Inspire the Writer Within

Ridgefield Writers Conference organized by three MFA Alums!

Aaron Perkus — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:25:44 +0000

Three Fairfield U. MFA alumni–Adele Annesi, Chris Belden and Rebecca Dimyan– have organized the first Ridgefield Writers Conference, to be held Saturday, September 28, in Ridgefield, CT. This one-day event will feature morning and afternoon workshops in fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, playwriting/screenwriting, and writing for young adults. Worksop leaders include such Fairfield MFA faculty as Carol Ann Davis and Pete Nelson, and MFA alums Chris Belden and Steve Otfinoski. There will also be two panel discussions with publishers, editors and agents, as well as an evening reading with local authors, including MFA professor Nalini Jones. The conference keynote address will be delivered by author and Fairfield MFA program director Michael White. The fee for this all-day conference is $150, or $125 for those applying by July 1. Please visit the RWC website for more information on how to apply: http://www.adeleannesi.com/Ridgefield-Writers-Conference.html.

Joe Carvalko’s New Book Now Available on Amazon!

Aaron Perkus — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 14:56:53 +0000

PRESS RELEASE 02/20/2013 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

We Were Beautiful Once, Chapters from a Cold War, a Novel, (Sunbury Press, Feb. 2013), Joseph Carvalko.

We Were Beautiful Once is a psychologically complex courtroom novel that builds an intriguing web of events, creating a sustained sense of anticipation from chapter to chapter in the mold of John Grisham’s The Pelican Brief, where trial lawyer Nick Castalano tries to uncover the fate of Roger Girardin, MIA during the Korean War, and discovers he may have been murdered in a POW camp. Before the war, Jack O’Conner, Hamilton, Girardin and Julie, Girardin’s girlfriend and Jack’s sister, hung out. In part the story follows the lives of the survivors, who after the war, with Roger’s disappearance and Jack and Trent having spent years in a North Korean hell-hole, change dramatically, notably Jack goes through life teetering on the edge of insanity (believing he may have killed Girardin) and that his murderous act will be discovered by his sister, who waits her entire life for Roger’s return.

Josip Novakovich wrote: “Carvalko has written a wonderful military mystery novel, with great authentic details and deep psychological insights–a thrilling trip into our past.” Novakovich is a current nominee for the Man Booker International Prize 2013, Whiting Writers’ Award recipient and bestselling author of April Fool’s Day, Yolk, Salvation and Other Disasters, Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust.

Da Chen wrote: “Carvalko writes with such convincing realism and lyricism that I was at once brought into the landscape of his literary vision and grip of his storytelling. His prose is wiry and wise, steely yet soulful. His tales are tethered to real life, lived and thoroughly pondered. In right light, he is a cross between James Patterson and Scott Turow, only wiser and much more generous.” Chen is New York Times bestselling author of Colors of the Mountain, a memoir, Brothers, a novel, and My Last Empress, a novel.

Bio

Joseph Carvalko is an American writer, lawyer born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The novel, We Were Beautiful Once, Chapters from a Cold War was inspired by a case he tried in Federal Court to locate a Korean War POW. A 2004 documentary “Missing, Presumed Dead: The Search for America’s POWs” narrated by Ed Asner details his trial efforts. In addition to numerous professional and academic writing, other of his publications include: The Techno-Human Shell-A Jump in the Evolutionary Gap (2012), which details the rapid rise in cyborg-like technology; A Road Once Traveled, Life from All Sides (2007); and A Deadly Fog (2004). In 2012, he was one of two finalists for the 2012 Red Mountain Press Prize for Poetry, for The Interior, A Memoir; and one of three finalists for the 2012 Esurance Poetry prize, for his poem The Road Home. When he is not writing, he plays jazz piano. He, his wife Susie and four cats live between the Connecticut and Florida coastal areas.

Please click here for Amazon link.

All in the Family: MFA Alum A.J. O’Connell’s Interview of MFA Alum (and book prize winner) Nick Knittel

Aaron Perkus — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 01:39:47 +0000

‘Good Things’: An interview with author Nick Knittel

BY A.J. FEBRUARY 15, 2013

I expected someone older when I met Nick Knittel. It was 2009 and Knittel was part of my second-ever workshop at Fairfield University’s low-residency MFA program. He’d submitted a story about two little boys who’d lost their mother. Because the story featured a compassionate father, that’s kind of who I expected when I checked in on Enders Island.

Instead I met a young man, just out of undergrad, who could write a mean piece of short fiction.

Two years later, Knittel won our MFA program’s inaugural book prize (judged by poet Charles Simic) for “Good Things,” a collection of deep, quiet short stories. The book was released by New Rivers Press in October 2012. Now that first story I read – the one about the grieving little boys – is available for all to read, along with nine others.

For entire interview, please click here

Congratulations Jamie and Matthew on your recent success!

Aaron Perkus — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 20:44:06 +0000

James M. Chesbro’s essay ”Night Running” which first appeared in CT Review, has been selected as a notable essay for the Best American Essay series, 2012. http://www.hmhbooks.com/hmh/bestamerican/essaysbookdetails

Matthew Hamilton’s poem, “Benazir Bhutto” was short-listed in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal poetry contest, “Betrayal,” and will appear in the March 2013 issue.

http://asiancha.blogspot.hk/2013/02/cha-betrayal-poetry-contest-shortlist.html

CORPOREALITY: Hollis Seamon’s New Book is Now Available!

Aaron Perkus — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 17:06:59 +0000

In Corporeality, Hollis Seamon’s latest fiction collection, we meet the cat lady, the professor dealing with a plagiarist while coping with personal hardships, sibling rivalry of the unnaturally cursed kind, the dog that goes beyond everyday dog sense and scent to protect its owners. These are some of the eclectic characters and settings that make Corporeality irresistible and difficult to put down once you’ve started reading. Like her preceding collection Body Work and mystery novel Flesh, this book is a testament to Seamon’s ample gifts as a storyteller.
PRAISE FOR CORPOREALITY:
Hollis Seamon’s Corporeality is a wonderful collection of stories, dazzling and unsentimental, full of everyday tragedies, fairy-tale motifs, and rambunctious, life-affirming characters who stand up to bullies and to fate, whether in a hospice, a flophouse, or a university classroom. It’s a feast of language that you won’t soon forget.
—Alan Davis, author of So Bravely Vegetative and Alone with the Owl
The characters in Corporeality are smart. Smart enough to see that the world is chaos and decay, but sometimes too smart for their jobs, whether they’re professors or trash collectors. And they are way too smart for their undependable bodies, which is the great rub of Hollis Seamon’s fine and original stories. How do we cope, these carefully calibrated stories ask, when our minds grow daily more perceptive and sharp and witty, yet the darkness still approaches?
—Dave King, author of The Ha-Ha
What a magical collection! Hollis Seamon’s enchanting stories will make you marvel anew at the forever strange, blessed, and heart-breaking affliction we share as human beings on this earth. Seamon’s lovingly-rendered characters will linger in your memory for a long, long time.
—Edward Schwarzschild, author of Responsible Men
These stories make memorable the people you wonder about in passing—the cat lady, the deformed, the witness to a questionable death, the professor who walks out of class never to return, the teen boy in hospice, the neighbors of the crazy, victims of acts of god, the loveless and forlorn. Written with both humor and pathos, the quirky characters in Hollis Seamon’s stories drew me in and left me, as she writes, “astonished by life.”
—Eugenia Kim, author of The Calligrapher’s Daughter
These stories have grace, wit, adventure, danger, humor, compassion, magic, and rage. Hollis Seamon casts full and dazzling light on those who are often overlooked—teenaged lovebirds in hospice, flood victims before the flood, plagiarists, arsonists, old ladies, fat dogs. She brings them to life so tenderly and powerfully that they stay with you, long after the last page.
—Nalini Jones, author of What You Call Winter

Review of Matthew Hamilton’s THE LAND OF THE FOUR RIVERS

Aaron Perkus — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 16:06:29 +0000

Review of Matthew A.Hamilton’s (Armenia 2006-08; Philippines 2008-10) The Land of the Four Rivers

Please click here for full review.

The Land of the Four Rivers:
My Experience as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Armenia (2006-2008)
by Matthew A. Hamilton (Armenia 2006-08; Philippines 2008-10)
?ervená Barva Press (http://www.cervenabarvapress.com/)
$7.00
42 pages
2012

Reviewed by Mark Brazaitis (Guatemala 1991-93)

As Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, we all, I feel confident saying, have at least a couple of photographs documenting our service. (Some of us doubtless have crates-or iPhones-full of them.) Because we were there, because we know the people and the settings in the photographs, we have a particular attachment to them. They call up full and rich and even complicated memories and associations. To us, each photograph is worth more than a thousand words. Each is a mini-novella, a long poem.

But anyone who didn’t have the experiences we had and is seeing the photographs cold knows only what is in front of their eyes. A photo of the family we lived next door to in the mountains of Bolivia or on the plains of Kenya might evoke in us an epic saga of love and hardship, of courage and defeat and hope. The person to whom we show the photo might simply remark, “Wow, it must have been a hot day if that’s all those people were wearing!”

Most of the poems in Matthew Hamilton’s chapbook The Land of the Four Rivershave the look of three-by-five photographs, with a dozen ormore lines of more or less equal length. And like good photographs, they are colorful evocations, careful snapshots of what he saw and experienced in Armenia. But unlike with Peace Corps photographs, no one is likely to find anything tangential and inessential to comment on in Hamilton’s poems. This is a testament to his poems’ clarity and accessibility. (They do what a surprising number of modern poems are too cowardly to do: They risk being understood.) If his poems were photographs, we would not only see them, we would step into them.

Take, for example, the opening of “Expedition into Mystery”:

I walk over to a woman selling apricots
and buy a half kilo. Her gold teeth thank me.
Then I walk to Gorki Park, pluck one
of my treats out of the bag and take a bite.
Some of the juice falls on the sidewalk.
A dog walks over and licks it up.

The storytelling is straightforward, the images (apricots, gold teeth) concrete. Encounters with voracious, half-starved but somehow gentle street dogs are as common in Volunteers’ experiences as episodes of homesickness, and the apricot-juice-devouring dog of the poem will therefore resonate with former Volunteers. But the dog is equally likely to resonate with non-Volunteers. Although the poet doesn’t specify that the animal is a street dog, context suggests it. Here’s a dog desperate enough to drink fruit juice off of concrete. The connotation is negative: the country doesn’t care for its animals. But there’s a positive implication as well: not much is wasted here. (One of the consolations of serving in a poor part of the world is how little is thrown away.)

Mark Brazaitis is the author of The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Award from the University of Notre Dame Press, and four other books. His novel Julia & Rodrigo is forthcoming from Gival Press in 2013. He is a professor of English and directs the Creative Writing Program at West Virginia University.

Da Chen’s My Last Empress receives a starred Kirkus review!

Aaron Perkus — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 18:00:45 +0000

MFA Faculty member Da Chen’s latest novel, My Last Empress, has received a starred Kirkus review!

Nabokov meets Dream of the Red Chamber.

“Chen (Brothers, 2006, etc.), a Chinese-born writer and now resident of New York’s Hudson Valley, has a profoundly developed feel for the sweep of history—though here, unlike in Brothers, he compresses what might have been a saga into 300 pages. His story has an epic feel all the same: Samuel Pickens, a Yankee born into wealth and privilege, falls into head-swooning love with the daughter of a New England missionary who has spent her youth in China.”

To read the entire review please click here !

“Good Things” by Nick Knittel, Winner of the Fairfield Prize, now available

Aaron Perkus — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 17:55:15 +0000

“Spare, tightly constructed and meticulously crafted, these stories tell of lives of lower-middle-class Americans, the isolated and marginalized people many of our contemporary writers somehow manage not to notice. These are tough, realistic and well-told stories. Knittel has a deep understanding of his characters and their complicated and often hopeless circumstances, but he doesn’t judge them. He writes of them with compassion, and, as he does, the reader cannot help but be moved too.” – Charles Simic

The MFA program at Fairfield University was one of the greatest experiences I could have had as a writer. Nestled on the beautiful Enders Island, the program provided a solid and tight-knit community of students that, by the end of the first day, felt less like a group of strangers meeting for the first time and more like the long-lost family I never knew I had. It is a vibrant, diverse, and highly talented group of individuals that raised my skills as a writer higher than I ever thought possible. The two years of education, inspiration, and friendships have created a lifetime of memories. – Nick Knittel