1.\u00a0Remote Residency?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n We’re working on providing our middle cohorts (CW 510, 516, and 525) with the opportunity to attend a remote residency in lieu of our in-person residency. Stay tuned for an update at the winter residency!<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2.\u00a0 Introducing Our Newest Faculty Mentors<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As our program grows, so does our All-Star faculty. The latest to join our ranks are memoirist\/fictionista\/children’s author\u00a0Kao Kalia Yang\u00a0<\/strong>(https:\/\/kaokaliayang.com\/<\/a>), poet\u00a0Shanta Lee\u00a0<\/strong>(https:\/\/www.shantalee.com\/<\/a>), and sci-fi writer\u00a0Ken Liu\u00a0<\/strong>(https:\/\/kenliu.name\/<\/a>).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n 3. <\/strong>The Latest Tracks<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Spring 2023 term marks the first one with an MA student studying Spoken Word under the guidance of our Spoken Word faculty mentor, Angelique Palmer (https:\/\/www.angeliquepalmerpoems.com\/video<\/a>). Coming soon: Writing for Television!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Program alum and faculty mentor Nisha Sharma recently made a big professional leap: she quit her established career as a chief diversity officer for a global tech company to be a full-time novelist.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This \u201cleap\u201d wasn\u2019t spur of the moment or on a whim by any means; Sharma had planned for this switch for years, perhaps dating all the way back to when, at nineteen, she first decided she wanted to be a working writer. Since then, she\u2019s taken strategically planned steps to solidify her ability to sustain herself as a full-time creative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After graduating from law school, a career decision she made based on a number of nuanced cultural and personal reasons, she created her game plan to secure an agent, publishing deals, and diversify her income through teaching and consulting. At the time, she was essentially working two full-time jobs: writing and working in corporate. The bulk of her weekends were dedicated to her craft, but during the weekdays, she committed to the \u201cJohn Grisham method\u201d: writing on her commute into New York City, and editing the morning\u2019s work on her commute home. After finishing her first novel prior to starting at Wilkes, she queried extensively and was able to land her first agent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI firmly believe that writing is about passion, about creating something that is completely void of influence from the market and publishing,\u201d Sharma said. \u201cBut the minute you decide that you want to sell your book to a publisher, you enter a business, which means you have to start looking at your stories as a product in a larger market.<\/strong> I knew I had a good product when I landed my agent, but I also knew that leaving my job before I even sold my product wasn\u2019t a smart business move.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n After signing with an agent, landing a book deal with Harlequin that fell through, and completing an MFA from Wilkes, Sharma sold My So-Called Bollywood Life, <\/em>a young adult romance she had written as her MA thesis. After this point, her writing career started to gain some momentum, and after many more years of patience, hard work, and strategic planning, she got to a place where she could comfortably make the switch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When asked what went into her strategic plan, Sharma shared her approach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, she\u2019s been devoted to the writing and publishing life for just over three months.<\/strong> She mimics the same schedule she had when she worked in corporate jobs, maintaining focus through productivity apps and tools she found through research. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019m developing new habits and routines that align with my dream career and aspirations, but they support only one rule: protect your genius,\u201d<\/strong> said Sharma. \u201cA writer\u2019s genius is the stories they create, which means that most of my time has to be about writing some of the best fiction I can. Everything else has <\/em>to come second to that.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sharma has multiple recent or forthcoming projects, including a queer holiday novella called A Singh Family Christmas<\/em><\/a>. Her much-anticipated YA romance, The Karma Map<\/em><\/a>, is set to release in March 2023, and the follow-up to her breakout adult rom com Dating Dr. Dil<\/em>, Tastes Like Shakkar<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> will be published in August 2023. You can follow her publishing news and updates on her Substack at nishawrites.substack.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Head over to the Write Life to read reflections from program alum Matthew Hinton<\/strong>, who recently published his collection of short plays, Playroom, <\/em>an idea ten years in the making that was born right in Wilkes-Barre.<\/p>\n\n\n It has been a long journey from my days as a graduate student in the program to publishing Playroom<\/em>. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Back then, I worked for Mike Lennon on research for the official Mailer biography (A Double Life<\/em>) and carved out time to launch the initial installments of The Write Life.<\/em> (If you go back far enough in the archives, you\u2019ll find a trove of reflections on what I was doing in those heady days. Like myself, the blog has come a long way, and both of us \u2013 I think \u2013 for the better.) Back then, I was ensconced in the Mailer Room of the library; today, I spend my days at Misericordia University (Dallas, PA) running the Writing Center and teaching the occasional course in drama, imaginative writing, or American literature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite the hustle of higher education (and maybe even because of it) the number of writing endeavors I take on multiplies by the microsecond \u2013 in my practice of the \u201cspooky art\u201d I drop my bucket where I stand and find it overflowing with opportunities. . . . READ MORE<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n January 31 marks Norman Mailer\u2019s 100th birthday and the much-anticipated release of J. Michael Lennon\u2019s newest project, A Mysterious Country: The Grace and Fragility of American Democracy, <\/em>a 68-piece collection of Mailer\u2019s work Lennon compiled alongside Mailer\u2019s son, John Buffalo Mailer. A Mysterious Country <\/em>is the product of a deep-dive into the Mailer archives, from which Lennon and Mailer unearthed sidelined material in the form of profiles, interviews, essays, and articles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This project closely follows the recent release of Lennon\u2019s memoir, Mailer\u2019s Last Days: New and Selected Remembrances of a Life in Literature, <\/em>which was just published by Etruscan Press in November of 2022 (see Vicki Mayk\u2019s interview of Lennon about this project for Hippocampus Magazine<\/a>). Though both hinging on the life of Norman Mailer, this new project demonstrates Lennon\u2019s continued pursuit of extracting Mailer’s insights on American democracy and society.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n HALLIE O\u2019NEILL: You recently published a memoir with Etruscan, <\/em>Mailer\u2019s Last Days: New and Selected Remembrances of a Life in Literature, congratulations! How do these two projects relate to or converse with each other?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n J. MICHAEL LENNON: They reverberate with each other. Mysterious Country <\/em>is a collection of 68 different excerpts from Mailer\u2019s work covering a period from the second World War up to the year of his death in 2007. All of those excerpts have something to say about the nature of the American democracy project \u2013 what it\u2019s based on and how it\u2019s always in peril, always troubled, always open to attacks. It\u2019s pretty harrowing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The memoir is really the story of how I became involved with Mailer. It goes back to my early life before I met Mailer, and how, when I was a young man in the U.S. Navy, I started reading him. The book that really made me a Mailer fan wasn\u2019t his first famous novel, The Naked and the Dead, <\/em>as much as I like that book. It was a book that he wrote right at that time in the 60s when I was still in the service, and it was called The Armies of the Night. <\/em>In fact, the title of the book comes from The Armies of the Night. <\/em>In writing about the March on the Pentagon, he was taken by the fact that here we were in this country, and we still had the right to peacefully protest. He said, \u201cWhat a mysterious country this is, that it can be so divided and yet people can speak out on both sides.\u201d And that\u2019s what struck me when I read it; that\u2019s one of the reasons I like the book so much. My own life and the protests that I was involved in, and my decision to write my doctoral thesis on Mailer, in many ways stemmed from that book, which is kind of the centerpiece of A Mysterious Country.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n O\u2019NEILL: This book will be released on Mailer\u2019s 100th birthday. What else makes this release special or notable?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n LENNON: Well, going back to 2015-16 when Trump began his campaign for president, I can\u2019t tell you the number of people who said, \u201cI wish Norman were alive today to write about Donald Trump.\u201d And to analyze him, and to puncture his pomposity. To see the void or vacancy within and to see that it\u2019s all huff and puff. We had symposiums on this in the Norman Mailer Society, back to even before Trump got elected. And since that time, a number of people have written essays and articles calling up the ghost of Norman Mailer to tell us what went wrong and what we should do about it in this country to preserve democracy. David Denby of the New Yorker wrote a long piece for Harper\u2019s which he begins by quoting The Armies of the Night, <\/em>saying, \u201cMailer saw this coming.\u201d Mailer had a great antenna, great radar for what was happening in the country, and he saw it. So it was, in a way, almost kind of inevitable that we were going to come up with this book. His son and myself began talking about it, saying \u201cLook, people aren\u2019t seeing the whole picture.\u201d He wrote The Armies of the Night <\/em>but he wrote a lot of other things as well. So, why don\u2019t we just scour everything that he wrote and look for essays, and profiles of presidents – we said, why don\u2019t we get these documents together in one place and put them out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n O\u2019NEILL: The description on the publisher\u2019s website notes, \u201cAmerican democracy was a lifelong project for Norman Mailer. It was his grand theme.\u201d <\/em>What other thematic elements are at play in this collection, if any?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n LENNON: Mailer believed that the central problem confronting America was race relations. And until that was resolved, the country was always going to be in some kind of a conflict. Related to that, of course, is immigration. So, immigration and race relations and the fights that have been going on in America basically since it was founded are still continuing in this country, and he felt that the struggles going on between left and right were basically a result of those issues.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another issue that is addressed in the book is the issue of American corporations and their incredible power. And he was writing this before the rise of social media, before Amazon had its power, and Google, and Apple, and all the billionaires and multi-billionaires of the country. Mailer was very concerned about the power of the corporation, and he wrote about it at great length. He said it was unfair, it produces conformity, it\u2019s leveling, and it\u2019s destructive to the small business owners in this country. This country is built on small businesses, and he had great pride and belief in them, whereas the corporation just gobbles them up and snuffs them out. And the gap between what the owners of corporations are paid and the poor wages that the workers are paid at many of them \u2013 he felt this was a bad thing for the country. It wasn\u2019t good for democracy. So race relations, corporations, immigration, the glut of advertising in this country, he attacks that as well. He said we should be putting our money into the quality of products rather than spending most of the money on advertising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He also talks a lot about what happened in Germany in the 1930s. His mother was born in Lithuania. She came to this country as a three-year old, and all through the 1930s, she was very much aware of Adolf Hitler, and the fact that he was persecuting the Jews, which was not universally recognized then. In that decade, there was an America First movement, which used the same language being used now by the followers of Donald Trump. She was very worried and afraid of Hitler, and Mailer was 9 or 10 years old at the time and he never forgot it. So remembering the past and free speech, those are other themes in the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n O\u2019NEILL: As Mailer\u2019s biographer, you spent much of your time in his company and with his work. With each new project you embark on that involves Mailer, what new insights about his life and work do you uncover, if any?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n LENNON: I had not really gauged the depth of his interest in this issue. I knew about it, it was always there, but I hadn\u2019t realized how insistent he has been on it. So in going back and reading all the interviews that he gave, a lot of the book consists of things he said in interviews, about a third of the book, not things he wrote but things that he said \u2013 from the year 2000 on, the last 7 or so years of his life, all through the period of time through the Iraq War and 9\/11, that\u2019s when his antennae really began to pop out of his head. Worrying about what was in store for America if it wasn\u2019t careful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We originally had something like 150 pieces we were going to use in the book, which is just too many. Ultimately, we ended up with 68, but the book could\u2019ve been 2.5 times the size. It\u2019s at 100,000 words, which is basically the limit of what the publisher could handle. I had forgotten how much there was. Through the years, I\u2019ve collected all of the various interviews Mailer did at college campuses and obscure newspapers. He must\u2019ve been interviewed between 700-1,000 times. And that\u2019s the ones in print, because many more were done on talk shows and radio shows. I listened to a lot of those and we used some of those in the book. He was a ubiquitous presence in American media for a long, long time. I don\u2019t know of anybody else, except for maybe Muhammad Ali, who was in more talk shows, more radio shows, and also in magazines and newspapers all over the country. So in scouring through my archive, there was stuff that I didn’t even know about that came to the floor. That was kind of a revelation for me. I was kind of worried \u2013 I spent most of my professional life writing books and articles on Norman Mailer, making films about him and so on \u2013 I was afraid he was just going to be forgotten. But he hasn\u2019t been. So that was a really wonderful feeling. People are still bringing up the ghost of Norman Mailer all the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For more information about how to purchase <\/em>A Mysterious Country, you can visit Arcade Publishing\u2019s website.<\/em><\/a> There are about 30 different centenary projects coming out on Mailer\u2019s birthday, including a Showtime documentary, which Lennon was a consultant for and will be featured in.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Bonnie Culver<\/strong>\u2019s <\/strong>comedy screenplay, \u201cI Do,\u201d and family film, \u201cRainbow Man,\u201d were among the 16 top films and both were finalists in the Mystic Film Festival, 2022; \u201cRainbow Man\u201d is a quarterfinalist in the ISA Emerging Family\/Holiday Film Competition, with final awards coming in 2023; \u201cA Ticket to the Circus,\u201d a one-woman show starring Anne Archer and directed and produced by Michelle Danner, will begin streaming in January 2023. Link to follow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Laurie Loewenstein <\/strong>published Funeral Train<\/em>, the second book in her Dust Bowl mystery series, with Kaylie Jones Books\/Akashic Books in October 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nancy McKinley<\/strong>‘s nonfiction narrative won second place in the writing contest, “Worst Cooking Experience,” sponsored by The Cupboard in Fort Collins, CO.<\/p>\n\n\n Janine P. Dubik<\/strong>\u2019s (MFA \u201819) poems have been included in the 2022 Poetry in Transit program for the seventh consecutive year; in the 2022 Manuscript literary magazine at Wilkes; and in the Poets Live Fourth Anthology. She gave a 15-minute cutting from a fictional work in progress at the Nov. 5, 2022 Page to Stage readings at the Diva Theater in Scranton.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Michael Hardin <\/strong>(MFA \u201822) had two poems, “Swim Meet” and “Mannheim Train Station at Midnight,” accepted for publication by Ocatillo Review. He also had a memoir chapter, “Playing Football for Jesus,” accepted by the same magazine. His poetry manuscript, “Born, Again,” was a finalist for the Dogfish Head Publication Prize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rob Figueroa <\/strong>shot an episode in New Amsterdam, which airs June 3 on NBC. He shot a Christmas movie back in 2018 that is constantly airing and will air again December 6 on the Hallmark movies and mysteries channel. He also shot a film with Owen Wilson that will open in theaters April 28, 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hallie O\u2019Neill <\/strong>found a home for her short CNF story, \u201cWhen I Go On Dates, I Eat Men,\u201d which was published in Apricity Magazine in November 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mandy Pennington<\/strong>\u2019s nonfiction piece, “Save My Seat,” was published in the American Writers Review 2022: The End or the Beginning (San Fedele Press)<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n John Roberts<\/strong> has been reading at open mics with Poets Live, a local group in Scranton, for over a year getting his voice and work in tune. One of the poems that was hatched at his first residency at Wilkes during June of ’22 was accepted and published in their “Poets Live – Fourth Anthology” on November 17th. He has also received notice that a few short flash memoirs have been accepted for an upcoming anthology through Foothills Publishing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFor last year’s words belong to last year’s language, and next year’s words await another voice.\u201d<\/p>\nT.S. Eliot<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Season\u2019s greetings! December is here, and so is the year\u2019s end. For students and faculty, this means wrapping up semester obligations and preparing for a January residency \u2013 the first in-person winter residency for many of us. We\u2019re all adjusting to the added hours of darkness as winter solstice passes, hopefully bolstered by the planning… Read More »Another Year Over<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":566,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[16,10,8,25,29,30,23,24,14,11,27,28,9,31,13,12,15,7,26],"class_list":["post-559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-revise-this","tag-authors","tag-creative-writing","tag-graduate","tag-j-michael-lennon","tag-kao-kalia-yang","tag-ken-liu","tag-nisha-sharma","tag-norman-mailer","tag-novels","tag-pennsylvania","tag-playroom","tag-playwriting","tag-residency","tag-shanta-lee","tag-wilkes-university","tag-wilkes-barre","tag-writers","tag-writing","tag-ya-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revisethis.wilkes.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revisethis.wilkes.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revisethis.wilkes.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revisethis.wilkes.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revisethis.wilkes.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/revisethis.wilkes.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":580,"href":"https:\/\/revisethis.wilkes.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions\/580"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revisethis.wilkes.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revisethis.wilkes.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revisethis.wilkes.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revisethis.wilkes.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Profile](\"https:\/\/revisethis.wilkes.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Screen-Shot-2022-12-22-at-7.41.07-AM.png\")
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\n\n\n\nFROM CORPORATE DIVERSITY OFFICER TO FULL-TIME NOVELIST: NISHA SHARMA ON MAKING THE PROFESSIONAL LEAP<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n
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\n\n\n\nTHE WRITE LIFE:<\/em> PROGRAM ALUM PUBLISHES SHORT PLAY COLLECTION<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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\n\n\n\nHAPPY 100TH BIRTHDAY, NORMAN MAILER: IN CONVERSATION WITH J. MICHAEL LENNON<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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\n\n\n\nFACULTY NEWS<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nALUMNI NEWS<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
STUDENT NEWS<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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