Recently in Publication News Category

Elisabeth is a third-year poet in our MFA program who has authored several chapbooks and is soon to make a splash with her first upcoming full-length book of poems, ULTRAMEGAPRAIRIELAND (Bloof Books, 2014).

While a year away, it's never too early to start the hype. Here we take a sneak peek at what to expect from her work and get some insight into the publication process.

Nicky Tiso: First off, congratulations on the book deal. How does it feel?

Elisabeth Workman: Ecstatic relief. (I've been holding it for so long and now can finally let it go.) And the ecstacy is that it's been embraced/accepted by my first choice (or hope, rather, as if the choice was mine!) for a home for the manuscript--the superlative Bloof Books.

N: I see you've published a chapbook Megaprairieland. Is Ultramegaprairieland conceived of as a sequel? What can we expect from it?

E: It's an expansion of it, an ultra-izing of the mega-ness, with more spectacle and parades and rabid revisionist histories.

N: Did you submit any other places or what advice have you for people looking to get published?

E: Thanks to grant funding, I was able to submit to more than several book contests, which made me feel slightly dubious. The manuscript was short-listed with several presses, which was reassuring, I suppose, but I would encourage people to pursue the presses that are feeding their hunger. What are the books that land their tentacles all over and through you and won't let go? Which books make you a crazy writing zombie? Who publishes them? For me, that was Bloof.

N: Did the previous grants/fellowships you've received help enable you to write this book?

E: YES. Funding from the Jerome Foundation allowed me to pursue a mentorship with Sharon Mesmer and travel to NYC to meet her and do a reading at Zinc Bar with the women of Flarf; support from the Minnesota State Arts Board afforded me the means to isolate and hide out in a cabin for two weeks when I was thirty weeks pregnant and finish poems for the manuscript; and the McKnight Fellowship meant I could finalize the manuscript, send it out, work on new projects, and not have to return to work full-time after I had my baby.

N: Were your chapbooks self-published or did you have a publisher for them?

E: Grey Book Press published MEGAPRAIRIELAND; it was selected through their first open reading period/chapbook "contest," judged by Sandra Simonds and GBP editor Scott Sweeney. My other three chapbooks were published through the Dusie Kollektiv at the invitation of Susana Gardner, which proved to be, not only an exciting alternative to rote publishing patriarchies, but more--an exciting and generative international poetry community.

N: Does Bloof have any relation to Flarf?

E: They both end in F, and are full of wild-eyed pirate poets.

N: Can you describe your writing in three words?

E: No, I can't. Okay, I'll try. MUTANT APORIA VEIL? STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKEHOLE BULIMIA? IGGYPOP MARZIPAN PUDENDA? (that one's for Maria Damon)

N: Can I describe your writing as "hot gore"?

E: As long as you don't capitalize the G.

N: Books that have really influenced your writing?

E: There are so many. For this project, in particular:
Disobedience, by Alice Notley
The Golden Age of Paraphernalia, Kevin Davies
Warsaw Bikini, Sandra Simonds
Deed, Rod Smith
The Romance of Happy Workers, Anne Boyer
I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up (Or, Social Romanticism), Bruce Andrews
the work, in general, of Sharon Mesmer and Nada Gordon and Elizabeth Bachinsky and K. Silem Mohammad and Christian Bök
and lodged willy-nilly in my psyche, Titus Andronicus; Helen Adam; Keats; the Wife of Bath (she was gap-toothed, too); Tristan Tzara; and not least Lewis Carroll

N: Shout outs?

E: SHANNA COMPTON, Bloof Boss and beautiful poet
SHARON MESMER, mentor, sister, birthday twin, atomic bitch poet
SANDRA SIMONDS & SCOTT SWEENEY, fierce poets, editors, supporters
THE FLARFISTS
EL CONEJO & LIL' B
& ALL THE AMAZING CONSPIRATORS & FRIENDS I'VE MET HERE

Maybe Malibu, Maybe Beowulf

Then, there was toil,
as toiled the slaves of Rome
in flowy frocks and torpedo tubes
abnormally polite to the love hostage
who realized quite unexpectedly
the "U" in U-boat
is for "venereal."
According to ancient science
after every explosive climax comes
"What then?" Then, entire families,
sitting in the middle of craters
chomping down corndogs. Then,
a little bit of syphilis.
Then, Comic Sans.
Year after year the toil
and the coitus. This would be
the real story told to earth people
in a voice more trusted
than the situation warranted.
What then? Maybe Malibu.
Maybe Beowulf.
Then, when the hills break out
ablaze, people will reach for their
joy sticks and try to transubstantiate
into the infernal wisdom of electricity
using Western techniques and trends.
Hi-fi clap-on, clap-off firelight,
then another high noon
in which staring at the same dot
transfixed for hours could
potentially result
in hot gore.

Elisabeth's chapbooks include a city_a cloud; Opolis; Megaprairieland; and Maybe Malibu, Maybe Beowulf. Ultramegaprairieland will be her first collection and is forthcoming from Bloof Books in 2014. In 2010, Elisabeth received the McKnight Fellowship for Writers/Loft Award for Poetry, selected by Marilyn Nelson. In 2009, she was a recipient of the SASE/Jerome Award from Intermedia Arts. Her poems have appeared in Abraham Lincoln, Dusie, Boo Journal, Diode, Alice Blue, and lots of other places. She lives in Minneapolis, MN, with the designer Erik Brandt and their daughter Beatrix. For more information, please visit Geotypografika.com.

The debut novel by 2005 MFA Program alum Amanda Coplin continues to garner praise. "The Orchardist," published by HarperCollins in early August 2012, has already landed on Publisher Weekly's top ten for fall list; O Magazine's top ten for fall 2012; and received rave reviews from The Washington Post, Seattle Times and Star Tribune. Coplin was also chosen for Barnes and Nobles "Discovr Great New Writers Series" for 2012. While in the program, Coplin studied with Edelstein-Keller Chair Charles Baxter. Baxter calls the book "patiently beautiful" and notes that "it does not feel like a first novel; it feels like a life's work." Coplin began the book while in the MFA Program. She will be on an extensive book tour throughout the fall and will be a guest during our "First Books" reading in March 2013.

During our annual end of the year tally rally, Creative Writing discovered an interesting stat: from summer 2011 to spring 2013, we will see a total of 18 books published by MFA program alumni and current students. 18 books! Some are debuts, some are second books, but, really, 18 books?! We wonder if even the glittery and angel-dusted Iowa Workshop can claim that. Let's do a small run down: Amanda Coplin, The Orchardist, due from Harper Collins in August 2012. The Mermaid of Brooklyn, Amy Shearn, spring 2013 (Simon and Schuster). what have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?, Arlene Kim (Milkweed, July 2011). Unbored, Elizabeth Foy Larsen (Bloomsbury, October, 2012). Uncle Janice, Matt Burgess (Doubleday, spring 2013). The Peripatetic Coffin, Ethan Rutherford (Ecco Press, fall 2013). Use Your Words, Kate Hopper (Viva Editions, 2012). Karen Rigby, Chinoiserie (Ahsahta Press, 2012). Friends Like Us, Lauren Fox (Knopf, 2012). Nate Slawson, Panic Attack USA! (YesYes Books, 2011). Butcher Tree, Feng Sun Chen (Black Ocean, 2012). Mother Substance, Sarah Fox (Coffee House Press, spring). And more and more and more.....Minnesota: we get the great writers.

In the midst of writing new fiction, directing the Creative Writing Program, teaching and advising MFA candidates, Julie Schumacher somehow found time to answer a few questions about her new book, The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls, due out this May from Delacorte Books for Young Readers.

Here's a sneak preview of the opening lines:
I'm Adrienne Haus, survivor of a mother-daughter book club. Most of us didn't want to join. My mother signed me up because I was stuck at home all summer, with my knee in a brace... The members of "The Unbearable Book Club," CeeCee, Jill, Wallis, and I, were all going into eleventh grade A.P. English. But we weren't friends. We were literary prisoners, sweating, reading classics, and hanging out at the pool. If you want to find out how membership in a book club can end up with a person being dead, you can probably look us up under mother-daughter literary catastrophe. Or open this book and read my essay, which I'll turn in when I go back to school.

Julie, how would you say this novel is different from your previous work?

It's the only book I've ever written that was not my idea originally. It was my editor's idea. It's a book about books and reading--which, when I first considered it, seemed like a fun and simple project, but was not.

And on the flip side, how is it related?

No matter what I start writing about, I end up gravitating toward a particular emotional territory: family relationships, characters who are drawn toward one another but don't get along, off-beat interactions or misunderstandings, unrealized desires. Those motifs work just as well and can be at least as satisfying in YA literature as in literature for adults.

What was the biggest challenge for you in writing this book?

Structure. There were a lot of pieces that needed to be fitted together: mothers with daughters, daughters' life experiences with the books they were reading, etc. And somewhere along the line, for my own amusement, I decided that the main character in the book would be the daughter of the main character in my first novel, The Body Is Water [published in 1999 by Harper]. Which added a few plot complications as well.

Have you ever been in a mother-daughter book club like the one you write about?

No, I haven't. I have two daughters, one of whom finds reading fiction to be a terrible chore, and the other who, when she was younger, wanted to read only books with dragons on the covers. It would not have worked out.

How does the process of writing a book work for you? What makes you despair, what makes you ecstatic?

Ecstasy doesn't enter into the process very much for me. There are the moments when I can feel the project moving forward or evolving, and moments when I'm driving and have to pull over because something in the book has unlocked itself in my mind and I have to write it down. Those are great moments. But there are also plenty of dead ends and frustrations. Lots of writers are brooders and ruminators, I think, by necessity. They need to mull and examine and re-examine their thoughts, and mull again.

Without giving too much away, do you have a favorite scene or chapter?

There's a scene I like at a mini-golf course. It's a decrepit place run by a guy named Mr. Baxter--but he exists only off-stage.

Rumor has it this may be the last YA book you write. True? What's next for you?

I'm working on a short story collection, which is almost done. My head and my imagination aren't in the YA world as much as they were when my own kids were younger, so I'm not reading as much YA as I used to. But I do like the idea of keeping a foot in both worlds, and I've never felt there was a gulf between YA and adult lit. Good writing is good writing, regardless of where it's shelved.

Editor's note: Julie's novel is now available on Amazon for pre-order of the hardcover and Kindle editions.

Lauren Fox, who graduated from the MFA program at the University of Minnesota in 1998, was kind enough to talk to me about her new book, Friends Like Us (Knopf, 2012). We talked about how Donkey Kong, how humor and pain get entangled, and the MFA program's influence on penmanship. Lauren Fox is also the author of Still Life with Husband (Knopf, 2007), and her writing has appeared in Seventeen, Marie Claire, and The New York Times. She lives in Milwaukee (in the oh, oh so grand state of Wisconsin) with her family.

1. Why use the Midwest as a setting? (Milwaukee! I'm thinking about Still Life with Husband.) What does that kind of setting bring to a story?

I grew up in Milwaukee, lived in Madison for a while and then spent almost a decade in Minneapolis. Except for a year in DC, I've lived my whole life in the Midwest, so it's what I know. It's home. I know its rhythms and quirks and at least some of its secrets. I'm not a person who can visit a place and then understand it well enough to set a novel there. I don't have that geographic intelligence that some people have. I get lost a lot. So it makes sense for me to set my novels in a place I know pretty well. I also found, after my last book came out, that people who don't live here have lots of preconceptions about the Midwest (There are suburbs in Milwaukee? And Jews? And irony? Yes, eleven, and yes!). I like undercutting those presumptions.

2. Can you talk a little bit about a story/novel begins to sprout for you? Do you start with a character, a sentence, an idea, an image, something else?

I start with a feeling, or sometimes a song. I am also a first-class brooder, and have been ruminating on certain incidents and grudges (you know who you are) for the last thirty years. Things are always percolating, and I'm always taking notes.

3. What is your writing life like? Are there rituals involved? Does it escape quick like spirits out of a cracked urn? Does it slouch like thick honey towards the opening?

My writing life is like a game of Donkey Kong (how dated is that?). I have two fabulous little girls who start talking to me at about 6:30 AM and don't stop until 9:00 PM. (Literally - they'll be talking one second, and asleep the next.) I'm always just trying to find a few minutes here and (oops, sorry, had to tend to a stubbed toe) there to write. (And my older one is in school, and I do have childcare. It's not like I'm writing novels while my kids are naked and foraging for food in the backyard. Not quite.)

4. I like something Lorrie Moore said about humor, that it comes "from the surprise release of some buried tension." I feel like humor runs very close to sadness. I take my pathetic moods so seriously that I can't take them seriously at all. Can you just talk about the role of humor in your work? What purpose does it serve your characters? How does it help us understand/deal with our painful spots?

Novels are about crises, and a crisis without humor is... a therapy session? My characters are flawed people who make some really bad decisions. They tend to make awful messes out of their lives. I think humor pulls them briefly out of their own confusion and regret, at the same time that it underscores it. I definitely come from a great tradition of dark humor, both culturally and within my family. You can't come from a 2,000-year history of people trying to kill you and not find a little giggle here and there. Both of my parents are very funny people, and my brother's sense of humor is so dry that it sometimes takes me months to figure out whether he was joking about something. So I grew up really valuing that, and sort of intuitively looking for the humor in any given situation - almost as a way of describing it. I do tend to think that most things are either horrible or hilarious or both. The things that are both are the most interesting to me.

5. What inspired your book, Friends Like Us, that's about to be released? What is it like to move from writing one novel to another?

Moving from writing one novel to another was complicated by the fact that I was pregnant when I started writing my second novel. My main character was always bloated, tired and irritable. Not my best work. So Friends Like Us is actually my third novel (after I discarded the second one). And writing it was hard. I kept hearing phrases from the reviews of my first book in my head and feeling paralyzed, by both the praise and the criticism. I felt like I couldn't live up to the praise, and I took the criticisms as confirmation of my worst fears. Friends Like Us didn't really pick up speed until I forced myself to tune out all of that noise. After that, writing it felt like a victory. It was inspired by the intensity of that time period - for me and my friends it was our mid- to late-twenties - when some people are striding confidently toward their bright futures, and some of us are stagnating in jobs we hate and lives and relationships we don't have a handle on. (Note my clever switch to first person plural there.) The relationships between and among the three main characters in Friends Like Us are informed by the push and pull of love and friendship and impending adulthood.

5b. How did you carry around the story on a daily basis? (By this I mean, sometimes the poem I'm working on makes me more happy, less happy, etc. It seeps into my behavior.)

I carried the story around next to a grocery list, a permission slip for a field trip to the art museum, a pink mitten, a half-eaten bag of Cheetos, two overdue library books, and a song by Adele. I was very, very happy to add it to that collection.

6. What can a writer get out of an MFA program? How did your writing change during your time here?

I guess I can only tell you what I got out of the MFA program, which was time and support and confidence. I think that you can construct your life in some ways to resemble an MFA program -- you can work part-time, if you're willing to live an ascetic existence and are not encumbered by other financial obligations, and you can immerse yourself in the literary culture of your city or town, and you can be a part of writing group. And I've been doing these things, off and on and with varying success, ever since I graduated college. But an MFA program provides you with a scaffolding for all of that, a structure and a community of writers and a support system that is hard to replicate when you're on your own. How did my writing change during my time at the U? My o's got a little more oval, my l's slimmed down, my w's got a little pointier, and my q's became curlier.

7. What should writers be looking for when trying to find the "right" program?

I don't really know how to answer this one. It depends so much on the writer, what he or she is looking for, what s/he hopes to accomplish. For sure I would advocate finding a place that will offer you full funding. (Ed. I think even just this is advice potential applicants need to hear.) I don't suggest taking out a huge loan to enroll in an MFA program, because it's so hard and painful to balance creativity with money worries. It's something you probably have to look forward to, as a writer, for the rest of your life, so you might as well try to escape it for a few short, crucial years.

8. What made you decide to apply for MFA programs?

I wanted everything I've been talking about -- the time and freedom to write, the structure and support and community to allow me to do so.

In a little over a decade, our alums have published over 60 books with presses such as Doubleday, Harper's, Coffee House, Simon and Schuster and Knopf. They've won National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, Provincetown Fine Arts Fellowships, Stegners, and Rome Prizes. Current students are blazing out of the gate, too: we have not one, but two current MFAs publishing books with major presses this year: Mary Chen's first book of poetry will be out in January 2012 from Black Ocean and Sarah Fox will publish her second book, Mother Substance, with Coffee House Press in fall 2012. Our website has one of the most comprehensive alumni pages at the University of Minnesota (Alumni News and Notes) Please take a look at our new feature, "Alumni In-Depth," where we list specific alumni accomplishments along with "Life in the MFA" recollections: http://creativewriting.umn.edu/people/alumniindepth.html

Two recent graduates of the MFA Program at the University of Minnesota, Amy Shearn and Amanda Coplin, will publish novels in 2013. Amy Shearn's novel, tentatively titled "The Double Life of Jenny Lipkin," will be published by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Shearn's first novel, "How Far is the Ocean From Here?" was published by Shaye Areheart Books. Amanda Coplin is a former Provincetown Fellow. Her debut novel, "The Orchardist" will be published by Harper Collins in 2013 after a heated auction between seven publishing houses in New York. "The Orchardist" was Amanda's MFA Thesis.