Novelist on KWH-TV

Al Filreis

Novelist (and memoirist and short story writer) MARY GORDON will be visiting the Writers House here in Philadelphia as a Kelly Writers House Fellow — next Monday and Tuesday (April 27–28).

The Tuesday morning session — an informal interview & conversation, moderated by me — is an event in which you can participate. You can watch it live on KWH-TV. But, more, we encourage you to ask Mary Gordon questions by sending them by email. And we also encourage you to phone us with your questions — to talk directly to Ms. Gordon and me.

The Tuesday morning event will begin at precisely 10:30 AM eastern time.

To participate in the KWH-TV live Mary Gordon program, please RSVP to

whfellow@writing.upenn.edu

— at which point we will send you simple instructions for connecting to the video and for posing questions.

Writers House Fellows are made possible by an ongoing generous grant from Paul Kelly.

- - -

Kelly Writers House Fellows: http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/people/fellows/

2009

* Robert Coover
* Joan Didion
* Mary Gordon

2008

* Art Spiegelman
* Lynne Sharon Schwartz
* Jerome Rothenberg

2007

* John McPhee
* Jamaica Kincaid
* Donald Hall

2006

* Richard Ford
* Cythia Ozick
* Ian Frazier

2005

* Roger Angell
* E.L. Doctorow
* Adrienne Rich
* Lyn Hejinian

2004

* Russell Banks
* James Alan McPherson

2003

* Walter Bernstein
* Laurie Anderson
* Susan Sontag

2002

* Michael Cunningham
* John Ashbery
* Charles Fuller

2001

* Tony Kushner
* David Sedaris
* June Jordan

2000

* Grace Paley
* Robert Creeley
* John Edgar Wideman

1999

* Gay Talese

April 22, 2009

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.