Uncategorized

RC alumna Anna Clark has a contract with Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt)  to write “the dramatic story of Flint’s water crisis,” her agent announced Tuesday at Publisher’s Marketplace, a trade site. The book, Water’s Perfect Memory, will frame “Flint as a canary-in-the-coal-mine tale of how the underfunding of cities across America imperils the lives if its residents.”

Clark, a Southwest Michigan native who has lived in Detroit since 2007, graduated from the RC in 2003 and is the editor of “A Detroit Anthology” (2014) and the author of “Michigan Literary Luminaries” (2015). No target date is given for publication.

Barry Garelick  (67-71, Mathematics) has published a book of math education essays, Math Education in the U.S.: Still Crazy After All These Years. Previous books include Confessions of a 21st Century Math Teacher and Letters from John Dewey/Letters from Huck Finn. All books are available from Amazon.

Here’s the blurb about Barry’s new book from the Amazon site:

“Hell hath no fury like a mathematician whose child has been scorned by an education system that refuses to know better,” Barry Garelick wrote in his first published article on math education in 2005. He has been at it ever since, and his focus has remained the same: why many of today’s practices for teaching math are ineffective and often destructive. This collection brings together some of his best articles on math education over the past ten years.

Garelick states: “In writing these articles, I often feel that I am explaining in detail why jumping out of an airplane without a parachute will result in death. And while I am heartened that my readers have found these articles useful, I am also disheartened when I hear the education establishment react with arguments that are tantamount to ‘Oh but if you jump out of an airplane the right way, you can survive.’ ”

Nevertheless there is a growing momentum in the U.S. against the well-intentioned but highly injurious nonsense that passes for math education. This collection of articles will assure those people who are convinced that it is being taught poorly that they are right.

The  third annual Voices of the Middle West festival will be held at the RC, Saturday, March 12th, beginning at 10 am. More information at Midwestern Gothic. On Friday, Saturday March 11th, several of the presenters will read from their works at Literati, 7 pm. RC lecturer Robert James Russell  was interviewed about the festival by Anna Prushinskaya for the Ann Arbor District Library’s Pulp: Arts Around Ann Arbor. Anna is An RC Creative Writing alum (2008).

U-M history alum and author Jim Tobin describes current efforts by RC students to re-activate East Quad’s venerable Benzinger Library, in Michigan Today. Tobin also details its long and sometimes amusing history.

RC Creative Writing alumna Carrie Smith will be at Aunt Agatha’s on Wednesday, February 17 (7 pm) and in Benzinger Library on Thursday, February 18 (7:30 pm), reading from Silent City, her new crime novel.

Carrie won three Hopwood Awards (one in 1977 and two in 1979), and a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has been a finalist in Nimrod Magazine’s Katherine Anne Porter prize for fiction, and is the author of a literary first novel, Forget Harry published by Simon & Schuster.   Carrie moved to New York City in 1981. By day, she is Senior Vice President and Publisher of Benchmark Education Company. By night, she thinks about murder. She lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her partner and sixteen year old twins.

RC Creative Writing student Emily Ontko asked Carrie a few questions . . . .

What inspired you to become a writer?

I’m not sure I was inspired per se. I think fiction writers are just natural observers of the people and events around them. Our medium—the raw material—is our observations, and we translate or transform those into something that is entertaining, thought provoking, and informative to others. I can’t say what makes some people more focused observers than others. In my case, it probably had to do with growing up gay in a wacky ultra-republican family.

Do you have any tips for staying focused on and interested in story ideas (and, by extension, overcoming writer’s block)?  …

Q-and-A with RC Creative Writing alumna Carrie SmithRead More »

RC Creative Writing alumnus Nicholas Petrie will read from his new book, The Drifter. Nicholas won a Hopwood for short fiction in 1991; he received his MFA in fiction from the University of Washington. His story “At the Laundromat” won the 2006 Short Story Contest in the The Seattle Review, a national literary journal. A husband and father, he runs a home-inspection business in Milwaukee. The Drifter is his first novel.

RC students Paulina Adams, Lily C. Buday, Sam Johnson, Caroline Rothrock, and Skyler Tarnas  won Fall Hopwood Awards. Congratulations!

Paulina won both the Academy of American Poets award and the Jeffrey L. Weisberg Prize. Lily won a Hopwood for Underclass Nonfiction. Sam and Caroline won Hopwoods for Underclass Poetry. Skyler won the Roy W. Cowden Fellowship.

Congratulations to RC creative writing lecturer Alexander Weinstein, whose short story collection, Children of the New World, will be published in 2016 by Picador!

Earlier this November, the Michigan Humanities Council awarded the RC $7,050 to support the 2016 Voices of the Middle West conference, to be held March 12th. The award was one of 21 Humanities Grants (6 in Washtenaw County) to support projects “exploring history, poetry, reading, education and community identity.”

The award application describes Voices as “a public conference and book fair featuring writers, independent presses, and journals based in the Midwestern United States. The festival’s goal is to bring together writers and presses from around the Midwest together with faculty and students from the region’s universities and members of the general public to showcase Midwestern letters and discuss trends in writing and publishing. The 2016 festival, scheduled for March 12, 2016, is the third annual event. A key goal of the festival is to showcase the racial and gender diversity in contemporary Midwestern literature.”

More details about the 2016 Voices conference will be forthcoming, but the featured keynote speaker will be Ross Gay, author of Against Which, Bringing the Shovel Down, and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude.