Wordcraft -- SMU: Thanks, more please, with signs

I had trouble finding SMU’s DeGolyer Library for the final session of this year‘s SMU Literary Festival. “There’s a festival?” a helpful student asked, directing me to the library, its front innocent of so much as a sign outside to announce the festival. Fortunately, the readings by Amina Gautier and Martha Rhodes made forgoing an hour or two of Saturday’s sunshine worthwhile.

Ms. Gautier read two stories from her Flannery O’Connor Award winning collection, At-Risk. Who wouldn’t be pulled in, with sentences like this from the story “Push”, a tale of a mean girl from her own perspective: “These are the days when everyone has a pass to beat up kids”?

And if everyone picks on kids, why shouldn’t kids pick on kids, too? “What it really comes down to is the rightness of the push,” the anonymous protagonist decides, while serving a detention for her behavior.

I won’t reveal the story’s ending -- get it for yourself from www.amazon.com/ or others -- but it’s as logical as it is surprising.

Not that Ms. Gautier is the mean girl of “Push,” she assured her audience. Or the in-group wannabe of her other reading, from “Dance for Me.”

Of the ten stories, “All the girls are completely different and none of them are me. The experiences don’t necessarily have to happen to me.”

What they all are about are her experiences of growing up as a scholarship student in Brooklyn in the late 1980’s, when “there was always this expectation that if we were good -- if we were smart -- we would escape.”

Poet Martha Rhodes, following Ms. Gautier, commented wryly, “I would like to write fiction. But my fiction sounds like a really bad translation of Caesar’s Gallic Wars. It’s very stiff.”

Her poetry, however, is anything but stiff. Her latest collection, The Beds, began as a reaction to the events of 9-11, she told the audience, but evolved into a more personal inquiry about the nature of grief. And sometimes it’s fierce grief, angry grief, even grief with a sense of humor.

“I found myself going to form, going to rondelet a lot,” she told her listeners, responding to questions about the sequence of the poems. “The poems just came out feeling related to each other. . . They’re not ordered chronologically. I really go by tone more than by theme.”

I felt sorry for the young woman who guided me so courteously -- and left, without hearing any of this. After the literary festival was revived in 2009 following a hiatus, a student blogger mused about earlier days, when world-famous authors gathered at the university to read and party. Maybe it’s time to revive a little of that feeling. Or at least post signs saying to students, and the public -- here it is. Come in. It’s worth it.

Wordcraft -- Award-winning writers at SMU lit fest

There’s an Oprah favorite, a Flannery O’Connor Award-winner, an editor from American Literary Review, and five other writers whose short stories and poetry have garnered dozens of literary awards. Sounds like great reasons to drop by the SMU Literary Festival this week.

Although the official run is Thursday through Saturday, March 22-24, students from several Dallas high schools will offer preview readings tonight, March 21, beginning at 6:30 in McCord Auditorium in Dallas Hall at SMU.

The annual festival is free at the SMU campus, giving the public as well as students and faculty of the university’s creative writing department a chance to hear and talk to important new writers. The authors have so many honors, I’ll only mention a few of the highlights in this space.

Readings by Dean Bakopoulos and Martha Rhodes open the program at 6:30 Thursday evening in the DeGolyer Library on campus. O, The Oprah Magazine’s online edition, www.Oprah.com/, listed Bakopoulos’s latest novel, My American Unhappiness, as one of its best in 2011, calling it “So funny you may miss this novel's slyly profound message.”

Ms. Rhodes’s poetry collection, Perfect Disappearance, won the Green Rose Prize. She is director of the Frost Place Festival and Conference on Poetry.

Friday’s readings are by Eduardo Corral, Shannon Cain, Tyehimba Jess and Krys Lee. Corral, a CantoMundo fellow, received a “Discovery”/The Nation award for his poetry, among other honors. Ms Cain’s debut story collection, The Necessity of Certain Behaviors, is a Drue Heinz Literature Prize winner, and her stories have received the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Prize.


Jess’s first book of poetry, leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. He is also a former member, among other achievements, of the Green Mill Poetry Slam Team. Ms. Lee’s 2012 book, Drifting House, spans the history of Koreans since World War II in their homeland and in the United States. Her stories have received special
mentions in Narrative Magazine: 20 under 30 and the Pushcart Prize anthology 2012.

Saturday afternoon, Amina Gautier and Corey Marks will read following SMU’s Undergraduate Award luncheon. Ms. Gautier won the Flannery O’Connor Award for her short story collection At-Risk. Her work has been published in Best African American Fiction, Southern Review, and other publications.

Marks is the author of Renunciation, a National Poetry Series selection, and The Radio Tree, a Green Rose Prize winner. He directs creative writing at the University of North Texas, where he is poetry editor for the American Literary Review.

For a complete schedule, maps, and parking information for the literary festival, see
http://smu.edu/english/Events/LitFest2012/EventSchedule.htm/.