2 JSC students Receive Writing Fellowships at Vermont Studio Center!

Ashley McCauliff

(Photo by Jessica Lafflin)

Dayton Shafer

(Photo by Jessica Lafflin)

From Basement Medicine:

Ashley McCauliff and Dayton Shafer, two seniors in the B.F.A. Creative Writing program, have been awarded a two-week fellowship in the Vermont Studio Center, which they will begin at the end of the semester.

This fellowship, which is offered only at Johnson State College and is highly sought after, is offered yearly to two senior students from the Creative Writing program and includes free housing and meals during their stay. The idea, as Assistant Professor of Writing and Literature Jacob White sees it, is to provide the two students a period of time where they can solely focus on their writing as he believes writing requires a level of “habit and rhythm and repetition” to excel. . . .

Read the rest of the article at Basement Medicine, here . . .

Kaitlyn Greenidge and Student Fiction Reading

On March 21, JSC hosted a night of lively, powerful fiction with visiting author Kaitlyn Greenidge and three JSC fiction students:  Stephanie Girard, Lit Tyler, and Deirdre Walsh.  

Kaitlyn Greenidge, reading an excerpt from her 

novel-in-progress.  Her work has appeared or is

forthcoming in American Short Fiction, The Believer,

Afrobeat Journal, and Canteen Magazine.

Deirdre Walsh

Stephanie Girard

Lit Tyler

Submit to Susquehanna Review

Call for Submissions

Susquehanna Review, the national undergraduate journal of Susquehanna University, is open for submissions! We accept entries in fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry from students across the country.  Send us your best stories, your quirkiest characters, details that pierce, writing innovative and brave.  We are looking for fresh language that excites us, both as readers and as writers, honed in on the depth and variety of human experience.

Also art—so if you photograph, sketch, pointilate, paint (or are swooned by a peer who does)—that too we court.

We are excited to announce that two contributors (one poetry and one prose) will be awarded the annual Gary Fincke Creative Writing Prize, which includes a $100 award. All chosen works will appear in both our print journal and our new online journal.  Please read our guidelines and submit by March 25^th at:  http://susquehannareview.com/submissions.html

Please email any questions to sureview@susqu.edu.  We are happy to answer.

Fiction Writer Kaitlyn Greenidge to Read with JSC Students Monday, 3/21!

Kaitlyn Greenidge currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. A 2010 graduate of Hunter College's MFA program, she has been the recipient of a Hertog Fellowship, the Bernard Cohen Short Story Prize, and a fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.  Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, The Believer, Canteen Magazine, and Afrobeat Journal 

Kaitlyn will read from her work on Monday, March 21 at 5:30pm  in JSC's Stearns Performance Space.  She will be joined by three other JSC fiction students -- Deirdre Walsh, Stephanie Girard, and Lit Tyler -- who will read from their fiction preceding Kaitlyn's own reading.

                                              

                                           WHEN: Monday, March 21, 5:30 p.m.

                                  WHERE: Stearns Performance Space

JSC Reading Series Continues! . . .

MONDAY, MARCH 14: 

                     CHRIS BACHELDER

                                               (5:30pm, Stearns Space

Chris Bachelder is the author of the two satirical novels U.S.! and Bear v. Shark, as well as the new novel Abbott Awaits.  He has also written the e-novel Lessons in Virtual Tour Photography.  He grew up in Virginia and now teaches in the writing program at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he lives with his wife and two daughters.

His essay "The Dead Chipmunk:  An Interrogation Into the Mechanisms of Jokes" appears in a recent issue of The Believer Magazine.

Also, listen to Bechelder talk with NPR back in 2006 about his second book, U.S.!:  A Novel, a wildly funny satire about muck-raker Upton Sinclair.  (You can listen to Bachelder reading from that novel here.)

You can read additional interviews with Chris Bachelder at Oxford Magazine, Subtropics, and Bookslut.  Also, check out his short story "Gatsby's Hydroplane."

Here is how Louisiana State University Press describes Bachelder's newest novel, Abbott Awaits:

"A quiet tour de force, Chris Bachelder’s Abbott Awaits transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, startlingly depicting the intense and poignant challenges of a vulnerable, imaginative father as he lives his everyday American existence.

"In Abbott we see a modern-day Sisyphus:  he is the exhausted father of a lively two-year-old, the ruminative husband of a pregnant insomniac, and the confused owner of a terrified dog.  Confronted by a flooded basement, a broken refrigerator, a urine-soaked carpet, and a literal snake in the woodpile, Abbott endures the beauty and hopelessness of each moment, often while contemplating evolutionary history, altruism, or the passage of time.

"An expectant father and university teacher on summer break, Abbott tackles the agonizing chores of each day, laboring for peace in his household and struggling to keep his daughter clean and happy, all while staving off a fear of failure as a parent, and even as a human being.  As he cleans car seats, forgets to apply sun block, clips his dog’s nails, dresses his daughter out of season, and makes unsuccessful furniture-buying trips with his wife, his mind plays out an unrelenting series of paradoxical reflections. Abbott’s pensive self-doubt comes to a head one day in late June as he cleans vomited raspberries out of his daughter’s car seat and realizes: 'the following propositions are both true: (a) Abbott would not, given the opportunity, change one significant element of his life, but (B) Abbott cannot stand his life.'

"Composed of small moments of domestic wonder and terror, Abbott Awaits is a charming story of misadventure, anxiety, and the every- day battles and triumphs of parenthood."

                                                                                           Courtesy of the Louisiana State University Press Spring 2011 catalog

Bring it!: The JSC Writing Slam Returns!