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Introduction
Each year the International Institute of Modern Letters invites a number of leading international writers across a range of genres to teach masterclasses for current students of the MA in Creative Writing, and appear in public events in Wellington. Recent international guests have included Andrew Bovell, Brian Castro, Santo Cilauro, Robert Dessaix, Mark Doty, Aminatta Forna, Richard Ford, Chris Gavaler, Lavinia Greenlaw, Lee Gutkind, Joy Harjo, August Kleinzahler, Hari Kunzru, David Malouf, Glyn Maxwell, Michael Palmer, Richard Powers, Christopher Reid, Nicholas Roe, Christopher Vogler, Linda Vorhees, Eliot Weinberger and Lesley Wheeler.
Our first guests for 2012 were the US fiction writer and poet Ron Rash and the UK poet, editor and translator Michael Hulse. As part of Victoria University's involvement with Writers and Readers Week, both writers held masterclasses for MA students at the IIML on 9 March.
Michael Hulse (March 2012)
Michael Hulse’s poetry has won him first prize in the UK’s National Poetry Competition and the Bridport Poetry Competition (twice), and Eric Gregory and Cholmondeley Awards from the Society of Authors, and has brought him invitations to reading tours of Canada, the US and Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, India, and several European countries. He has edited the literary quarterlies Stand, Leviathan Quarterly and (currently) The Warwick Review, co-edited the best-selling Bloodaxe anthology The New Poetry, and in the Nineties was general editor of the Könemann literature classics series and of Arc international poets. He has translated more than sixty books from the German, among them works by Goethe, Rilke, W. G. Sebald, and Nobel Prize winners Elfriede Jelinek and Herta Müller, bringing him plaudits from Susan Sontag and A. S. Byatt.
His latest publications are The 20th Century in Poetry, an anthology of twentieth-century poetry of the English-speaking world co-edited with Simon Rae (Random House/Ebury Press, 2011); a new book of poems, The Secret History (Arc, 2009); and a translation of Rilke’s novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Penguin Classics, 2009).
During his masterclass at the IIML, Michael Hulse talked about global poetry and the politics of anthologies, offered an alternative view of what might constitute experimental poetry, and read from his own work.
Ron Rash (March 2012)
Ron Rash is a multi award-winning poet, short story writer and novelist who lives in America’s Appalachian Mountains. His novels, including The New York Times bestseller Serena and One Foot in Eden, have earned him comparisons to John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy. Burning Bright, his most recent short story collection, won the 2010 Frank O’Connor Award.
Rash’s widely praised latest novel, The Cove, is a story of love and loss set against a background of hardship and xenophobia in Appalachia during the Great War.
'The Cove is a novel that speaks intimately to today’s politics. Beautifully written, tough, raw, uncompromising, entirely new.' - Colum McCann
'Ron Rash is a writer of both the darkly beautiful and the sadly true; his new novel, The Cove, solidifies his reputation as one of our very finest novelists.' (Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls)
During his masterclass visit at the IIML, Ron Rash talked about 'regional' writing as a gateway to the universal, discussed his interest in the impact of landscape on psychology, and described some of his techniques for generating and redrafting fiction.
Read more:
- Pedestal magazine interview
- The Tuckasegee Reader: Gary Carden and Ron Rash on writing and Appalachia