Welch’s short stories have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Greensboro Review, Threepenny Review and elsewhere, and her collection of stories, The Road from Prosperity, was published by Southern Methodist University Press.

Her latest book, Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World, is a series of essays on the struggle for public writing and public voice in an era of corporate privatization.

She is a professor in the UVM Department of English where she has taught classes in nonfiction and fiction writing, rhetorical theory, and literacy politics for the past 15 years.

Angela Patten

Poet Angela Patten grew up in Dublin but has lived since 1977 in Vermont—currently in a hamlet named Jonesville, which is perhaps best known for its post office, where Long Trail hikers receive their mail. Patten’s life of transition inspires much of her poetry, and she joined us in the studio March 4th to share her work.

Download the show.

Read poems from her first book, Still Listening, which you’ll hear on the show.

Read poems from her latest book, Reliquaries, which you’ll hear on the show.

Visit her Web site, named Carraig Binn—a Celtic name for her home in the woods near Jonesville.

BIO:

Angela Patten is a native of Dublin, Ireland. She moved to the United States and Vermont in 1977.

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Vermont, she received an MFA in Writing from Vermont College.

Author of two poetry collections,Reliquaries (Salmon Poetry, 2007) and Still Listening (Salmon Poetry, 1999), she is also included in several anthologies includingCudovista Usta (Marvellous Mouth), Drustvo Apokalipsa (Slovenia, 2007); Salmon: A Journey in Poetry, 1981-2007, edited by Jessie Lendennie; The White Page/An Bhileog Bhan: Twentieth Century Irish Women Poets (Salmon Poetry, 1999); and Onion River: Six Vermont Poets (RNM Inc. 1997).

Her poems and essays have appeared in literary journals includingThe Literary Review; Prairie Schooner; Michigan Quarterly Review; Poetry Ireland Review; Calyx, Full Circle Journal, and others.

She is the recipient of a 2007 Creation grant from the Vermont Arts Council and a 2002 Vermont Arts Endowment grant from the Vermont Community Foundation.

She was a finalist in the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry (Nimrod International) in 2007 and in the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Competition, (Ireland) in 1996.

Angela teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Vermont. She has presented her work at readings in Ireland, Germany, the Czech Republic, and throughout Vermont and New England.

Zoe Lewis

Zoe Lewis, a freshman anthropology major at UVM with a minor in community development, joined us Feb. 18 to read her story The Execution of Jay Shorry B., modern-day revisioning of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

Listen to the show.

Read the original draft of The Execution of Jay Shorry B.

Lewis hails from Boston, Mass., where she is part of a family of four. Her parents are a therapist and an internal medicine doctor specializing in HIV/AIDS respectively, and her 21-year-old sister is  working as a journalist in Columbia with the human rights observatory.

Lewis’s interests include theatre, writing, skiing and travel. She spent the year after her high school graduation living in rural Orissa, India, where she worked as a middle school teacher with a grassroots development organization named AIDINDIA.

Tina Escaja

Poet Tina Escaja joined us in the studio on Feb. 11 to read and discuss her poetry and her poetic preoccupations: women, Spain, American politics and so much more. She is joined by her friend, Helen Wagg, who translates Escaja’s Spanish-language poetry. As a result, listeners get the chance to hear the poems in their original Spanish and their English translations.

Listen to the show.

Visit her Web site.

Read some of the poems she reads on the show:

From Caída Libre (Free Fall)

From Código de barras (Bar Codes): Una, Grande, Libre (One, Great, Free); Luna morada (Black moon); Mujeres del mercado / Pescaderas del Caribe (Market Women / Fish Vendors)

The pictures that inspired Market Women are from Dan Higgins and were taken in Puerto Cabezas. See samples here.

For the poem “Oído: Pálpito y Ser” (Hearing: Pulse and Life), Higgins, who Escaja calls “my great collaborator,”created this video.

Escaja is originally from Spain and is Professor of Spanish at the University of Vermont. She has published extensively on gender and contemporary literature from Latin America and Spain, and is currently the President of the AILCFH (International Hispanic Women’s Association).

As a writer and scholar, Escaja has authored/edited more than 10 volumes of works that include essays, poetry, plays and fiction. An awarded poet, she has also created experimental and multimedia works, including hypertext, and has fruitfully collaborated and exhibited with artists from a variety of media.

Tony Magistrale

Listen to the show.

You’ll love the poetry. AND the great stories about Stephen King!

Magistrale has taught courses in writing and American literature at UVM since 1983, when he returned to the United States after a Fulbright post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Milan, Italy. He has lectured at many universities in North America and Western Europe, most recently serving as Visiting Professor of American Studies at the University of Augsburg, Germany.

He obtained a Ph.D at the University of Pittsburgh in 1981. He and his wife, Jennifer, and two sons, Christopher and Daniel, currently reside in South Burlington, Vermont.

Over the past two decades, Magistrale’s twenty books and numerous articles have covered a broad area of interests. He has published on the writing process, international study abroad, and his own poetry. But the majority of his books have centered on defining and tracing Anglo-American Gothicism, from its origins in eighteenth-century romanticism to its contemporary manifestations in popular culture, particularly in the work of Stephen King. Accordingly, a dozen of his scholarly books and many published journal articles have illuminated the genre’s narrative themes, psychological and social contexts, and historical development.

He is frequently cited in scholarly books dealing with the interdisciplinary aspects of American horror art, and has been interviewed and/or profiled on PBS television; ABC Radio, Australia; Vermont Public Radio; North Carolina Public Radio; and by the following national and international newspapers and magazines: The New Yorker, Cinescape, The National Review, The Miami Herald, The Boston Globe, Houston Chronicle, The Baltimore Sun, New York Daily News, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The St. Petersburg Times, Lighthouse Media One (London, England) and Oggi (Italy).

In 1997, Magistrale received the Kroespsch-Maurice Award for Excellence in Teaching at the University of Vermont. In 2001 he was presented the university’s George V. Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award. And in 2003 he received the Arts and Sciences Dean’s Lecture Award.

Most recently, his book of poems, What She Says About Love, was awarded The Bordighera Poetry Prize for 2007. It will be published as a bilingual edition in November 2008 by The Bordighera Press.

Major Jackson // ©Marion Ettlinger

For our first writer of the season, we’re pleased to announce that we’ll be welcoming into the studio Major Jackson, whose books of poems are Hoops (2006, Norton) and Leaving Saturn (2002, University of Georgia Press).

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Jackson has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, and other literary magazines. Hoops was selected as a finalist for a NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry, and Leaving Saturn was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry.

His third volume of poetry, Holding Company, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.

Jackson earned a B.A. from Temple University and an M.F.A. from the University of Oregon. He has worked as the curator of literary arts at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia and the Mountain Writers’ Center in Portland, and has taught at Columbia University, Xavier University of Louisiana, New York University, and University of Massachusetts – Lowell as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence.

Today, he lives in Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Associate Professor at University of Vermont. He also serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.

A video:

Major doesn’t read this poem on this particular show, but I love it and the video so much that I’ll post it anyway.

Thanks to everyone who appeared and, even more, to those of you who have been listening in! We’ll be back in January with more Vermont writers.

Listen to the final show of the season.

Listen to the show.

Read Aaron Smith’s novel excerpt.

Read Mary Elizabeth’s novel excerpt.

Aaron Smith

Aaron Smith was born and raised in Fair Haven, Vt. After spending the past 10 years running various Internet businesses in Boston, Aaron left his job, sold his condo, got married and moved back home to the Green Mountains. Dividing his time between writing, historical research and looking out the window waiting for snow, he is currently on a six month honeymoon traveling throughout the great state of Vermont and writing about his experiences with his wife Laura on their blog VermontOrBust.com.

Mary Elizabeth

Mary Elizabeth has written an impressive number of non-fiction and educational books, but she’s doing her first fiction reading ever (!!!) as part of our show. Her most recent book is the newly-published Barron’s American Slang Dictionary and Thesaurus. She has also written books on poetry, public speaking and spelling for Barron’s Painless series, and six Garlic Press Literature Teaching Guides for works such as To Kill a Mockingbird, The Odyssey, and The Lord of the Flies.

Mary Elizabeth is the librettist for the children’s opera Kiravanu, which premiered in Sydney, Australia in 2008. Mary Elizabeth is also a composer, whose setting of

W. H. Auden’s “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio” was premiered by the Otter Creek Choral Society and Champlain Brass Quintet in 2003. She was responsible for researching and creating the nearly 1,700 international music education worksheets for the Sibelius Music Notation program, and she has recently created the music illustrations and piano tracks for Barron’s AP Music Theory with Audio Compact Discs, due out in February 2010.

Mary Elizabeth teaches technology-related courses at University of Vermont through Continuing Education. You can follow her on her blog, Voice of the Phoenix, and read some of her thoughts on fiction, non-fiction and audience that came up after appearing on the show.

The NaNoWriMo Crest!

November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, for short.

NaNoWriMo is a national event during which close to a gazillion writers (by the most recent count) attempt to write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. Your humble Writers@WRUV host is taking a crack at it this year, as are hundreds of other Vermonters.

VerWriMos Sharon Buchanan and Chloe McCabe

On this show, originally aired Thursday, Nov. 19, we feature Vermont writers Sharon Buchanan and her daughter, Chloe McCabe, each of whom is attempting to write a novel of 50,000 words or more—in Sharon’s case, much more—during the month of November.

Listen to the show.

Read their story excerpts.

Prep yourself for writing 50,000 words NEXT November!

Greg Bottoms

UVM associate professor and author Greg Bottoms stops into the WRUV studios to talk about the allure of hate, the intersection between pain and creativity, and other lighthearted topics. Along the way, he shares his story “Dinner with Strangers,” which touches a bit on all of the above.

Listen to the show.

Read “Dinner with Strangers.”

Bottoms is the author of four books, including the memoir Angelhead: My Brother’s Descent into Madness, an Esquire Magazine “Book of the Year” in 2000; the prose collections Sentimental, Heartbroken Rednecks: Stories from the New South and Fight Scenes;  and the travel narrative The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art.

His essays, memoirs, and short stories have appeared in Esquire, The Oxford American, The Believer, Creative Nonfiction, Mississippi Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Utne, Salon, Killing the Buddha, and many other places, and have been translated into Spanish, Italian, and Turkish.

He has taught fiction and creative nonfiction writing at the University of Virginia, where he was a Henry Hoyns Creative Writing Fellow, Sweet Briar College, where he was a teaching and writing fellow and visiting assistant professor, and the University of Vermont, where he is now an associate professor of English.