JANUARY 31 HOPE COLLEGE VISITING WRITERS SERIES

3:30 Herrick Room Q and A

7 pm Winants Graves Hall Reading

Contact: Sarah Baar, baar@hope.edu

FEBRUARY 3 SHORELINE VISION KEYNOTE SPEAKER

2:30 Bookselling and Conversation

3:15 – 4:15 Speech

Watermark 920 Muskegon

TUESDAY FEBRUARY 7 HASP KEYNOTE SPEECH

9 am arrival Haworth Center Conference Center

Contact Kathy Beal pkbeal@sbcgolbal.net

THURSDAY FEBURARY 9 HAIR: TEXT AND IMAGE: poetry reading

6:30-8:30 pm

Hair: Text & Image

CHRYSTOPH MARTEN

511 West 25th Street, # 608.

February 9 – March 3rd, 2012

Opening: Thursday, Feb. 9th, 6:30-8:30 pm

Elaine Sexton 212-462-9585 / elainesexton1@gmail.com

Chrystoph Marten 212-414-1422

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 15 HASP HOPE COLLEGE  .

FRIDAY MARCH 2  “The Personal, Political, Provocative” The Sun Magazine

ASSOCIATED WRITING PROGRAMS

10:15 am Empire Ballroom Palmer House Hilton Chicago

National Conference

Chicago, IL 

Contact: Molly Herboth

919-942-5282

molly@thesunmagazine.org

TUESDAY MAY 1   Reading and Signing

I watched a documentary on Annie Leibovitz Annie Leibovitz last night and I want all my students to watch it.  It’s a portrait of  

becoming an artist.

So so so so good.

 Two things she said that I really want to help my students, and myself, keep at the very center of our process this semester:

1.  You don’t know what you are going to get until you get there.  You can’t plan your art.  You have to go to the place (for writers, that is the dream space) and notice what is there.

2. The small things are the things that end up “making” the piece.  You have to keep an eye for the tiny things, and you never can know where they will be or what they will be, or even that you have them when you happen upon them. You often aren’t going to know, for a long time, what you have.

It’s this kind of eye towards mystery, and this patience with not knowing, that I’m trying to teach. And practice.

Heather,

They all ask me about it during my residency interviews; about my writing, about how I wrote a book in college. They ask me how many pages it was, as if they don’t believe me. I tell them one-hundred and twenty something. My chapbook, the one that I bound and that’s sitting on my desk next to books about Emergency Medicine and board study guides. They all say “oh!” I’m validated.

I put it on my application, in one line under hobbies sandwiched between “hiking” and “cycling.” They ask me about it at Michigan, at Indiana and in North Carolina where the assistant program director tells me of her love for Hemingway and the Nick Adams stories and I smile and tell her to read Abigail Thomas. I tell them about you, about prosopagnosia and “Die, Demons, Die” and then feel like something is missing. Because I don’t write much, I don’t blog anymore and the last book I read was titled “The ICU Book.”

I never realized how good your class was, how good your art was, and how amazing you were until now. I miss those twelve hard seats and noisy desks. I miss the beers with Charlie and Peter and all the wine I drank to find the whiskey. I am about to board my plane, with “What is the What” in my bag and a commitment to write every day for the next three weeks.

I miss it. I miss you.

Thank you.

A.S.