Innovative voices
Creative Writing Reading Series
Sponsored by the MFA in Creative Writing, authors from around the world come to Saint Mary’s for readings, conversation, and community. All events are free and open to the public.
Fall Readings
Craft Conversations
Monday, September 27, 2021, 7:00pm via Zoom
Chris Feliciano Arnold has written essays and journalism for The Atlantic, Harper's, Outside, Vice News, The New York Times and more. His fiction has been published in Playboy, The Kenyon Review, Ecotone and other magazines. His work has been noted in The Best American Sports Writing and The Best American Short Stories. He has received fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon. His first book, The Third Bank of the River: Power and Survival in the Twenty-First Century Amazon, is a work of narrative nonfiction published by Picador in June 2018.
Monday, October 18, 2021, 7:00pm via Zoom
Aria Aber's debut collection Hard Damage (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and a Whiting Award. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. A graduate from the NYU MFA in Creative Writing, where she was the Writers in Public Schools Fellow, she holds awards and fellowships from Kundiman and the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She was the 2020 Li Shen Visiting Writer at Mills College and is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.
Monday, November 1, 2021, 7:00pm via Zoom
Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking, 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares, and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018. Currently, he is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
Talks on craft, publishing, & life after the MFA.
Wednesday, September 29, 2021, 2:00pm via Zoom
The Sentence with Jamil Jan Kochai
The novelist Thomas Berger once suggested that the sentence was “the cell beyond which the life of the book cannot be traced, a novel being a structure of such cells.” Continuing this line of thought, one might argue that a great novel is built upon great sentences. In this craft talk, we will be thinking through the techniques and theories discussed in Brooks Landon’s Building Great Sentences in order to determine what elements make a great sentence, and how particular sentences are fashioned by writers like Patrick Chamoiseau, Sandra Cisneros, and Annie Proulx.
Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking, 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.
Wednesday, October 13, 2021, 7:00pm via Zoom
Post-Freudian Slips: How Contemporary Psychoanalytic Thought Can Deepen the Inner Lives of your Characters with Chris Feliciano Arnold
This craft talk will introduce students to a basic overview of contemporary psychoanalytic thought that can help them instill characters with a deeper level of psychological realism. Building upon the pioneering ideas of Sigmund and Anna Freud, we will explore how the Post-Freudian thinkers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century can help writers render splintered selves, fluid identities, formative relationships, traumas, ecstasies and critical experiences like birth, sex, violence, parenthood and death.
Chris Feliciano Arnold is the author of The Third Bank of the River: Power and Survival in the Twenty-First Century Amazon. He has written essays and journalism for The Atlantic, Harper's, Outside, Vice News, The New York Times and more.
Wednesday, November 3, 2021, 12:00pm via Zoom
Poetry of Grief: Mourning the Future with Aria Aber
This craft talk is an interrogation on how the elegy - and the poetry of grief in general - has changed over the centuries. The elegy, as one of the oldest classical forms of poetry, serves as a mirror, a look back into the past, and as a site of metamorphosis. Yearning for the impossible, the poet turns to the page to immortalize a part of what's lost and to retrieve what is scattered. How do poems sustain hope - in beauty, in future, in community - as the earth seems increasingly unsustainable for human life? In an attempt to study these questions, we will read poems by Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden, Adrienne Rich and Solmaz Sharif to see how the elegy merges the public an dprivate object of mourning to morph and manipulate lyric and narrative time.
Aria Aber's debut collection Hard Damage (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and a Whiting Award. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. A graduate from the NYU MFA in Creative Writing, where she was the Writers in Public Schools Fellow, she holds awards and fellowships from Kundiman and the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She was the 2020 Li Shen Visiting Writer at Mills College and is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.