The year has changed over and a new semester has begun. While the long (long) wait for spring is underway, here is what we are reading, googling, watching, and what we would work on if we were snowed in to a one-room cabin by ourselves . . .
Hubble Stark
Second-year MFA candidate in Fiction
Googling: Miscarriages, tuberculosis, and polio, mostly.
Watching: Watched Risky Business, soccer, and Frasier.
Reading: A lot of Agatha Christie and James Lee Burke.
Snowed in til spring?: New manuscript and the creepiest story to tell myself before nightfall.
Marko Capoferri
CutBank Poetry Editor, second-year MFA candidate in Poetry
Googling: I checked and found out that I turned off my search history tracking in January of 2019. I have no illusions that has kept my information private from our digital overlords, but I suppose I may have been a little hopeful/naive four years ago? At 12:32 AM on 12/31/2018, I searched "train drops of jupiter lyrics." I think I was sober, too.
Reading: Over winter break I finally got to read (most of) Until The Red Swallows It All, a collection of narrative nonfiction pieces by Missoula's very own Mason Parker. While a lot of the book deals with land and ecocide in Mason's native Oklahoma and beyond, there are a lot of other people in the book, too, and it's easy to see how much love Mason has for both the land and the people he introduces the reader to, even if the relationship with either may at times be fraught.
When I'm feeling a little adrift I often go back to my beloved poetic lord and savior Larry Levis. I spent some good time with his 1985 collection Winter Stars, the volume where he really became the Levis we know and love, where he figured out how to harness his capacious mind and put it on the page in shapely, discursive lyrics.
Watching: I watched a lot of YouTube clips of stand-up comedy.
Snowed in til spring?: Stuck in a cabin for months, I'd probably see how many consecutive push-ups I could do.
Kirstie Clinko
First-year MFA candidate in Fiction
Googling: The most unforgettable google search I’ve ever made was when I entered five numbers I heard in a dream. The unknown voice implored me to remember the numbers, and they repeated all night. When I woke, I jotted them down and thought no more of it. A couple of weeks later I entered them in a google search and found they were part of a mathematical formula called the Nth degree. My father had passed away a couple of months earlier, and he used to say to me, “I love you to the Nth degree.”
Reading: Earthsea [by Ursula K. Le Guin] is a superb exercise in world-building and held tension. Ged’s pride leads him to a mistake that loses a terrible evil in the world. His attempts to escape bring him to confront dragons and one of the old powers of the Earth, before an epic chase takes him right to the edge of the world. Ged follows the hero’s journey, chasing the thing he fears most, to save his people.
Snowed in til spring?: I'd work on my Y.A book and my crime ghost story.
Jenny Rowe
CutBank Print Editor, first-year MFA candidate in Nonfiction
Googling: Lots of daily and weekly horoscope sites for Libras (my sign); I tend to go through phases of this, and at the beginning of every new year I'm especially open to mystical ponderings.
Watched: Finished rewatching Mad Men with my partner Zach in Iowa City (I think we've each seen it at least three times through already, but watching it together for the first time felt special).
Reading: I flew through Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain: Translating a Life in Spain by Michele Morano and Chris Dombrowski’s The River You Touch. (I think grad school is training me to be a faster reader than I normally am, out of necessity.)
Snowed in til spring?: My memoir/essay collection (not sure which it's going to be yet); my current strategy has been to write one distinct essay at a time and hope they form themselves into some kind of coherent, book-like creation by the time I submit my thesis, but I'm trying not to put too much pressure on the work yet. It would be interesting to see how the essays would evolve if I didn't have any other life distractions!