Writers Institute Ribbon Cutting

Susquehanna’s creative writing department has officially moved from the lower level of Hassinger Hall into a building of their own, and I got to attend the ribbon cutting ceremony.

What was once the parish attached to the St. Pius X Catholic church (the congregation has since moved to a larger facility about a block away) is now the new writers house. Completely renovated, the house is now filled with dark wood floors, faculty offices, a conference room, a classroom, and shelves and shelves of books, books written and signed by visiting writers and our own professors as well as plenty of copies of SU's student-run literary magazines and a whole host of chapbooks featuring the work of past SU writing majors.

Before the cutting of the ribbon, Dr. Fincke, our department head, gave a brief speech tracing the history of SU’s writing program, from when it started with three minors in 1992 up through to today—the program is now thriving with 152 majors and 20 minors.  A friend of mine caught the whole speech on tape:

Then, after the speech, the writing faculty armed themselves with scissors and officially opened the new building:

• For more information on SU's writing program, as well as pictures, video, faculty bios, and excerpts of writing from Susquehanna students past and present, visit The Writers Institute website.

• For a more on Susquehanna's writing program, read some of my other Campus Life posts about the Writers Institute, or visit my other blog, Workshop, and follow me through my freshman Intro to Fiction workshop class.

Meeting Steve Yarbrough

When I read Steve Yarbrough, I’m reminded that stories matter. In deep weird ways, stories are a part of who we are.

Like in the title story from his collection Veneer. The narrator sits in a restaurant with an old friend, and he tells her about his worst Fourth of July ever: the summer before his family lost their farm, when they splurged on a grill and some steaks and pretended it was the best meal they’d ever had even though they’d accidentally burnt the meat to a crisp.

The way I tell it, it’s just an anecdote, but in Steve Yarbrough’s hands, this story tells us everything we need to know about the affair the narrator’s about to have.

What I love about Yarbrough’s stories is the way he layers them, stories within stories, the past on top of the present. When you finish his stories, you never quite arrive where you thought you would, but you know you’re in the right place.

He knows how to tell stories. He’s published five novels and three short story collections. His work has appeared in the Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. He’s the winner of the California Book Award, the Mississippi Authors Award, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction. His novel Prisoners of War was a finalist for the 2005 PEN/Faulkner Award. He’s also chair of the writing department at Emerson College in Boston.

So it goes without saying I was a little nervous about meeting Steve Yarbrough in person to hear what he thought of my own writing.

Every year Susquehanna’s Writers Institute brings about six acclaimed authors to campus through its Visiting Writers Series. Not only do these writers give Q&As and readings here on campus, often they will also guest-teach classes, have lunch with students, and meet one-on-one with upperclassman writing majors to discuss each student’s work.

That was me, the upperclassman writing major, popping another breath mint as I headed down the sidewalk to the Writers House for my conference with Steve Yarbrough. But it turned out I was nervous in vain—not only is Steve Yarbrough a great writer, he’s also a really nice guy.

He told me he enjoyed my stories and asked me about my background, we ended up talking about our families and books we’ve enjoyed (he recommended about a dozen and I wrote them all down in the margins of one of my manuscripts) and we talked about the grad programs I’m applying to. Our thirty-minute meeting spilled over well into four o’clock, and he ended up shaking my hand three times before I left the building.

  

More books by Visiting Writers

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• Check out all of Susquehanna’s past and current Visiting Writers by clicking here.
• For a more in-depth look at Susquehanna's writing program, visit my other blog, Workshop, and follow me through my freshman year.
• For more information on SU's writing program, as well as pictures, video, faculty bios, and excerpts of writing from Susquehanna students past and present, visit The Writers Institute website.

Iowa Roadtrip

"Ray, people will come Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past." - Field of Dreams

We drove all through the night—it’s about an eighteen-hour drive from Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania to Ames, Iowa—and napped in a Wal-Mart parking lot just over the Iowa border as the sun came up.

We made the final three or four hours of our drive in the daylight down the straightest roads I’ve ever seen. No curves, no diagonals. They cling tight to the cardinal directions and they always intersect at right angles.  Even the broadest curves are heavily marked off by yellow-and-black chevron signs.

If you look at a map, you'll see that in Iowa the roads are a grid of pavement that divides the land into squares of corn. As we drove, we saw fields and fields and fields and fields, all of them stubby and newly harvested. The sky was huge, completely unmitigated by mountains or trees, and it almost made me feel naked.

“It looks like a stereotype,” I laughed and Holly nodded.

*     *     *

For me and Holly the main attraction in Iowa, the reason why we were pushing our four-day Fall Break weekend to limit, was our friend Casey, an SU alum who had just started his first year of grad school at Iowa State studying statistics.

Casey greeted us with a wide-armed hug and then cooked us some grilled turkey sandwiches before he showed us around his new campus. Compared to Susquehanna’s cozy green campus, Iowa State is like a town in and of itself, with tall buildings (the library is four stories!) and traffic and its own busing system.

The town of Ames had that classic college-town feel, narrow streets lined with quirky bars and restaurants that sported the red and yellow of the Iowa State Cyclones. Casey took us to a bar called Es Tas, and we sampled their specialty: fried tacos.  We caught a movie at the dollar-theater, ate at The Fighting Burrito, helped Casey cheer the New York Giants on to victory against the Detroit Lions at a sports bar called Wallaby’s, and, on our final night at Casey’s apartment, watched Field of Dreams—which, Casey explained, is the greatest (and maybe the only) Iowa movie ever made.

*     *     *

Before we left the state, we stopped in Iowa City to see another SU alum, a writing major named Marcus who's working on his MFA in creative writing at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop.  We circled his block twice before we found his apartment, and then he talked almost nonstop about how much he loves the program.

Then he showed us around the city, and we ended up at place called Shorts, the restaurant that served, Marcus assured us, the best burgers in town.  It was good stuff.

Then, because the MFA program at the University of Iowa is one of the grad schools I'd like to apply to, Marcus took us over to the Dey House, the home of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.  He showed us around the classrooms and the library (stocked with books written by Iowa alumni), and then he introduced us to a few of his classmates and his professor, Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Alan McPherson before we hit the road for another night of driving.

Not bad for a four-day weekend.

The Bloomsburg Fair

It's like a fair, only bigger.

When Holly talked me and Rob into to making the 45-minute drive up to Bloomsburg, I was expecting a handful of rides and maybe two dozen food stands, but I was wrong.  With over 400,000 visitors, 1,200 concession stands, and big-name music acts, the Bloomsburg Fair is one of the biggest fairs in Pennsylvania.  They were offering ten-dollar helicopter rides by the entrance as we walked in.

The fair draws in big acts (which this year included Jeff Dunham, REO Speedwagon, and Lady Antebellum), but it also features some off-the-wall entertainment: an Elvis impersonator, a "Dock Dogs" dog-jumping competition, Cinderella-style carriage rides, and a lawn mower race.

And there's the standard fair stuff: bright-colored rides, farm animals and food.  We pet some sheep, stumbled into a 4H auction, tried (and failed) to win Holly a goldfish, oggled at the giant prize-winning pumpkins, and wandered through the concession stands trying to decide what we wanted.  Funnel cake?  Candy apple?  Apple dumpling?  Frozen banana?  I went for a waffle cone full of Chocolate Pretzel Crunch ice cream from the Penn State Creamery booth.

The Diary of Anne Frank

Friday night I helped a friend cross an item off his senior year bucket list: attend this fall’s theatre department production, The Diary of Anne Frank. We arrived almost late (I tend to be almost always late for everything) and ended up sitting in the very first row because the show was almost sold out.

The set was sparse, roof beams above, floor boards below, and a few crates that sufficed for furniture. With the exception of a few cherished objects (a fur coat, a music box, the diary itself), there were no props. The actors mimed nearly everything. We watched the eight Jewish characters on the stage eat from empty hands, seek privacy behind invisible doors, and light Menorah candles that gave off no light.

After the show I learned that the tiny dimensions of the set that the eight actors shared actually matched those of the original rooms where Anne and her seven companions remained hidden for two years.  When the play ended, director Doug Powers joined the cast on the stage for a brief Q&A with the audience. The actors dangled their feet over the edge of the stage and discussed the challenges of acting in a tight space and bringing to life characters who were described primarily through the eyes of a young girl.

Sometimes people forget that Anne was just a girl, Powers explained during the Q&A. His aim in producing the play was to get his audience to see Anne not as a symbol of the Holocaust, but as a person. He said that by restoring her humanity, we strengthen her message.

More On SU's Theatre Department
Tickets and Upcoming Shows

The National Aquarium

After enjoying the Mini Coop, the Inner Harbor, and, of course, delicious seafood, we finally made it to the main event, the National Aquarium. Home to over 16,000 animals representing over 660 different species including poison dart frogs, tree sloths, dolphins, and jelly fish, the National Aquarium in Baltimore is Maryland’s most popular tourist destination.

Below is just a brief glimpse of what the aquarium has to offer.

Sea Robins, named for their wing-like fins

Fish native to Pennsylvania and Maryland

Yellow-Headed Parrots living in the
Aquarium’s Amazon Rainforest Exhibit

A mean-looking Austrailian Freshwater Crocodile

And, of course, there are sharks.

• More on the National Aquarium
• More on Baltimore's Inner Harbor

The Inner Harbor

It takes about two and a half hours to drive from Susquehanna University to Baltimore, so we arrived at the Inner Harbor a little past noon. Our plan was to visit the National Aquarium and then grab a seafood dinner before heading back to Selinsgrove to turn in the rental car. After purchasing our aquarium tickets, though, we had to rearrange our plans.

The National Aquarium only admits a limited number of visitors at a time (with over 1.6 million visitors annually, the aquarium is Baltimore’s most popular attraction).  Our tickets gave us a 2:30 admission and a chance to walk around the Inner Harbor.

The National Aquarium, home to over 16,000 different animals.

With its brick-paved sidewalks and leafy green trees, the Inner Harbor is one of the most scenic urban places I’ve visited. We walked beside the water and took in the sights: a street musician playing the guitar and the harmonica; an artist sitting on the sidewalk painting dolphins into a seascape; an old Coast Guard cutter docked beside an old submarine, both open for tours; a unicyclist performing for a crowd; and, in the window of the American Visionary Art Museum, a pink poodle that was easily six feet tall.

Since we were getting into the aquarium late, we decided to grab a big lunch. There are a ton of places to eat in and around the Inner Harbor—Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, Capital Grill, Hard Rock Café, ESPN Zone, to name a few. We decided on Phillips Seafood Restaurant at the Harborplace shopping center.

We sat at an outside table with a view of the harbor and enjoyed delicious seafood. I had the Chesapeake crab cakes and “potatoes gratinée;” Holly got the melt-in-your-mouth salmon with cucumber and yogurt sauce; and Andrew ordered a little bit of everything—a good choice because I think everything at Phillips is probably good.

Lunch

After visiting the aquarium, we still had about 45 minutes on our hands before it was time to hit the road, so we walked over to the Barnes & Noble we’d passed on our way in. I’m a sucker for bookstores in generals, but this wasn’t just any bookstore. This was two stories of books inside a refurbished power plant. Really cool. They had shelves wrapped around the four old smoke stacks that take up the center of the store.

When we were finished looking around the book store, we headed back to the parking garage to take the Mini Coop home.

Barnes & Noble