Today@Sam Article
New English Professor To Share Creative Writings
Nov. 2, 2016
SHSU Media Contact: Jennifer Gauntt
Story by Scott Kaukonen.
Consider it an introduction.
Olivia Clare, poet, fiction writer and new faculty member in the Sam Houston State University Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing, editing and publishing, will read from her work on Monday (Nov. 7), at 5 p.m. in Austin Hall.
“We are thrilled to welcome Olivia to our faculty,” said Scott Kaukonen, director of the MFA program. “Professionally, she’s an outstanding writer who has already published in some of the leading venues for contemporary writing, and she’s an enthusiastic and inspiring teacher who has made an immediate impact on campus and in the community. She brings so much energy and wisdom, and our students are and will be so fortunate to work with her.”
The event is free and open to the public.
Clare’s collection of poetry, “The 26-Hour Day,” was published by New Issues Press in 2015. Her individual poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Pleiades, London Magazine, Denver Quarterly, and Ninth Letter.
Her collection of short stories, “Disasters of the First World,” will appear this summer from Grove Atlantic publishing, with a novel to follow a year later.
Her very first published short story, “Pétur,” appeared in the literary journal Ecotone and was subsequently reprinted as part of The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014. Other stories have appeared in Granta, n + 1, Epoch, The Yale Review, The Boston Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere.
“I see myself as both a poet and fiction writer,” Clare said. “When I was getting my first MFA, in poetry, I didn’t even think about writing fiction. My brain wasn’t there. Later, I started writing longer things that felt like they had a narrative. Those were still long poems to me, but somewhere along the way, I started calling those things short stories.
“In my fiction, I approach the sentence the way I approach the line in my poems,” she said. “Sometimes the rhythm of a sentence comes to me before anything else. My sentences tend to proceed in a nonlinear fashion. For me, all that comes from my experience as a poet. The short story has so much in common with the lyric poem.”
Author Marie-Helene Bertino has said about Clare’s collection of stories, “The characters who haunt these pages are marked in their depths by their profound and painful stumblings toward connection.”
“I write about solitude and loneliness a good deal,” Clare said, “but the characters always want something else—some real, or even unreal, contact. A friend has called (my stories) ‘tilted,’ as though they’re in a tilted world. That makes sense to me. Words like ‘strange’ and ‘otherworldly’ come up quite a bit to describe the stories.”
Clare is a recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship from Colgate University, as well as a 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. She's been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and she was a 2015 Tin House Writers’ Workshop Scholar.
Clare holds MFA degrees in creative writing from both the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Southern California. This past spring, she completed her doctorate in English from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, where she was a Black Mountain Institute Fellow, before accepting the position at SHSU.
“I am overjoyed to be back (in the South),” Clare said. “I grew up in Louisiana. My parents are there, and they’re thrilled to have me nearby. My novel (in progress) takes place in Louisiana; being back in the South means so much to me and to my novel’s characters. I am loving Texas so far. I say ‘y’all’ every chance I get.”
Clare is one of two new faculty members in the MFA program this fall, along with Ching-In Chen.
“I am so impressed by the students at Sam Houston,” Clare said. “It’s an honor to be in the classroom with them. I try to extract bits of knowledge and lessons for myself, taken from my writing life, for my students. On my computer, I have a long, long document called ‘Teaching Notes.’ If something comes up while I’m writing—something I’m learning—I write that down.
“Every now and then, I’ll bring up an anecdote from my writing life. But I also hope my students learn from some of the things that slowed me down at first. For example, I ask my students to write thorough backgrounds for their main characters. I used to resist doing this for my own characters, and I always resented this assignment when I was a student. Now, I tell them, I use character backgrounds while I’m drafting all the time. Something that can feel so basic or unnecessary is actually essential . . . and a pleasure.”
The evening’s event continues the ongoing reading series sponsored by the MFA program. It will continue on Nov. 29 and 30, when the graduate students in Kaukonen’s creative nonfiction workshop share their work at the Wynne Home. Those readings will begin at 6 p.m. each night.
For more information, contact Kaukonen at kaukonen@shsu.edu or 936.294.1407.
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