Tin House has selected my essay on Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s classic environmental book, The Everglades: River of Glass, as one of their sample pieces online for the fall 2018 “Poison” issue. Here’s the link. Let me know what you think.
Author: Michael N. McGregor
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Speaking at a Celebration of Robert Lax at Poets House in NYC: 7 p.m., Friday, November 30
If you live in or around New York City, come down to Poets House at 10 River Terrace at 7 p.m. on Friday, November 30, for a Celebration of Robert Lax on his 103rd birthday. I’ll be sharing stories about Lax and reading some of his poems, along with poet and former Lax literary assistant John Beer and poet Stacey Tran. Lax’s niece and literary executor, Marcia Kelly, will be in attendance too. It should be a wonderful evening of great poetry, fellowship and reminiscences. The cost is: $10, $7 for seniors & students, free for Poets House members.
Note: We were hoping we’d have copies available of New Directions’ reissue of Lax’s classic collection 33 Poems, but publication has been delayed until next February. We’ll have advance copies for you to look at, though.
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More About my Writing Residency in China This Fall
I announced a couple of months ago that I’ve been asked to be a resident writer at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, this fall.
I have a few more details about it:
The residency is sponsored by the English Creative Writing Center at Sun Yat-Sen University, the only program in China focused on creative writing in English. The programs founder and director is a writer herself, Dai Fan.
The residency begins on October 22 and lasts through Nov. 18. For the first two weeks, we’ll be in Yangshou in the Guangxi Autonomous Region with no duties other than writing. (The featured image here, of Yangshou, is from the China and Asia Cultural Travel website.) Next, we’ll spend a week at Sun Yat-sen’s main campus in Guangzhou, giving talks and readings and meeting with faculty and students. Then, the last week, we’ll be back to writing, this time in Meizhou in Guangdong Province.
I’ll be there with seven writers from six other countries–for information on them and their work, click on their names below:
Charlson Ong, the Philippines
Elisa Biagini, Italy
James Scudamore, Great Britain
Monica Aasprong, Norway
Sally Ito, Canada
Vladimir Poleganov, Bulgaria
Zdravka Evtimova, Bulgaria
I’ll post some of their work in the days ahead.
I haven’t been blogging on this site lately but I will during my time in China. For now, if you’re interested in learning more about the program and what I’ll be experiencing, check out this edition of Ninth Letter with links to creative works by participants in the program two years ago.
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An Essay on Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s THE EVERGLADES in the September Issue of TIN HOUSE
My first trip to Florida this past March introduced me to all kinds of new things: alligators, islands called keys, spring break on Miami Beach, Cape Canaveral, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the amazing writer and environmentalist whose name is on the Florida school where 17 students and staff were murdered earlier this year.
Although Douglas published the definitive book on the Everglades in 1947–The Everglades: River of Grass–her work is not as appreciated today as it should be. To do my small part to remedy the oversight, I wrote a piece for Tin House magazine’s Lost & Found section. You’ll find it in the new September issue, out tomorrow.
Douglas was 108 when she died in 1998, old enough to have cut her advocacy teeth in the struggle for women’s suffrage. You can get a taste of her remarkable career as a journalist, fiction writer and activist on her Wikipedia page.
Or, for a quick list of 13 things to know about her, try this page.
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Another Piece on Brian Doyle: Turning MINK RIVER into a Play
Oregon Arts Watch just published my piece about a Northwest theater director and playwright turning Brian Doyle’s novel Mink River into a play. You can read it here: http://www.orartswatch.org/brian-doyle-and-the-language-of-the-stage/
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Still Crazy (to Write Fiction) After All These Years
Twenty-one years ago, I graduated from Columbia University’s MFA in Creative Writing program with a focus on fiction writing. My intention was to find a job teaching fiction writing and focus on writing short stories and novels, all of which I did…for a while.
My first teaching job was at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where I taught three sections of fiction writing each term, with an occasional literature class, while advising the student magazine, Grassroots. During the three years I spent there, I revised and published four short stories I had written in graduate school, one of which, Fireline, published in StoryQuarterly, went on to win both an Illinois Arts Council Literary Grant and the Daniel Curley Award for Short Fiction. I completed the novel that had been my thesis too, and found an agent for it. So far, everything was going according to plan…
But I couldn’t find a permanent job in Fiction and, since I had a solid journalism background and had published a number of essays and profiles in publications such as Poets & Writers, I started applying for Nonfiction jobs. I was ultimately hired by Portland State University in 2000 to help found its graduate program in nonfiction writing. When the agent failed to sell my novel, I started shifting my energies more and more into nonfiction and, although I worked on another novel for a time, I left fiction behind.
Now that I’m retired from teaching, I’m able to go back to my first love. I’m working on that set-aside novel again and I recently published a short story–my first in 17 years–in Inkwell. It’s called “O Kairos” and features a Greek couple scratching out a living on a small island. You can read the beginning of it here.
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Utne Reader Republishes My Profile of Brian Doyle
In February, Kerry Temple, editor of Notre Dame Magazine, which had published my profile of writer and friend Brian Doyle in its Autumn 2017 issue, forwarded a message from Christian Williams, Editor-in-Chief at Utne Reader. He had just read my “beautiful tribute” to Brian, Williams wrote, and wanted to reprint it in the Spring 2018 edition of his magazine. The issue is now out, and my piece is on the Utne Reader website too, so if you weren’t able to read it before, you can find it here.
I recently wrote another Brian Doyle-related piece, this one about a theater director turning his beloved novel Mink River into a play. It includes a chronicle of how Brian came to write the book. It will go up on Oregon Arts Watch sometime in the next two weeks.
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Podcast Interview: Talking about Memoir, Biography and the Craft of Nonfiction
A few weeks ago, I stopped by Jennifer Lauck’s Blackbird Studio to talk to her class about memoir, biography and writing in general. She recorded the session and it’s available free on her website. Have a listen.
Jennifer is the author of the bestselling memoir Blackbird and three other books. You’ll find more about her and her books on her Amazon author’s page.
If you live in the Portland area, check out Jennifer’s classes for writers.
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A Writing Residency in China This Fall
In March, after my talk on the ethics of biography at the Associated Writers and Writing Programs conference in Tampa, Florida, a Chinese writer named Dai Fan, who directs the creative writing program at Sun-Yat Sen University in Guangzhou, China, came up to me and invited to be part of a writing residency there this fall. It’s taken a while for the paperwork to be done but I can announce now that I will be joining writers from seven other countries for four weeks of writing, lectures and readings this October and November.
We’ll have two weeks free for writing in the beautiful autonomous region of Guilin (pictured here), a week of talks and readings in Guangzhou, and a final week of writing in the cultural capital of Meizhou.
I’ll give more details, including the names of the other writers and the countries they’re from, in a future post.
The creative writing program at Sun Yat-sen University is the only one of its kind in English in China. Students from the program will be our interpreters while we’re there. I anticipate many interesting conversations with them, as well as the other writers and the program faculty.
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I’ll Be Leading a Nonfiction Workshop for the Manhattanville College MFA’s Summer Writers’ Week, June 18-22
If you’re looking for a summer writing program to attend, you can’t do better than the Manhattanville College MFA’s Summer Writers’ Week. For just $650 ($750 after March 31), you get an all-morning workshop each day with a small group of fellow writers, afternoon craft presentations in all genres, and evening readings and other events. Housing for the week is just $40/night–and Manhattanville College is only a half hour away by train or car from New York City. (All workshop and events take place in the most beautiful rooms you’ll find at any writers’ week anywhere.)
Bestselling fiction writer and memoirist Dani Shapiro will be the week’s keynote speaker and lead the fiction workshop.
Poet Melissa Tuckey, a co-founder of Split This Rock, will lead the poetry workshop.
Screenwriter Sharbari Ahmed will lead the dramatic writing workshop.
And I’ll lead the nonfiction workshop.
Click here for full details and registration information.
