Students share fiction, poetry works

In an otherwise deserted campus, a crowd of about 40 people gathered Friday night in Ballantine Hall Room 109 for the second of two nights of readings from first year Master of Fine Arts students in IU's Creative Writing Program.\nThis event kick-started the M.F.A. program's year-long series of student readings, offering these students their first, and, for many, nerve-wracking chance to demonstrate their abilities in front of an audience made up of their fellow students and professors.\nDuring the course of the night, seven of the program's 13 first-year students read their poetry or fiction. First up was poetry student Mitchell Douglas, who read seven of his poems, giving a brief introduction before each one. His last poem, titled "Graduate," he prefaced by telling the audience of how he kept running into people with whom he went to high school in his hometown of Louisville.\nAlthough each of the readings was unique, the alternation of poetry and fiction throughout the evening mixed things up a little. The first fiction student to read was Emily Doak, who read some selections from a novel she wrote. Fiction student Grady Jaynes, like Doak, read a selection from a larger work, titled "An Ideal Distance," about a man recovering from heart surgery.\nPoetry student Micah Ling read poems that were part of a sequence about the life of a family and its home remedies.\n"I started writing poems about remedies," Ling said, "and this family emerged from that."\nAlthough some of the readings went a little over the 10-minute mark, Tony Ardizzone, director of the Creative Writing Program, said each of the students read for an appropriate length of time. \n"Everyone read long enough to give people a sense of them," he said, "and it never dragged."\nAisha Sharif's poems dealt with the uglier side of life. Her poem "Letters to Momma Too" told of the sad demise of the grandma who taught the speaker how to become a lady.\nMany of the readings appealed to all five senses, but the selections read by fiction student Jeffrey Wallace particularly caused physical reactions. Members of the audience cringed when Wallace read a short story about a girl who dies an unpleasant death after a swarm of bees flies into her ear. As far as Wallace knows, however, this kind of thing does not happen in real life. \nThis event was the first time Wallace had read this story in public, and he was not sure what to expect as far as audience reaction.\n"I didn't know what people were going to say," he said. "It's not like what the other people have been reading."\nThe last performer, poetry student Jackie Jones LaMon, added a little something extra to her readings by using a different tone of voice and style of reading for each poem. \n"My most recent work has been work exploring voice, but also giving voice to those who lost theirs over the course of history or who may never have had a voice at all," LaMon explained before beginning her readings.\nLaMon said she gained confidence from reading her poems to an audience.\nAfter the readings, members of the audience congratulated the student readers.\n"I think everyone left wanting more," Ardizzone said.\nMore information about IU's Creative Writing Program and its reading series can be found on the Web at www.indiana.edu/~mfawrite/.\n-- Contact staff writer Jennifer Jackson at jeejacks@indiana.edu.