UAF Literary Community Continues to Grow
Photo by Shane Bennett
By Jacob Knuth
The primetime event at The Pub this past weekend featured UAF's freshest crop of literary talent at the 2022 First-Year MFA Reading. A wonderfully sundry group of writers, hand-picked by our very own MFA faculty in the English department, got the chance to crack the window into their beautiful bodies of work, making for a real star-studded night in the heart of campus. Luckily, I was there to bear witness.
Our one and only third year poet, KJ Janeschek, hosted the event and kicked the night off with a bit of effortless humor, effectively foreshadowing some of what was ahead, but not all!
Fidelis Feeley of California is a fiction writer who enjoys exposing the lies in popular stories, and she had nothing to hide with what she shared from the tough spot of first-to-go. Fidelis took us on a wild journey of a childless mother who steals a baby and does all she can to make it feel like her own, using vivid phrases like, "I stroke the dent in your sweaty head." The jarring content was accompanied by such a vigorous tone, you may have found yourself slipping into reality and forgetting all about the fiction– this piece was a real chakra-shaker.
Next to read, Rachel Blume, a Texan mother braving her first Alaskan winter with her young son, Ollie, made it to Fairbanks by way of a cutthroat fiction program at the University of Houston. She's into working with magical realism and looks to shine a light on vulnerable groups. Rachel strung together what felt like constellations of beautiful imagery throughout her story exploring familial relationships and the monsters under the bed, saying, "Shadows are a monster we cast a light on to destroy." She wrote in a way that made the family feel like yours, as though you were in the living room with them, generations contemplating the realness of the paranormal.
Julia Rutherford, a creative nonfiction writer out of Maine, particularly enjoys exploring the topics of family, relationships, and travel. She took us down a vivid road that some of us know all too well; one of getting together, breaking up, and wondering what's right and what's wrong. Julia brought us right up against those moments, so much so that we could smell them, "Puffing on your third Camel" and feel them, "Distance makes no difference when addicted to a person." It was almost as if hearts were chewed up and read aloud– tasty!
Zeke Shomler is a poet blossoming out of the unrest of Portland and you would not have believed it was his first time performing his poetry. He commanded, "make my body a museum when I die" and it might just happen. A crowd-favorite was his final installment which painted picture after picture of everything nobody's ever imagined in rapid succession ranging from the stirring to the ridiculous, with lines describing "a police horse writing a ticket," and "battery-powered mascara.”
Tim Ott, a self-proclaimed Renaissance man who has been all over the globe and sees the countryside of Iowa as his home, showcased his versatility with the quill all while holding a glass of wine. He kicked off his work with a challenging form of poetry, the villanelle, exploring the sport of wrestling with the idea that, "It's hard to be strong when you're pinned on your back." His ensuing story expanding on the things we may see at a wedding through the eyes of a reverend told between sips of red wine surely garnered the most giggles from the crowd that night.
Manuel A. Melendez, a Cuban-born poet who is passionate about merging the written word with our physical reality in a way that's permanent, might just be the first poet whose work you'll be able to walk through and feel forever. When he grabbed the mic, he placed his finger on the pulse of the room, holding onto the collective heartbeat with a deftly methodical rendition of his latest sestina (maybe the most difficult form of poetry), "Caldera". Through the peaks and valleys of his language, he left us with spine-quivering imagery including "let in the incensed torrent slathered in plastic wisdom that will loom over avatar flesh."
Kathy Kitts, a retired scientist who worked with NASA on various projects (most notably the Genesis mission) decided to take her creative talents to the next level, bringing her to UAF by way of New Mexico, the other end of the United States’ extreme climate spectrum. Kathy expressed her seniority with a piece cheekily titled "When I Grow Up" and she took the hot topic of gender identity head-on, arguing, "I don't understand the insistence that children practice their assigned sex. If it's all hormones, then what's there to practice? Can you really forget how to pee?"
Nóra McIntyre, a fiction writer from upstate New York, shared with us a brilliant piece of flash, "a ghost story of sorts." Opening with the image of a Union soldier’s body rattling home on a railroad through Iowa, Nora considers his coming home if he hadn't died on the battlefield with what became a memorable moment of adumbration in the piece, sharing, "If Francis were alive, and if he had a window seat for his train journey home, he would see the wheat fields rushing past, so close, he'd reach out with absent fingers, as if to pluck a sprig of it and stick it between his lips." Although a story about the paranormal, the whimsical nature in which it was read gave it the feeling of a lullaby, akin to the macabre nature of nursery rhymes.
This was the formal welcoming of our newest artists in the UAF literary community and their broad range of talents hail from all over the map. All in all, it was a night to remember and it is safe to say it was more than one for the books!