SPRINGSPRING 2015 2018 New Ficon Faculty Interview with Karen Thompson Walker by Marcie Alexander, MFA Ficon ‘19 Karen Thompson Walker joined the pro- Marcie Alexander (MA): Your new novel, gram’s faculty in the 2017 academic year as a The Dreamers, comes out early next year. new Assistant Professor of ficon. Walker’s What's the premise? first novel, The Age of Miracles, was named Karen Thompson Walker (KTW): It’s about one of the best books of the year by People; a contagious sleeping sickness that spreads O, The Oprah Magazine; The Financial Times; through a small college town. People fall Kirkus; Publishers Weekly; Amazon; and Barnes asleep, and they can’t wake up. Eventually, it & Noble. It has been translated into 27 becomes clear that this strange perpetual languages and oponed for film by River Road sleep is accompanied by extraordinary Entertainment. Walker’s wring has also dreams. appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New MA: What led you to the idea? York Times, and Real Simple, and she gave a I've always been TED talk about fear and the imaginaon at interested in contagion TEDGlobal 2012. Karen previously worked as a stories. (Blindness, by book editor at Simon & Schuster and is a José Saramago, which graduate of UCLA and Columbia. Her new imagines an epidemic novel, The Dreamers, is set for release in Walker January 2019. • • • — Cont’d page 2 crwr.uoregon.edu Literary Reference CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM 1 Literary Walker (connued from page 1) of blindness, is one of my favorite books and a major influence.) At the me that I Reference started wring this book, I was living in Iowa City. Living in a college town reminded _______________________ me of some of the weirdness of college, and of the narrave possibilies of the crowded environment of a dorm floor, which is where The Dreamers begins. The FACULTY idea that it would be a sleeping sickness came a lile later—and actually came partly from a dream, as convenient as that may sound. I had a dream that I couldn’t Poetry wake up. I like wring about the uncanny elements of ordinary life, and sleep and dreaming are such clear examples. Garre Hongo MA: So it just fit right into what you were already working on. Daniel Anderson KTW: Right. It was returning to territory that I was interested in and wrote Geri Doran about in The Age of Miracles, which is the collision of ordinary life and ordinary people with some kind of extreme and strange disaster situaon, to see how it Ficon affects them, or how it does or does not change them. MA: How was the process of approaching and wring your second novel Jason Brown different for you than going in to your first? Marjorie Celona KTW: I think I was able to foresee problems a lile more successfully. And just Karen Thompson Walker the feeling of having wrien one novel before made me a lile more calm and a lile more confident, which are feelings that were totally absent when wring my Career Instructor first book. I didn't even know if I could do it. Can I even write 250 pages about the Cai Emmons same characters and world and situaon? Can this story even be something that Brian Trapp anyone would think to call a novel? Wring the second novel felt more like, I know I can write a novel, but is it going to be a good novel? Every novel has its own Instructors challenges, of course, and I’m always learning. Ulrick Casimir MA: Your first novel got a lot of posive crical recepon and acclaim—you Michael Copperman had TED talks, arcles in The Wall Street Journal, all these reviews and all these Miriam Gershow interviews, and I can imagine that felt both amazing and also kind of overwhelming. Tia North Do you feel like it affected your approach, or gave you any sort of hesitaon toward Jacob Powers your next novel at all? Or was it more like, great, that worked out, and so now I'm _______________________ just going to go do that again? KTW: [laughs] No, I wouldn't describe it that way. I had a very strange and ADMINISTRATIVE lucky experience that the book got a certain amount of aenon. It was great, but for a writer, it was weird. I remember feeling that I was much more producve, and P. Lowell Bowditch more comfortable wring and in my wring head once me had passed. That first Program Director year or so, the reviews were in my head—even Amazon reviews, or even things people had said at readings, about things they didn't think worked. Or things that Julia A. Schewanick did, and I thought, well this me I'm doing the opposite.… It was just distracng, for Business Manager a while. That was 2012. I spent about four and a half, five years wring the new _______________________ book. And the further I got from that crazy me, the easier it was to work. MA: Your previous book was narrated by a first person narrator, looking Creave Wring Program back on her life to the me when she was 12. Does The Dreamers have a similar 5243 University of Oregon narrave situaon? Eugene, OR 97403-5243 KTW: No, it’s in third person. It has a large cast of characters, and the narrave T: (541) 346-3944 voice dips into various people’s heads in different parts of the story. F: (541) 346-0537 MA: In choosing that, what was your reasoning behind, this is how I can best E: [email protected] tell this parcular story, versus the perspecve of your previous book, of an hp://crwr.uoregon.edu individual looking back on her experience? Walker — Cont’d page 14 2 UNIVERSITY OF OREGON COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES Spring 2018 Art and the Ekphrasc Tradion Interview with Ma Donovan by Kae Haemmerle, MFA Poetry ‘18 Ma Donovan is the finding ways to conjure it but not exhaust it. I don't know author of the collecon of if you’ve been to the Pantheon, but for me there's no essays, A Cloud of Unusual substute for standing in that space. Photographs are Size and Shape: Meditaons going to fail and certainly language as a medium is going on Ruin and Redempon, as to fail. But what I can do is ask quesons. Why am I so well as two collecons of haunted by and obsessed with this space? What am I poetry – Vellum and trying to get at? What is it about the light, that small Rapture & the Big Bam. window of sky, that is haunng me? Then at the same me you have to confront that seemingly impossible task • • • of trying to recreate an aspect of that, trying to focus on Kae Haemmerle (KH): The subjects of your poems so the minua and find a way to draw the reader's aenon oen are rooted in artwork and music. How have those to a parcular detail that you otherwise might not have subjects come to inform your poetry and interest in the appreciated as a viewer. Those are the moments for me ekphrasc tradion? where it’s actual invesgaon on my part. The course of Ma Donovan (MD): I've always been excited about the wring process is a meditaon where I'm just forced art and the ekphrasc tradion. Learning about a piece of to look at it and look at it and look at it. This is something art in the process of finding the poem is to find forms that that I feel poetry can and should do, in addion to change one's relaonship to that art and serve as an innumerable other things: teach us about the act of interrogaon of the piece, or expansion of that piece— looking and the world of art. something that can rupture the stasis of visual art and KH: The "I" speaker you deploy in Vellum is an work through narrave or ask quesons about it as a observer, a quesoner, a meditator. Was this a result of means of engagement. The poem is in part asking working in the ekphrasc tradion? Have you perhaps quesons about it, sing with it, trying to get to that changed your approach to the speaker with your more moment of the aesthec experience and then also recent collecon, Rapture & the Big Bam? pushing beyond that, which poetry affords as a narrave MD: When I look back at the poems in Vellum, which form or form that can include narrave. Oen for me, a at this point were wrien a while ago, it’s something that source of a poem might be having some sort of response I was cricized for when I was in grad school, that I didn't to a piece of music or an arst or a painng or sculpture have enough of myself in the poems. At the me, I really and just wanng to understand it and go through that act resisted the need to have the personal in there. Maybe of looking. Inevitably for me, even the act of wring the some of that was coming out of a resistance to the poem, whether it ends up being a failed poem or a piece confessional tradion, and I didn't feel like poems needed that I feel is finally seled or dislled, will have opened up to do that. But when I look back at them, I feel like those that work of art from the course of trying to approach it, poems can risk holding their cards too close, making it understand it, interrogate it.