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Entries from March 31st, 2010

Good Late-Morning.

March 31st, 2010 No Comments

-The Rumpus announces its forth-
coming thirty
solicited poems for April,
National Poetry Month.
–If you missed the David Shields reading at Booksmith Monday night, listen to the hour-long interview Shields gave Ed Champion on The Bat Segundo Show.
–Be the envy of all the writers hunched over a bar tab.
–Speaking of The Rumpus…
–Vanderbilt now has a journal of fiction, poetry, [...]

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Without Irony, You Are Dead: Tim O’Brien at the Harvard Book Store Reading Series — Guest Post by Wilmur Makepeace O’Toole

March 29th, 2010 9 Comments

[The author of this post, an Emerson MFA candidate and guest writer for Vernacular, has requested that I post it under a pseudonym: Wilmur Makepeace O'Toole. - Peter]
The Things They Carried holds a secure place on the reading lists of American classrooms, from high schools to graduate programs. The book’s international prestige (it won the [...]

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This Friday at the GRS

March 29th, 2010 No Comments

Prepare yourself for the works of  Cassie Condrey. We’ve also got:
Laura Campagna, second year fiction. Of her writing she says, “I’m queer and a feminist, and I think you can find those elements in my stories, but I don’t want my work to be didactic. I try to create characters that aren’t normally represented in literature, [...]

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Will Self Imbibes Sophisticated Soft Drinks

March 28th, 2010 8 Comments

1. I don’t know anyone who has read Will Self.
2. One of Will Self’s blurbs says that “if Magritte had been a writer instead of a painter, his work might have looked something like” [Self's].
3. In 1997 Will Self took heroin on Prime Minister John Major’s jet.
4. “Will Self” sounds like a nom de plume.

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Saturday is Emerson’s Graduate Open House! by Claire Blechman

March 26th, 2010 No Comments

Welcome to all the incoming Prospective Students!
When I came to open house as a prospective (back in 2006), I fell asleep on the floor behind a radiator somewhere in the Tufte building. I’d made the mistake of taking an overnight bus from NYC (4 am – 8 am) to save on hotel expenses. Please, prospective [...]

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On Encouragement

March 25th, 2010 2 Comments

I’d like to take a moment to consider the “encouraging” rejection slip. You know the ones: those rejection slips that don’t bluntly say “No thanks”, but that tell you how great you are and how good your piece was, even if ultimately you didn’t make the cut. If you’re lucky they might ask you to [...]

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Yes, another reason to visit the BPL.

March 25th, 2010 No Comments

You have one week left to check out this excellent exhibit on Edgar Allen Poe’s history in Boston. They’ve got letters, they’ve got a rare first edition of “Tamerlane,” and they’ve got a serious exploration of Poe’s feuds with Bostonian litterateurs; everything you need to dork out, hard core styles. And, yes, OMG yes, the [...]

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The Poet from Shandong

March 22nd, 2010 2 Comments

Like any blog with even a modest readership, Vernacular attracts its share of spammers, and WHOIS lookups can be more revealing than you’d think.
I discovered this comment while emptying the queue today, and can’t resist sharing it.  Its author neglected line breaks and a title, so I beg your pardon, “alec.” (I know your real [...]

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WR600 or: How I learned to stop worrying and love workshop drafts.

March 22nd, 2010 2 Comments

I have sometimes felt a significant amount of displeasure while reading workshop pieces. And, for particularly painful ones, when it’s time to take them back to the classroom, I’ve found myself wishing that I’d gotten drunk beforehand, and I don’t like to drink unless there’s a good reason. I get itchy in my seat, and [...]

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The Beginning of the End

March 21st, 2010 No Comments

Just this past week my fellow Emerson graduate students and I received our thesis chair and reader assignments, marking the start of our final push toward MFA-dom. I was nervous when I found out (via Facebook) that the announcements were in, and wondered if I would get my first choice. You see, I’d selected our [...]

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