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The Winter Wheat Festival of Writing is just around the corner! We have dozens of great and intriguing panels for you to attend, from poetry, fiction, nonfiction, publishing, techniques, and new ideas for your own writing.

Are you a poet or just love poetry? Take a look at these 5 panels that are poetry-focused:

 

“The Poetic Image as Communication,” with Jacob Hall

We will have a discussion on the utility of the poetic image as a means of communicating theme, narrative, sense, and emotion within a poem. This will involve exploring hypothetical uses of image as a means of communication, as well as examining works from a range of poets who utilize the communicative image within their poems. Finally, we will have a workshop in which attendees will work to craft their own poetic images intended to communicate with a reader.

Jacob Hall is a second-year MFA candidate in creative writing at BGSU. He serves as the assistant poetry editor for Mid-American Review.

(this workshop will be held on Friday, November 4^th from 3:00-4:15pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select A2 when you register!)

 

“Rhythm. Rhythm. Rhythm. Rhythm.” with Abigail Cloud

An old Sesame Street music scene begins with those words and continues on to study objects that make distinct rhythms. Why is rhythm so often hard for us to grasp as adults? In this workshop we’ll experiment with ways to charge our poetic language rhythmically, whether or not we’re following a meter.

 Abigail Cloud teaches creative writing, editing, and publishing at BGSU and serves as editor-in-chief of Mid-American Review. Her book, Sylph (Pleiades, 2015), won the 2014 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize.

(this workshop will be held on Friday, November 4^th from 4:30-5:45pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select B2 when you register!)

 

“The Contemporary Ode,” with Katrina Vandenberg

Poet C.D. Wright said that the ode is “one of the few literary tendencies left on the lot that admits wonder and presumes a future.” In this hands-on workshop, we’ll examine what it means in 2016 to celebrate and wonder, noting strategies of contemporary ode writers like Ross Gay, Sharon Olds, Pablo Neruda, Lucille Clifton, and others, then put those strategies to work on the page as we create new work.

Katrina Vandenberg is the author of two books of poems, The Alphabet Not Unlike the World (2012) and Atlas(2004), both from Milkweed. She teaches in The Creative Writing Program at Hamline University, and serves as poetry editor for Water~Stone Review. She is co-attending the FUSE conference as founding editor of the undergraduate magazine Runestone. www.katrinavandenberg.com

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5^th from 9:30-10:45am. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select C8 when you register!)

 

“Write Yourself as You Are, with Purpose: Feminism & Poetry,” with Roseanna Boswell

Adrienne Rich wrote, “the moment a feeling enters a body, is political,” suggesting that the intersection of feelings and bodies is political, which means that poetry is political. Helene Cixous demanded: “write yourself. Your body must be heard,” because we must meet ourselves in our own words, our own bodies, and not settle for someone else’s perspective. Writing poetry is not just political for the listener or reader then, but also for the writer who is claiming their voice as a valuable one. In this workshop we will discuss using poetry as a means of accessing identity, and attendees will be given the chance to draft poems with this goal in mind.

Roseanna Boswell is a poetry MFA candidate at BGSU in Ohio. Her writing focuses primarily on the voices of girls and women, and seeks to explore and interrogate traditional notions of femininity as related to gender, sexuality, and body image.

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5^th from 11:00-12:15pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select D2 when you register!)

 

“(Re)combining Poetic Sensibilities,” with Brandon North

Centos, erasures, Google sculpting, and other recombinant methods of composing poems are helpful with the metacognition of one’s poetic sensibilities. For both the student and experienced writer, composing with gathered materials is useful in reorienting, honing, or expanding one’s sense of what is possible in a piece of writing. In this workshop, we will try out several methods of composing found poetry with an eye toward critically investigating why we might use, choose, and/or combine words/phrases/sentences in crafting poems. After writing through each method, we will discuss the aesthetics we find ourselves leaning toward, both personally and collectively.

Brandon North is a second-year poet in the NEOMFA program and holds an MA in literature from Wright State University. His work appears or is forthcoming in decomP and UnLost. He redirects energy at centeringspirals.blogspot.com.

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5^th from 1:30-2:45pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select E6 when you register!)

 

Check out these and other great panels on our website:

WINTER WHEAT

Mid-American Review would like to feature Winter Wheat Festival of Writing Coordinator and poetry editor, Coral! 

Coral Nardandrea hails from Ocala, Florida, a small horse town landlocked in a state known for its oceans, swamps, and glades. She got her undergraduate degrees in creative writing and women’s studies, which complemented each other more than you’d think. She came to Bowling Green to get her MFA in poetry and to get to know another small, landlocked town. This year, Coral is coordinating Mid-American Review’s Winter Wheat Festival of Writing and serving as an assistant editor on MAR’s staff. She’s enjoying the other side of the country (and its seasons) so far, though she wishes there were more trees.

 

Q: What drew you to the writing world?

C: Just a love of stories, really. I started making up stories when I was pretty little—all of my toys had extensive, dramatic backgrounds. Each time I sat down to play, I had to decide what the story was—who was related to who, their likes and dislikes, where they were from, what their goals were. Eventually I started writing those things down, because acting them out wasn’t enough. I was always reading, too, and that really nourished my imagination.

That shifted a bit, of course. In college, I was converted from fiction writing to poetry, and my appreciation of words and what they can do is always growing. While I still lean towards the narrative—a good character, a good story—my understanding of how words shape that narrative is much deeper.

 

Q: How has your time in the MFA been?

C: I really enjoy the writing community we have here. Our cohort is very close-knit, and it’s amazing to be surrounded by people who are creatively wired, who can discuss the pros and cons of Sylvia Plath’s rise to fame over a beer or two, and who will make time for a road trip to see Rita Dove in the middle of a school week. My writing has also really improved from being immersed in poetry and connected with people who love it.

 

Q: What makes you want to accept a submission?

C: I’m always looking for something that makes me perk up a little. If the language can make me say, “Oh, that’s different from the fifty other submissions I’ve read today,” I’m perking up. Also, the fiction writer in me always loves a good narrative. Poems have to matter. You have a short amount of time to pack a punch, to tell me something important, and I want to feel changed by the time I’ve finished your poem.

 

Q: What’s your favorite story/poem MAR has accepted?

C: This is hard! “Lesson” by Christina Duhig was a poem I fought hard for when we discussed its publication, so it has a special place in my heart. But I think my all-time favorite has to be coming up in Volume 37: Matthew MacFarland’s “Mosaic Floor Depicting the Rape of Persephone, Uncovered at a Tomb in Amphipolis, Greece, October 2014.” There’s just something so quietly haunting about it. It’s a powerful poem. I’m so excited for everyone to read it.

 

Q: What’s the best advice a writer has given you?

C: I’m lucky to have a lot of mentors in my life who give amazing advice. Probably the most helpful thing I’ve ever been told is to be kinder to myself. To stop saying “should.” There’s enough rejection in the writing business without adding my own doubts before I can submit a packet to a journal or print a poem off for workshop. I’m still working on this, but respecting my poetry for what it is has helped make me a more confident writer.

 

Q: Best experience in Bowling Green so far?

C: Honestly, each week has been its own grand adventure. Spending time with those in my cohort, whether we’re watching trashy television, staking out the Black Swamp Festival, or riding every coaster at Cedar Point, has always left me with a story to tell or an inside joke to reference. The people have made my experience here, and I’m glad to know them.

Candy in Our Brains by Anne Barngrover and Avni Vyas. Missoula: CutBank Books, 2014.

Anne Barngrover and Avni Vyas recently collaborated to co-author Candy in Our Brains, a humorous and raw take on life and relationships told through a collection of poems. Full of unlikely combinations, and using a series of poems following “the heroine,” Barngrover and Vyas take the reader through the struggles of love. In the poem titled, “It’s My Party and I’ll Implode If I Want To” the authors pair interesting combinations such as, “You show up with a cake and moths fly out when I slice it” with the gritty thread of thread of dissatisfaction, “For your birthday: / heavy petting and a cake with your name in purple, gouged as if by my nails.”

Barngrover and Vyas pursue turmoil in nature in “The Heroine Shamwows Her Way Through A Hurricane” where “The fissures in our youth show up in our faces…tiny mushrooms breaking out in a rash: this / could be the tumor in my happiness swelling. This is my joy split wide open.” In “Fossils,” the language of forest and animal combine: “We were together, a cawing / battalion” and later, “How could we / have foreseen how much to camouflage in bruise and how much to coddle?” A collection that is unified by startling and vivid language, the turmoil of our relationships seeping through metaphor and everyday reality, Candy in Our Brains makes for a powerful collaboration.

Teri Dederer, Mid-American Review

Welcome back to Pets with MAR. Meet two adorable cats, Chloe and Lucy, owned by our Winter Wheat Coordinator and editor on the poetry staff, Coral Nardandrea. Her fellow MFAs designated her a crazy cat lady even though she only has two cats. (And a cat pillowcase. And a cat blanket. And a cat wine rack.) Coral is finishing her second year at BGSU’s MFA program and plans to go into the business of publishing.

First up, meet Chloe!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chloe has been training her human for twelve and a half years now. The human has since figured out which blanket is her favorite, which meows signal hunger, and the list of the few movements allowed when being sat upon. Once a hunter of bottle caps, hair ties, plastic bags, and flip flops, Chloe has since retired, and can rarely be persuaded to play by any toy except her old tennis ball. To earn her favor, hopefuls must be impressed by her snore and respectful of her disdainful expression.

 

And now, Lucy!

Lucy is the most recent addition to the family, much to Chloe’s displeasure. A little round, simple-minded, and unable to meow, Lucy likes her life just the way it is, with a lot of food and even more sleeping. She’s preferred her quiet lifestyle since getting stuck in a chimney for a week when she was a kitten under another human’s care, and certainly avoids traipsing over roofs several years later. She can be distinguished from her sister by her often-dazed expression and signature waddle.

 

 

 

The White Swallow by Anna Kovatcheva. Los Angeles, California: Gold Line Press, 2015. 52 pages. $10.00, paper.

Anna Kovatcheva’s The White Swallow was the winner of the 2014 Gold Line Press Fiction Chapbook Competition. Broken into five sections, The White Swallow explores the complexities of fulfilling expectations and the sacrifices one makes to take care of others. The forbidden love surrounding two young girls suffers both external and internal complications as the two try to navigate their unsatisfying world. In the story, the healing bird, based off Bulgarian folklore, brings both life and destruction.

Kovatcheva’s language also balances both grace and gore. In the opening section, the swallow burrows into a dead baby; “The bird pecked at the baby’s open ribs, and its small head disappeared inside.” Later, Zina, the girl carrying the bird inside her, tries to heal a cat. The line states, “She heard ribs grind and straighten, heard them knit together. The cat’s ruptured stomach stitched itself whole, skin and fur slide back into place. The lungs reinflated.” However, each gruesome reconstruction is paired with a beautiful song; “She opened her mouth to fill her lungs, and the bird song came. A high trilling, desperate and earnest.” The magical realism adds another layer to the piece rather than distract from the very real horrors of everyday life. While these characters are destined for tragedy, The White Swallow allows for momentary glimpses of hope through beautiful imagery and profound emotion.

 

-Katie O’Neill, MAR

Katie O’Neill is a second year MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University. She is from Lake Winola, PA.