MFA Programs - Myra Sklarew

In the mid-70s two projects in particular lay the groundwork for establishing an MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University: the designing and implementing of a course on Washington, D.C. as a learning resource, and an annual Writer’s Conference. 

Today, the University’s links to the vast resources of Washington are well known, but forty years ago this was not the case. The huge reservoir had scarcely been tapped. And thus we put in place a program for incoming freshmen and transfer students that embodied everything from the Congress, Department of State, the courts—from small claims to Supreme Court—international organizations, State Department, archives and libraries, Smithsonian, walks through our diverse neighborhoods led by young people from those neighborhoods, performing and fine arts, the media, lobbying organizations, religious organizations, the environment, including a journey on the Potomac River kindly provided by the National Park Service on their Wood-duck Barge at 5 A.M., usually in the pouring rain with Smithsonian Castle Curator James Goode who pointed out significant buildings as we sailed along. 

And the great generosity of key figures in these organizations in helping to teach our students will be remembered. We never could pay them but we would set up a table in the Gray Hall ditto room—the size of a closet—and serve elegant lunches to congressmen and Supreme Court aides to justices—Justice Douglass’s for one who saved the C & O Canal when there was a move to turn it into a road by requiring members of Congress to walk with him from Georgetown to Cumberland along the beautiful Potomac River.

At the same time, Georgetown University was the only university in the area that had had writer’s conferences and they were beginning to wind down their annual summer program. So we started what turned out to be an annual Writer’s conference. Of course we had no funds and had to raise all of it, which we somehow managed to do. Jane Stanhope, a stronghold in the Literature Department, once gave me a gift of bed sheets on which she had signed the names of dozens of famous writers from Dante to Longfellow in various styles of handwriting, as a commentary on the fact that it was my job to house, feed, transport and somehow come up with honoraria for the guest speakers and readers.  When I invited John Barth to come for $25 (no travel or housing) , he wrote back: "Your fee is $25; mine is $1000. Shall we dance!

March 21 Splendid Wake Event: Black Intellectual History, Wounded Warrior Project, Spoken Word

A SPLENDID WAKE: PART II: UNUSUAL LITERARY PROGRAM TO TAKE PLACE MARCH 21, 6:30-8:00 P.M., Gelman Library, George Washington University, Suite 702, 2130 H Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. Free and Open to the Public!

"In the Shadow of the Capitol" is just one of three unusual literary topics to be discussed March 21 at George Washington University’s Gelman Library.

Part of "A Splendid Wake," a project to document poets and literary movements in the nation’s capital from 1900-present, poets and panelists will report on experimental contemporary poetry, warrior poetry projects, and on D.C’'s African-American intellectual/creative activity during years of segregation in Washington.

DC poets of mathematics and science

Some remarks from JoAnne Growney
http: poetrywithmathematics.blogspot.com  

Nine years ago I moved to Silver Spring from small-town Pennsylvania.  My careful knowledge of particular poets in the Washington, DC area began to flourish more than twenty years earlier when -- as a professor of mathematics at a Pennsylvania university -- I began to notice and collect poems related to math and science. 

But, before more history, let me focus on a recent event.  On January 17, 2014, DC poets E. Laura Golberg, Katharine Merow, Myra Sklarew , and Mary-Sherman Willis joined me and other mathy poets in a "Reading of Poetry with Mathematics" at a national mathematics conference in Baltimore.  Despite this poetic proclamation from Archibald MacLeish:

          A poem should not mean . . .
         
those of us present at the reading -- focusing on poetry connected to the subject matter of mathematics -- felt the special magic generated when worlds collide. (The online free-access Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, sponsor of the reading, is a place to find an ongoing and increasing source of such integrated work.)

And now I return to the early history of my engagement with DC-area poets of mathematics and science: 

Dryad Magazine and Dryad Press

Dryad magazine and Dryad Press -- Merrill Leffler

          www.dryadpress.com

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,

    In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

    Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

                --John Keats

I have before me Dryad #1, Winter 1968. I don’t think of myself as a nostalgist but I can almost call up the uncontainable excitement I felt the afternoon I drove to the printer in Virginia and held the new 40-page issue and its scent of pressroom ink in my hands. I mailed this first sentence to Neil Lehrman and asked what he remembered. “Oh, that afternoon holding copies of Dryad in my office,” he said, “and the emotion I felt at what we had birthed. Off I went to show our accomplishment to my work friends, none of who had any interest in poetry. Still, I did force them to subscribe!”

Aerobee launch in Fort Churchill

            Neil and I were an unlikely pair to start a poetry magazine – not just because of our work lives. He was a newly-minted CPA and had returned to Washington – he grew up in Silver Spring – to work as a financial analyst for the Securities and Exchange Commission. I arrived in Washington in 1963 with a physics degree and a position at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight as an aerospace engineer – all of a sudden in my early 20s I was coordinating scientists, engineers, and technicians for launching scientific experiments aboard a two-stage rocket, the Aerobee, designed to reach orbital altitudes. I was on the road regularly to oversee launchings at White Sands Missile Range, Wallops Island, and a Canadian Army Base in Fort Churchill, Canada, midway up the Hudson Bay. Heady – at least for a time.

            It’s not that one’s work life is incompatible with one’s poetry life – I think of the Yiddish poet Mani Leib and the last lines of his Whitman-like “I Am,” wonderfully translated by John Hollander. To all but his literary friends, Leib was a shoemaker – know this, he wrote, “I am not a shoemaker who makes poems/ But I am a poet who makes shoes.”

           

Mapping Literary DC

Mapping Literary DC

Literary mapping projects in Washington, DC bring together several of my obsessions in one place: my love of maps as beautiful graphic objects, my interest in the built environment (architecture, parks, roads, etc.) and how it changes over time, the history of DC in particular, writing that emphasizes setting, and the lives of writers. 

It has been my honor to have been involved in several DC mapping projects, which I’ll enumerate here.

DC Writers’ Homes

http://www.dcwriters.org

This project, which I co-edit with Dan Vera, was inaugurated in November 2011 and we’ve been adding to it ever since.  But our obsession started about five years prior to that, as we began to research the private homes, most unmarked, of writers we admire.  The web exhibit, now covering over 225 locations, photo documents the former homes of novelists, poets, playwrights and memoirists from the greater DC area.  We’ve tried hard to include authors from the full range of the city’s history, from the founding to the present.  We only include authors who have passed away, but whose houses still stand.  (As I usually say to school groups, the writers must be dead but their houses must be alive.)  The site includes a map, a bio on each author, photos of houses (masterfully taken by Dan), and an elaborate cross-reference system that encourages browsing.  Readers can search by neighborhood, a writers’ race or ethnicity, the time period in which they were active, their jobs (other than writing) and other affiliations.

Beltway Poetry Quarterly, “Mapping the City” Issues

http://www.beltwaypoetry.com/mapping-the-city/

I have published two issues of place poems in the journal I edit—that is, poems that mention by name specific streets, neighborhoods, parks, monuments, or businesses in DC.  The first of the two, co-edited with Andrea Carter Brown, was published in Summer 2006, the second (which I edited alone) in Fall 2010.  They are linked together by a single map, designed by Emery Pager.  On the map, readers can click on push-pins to read the poems associated with each location.  Together, the 92 poems provide a unique tour of the city.

DC By the Book

http://www.dcbythebook.org

Sponsored by the DC Public Library, this web site shows where books of fiction take place in DC.  Readers can search by neighborhood or theme—and are encouraged to add more excerpts from their favorite books.  I was one of two subject matter experts, along with Michon Boston, for the project’s inaugural year.

The Word Works—Truth, Lies and Gossip

In the life of a small press, some things cannot be said and certainly not as a blog post where truth, lies and gossip are often equal partners. This means some unspoken stories go to the grave with their tellers.

Perversely I correct people who say Karren Alenier is The Word Works or The Word Works belongs to Karren Alenier because it started with her.

Fact: Wandering on the Outside by Karren LaLonde Alenier was the first book published by The Word Works. The year was 1975. Deirdra Baldwin as founding director and chairperson of the board created The Word Works at the end of 1974 with her brother-in-law Paris Christopher Pacchione, a graphic artist. They made up the board of directors along with Yolanda Gerritsen, a Dutch citizen married to the American lawyer Roy Nierenberg who nailed down nonprofit status for Word Works.

When Deirdra showed up in 1975 at my house on Bradley Boulevard in Chevy Chase to ask for the manuscript that would become my first book, I hadn’t seen her in some months. The truth was I was fed up with her and the antics of a man named Jim Morrisette, the same man who claimed he was calling Ezra Pound in the middle of the night but Pound was always willing to talk to him. Perhaps I misheard but Pound had died in 1972. Morrisette was just looking for his next drink. Yolanda said Jim had fallen backwards out his chair at the Childe Harold during a planning meeting Deirdra had called.

Why did Deirdra pick me as the first author? She believed I knew more people than anyone else she had in mind and therefore would sell more books boosting the small seed grant from an anonymous donor (yes, here is one of those secrets). Her plan was that sale of my book with a foreword from her would fund the next book. It worked. Paul Revenko-Jones’ the end of the hand (1975) with a foreword from me came next. After that, Word Works got two National Endowment for the Arts grants and published In Praise of Secrecy (1977) by John Wellman, The Emerging Detail (1977) by Deirdra Baldwin, and The Unicorn and the Garden (1978) edited by Betty Parry.

Of course this is only a surface. Every book takes a pound of flesh out of the people involved in producing them. There are many stories that could be told, but not now and maybe never. But one thing to know—The Word Works is a literary organization, not just a publishing house. Our creating papers mandate that we provide an educational component and we do that through our public programs. Come to Café Muse at the Friendship Heights Village Center if you want to know more. I might whisper something in your ear.

On the Birth of The Wineberry Press

“Not sure we should call it Mulberry Press,” Peggy hesitates. “Mulberries messy, fall to earth, don’t do anything.”

 “Mulberries are pesky,” Elaine says. “A nuisance, they irritate. Like certain poems, or poets.”

 Our mulberries are delicious. The first book from our future—what may be The Mulberry Press—will be an anthology of poems by ten poets: my students, most older than I. Elinor Castendyk Briefs, Maxine Combs, Lucia Dunham, Elizabeth Follin-Jones, Barbara Goldberg, Elaine Magarrell, Mariquita Mullan, Elizabeth Sullan, Margaret Weaver. Their idea, an anthology, but I suggest they first submit their poems to journals, see if editors consider their poems good enough to publish individually first. Though I don’t think anthologists should include their own poems, they insisted mine be.

 Journals indeed accept the submissions. We can create an anthology. But what can we call the book? The press? Pomegranate Press? Persimmon Press? Maine poets can create the Blueberry Press. South East Asian poets, The Durian Press, Rambutan Press…Mango…

 “Our garden is prickly with wineberry vines!” I realize.

 “Poor man’s raspberries…”

 The Wineberry Press is incorporated. We are all on the editorial board. When we find a name—

 The Wineberry Press publishes Finding the Name 1983. We can only afford a one-color cover: naturally it is purple. For the launch, we all wear purple stockings.

 Over the years, sporadically as the fruit, The Wineberry Press produced new books of stories or poems: unusual, experimental, most skinny, collections conventional big presses would scorn. Our authors include Beatrice Campbell-Murphy Get With It Lord!, Maxine Combs Swimming out of the Collective Unconscious, Judith McCombs 20/20 Visionary Eclipse / Whorling Try/Angles, Elizabeth Follin-Jones Nobody Here is Listening, Elizabeth Stevens Horse and Cart, and after a long sabbatical, Maxine Combs Waiting for Wings and Elspeth Cameron Ritchie Tearing through the Moon: Poems & Prose of an Army Psychiatrist. All have gone on to publish other books, and Beatrice Campbell-Murphy had already published “one of the first anthologies of Negro Poetry— and yes, we called it that back then.”

###


by Elisavietta Ritchie