Callan Wink, Dog Run Moon, and the question: Can an MFA make a difference?

This one, then, is quick:  I speak often of my dear friend Alyson Hagy, whose emails to me are rich, whose books are complex and fearless, whose teaching at the University of Wyoming is impeccable, whose friendship I cherish.

This week, one of Alyson's students, Callan Wink, has a story in The New Yorker called "Dog Run Moon." It's a keeper.  Also a keeper is the post-pub interview that Wink did with Cressida Leyshon. He is asked about his work within the MFA program at the University of Wyoming.  He says, among other things, this:

More than anything else though, coming to Wyoming has benefited me in that I’ve had the good fortune to work with some extremely talented and generous writers, both students and faculty. Brad Watson, Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Alyson Hagy (and too many others to list here) have gone out of their way to give my work careful, serious, readings and I’m extremely grateful for that.

I know of what Wink speaks, when it comes to Alyson (and I've read enough of Brad Watson's work to know how he soars).  I am glad that others, reading this interview, will know something of the power that emanates from this highly special Wyoming program.

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Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives/Brad Watson: Some Thoughts

Sometimes it seems that I already know people I've never yet met. The profoundly talented Brad Watson is one of those. I first heard of him through my W.W. Norton editor, Alane Mason, who recounted discovering Watson's work in a literary magazine. He was a fresh talent, book worthy. She got in touch. Their first publication, Last days of the Dog-Men was uncanny and brave. It won the Sue Kauffman Award for First Fiction.

I was working with Alane then on a sequence of books, and so, from time to time, I would hear wind of a new Brad Watson book—this one a novel, The Heaven of Mercury, set in the early 20th century south. It was gothic, Faulknerian, adjective-rich, a thing utterly apart from the short stories. It was named a National Book Award finalist.

A few years ago, my friend Alyson Hagy, while having dinner at my house, spoke of her hope that a certain Brad Watson would join the creative writing staff at the University of Wyoming. After he did, I would sometimes hear stories of long hikes or fishing trips. A few weeks ago, Alyson mentioned that she'd seen an early copy of Watson's new collection of stories, Aliens in the Prime of their Lives. "It's gorgeous," she said.

Yesterday and this morning, I've been reading through. This isn't Dog-men. This absolutely isn't Mercury. This new collection of stories is so utterly new and once again bold; it is internally consistent. It's as if Watson, having expended so much energy on the lyrical and braided in Mercury, decided to see what might be done with a minimum of back story and a scarcity of adjectives.

A whole heck of a lot, is the answer. These stories achieve power, momentum, and absolute artistry through the accretion of odd facts, strange circumstances, and the wholly exposed wires of human circuitry, which are not, as it turns out, always so pretty. But pretty wouldn't be half as compelling as these stories are.

"Vacuum," my personal favorite, is the story of three boys who hear their overworked and unhappy mother threaten to walk away and not come back. With the boys' father already missing, the brothers set out to save the mother. Rarely have so many good intentions gone so terribly wrong; rarely does innocence yield such havoc. Watson lays it all out, one crooked turn after another, in language that is spare and terrifying. You finish reading "Vacuum" and you understand that you are going to have to steel yourself for whatever comes next. It will be undecorated and uncompromising. It won't be like any other story you've read.

Reading the collection, I thought again of just how lucky the creative writing students of the University of Wyoming are to have the equally talented Alyson Hagy working alongside Brad Watson, sharing space this semester with Edward Jones, among others. (Last semester they even had Kate Northrop, the poet, with whom, through Alyson, I've also become friends.) I never went to school to learn how to write prose, but if I were younger, just setting out, I'd want to know what these writers would teach me.

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My Unbirthday

Dear B, the card read, Happy Unbirthday! I thought you might be interested in the ghosts that haunt a fellow Pennsylvanian. Kate is now a colleague of mine.

When your birthday is in April and you receive an unbirthday gift in September, you are stopped in your tracks. When the gift comes from Alyson Hagy, a friend of whom I've written here before (her books—Graveyard of the Atlantic, Keeneland, and Snow, Ashes—on my shelves; her gifts to me strewn across the window sills of my house; her words of wisdom and weather a boon in my life), you pay careful attention.

The gift in question was a book of poems, back through interruption. The Kate was Kate Northrop, who has joined Alyson at the University of Wyoming, which has knit together (very much under Alyson's influence) one of the most exciting literature programs in the country, featuring teachers such as Brad Watson and Harvey Hix and Alyson herself, not to mention a cast of extraordinary visiting writers—Michael Ondaatje, Joy Williams, James Salter, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Art Spiegelman, Sigrid Nunez, and Dorothy Allison among them.

The point is: Alyson knows literature, she knows talent, her ear is adept. back through interruption is, I have discovered in these intervening days, a marvel—an exquisite parlaying of image and idea, a masterful jumbling of time. In poem after poem, Northrop turns incident into narrative, supposition into something that feels absolute and true. She gives you lines like this:

It was too urgent being human.

and this:

They are making matchbooks speak.

and:

...Is it
your business

after all, where a garden
winds up?

This is a book with which one settles in. This is a friendship for which I'm grateful.

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Interviewing the Master

It's got to be eight years now since a single email from the National Endowment for the Arts changed my life by introducing me to Alyson Hagy. Like others that year, we'd won a grant, and we'd been encouraged to reach out to one another. I sent an email, as I recall, that made some reference to Ken Kalfus' work. Alyson wrote back.

We've met each other twice in the meantime, but the correspondence lives—the emails that go back and forth, the packages that arrive via regular US mail (a candle, a bookmark, a handwoven book), the stories she tells (about, say, a robin in snow or a package tucked under a bridge) extending the range of my thinking. Alyson is enormously smart and book talented, tough minded but also kind. The sort of person who wins teaching awards at the University of Wyoming and takes them so entirely in stride that I learn about them long afterwards, by accident.

Good things ought to come to people like Alyson, and in early March they are. Michael Ondaatje, author of ENGLISH PATIENT, RUNNING IN THE FAMILY, ANIL'S GHOST, (oh, and incidentally, my favorite living author), is coming to her town to speak, and Alyson will not simply serve as one of his hosts; she'll be the one doing the big interview—just Alyson and Ondaatje on a stage before hundreds, talking origins, framing, poetry, challenge. I can't think of anyone who would do this job more meticulously than Alyson—can't think of a conversation I'd rather listen in on.

There will be power, come March 4, on a stage in Laramie. A match will be struck, a flame will burn, and a tendril of something new and daring will rise up from the smoke.

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