Those of us who were here at the time will not forget his visit to the program. To begin with, due to the 7 key on a computer being stuck, Les’s schedule said that he would be arriving in Jacksonville on Flight 65 at 10 pm when in fact he was arriving in Jacksonville on Flight 765 at 7:10 pm. Upon landing and finding no one there to pick him up, Les tried to call us. This was back in the age of the pay phone, and when he rested his credit card atop the phone, it fell behind the phone and got stuck.
A few hours later, the intrepid MFAs who had volunteered to pick him up got to the airport and couldn’t find him. I have called them intrepid, and that’s because they were. Instead of giving up, turning around and heading home, they decided to check the surrounding motels, in one of which, miraculously, they found Les, who was just about to go to bed.
My own fondest memory of that visit is of going on an alligator-sighting expedition with Les and Deborah Eisenberg, who was wearing stilettos.
Les will be greatly missed. His work we will never lose. We are lucky to have known him.
Testimonials
Camille Bordas (faculty)
Last year, I mainly focused on not sucking at my new job: teaching. As a result of this, I might not have made as much progress as I’d planned to on my novel (though I made some)(still no working title), but it was all worth it. I did finish a short story, however, which will appear in the New Yorker in the May 20th issue (“The Presentation on Egypt”). I spent a couple of weeks in France and in Spain, also, to promote translations of my novel, and will be back in Europe again to teach a fiction workshop in the Disquiet Literary Program in Lisbon in July.
Geoffrey Brock (MFA, 1998)
My long-simmering translation of Giovanni Pascoli’s Last Dream (poems) will be out in May from World Poetry Books, and my flash-fried translation of Marion Fayolle’s The Tenderness of Stones (a graphic novel) will be out in September from New York Review Comics. I have new poems out this year in the Yale Review, Copper Nickel, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Literary Review, and Massachusetts Review, and new translations in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, The Literary Review, and the Yale Review. I’m still teaching at Arkansas, where I edit the Arkansas International.
David Caplan (MFA, 1993)
I spent the last academic year at the University of Haifa, where I taught a course on contemporary American poetry, and gave readings and lectures around Israel (at various spots in Haifa and Jerusalem). My current projects include American Poetry: A Very Short Introduction, which I am writing for Oxford University Press as part of its Very Short Introduction series.
Jill Ciment (faculty)
It is alligator mating season, one of my favorite times of year. I am in the doldrums stage of publishing, the windless month before a book comes out. My novel, The Body in Question, will be published this June by Pantheon. And I am working on a new book, a memoir, The Other Half, which refutes much of what I said and didn’t say in my 1996 memoir, Half a Life, and has been excerpted in the June issue of Harper’s.
Michael W. Cox (MA, 1988)
Michael W. Cox had a novel published in November 2017, The Best Way to Get Even (MAMMOTH books). He has also recently published essays on Donald Justice (“Donald Justice Teaching the Fiction Workshop,” Midwest Quarterly 57.2) and David Foster Wallace (“Privileging the Sentence: David Foster Wallace’s Writing Process for ‘The View from Mrs. Thompson’s,’” Assay 4.2).
Stephen de Búrca (MFA, 2020)
Stephen de Búrca’s poem “Somewhere in Picardy” was published in the 50th issue of Crannóg magazine, an Irish publication.
Alison Gaines (MFA, 2019)
I defended my thesis called Eye Contact, and one of the poems from it will appear in the summer 2019 issue of Salamander. At the third-year reading afterparty, I was awarded a sash that read “Most Honest Face.” I am looking for a good teaching job in the Pacific Northwest, where I plan to move to be near family. So if you live in the Portland area, hit me up; I will need friends.
Peter Grimes (MFA, 2003)
Peter lives in a state of uncertainty in Fayetteville, North Carolina. What’s appropriate here? Fayetteville abuts the largest military installation in the world at Fort Bragg, and Peter hears church bells and mortar practice in alternation. Peter thinks of himself as “Peter.” Otherwise he feels personally responsible for what is caused by him. What’s not appropriate? Currently, he wonders about brewer’s yeast and if those other than brewers might access it and what would be the first thing he’d do if he got his hands on the stuff. Did Padgett address yeasts in the Book of Questions? Peter lives with Nancy, who teaches the ways of ancient Sparta to a pocket of militarized youth. Peter joined UNC-Pembroke’s ETFL Department in 2017. That stands for ET Faculty Location and is a secured division of the university. Peter teaches fiction writing and nonfiction writing that is really fiction writing and edits Pembroke Magazine <pembrokemagazine.com>. UNCP is noted for its diversity and is located in a field. Peter is very happy there. How long are these supposed to be? Peter’s embarrassing website is peterjgrimes.com.
Heather Hamilton (MFA, 2006)
Heather Hamilton’s chapbook, Here is a Clearing, was selected for the Poetry Society of Americas National Chapbook Fellowship and is forthcoming in spring 2019.
Michael Hofmann (faculty)
I’m at the time of life when looking back makes me vertiginous. 2018 was a year of long-running things sloughed off. A new book of poems, One Lark, One Horse, came out with Fabers (it’s all of twenty years since the last one: a US edition is due out in the summer from FSG). A new translation of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, the first in eighty years, that took me a decade, mostly of apprehension and recalcitrance (NYRB Classics): I’m happy to say his grandson, also Alfred Döblin, and of the Garden State but a clear likeness just the same, approves. [Padgett, are my non-exclusive commas all right?!] Making and introducing a selection of poems by the spectral Scotsman W.S. Graham for his centenary (also from NYRB). The judging of the MAN Booker International Fiction Prize. Writing the 4 Clarendon Lectures (“Messing About in Boats”) satisfactorily given at Oxford last month. Pieces on Thomas Bernhard (T.L.S.), and Emil Nolde, Lauren Groff, Antonio Munoz Molina, and Brexit (all L.R.B.). – Who is this man, and when will he stop? (Note from DL: Just out is MH’s translation of Kurt Tucholsky’s Castle Gripsholm from NYRB.)
Chris Jones (MFA, 2003)
I work at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis (loft.org), and we’re putting on a 100-author book festival in May and 400-person writing conference in November. My book, Behind the Book: Eleven Authors on their Path to Publication, came out from University of Chicago Press in 2018. I’m very happy to be back to winters and out of the heat of Florida, but I do miss the people in Gainesville.
Rachel Khong (MFA, 2011)
Living in San Francisco and sometimes Los Angeles. Working on novel #2, assorted other projects. Adopted a cat named Bunny!
Marianne Kunkel (MFA, 2007)
My first full-length collection of poetry, Hillary, Made Up (Stephen F. Austin State University Press), came out in September 2018. The book, composed entirely of poems from the voices of makeup and hair products to Hillary Clinton, has received positive reviews in The Rumpus and elsewhere, and I am grateful to all who came to my reading at Gainesville’s Third House Books & Coffee on Sept. 19.
David Leavitt (faculty)
After seven years of announcing the imminent completion of my new novel, the title of which has changed from newsletter to newsletter, I’m happy to report that the thing has been completed and submitted. Unless my publisher refuses to go along with it, its title will be This Was Once the Future.
It’s been a good year, thanks in large part to our wonderful new colleagues, Uwem Akpan and Camille Bordas, and to the superb conclusion to which the class of 2019 has brought its tenure.
The only other thing I can think of at the moment—this summer I’ll be teaching in the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon. As will Camille.
William Logan (faculty)
After a year’s sabbatical in England, I returned in July to the swamps—the steamy, humid swamps. In June, I published a new book of criticism, Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods (Columbia University Press), consisting of long essays on familiar poems, seen from a new angle. I published poems in American Journal of Poetry, Dispatches, Goliad, Hopkins Review, Kenyon Review, Modern Age, New Criterion, New England Review, Plume, Raritan, Sewanee Review, and TLS. I have poems forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Blackbird, Figure 1, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Hudson Review, New Criterion, Paris Review, Parnassus, Plume, Salmagundi, and Walrus. In addition to the spring and fall poetry chronicles in the New Criterion, I published an essay there on Philip Larkin’s “I Remember, I Remember,” as well as the introduction to Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods. I also published a review of the critic W. M. Spackman in Modern Age and a (very) brief interview in the online site Literary Hub for its “Secrets of the Book Critics” feature.
Margaret Luongo (MFA, 2001)
I’m including 2017 news because I forgot to submit that year. In 2017, I taught a course in contemporary European fiction about WWII in Luxembourg at Miami University’s European Center. Billy finished his MFA in printmaking. This year—and for the next two years—I’ll be directing the Creative Writing Program at Miami of Ohio. This summer I’ll be a Hawthornden Fellow at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, where there is no internet, which might be the only way to survive program directing for two years. The residency period runs a month, and I’ll be working on nonfiction. Since last I wrote, we’ve lost and gained cats. The new line-up: Basho, LouReeda, Major Tom, and HansGruber.
Randall Mann (MFA, 1997)
My first book of essays and reviews, The Illusion of Intimacy: On Poetry, is recently out from Diode Editions. My fifth collection of poems, A Better Life, is forthcoming from Persea Books in 2021. New writing appears in PoetryNow, Asian American Literary Review, At Length, Court Green, 32 Poems, jubilat, Foglifter, and the Poetry Foundation website. @randallmannpoet
Margaret Mackinnon (MFA, 1991)
My chapbook, Naming the Natural World, won the Sow’s Ear Poetry Review chapbook competition and was published this past summer. I am especially grateful for the elegant cover, which features art by Debora Greger.
Ange Mlinko (faculty)
This was a busy year: I’ve gotten to know the Gainesville Airport very well. I did readings in LA, St. Louis, Tampa, Houston, and Jacksonville; I was faculty at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference; I went to Yale to co-judge the Bollingen Award. I’ve published the occasional essay and poem in London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, and had new poems in Poetry, PN Review (UK), and The Sewanee Review. A sonnet cycle published last year in Paris Review, “Sleepwalking in Venice,” was chosen by Major Jackson for Best American Poetry 2019. Last but not least, I continue to edit verse for our fantastic journal Subtropics, with lots of assistance from my interns and David Leavitt, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude!
Christian Nagle (MFA, 1995)
Back in Japan since 2016. Working as Communications Wizard for Zensho Agency, Japan’s hottest recruitment firm. From home. I get paid while watching scandalous Shohei Imamura movies on my shamefully huge Orwellian 4K screen and practicing rare Chinese martial art called Yiquan (“each one”), which ensures I will live to at least 53, but maybe 100. My collection of poems, Flightbook, will be shot into limited orbit by Salmon Poetry (Ireland) in Spring 2020 and flame out just in time for me to litter the Tokyo Olympics stadiums with free copies. Recently rejected as loet paureate of Alexandria, VA. This is surely a good thing for my home city, as I fully intended to execute my duties in the style of Kevin McGowin, dressed as a bear and wielding an épée as he once did for the Montgomery Ballet, thereby disgracing my family and all of you. Here’s the website I wrote. In an undershirt. You can come visit only if I ever loved you even a little bit.
John Poch (MFA, 1997)
John Poch’s fifth collection of poems, Texases, will be published by WordFarm Press in April. In May, his photography/poetry collaboration, Between Two Rivers, with TTU colleague, Professor Jerod Foster, will be published by TTU Press. John recently won 2nd place in the Everett Southwest Literary Prize competition for his story collection, Mass Casualty Training Exercise and other stories. He was recently named President’s Excellence Research Professor at Texas Tech. He also published a scholarly article on George Herbert’s “Easter-wings” in Christianity & Literature this spring.
Hai-Dang Phan (MFA, 2013)
My first collection, Reenactments: Poems and Translations, was published by Sarabande in February, and already the book feels like it was written by someone else, the other Hai-Dang Phan. “Look beyond it without neglecting to embrace it” is a piece of good advice I received from a wise blurber. Poems, translations, and a prose thing have appeared here and there—in The New Yorker (“Osprey,” part MFA@FLA poem!), Shenandoah, The Southeast Review, Mekong Review, and The Fabulist. This year I’m one of the judges for ALTA’s Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize (free books!) and also helping to select America’s next top Mastheads (free association with Aaron Thier ‘12 and Sarah Trudgeon ‘13!). Just call me The Natural Selector. I used to live in Des Moines, now I live in Iowa City. I’m the Chair of the English Department at Grinnell, but still get to spend plenty of time on my couch.
Stephen Priest (MFA, 2006)
I work for a corporate conglomerate in New York City. If you don’t work for a corporate conglomerate in New York City, you should. It’s great. In the bathrooms they have these silkworms that spin dental floss, and at 3 am the bosses give you your only break of the 23-year hour day, and you can go into the bathroom and floss. Your teeth have never felt cleaner or freer.
I still do poetry? Since leaving UF, I’ve published poems (sometimes under the pseudonym Gergen Manstoff) in 32 Poems, The Agriculture Reader, Birmingham Poetry Review, Barrow Street, cellpoems, Chasm Journal, Juked and Subtropics. And I have a manuscript that’s been a runner-up for the 2014 Cleveland State Poetry Center First Book Award; a semi-finalist for the 2016 and 2017 Vassar Miller Prize, and a finalist for the 2018 one; a finalist for the 2017 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize; and a finalist for the 2017 Lost Horse Press Idaho Poetry Prize. Hoping it breaks through eventually.
Wishing everyone well and sending y’all a big ole GATOR CHOMP.
Ralph Savarese (MFA 1994)
My new book of literary nonfiction, See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor, just came out from Duke University Press. One of the autistic readers in the book is Temple Grandin with whom I discuss fiction about animals. Temple shined; from memory she recited lines by Wordsworth and Dante. Deej, the PBS documentary that my son, DJ, stars in, wrote and co-produced, won a Peabody Award last year. He was Oberlin College’s first nonspeaking student with autism. I still teach at Grinnell College but recently moved to Iowa City, which I love.
Eliezra Schaffzin (MFA, 1999)
I recently escaped the grip of some enduring medical unpleasantness long enough to write and send forth a few stories. One, about a virus, was deemed weird enough to be awarded the Calvino Prize (late 2017); the next, about a micro-animal called a tardigrade, was a finalist in a flash-fiction contest (spring 2018). From there I moved on directly to class Mammalia: my short story “Goat” appeared online with Conjunctions at the start of this year. I’ve realized I’ll need to pace myself lest my protagonists become too unwieldy, too soon. I’ll be guest-editing a weekly issue of SmokeLong in late March, should you have flash fiction to send that way. I occasionally and eagerly collaborate with composers of choral music and opera (and harbor a secret wish that I might one day also pen a rock ballad). For those of you who remember me, you will also remember Lisa, who is still here, still wonderful, and now also a divinity student. Wrap your noggins around that. My warmest regards to all.
Gail Shepherd (MA, 1985)
My debut middle grade novel, The True History of Lyndie B. Hawkins, was (finally!) published by Penguin/Kathy Dawson on March 26, 2019. Lyndie has received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Booklist, and it’s a Junior Library Guild Selection for 2019. I retired from my full time job in January (hooray) and I’m currently working on my next book and planning an educational summer cruise to Italy, Turkey and Greece with my nine-year-old nephew.
Meg Shevenock (MFA, 2006)
I attended the Tin House Winter Workshop in January, which was a dream. We were housed in a rickety old hotel on a bluff overlooking the ocean, and every morning I woke at 5:00, wrote poems, waited impatiently for a light hint, and then walked on a cold wild shore, like some kind of feral heroine. This, followed by poetry camp all day, with a group of amazing writers. Thus, I am down to weighing syllables and space in my manuscript, which I’m determined to publish soon; perhaps saying it enough will make it so—but I also have a strong good feeling this time around. I’m still privately teaching gifted students, and am currently an assistant choreographer for L.A.-based artist Ann Carlson, for her beautiful performance, “The Symphonic Body,” which will debut at the Wexner Center this spring. My collaborator Jamie Boyle and I maintain our ongoing telepathic art practice together and are slowly moving toward some new work. Finally, I recently moved with my husband and our dog to Columbus, and we are already dreaming of getting back to the west coast, perhaps Oregon, now that I’ve seen giant green ferns growing beside the ocean. I need wild, miss wild, and Ohio, while affordable and full of some of my favorite people, is the grayest, flattest thing you could ever draw.
Dan Shurley (MFA, 2020)
I spent the last semester shooting rap videos with Lia d’Agostino. Lia raps from the perspective of a harried Whole Foods mom who sells pine cones on Etsy. One of my personae (heteronyms?) is a programmer laid low by the death of Steve Jobs (“When Steve Jobs died I saw the void/ My LinkedIn says I’m still employed”). Since moving back to Gainesville I’ve been cultivating my inner Florida Man. We’ve been shooting Florida Man’s parts outside of police stations, plasma centers, and beer stores in Gainesville.
On another front, I’m writing a critical essay on Philadelphia’s lack of official acknowledgment of the dispossession and forced displacement of the Lenape people, forthcoming at Hidden City.
Alexandra Teague (MFA, 1998)
My third collection of poems, Or What We’ll Call Desire, is forthcoming from Persea Books in spring 2019. The paperback of my first novel, The Principles Behind Flotation, will also be out from Skyhorse in early 2019. Part of last year was spent traveling around doing events for Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, an unfortunately endlessly timely anthology I co-edited with Brian Clements and Dean Rader (Beacon, 2017). Right now, through July 2019, I’m on sabbatical from the University of Idaho, and am writing and exploring in Cardiff, Wales, as my husband, Dylan Champagne, completes a post-graduate degree here in music composition.
Troy Teegarden (MFA, 2006)
Three years ago Alison and I moved to my grandfather’s farm in northern Kentucky. I was raised there, and although he passed in October 2014 at 97 years old, we feel like he’s still around every time we handle one of his tools or work with his land. We raise chickens, rabbits, bees, and cows along with three horses, a donkey named Andy, and our young beagle, Mac. We also have an elderly cat who has been with us since 2006. She is sometimes called Kitty, or Mewse, or Meowzer, though her given name is Asia. She enjoys lounging and killing rodents, and she was once saved from death by the screaming of a blue jay. We garden every year. I tend to focus on hot peppers such as the Hinklehatz (Chicken Heart), Carolina Reaper, Ghost, and Scorpion varieties. Alison focuses more on the tomatoes, squash, corn, and lettuces. We process the peppers to flake in our kitchen and make mead in the basement to share with our friends when they visit. As far as careers go, we are both educators. I teach at the Boone County Alternative Center for Education (ACE) in Florence, KY, where I have been slowly moving the farm into the classroom. For example, we built our own incubator at the beginning of this semester, but we failed to hatch any eggs on the first try. I believe our design was solid, but many things can happen to prevent an egg from hatching. We started our second DIY attempt in late October. We’ll see how it goes. As of this writing, there are six silkie chicks in the classroom along with a rabbit named Snoop. I’m trying to figure out how to get a goat in here next.
David Y. Todd (MFA, 1993)
I was among some teachers given free tickets to a game and an “MVP – Most Valuable Professor” award by the U. Maryland Women’s Basketball team. Certainly the only time in this life my face would appear on an arena scoreboard. For The Writer’s Center’s Fall 2018 Writer’s Guide I wrote an “Appreciation of a Workshop Leader”—friend Zahara Heckscher, who got me that U. Maryland job before she died in January.
Suzanne Warren (MFA, 2003)
I work as a writer and educator in Seattle. Post Road selected my story “The Raspberry King” to appear in its Guest Folio, and my story “The Country of Husbands” won an Editor’s Reprint Award from Sequestrum. Also, I was awarded a 2019 fellowship at the Jack Straw Cultural Center in Seattle. I miss Gainesville.
Richard Weems (MFA, 1993)
co-wrote “Goodnight Death,” a short film about a Grim Reaper dealing with the victims of a serial killer. The script reached #1 on Coverfly’s Red List and was a HollyShorts Festival semi-finalist. The film itself, starring Callum Blue and Danielle Kotch, is due out in December.
Charles Wuest (MFA, 2002)
Last year I had a poem appear in Folio and an article on William Caxton’s edition of Malory appear in Arthuriana. I’m living in Greensboro, NC, and teaching at Averett University in southern Virginia.
Elizabeth Yerkes (MFA, 2020)
Elizabeth Yerkes read her story, “A Stranger Came to Town”, November 4 at the Millhopper Public Library. Bacopa Literary Review published the story in September.