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(10/13/03 4:18am)
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.
(10/09/03 5:44am)
Going to a fiction and poetry reading can help students escape the reality of the daily grind, and IU's creative writing program offers exactly that. The program fills the need with its year-long series of readings by visiting lecturers and students in the Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. Tonight marks the first of the readings.\nEach night, a portion of the program's 13 students will have about 10 minutes each to read a selection of his or her work. The program, which is planned to last about an hour and a half each night, marks the students' first opportunity to showcase their fiction or poetry and make their presence heard in the department.\n"The first-year reading series opens the year-long M.F.A. reading series and gives the Creative Writing Department and Indiana University community a chance to welcome the first-year M.F.A.s," said Susan Finch, third-year M.F.A. fiction student.\nThis year's students will offer a variety of poetry and fiction. Poetry student Mary Speaker, who reads tonight, plans on performing sonnets and a Middle Eastern form of poetry called ghazal.\nSpeaker said she feels that attending a reading such as this can benefit anyone, not just English majors.\n"Going to a poetry reading is always a good way to pause and be a little more reflective than you are in your daily life," she said.\nFiction students have the choice of reading an excerpt from a long work of fiction or a shorter, complete piece. Grady Jaynes is choosing the latter. Jaynes, who will be reading Friday night, said he is excited about the diversity of the readings. \n"You're going to hear a lot of styles," he said. "It's work that's being done right here. IU has a fabulous writing program, so there's always the off-chance that you're hearing somebody in the early days before they become successful." \nAs well as being a chance to see literary stars in the making, the event offers undergraduates an opportunity to see their instructors in a new light -- performing their own compositions as opposed to assigning them. Hearing the work of their instructors may make students see what they can do with their own writing skills. Poetry student Micah Ling, who will be reading Friday night, said she is pleased to have this opportunity to teach by example. \n"I'm really excited about poetry, and I try and convey that to students, so this is a good opportunity for them to see their teachers really write," she said. "It would be cool if some of the students would come out and see poetry in action."\nFor writers, this event will be an opportunity to absorb new ideas and styles of writing. \n"I find I always leave the M.F.A. readings feeling inspired," Finch said, "and eager to return to my own writing."\n-- Contact staff writer Jennifer Jackson at jeejacks@indiana.edu.
(09/16/03 5:44am)
The crowd at Boxcar Books Sunday evening looking for live entertainment may have wondered what it was in for when it saw a projector and screen set up next to the guitars and amps at the front end of the store. The crowd didn't need to worry -- no lectures were on the evening's agenda. Artist Andy Friedman and long-time friend and folk-blues musician Paul Curreri stopped into the bookstore and community center, 310A S. Washington St., for the second time in their "Make a Living" tour. Friedman and Curreri, who met at the Rhode Island School of Design, have been playing bars, bookstores and theaters around the country together for a year and a half.\nCurreri took the stage first, a slight man not quite dwarfed by his acoustic guitar. He gave the crowd gem after gem of country-blues melodies, his voice going from sweet, on the song "Greenville," to strong, to whispering conversation, and, occasionally, to yelling. A self-described soft-spoken man, Curreri has a strong singing voice, although he has never taken voice lessons. His singing was punctuated by timely outbursts from his guitar. The smile on Curreri's face after each song assured the audience that he loves what he does. \nThe projector was the instrument of Friedman, who, in his set, displayed to the audience a collection of Polaroid photographs and accompanied them with anecdotes, observations and advice on life. His burly frame silhouetted in front of the store's window, Friedman, a resident of New York, seemed an unlikely figure to be sharing such insights into life as "perfection is nothing more than what actually happens in the world" and "I'm looking for a parking lot to tear down, and I'm going to put up paradise."\nFriedman, trained as a painter, said he "wanted a way to look the audience in the eye." He wanted to get up and perform his art, as a musician would perform his music and he emphasizes that "pictures don't have to speak for themselves. The picture and myself are both the work." Friedman's desire to be a musician-style performer is evident in that all of his books are released under his and Curreri's label, City Salvage Records.\nAlthough Friedman and Curreri share a record label and tour together and have been friends for a decade, their two sets are not meant to complement each other. \n"There's no conceptual link," Friedman said. "We're on the road as if I were a musician. We're friends."\nAsked what the future holds for the Make a Living Tour, Curreri said, "I have a feeling we'll be doing this the rest of our lives."\nFriedman and Curreri were joined by local folk musician, Justin Vollmar, who performed a variety of slower-paced, quiet tunes with simple, straightforward lyrics. Vollmar has been doing shows for three years, because folk music is like "telling stories. I like the images in songs." Vollmar also plays with local Christian rock band Mt. Gigantic.\n-- Contact staff writer Jennifer Jackson at jj1@indiana.edu.