ASU Graduate Students John Young and Molly Meneely at the National University in Singapore ASU Graduate Students at the National University in Singapore In 2006, through a strategic partnership with the National University of Singapore, two Summer Teaching Fellowships were awarded to John Young and Molly Meneely in support of new creative writing teaching initiatives occurring at the National University in Singapore (NUS). These students will lead writing workshops for NUS students as well as Singapore high school students. The Piper Center provides a cash stipend to fund their travel, while NUS provides housing and accommodations to them during their stay. Conclusions: International Teaching Fellowship with the National University of Singapore Molly Meneely and John Young John In the spring of 2006, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing initiated an exchange program with the University Scholars Programme at the National University of Singapore. Two current MFA students, Molly Meneely and I, were provided with a teaching fellowship that provided housing and expenses for our trip. In Singapore, we conducted a six-week interdisciplinary workshop in fiction and poetry for twelve current NUS students in the University Scholars Programme and in the field of English Literature as well as to four NUS alumni. English is the national language of Singapore and, consequently, the students were focused on creative work exclusively in English. Guests to the workshop included Singapore’s de facto poet laureate, Edwin Thumboo, and the rising poet, Alvin Pang, both of whom have experience teaching in the United States at the International Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. Faculty at the USP like director, Peter Pang, and professors, Don Favreau and Lo Mun Hou, facilitated these relationships that we developed with Singaporean authors. The sixteen-student class was run as a workshop, three weeks devoted to the practice of each discipline, poetry and fiction. The course met twice a week: Thursday evening and Saturday morning. By the end of the course, students had completed three poems and one short story. The poems included a still-life, a dramatic monologue and a form of their own choosing. Exercises were conducted within class to prepare the students for the poems and the story. The students came from a wide range of backgrounds, from the social sciences to a future PhD candidate at the City College of New York. They read selections (having been schlepped across the Pacific) from a wide range of writers, many of whom inspired much debate and discussion in our class: classic writers like T.S. Eliot, Robert Browning and D. H. Lawerence as well as contemporaries like Joyce Carol Oates, Louise Gluck and Maile Meloy. The workshop began with a videotaped viewing of poet Anne Sexton reading and discussing her poetry, and our encouragement to regard writing as they would a good friend, one with whom you say things you didn’t know you knew before you said them. Over the course of the next month and half, we were confronted with increasingly strong work from the students, who demonstrated both the passion to learn as well as the necessary discipline writing demands. Through our emphasis on and engagement with various techniques, by the end of the course students were able to critique each other’s work with a sophisticated vocabulary. One student took it upon herself to begin an online writing group among her peers; another exchanged e-mails with me regarding to what extent an author is responsible to ground his or her reader with information relevant to the reading of the work, and to what degree he thought this grounding might constitute pandering. In poetry, which is deemed more publishable than fiction in Singapore, students displayed experience with strict forms and meter. In their stories, we encouraged them to stretch beyond such constraints and treat their characters with as much specificity and respect as possible. The result was a suite of stories not just enjoyable to read but wholly and entirely original. A few of the students took it upon themselves to invite us to dinner in Little India, where we were able to discover not only one of their friends who found reading “boring,” but also their favorite haunts around Singapore, one student’s mandatory service in the Singaporean military (two years service is required of every Singaporean citizen), and great Indian cuisine. During my stay I was lucky enough to join Professor Thumboo (affectionately referred to as “Prof” by his former students and Singaporean literary lights like Pang and Darren Shiau) on a day’s excursion north to Kukup, Malaysia, a small fishing village where we—his friends attending an academic conference and I—enjoyed curry crab, steamed garoupa, and other delights. The trip up through rubber and banana plantations was an experience, listening to the a van chock full of academics debate politics, ideas and the like, all charmed by Prof. Thumboo’s sharp sense of humor. That trip occurred the first week I was in Singapore, before I’d taught a single class, and I think of it as the beginning of a wonderful, eye-opening experience that I will never forget. Molly Beyond our regular 6-week course at University Scholars Programme, John and I also taught a 2-day creative writing “crash course” to forty local junior college students, also organized by NUS.  To manage the large roster and breadth of material (as with the regular course, we were to touch on both poetry and fiction), John and I alternated the schedule between full-group meetings and smaller breakout sections, which enabled us to deliver the broadest information in a lecture, but still foster smaller group discussion and workshop.  The crash course definitely got the students writing creatively, which, within the strict goal-oriented educational system of Singapore, could be considered a victory in itself; our emphases on process, peer input, experimentation, and revision, for example, provided an outlet to students which has otherwise been largely unavailable to them in a school environment.    Each student composed two poems (one to be workshopped) and one short story.  We also read poems in class and assigned one short story overnight for reading: Charles Baxter’s “Gryphon,” which, we came to believe, eerily mirrored our own unusual presence in the classroom for our students.  “Six times eleven is sixty-eight,” we read excitedly as the story’s famous substitute teacher confounds her 5th grade class in fictional Five Oaks, but for a moment, our Singaporean students seemed to think us the crazy ones, not just Ms. Ferenzci.  Nonetheless, many of the poems and stories I received in my breakout section made bold, earnest choices; students were unafraid of subject material outside themselves and, through a growing comfort with the workshop format, made honest, kind, and yet incisive, constructive remarks about others’ work.  If nothing else, both the six-week course and the junior college course promoted critical thinking about the techniques and possibilities of writing, as a well as good old-fashioned encouragement to keep at it.  The literary community of Singapore, many individuals of which we were lucky enough to meet through NUS, is small, close, and supportive.  It would not be a stretch to imagine an imminent explosion in literary culture in Singapore, and around Southeast Asia, should creative writing be adopted more formally as an educational field.  Naturally, beyond our teaching experiences, Singapore itself and its environs provided rich terrain for exploration and reflection.  Our apartment wasn’t in the flashy, pristine downtown that most associate with this, the “South Beach” of Asia, but in a typical neighborhood, and we dined at Singapore’s numerous “food courts,” outdoor patios with food stalls of Indian, Chinese, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese, and “Western” cuisine where dishes sold for US$2.  We ate ripe mango in chunks, drank fresh blueberry and kiwi juice, and choked down more spicy food and whole fish than we had (or ever will again) in the rest of our lives.  Singaporeans were both kind and curious about our creative work and global views.  Friends I made introduced me to the Singapore Art Museum, Mt. Faber Park, and rotiprata, the flatbread dipped in curry that is the best late night snack on Earth.  Through weekend trips of mine to Cambodia and John’s throughout Vietnam, we were able to expose ourselves to, just hours away, unmatched physical beauty of jungle, beach, and ruins alongside emotionally stinging cultural and political histories.  Later I traveled to Chiang Mai and Bangkok, Thailand; Hanoi, Vietnam; and Tokyo and Kyoto, Japan; each place a distinct and fascinating sensory explosion, the pieces of which I am still watching settle into coherent, colorful memories.  Mostly I talked to women, who were encouraging of my solo travel and provided enormous insight into Asia’s role in the global scene and its potential—behind the sustained growth of China and India—to influence Western culture and economies in nearly limitless ways in generations to come.  Upon returning to ASU, I enrolled in a graduate course in Anthropology on the Peoples of Southeast Asia and will be able to combine some of my cultural and literary studies of the summer with new research, to examine and evaluate the regional importance of commonalities within Southeast Asian literature.  With regard to our teaching and writing, and ultimately our participation as global citizens, the international fellowship from the Piper Center provided a powerful means for change and development in each of us, the extent of which, I have a feeling, we’ll keep discovering for years.

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An Enduring Circle: The Gift of Warwick

By Melissa Pritchard

It was December 1: the ten week term was over and we were enjoying a farewell party, something my writing students at Warwick confessed they had never had before, the event occasioned by a casual comment I had made one afternoon in class, saying I nearly always gave a party and book exchange in my home at the end of each semester, how I wished I could do the same for them, but living in London, two hours distant, made that unlikely. Within a day, class emails were launched, plans were fixed, and the party was on. Anna had generously offered her tiny dormitory kitchen and dining area, and now thirteen of us crowded hungrily around a table layered and messy with pans and plates of homemade food and a dozen or more mostly empty bottles of wine. David Morley, Director of the Warwick Writing Programme, stopped by for a visit and obligingly climbed on a chair to take a group photograph. After David left, someone noted a red fox, native to the woods nearby, slinking past the ground level window, giving a swift, feral glance inside. How strange we might have appeared to that wild fox, thirteen of us sitting quietly now, listening with the ardent and tenacious attention only students of writing can give one another, as each took his or her turn around the table, reading aloud from a new or revised story. Robin, Leila, Taylor, Anna, Zigian, Suzanne, Amy, Victoria, Nate, Sarah, Laura, Mike. Various emotions had begun to thicken the congenial atmosphere: loyalty, humor, friendship, respect, and from these, the sharp poignancy of gratitude. Gratitude for ten weeks deeply shared, for friendships forged, for hard, engaged work, for tolerance and generosity, and for myself, the keen awareness I might never see these students again, once I returned to America. A flurry of jokes and easy, contagious laughter failed to leaven this sudden, almost somber awareness. There was an awkward silence. It's over, I thought, my teaching here is over. I was adrift in this thought when Leila stepped up to me with new formality as the others sat strangely, conspiratorially, silent. She handed me a bouquet of flowers, a bag of wrapped and ribboned gifts which unwrapped, would prove to be a handsome book on travel, a teddy bear promptly christened "Warwick", and a large beautiful card which each student had written in and signed, a card I refused to read until I was alone in my hotel room, for it would, I knew, make me cry.

It had happened again, this time away from the classrooms and students I was accustomed to at Arizona State; it had happened in a modest classroom at Warwick University, among an academically improvised community of twelve British, Irish and American writing students. Bonds of friendship, trust, encouragement and a passion for the craft of writing, for the deeper arts of human observation, human emotion, human courage had been forged. Grateful to have served as catalyst,I had witnessed the creation of a writing community that served to strengthen and support its members. Here, perhaps, was the true gift, the lasting, unsung accomplishment, the capacity of a writing workshop to transform lives and elicit powerful stories, to let each student shine in gleaming, honest light.

And what was I to do with the love I now felt for each one of these students? What had I given them that they had not returned tenfold? Three months later, I continue to receive sporadic emails and letters. Everyone misses me, they say, sending news that one has won a literary award for a story written in class, another has an agent and publisher interested in a novel worked on in class. They continue to meet outside school,to support and read one another's work. They are telling me the circle endures.

Several weeks ago, when Amy Tan was a visiting Arizona State University as a guest of the Piper Center for Creative Writing, I spoke with her over dinner about teaching. She had never taught, she said. The concept made her terribly nervous, even worried - what if I hurt someone with my comments, what if I were to harm someone's writing process by saying the wrong or insensitive thing? Impressed by her acknowledgment of the gravity of a writing teacher's tender authority and potential impact, I replied that I shared those concerns each time I began with a new group of students. Privately, I wondered at my own audacity, my own assumption of such grave responsibility. Our conversation caused me to think about what this particular kind of teaching is, exactly. Principles of craft are imparted, of course. Accomplishment lends credibility and a possible instinctive eloquence to the teacher. But the success of a class has so much more to do with an atmosphere engendered, a climate fostered, of nurturance, confidence, safety and the sustained demand for creative excellence. When the student/teacher dichotomy blurs, when we become a roomful of souls besotted with language and passionate about the necessity for—the inevitability of—story, when we take comfort and inspiration from one another, celebrate with food, with wine, with gifts of books and readings from new work, then the greatest single story becomes the one we began shyly on that first day of class, with names and introductions, a story reaching its dramatic arc at good-bye, then from that bittersweet place, continuing on. We have formed our own human narrative, we are its creatures, its characters; we have given ourselves traits of courage, affection, loyalty and respect. Our story lives on, a celebration, ordinary and rare as the wild fox, glimpsed and feral, astonishing, elusive, vulnerable and fierce, replete with a common written and unwritten beauty.

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Todd Fredson's South American Journey

Thanks in part to a Virginia G. Piper International Travel and Research Fellowship, MFA student Todd Fredson spent last summer traveling around Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, and Brazil. The fellowships—which were awarded for the first time last summer—were created to help students in ASU’s Creative Writing graduate program fund travel-related research for their literary endeavors; they are awarded based on the literary merit of the student’s proposed trip, the potential for publication after the trip, and the contribution of potential publication to the field of creative writing. As Todd set out for Ecuador last summer, fiction student Kriste Peoples flew to Florence, Italy to study the depiction of Africans in Renaissance artwork for a creative non-fiction project. A third fellowship was awarded after the Fall 2005 semester to Matthew Gavin Frank, who traveled to South Africa to study an artistic movement rising out of squatter camps in Cape Town, d who is now working on poems he hopes to turn into a book-length manuscript of poetry about his experience.

Now that nearly a year has passed, Todd’s trip to South America has proven itself to be literarily fruitful in many ways. During the trip he made contacts with writers and artists who are not only inspirations for his work, but also resources for him as an International Editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review. His ruminations about the people he met and things he saw on the trip continue to provide new discoveries that he explores through his poetry. Together with Sarah Vap, his traveling companion and fellow poet, he has already published a four-part response to his trip entitled “Echolalia” in 42opus, an online literary magazine. The website describes the work as “a traveling impression/poem/(non)fictional telling” of Todd and Sarah’s trip. The four installments of “Echolalia” are divided by country, and are poetic renderings of what they saw, what they did in each place, and how their experiences changed their thinking. The poems are a documentation of how Todd and Sarah processed (and continue to process) these experiences alone and then together.

Todd embarked on the trip last summer hoping to attend literary events in each of five countries, do research, talk to writers, share his poetry, and listen to the work of others. In Guayaquil, Ecuador, their first stop, Todd and Sarah taught creative writing to 4th, 5th, and 6th graders at the Inter-American Academy. They did an exercise entitled “You Probably Didn’t Know” with the students, asking them to write about things they knew about that others might not. The results were beautiful and surprising. Some of the poems created in the residencies were later published in the international section of 22 Across, the annual anthology of young writers published through ASU’s Young Writer’s Program. Others were included in the Ecuador installment of “Echolalia.”

Todd spent the next leg of the trip in Peru, where he went to learn more about Yachay Wasi, a non-profit, United Nations-recognized and endorsed education program based outside of Cuzco; he was curious about the program as a model for alternative educations. The program was set up by a photographer from the village of Acopia to preserve the beautiful high Andean environment and Quechua, the Incan language, which is still widely spoken. During their time in Peru, Todd and Sarah stayed with Gonzalo, an agro-economist who worked for a bank, but who also spent time going to different villages speaking about sustainable farming practices. Gonzalo explained the terracing of mountainsides; how plants grow differently at different altitudes; the medicinal benefits of some of the plants in that climate; and that Peru has over 4000 types of potatoes! Gonzalo appears in beautiful detail in the second section of “Echolalia.”

After Peru, Todd and Sarah decided to reroute directly to Bolivia, but at the border, they heard stories of an eruption in the political climate, protests over fuel, the indigenous people versus the European descendents in charge of energy policy. Things were shutting down and becoming unsafe. So, like most best-laid plans, these changed. Todd and Sarah decided to reroute to Colombia. Two weeks later, the president of Bolivia resigned.

In Colombia, Todd and Sarah attended the International Poetry Festival of Medellín, which featured dozens of poets from around the world, including Wole Soyinka, Rita Dove, Ernesto Cardenal, Sherwin Bitsui, Breyten Breytenbach, and Sujata Bhatt. Medellín used to be the drug capital of the world—home to Pablo Escobar. The poetry festival started fifteen years prior in an attempt to reclaim the heart and imagination of the city. At the festival, Todd and Sarah watched each poet perform in his or her native language, and then a translator or student read the poem in Spanish. The festival was a major event; the readings took over the city. They read in parks, the zoo, universities, museums, libraries, out-lying neighborhoods, even prisons. The only resistance in the festival’s history came during the 90s, when a terrorist blew up a statue by the Colombian artist Botero, killing several people. In response, Botero made another statue and placed it next to the ravaged one, along with a plaque honoring those who had died. “This was an amazing thing to participate in,” Todd said. “Even if we couldn’t understand the poem, there was still so much to grasp via inflection, body language, just the whole presentation, the author’s presence . . . and crowds turned out everywhere. Poetry is a living occupation there.”

From Colombia, Todd and Sarah went on to Brazil via a tributary of the Amazon River called the Rio Solimões. The trip to the city of Manaus took four days by boat. Passengers slept and passed the time in hammocks. From Manaus they moved from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro and finally to Sao Paulo. The fourth section of “Echolalia” details the trip down the polluted river to the big cities where original art is sold among fake jewelry and the homeless wearing placards. They met a couple like themselves: artists studying for their Masters degrees, though in visual art.

Todd and Sarah filled their journals with images and notes to take home with them: a turtle they saw on the Caribbean coast of Colombia giving birth by moonlight; the tiny needles of Peruvian grandmothers hand-making lace at the market; pigs leashed like dogs on the roadside in Ecuador; spirals of whole orange rinds on the side of orange juice carts. “Echolalia” can be seen in all four parts on 42opus. Todd and Sarah consider it a work in-progress, and eventually plan to revise it into an electronic chapbook, with video and photos, and perhaps into a print version as well.

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