Nova, Nov 🦉

Updates from an Autumn of spadework

Dear friends,

So Autumn has come, as it must, and made everything magic. 🍁 Perhaps we haven’t quite the displays enjoyed by our Northeastern countrymen, but golly, this place sure is pretty when the temps turn the colors up. I am busying myself raking leaves, pruning trees, and sorting out what manner of curtains can possibly resist the heat-leak through my century-old windows. We’ve had our first fire this week in the hearth, have had our first gathering of friends in the form of a baby shower for the wee one, and are readying the place for overnight guests at Thanksgiving. It’s all very busy, but in a storing up treasures for future use kind of way. I’m looking forward to guests, to the boy, to the shoots from the apple tree in Spring.

Speaking of bearing fruit, there’s been little of that from me recently, but an abundance of seeding.

I wrote a little post about my trip to Tennessee for my first Hutchmoot.

I gave a brief interview with Jen Pollock Michel for her substack on the topic Should I get an MFA? which you can read here.

The Rabbit Room Poetry channel published my new poem “Rest.” It’s about my taking my kids swimming in the same pool I learned to swim in, but it’s also about W.S. Merwin and Richard Wilbur, and the new Jerusalem. Read it here below and let me know: do you remember learning to swim? Did everyone’s toes come similarly scraped or ought we to have re-surfaced our pool?

Rest—Mischa Willett

What’s more, I’ve just recorded a podcast episode with Jonathan Rogers for The Habit, about artistic failure, which should be out soon and I’ve done a written interview for Inkwell about Christian MFA programs which again, will appear later this month.

Meantime, the new book is moving through its stately paces: typeset and being sent out for blurbs, if I understand things aright.

Oh, and I’m gearing up to teach an undergraduate course in Spring, my first here at Whitworth, all about spondees, anapests, trochees etc. I’m calling it “The Noble Art of Metrical Verse,” and if you can believe it—what sorts of wonderful English majors are these?—the class filled up instantly.

MFA News

• We have a (baby) instagram. You can find it here.

• We have partnered with Image Journal, who offers a whole slate of programming for authors. Anyone who signs up for one of their seminars can have the cost of same reimbursed should they then decide to sign up for our program. Hooray for arts orgs supporting each other!

• We have pushed our first residency to Summer (last week of July, actually). Too many of our new students were saying things like “I’ve been looking forward to this my whole adult life; let’s not rush it.” Let’s not indeed.

• Our fiction mentor, Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum about whose new book I was just telling you, has another new book out, a collection of short stories called Outer Stars. You could meet her, you know, and learn to do work like this:

New Books

• The Role of the Moon, D.S. Martin
  The editor of the Poiema poetry series comes out with the strongest poems of his career IMHO.— Hey! you should get some bonuses for reading this far!! here’s 50% of any books in the series, mine, Cameron Brooks, Luke Harvey’s, Betsy Brown’s, Martin’s new one (so many good things! That makes them like 5 bucks 💸.) You could be the kind of person that gives people random poetry books for Christmas. Think about it; they’d tell stories for years. 😜 Code: CONFSHIP

• The Asking: New and Selected Poems, Jane Hirshfield
  This is likely to top my favorite books of the year list. A handsome collection by one of our very finest.

Listening

• Watchhouse, Rituals
  I was put onto this by Mockingbird, I think. Autumn music.

• Geoff Moore and the Distance, A Friend Like U
  The last gasp a very particular brand of early 1990’s pop right before grunge came and made everything, if awesome, similar. I am listening to this unironically a with great joy.

Okay friends, I’m off to go hear (like, in a few minutes) a talk by Curt Thompson, author of The Soul of Desire, who has been brought out to campus under the excellencies of the Weyerhaeuser Center for Christian Faith and Learning. Some life, eh?

Big love,

MW