March 9th Monday at Mahall's presents Karen Schubert, Megan Erwin

March 9th 2015 at 7:30 p.m. the Monday at Mahall's Poetry and Prose Series will present readings by featured authors Karen Schubert & Megan Erwin.

Karen Schubert’s most recent chapbooks are Black Sand Beach (Kattywompus Press, 2015) and I Left My Wings on a Chair (Kent State Press, 2014), selected by Kathleen Flenniken for the Wick Poetry Center prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in PoetsArtists, The Louisville Review, American Literary Review, Best American Poetry Blog, and diode poetry journal. Awards include a 2013 residency at Headlands Center for the Arts and 2014 Pushcart Prize nomination. She is a founding member of Lit Youngstown, a new literary arts organization in Youngstown, Ohio.

Megan M. Erwin is a graduate of the North East Ohio Master of Fine Arts program and the former editor of Whiskey Island. A former Bisbee fellow, she is a recipient the Leonard Trawick Creative Writing Award, an Academy of American Poet’s Prize, and a scholarship to the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at the University of Massachusetts. Her work can be found at Everyday Genius and the Valparaiso Fiction Review.

An open mic emceed by John Burroughs will follow. Beer, bowling and balderdash optional, as always.

Another take on the MFA debate…

Slate

has an interesting article pitting what it describes as America’s two writing cultures NYC and the MFA.

Here’s an excerpt:

MFA programs themselves are so lax and laissez-faire as to have a shockingly small impact on students' work—especially shocking if you're the student and paying $80,000 for the privilege. Staffed by writer-professors preoccupied with their own work or their failure to produce any; freed from pedagogical urgency by the tenuousness of the link between fiction writing and employment; and populated by ever younger, often immediately postcollegiate students, MFA programs today serve less as hotbeds of fierce stylistic inculcation, or finishing schools for almost-ready writers (in the way of, say, Iowa in the '70s), and more as an ingenious partial solution to an eminent American problem: how to extend our already protracted adolescence past 22 and toward 30, in order to cope with an oversupplied labor market.

And another:

Poets have long been professionally bound to academia; decades before the blanketing of the country with MFA programs requiring professors, the poets took to the grad schools, earning Ph.D.s in English and other literary disciplines to finance their real vocation. Thus came of age the concept of the poet-teacher. The poet earns money as a teacher; and, at a higher level of professional accomplishment, from grants and prizes; and, at an even higher level, from appearance fees at other colleges. She does not, as a rule, earn money by publishing books of poems—it has become almost inconceivable that anyone outside a university library will read them. The consequences of this economic arrangement for the quality of American poetry have been often bemoaned (poems are insular, arcane, gratuitously allusive, etc.), if poorly understood.

Read the whole article here

Those who can do...

Not too long ago

I was having dinner with a recent graduate from the NEOMFA creative writing program. This is the one that is awarded from a syndicate of Northeast Ohio universities including Cleveland State.

Over our bowls of soup this person told me of some issues he was having in a composition class that he was teaching at a local community college, basic classroom management stuff. ‘Cause what else is one going to do with a MFA? I mean what do folks tell you when they are in such a program, “I can always teach.” So I asked this guy how many education classes had he taken as part of the program. He replied, “None.”

I have to wonder, is this typical? How many of these programs are out there that foist people into professions with absolutely no training for the profession. Was this idiosyncratic to this one person? A cursory look over the courses required shows no education classes. Do you want your gall bladder taken out by someone who understands the theory of its function but couldn’t tell a scalpel from vibrating saw on the stainless steel tray of surgical tools? Who’s to blame?

Too often it seems, when the arts are concerned, the craft of teaching is chucked aside especially by “teaching artists”. No wonder creativity in the classroom is so marginalized. So we successfully completed a series of experimental villanelle examining man’s inability to come to terms with his mortality. What are we going to do about the four inner city youth, high school grads, in our Comp 101 class who obviously are not reading above a sixth grade level? What responsibility do these programs owe to their candidates to provide even the barest modicum of preparation for the main opportunity for use of the terminal degree they are bestowing?

Similarly, artists who go into the classroom without taking the time to learn at least the basics of teaching are liable to, with all good intentions, actually do harm. The best teaching artists I know continue to educate themselves not only in their art form, but in pedagogy and the latest educational theory taking dozens of workshops a year.

See, 99.99% of those in Comp 101 are not going to become professional poets. What is our obligation to them?