MFA in Creative Writing Program
After publishing two collections of poetry with an extremely small press in my twenties, I moved to New York in 1998 to pursue a career in fiction writing, though never completely abandoning my interests in autobiographical investigation, lyricism, experimentation, and class. I am interested in what it means to knowingly engage with and embrace influence, and I am interested in what escapes literature may still provide for us; fictional forms that invite imaginative identification, hold space for pleasure and complexity, troubling and teasing easy realism, making meaning in new or counter logics, those move me most. It's this I work hard at in fiction. In teaching I focus on an open exchange and sharing of ideas, a critical empowering through prompting self-questioning and examining what place writing might really hold in one's life, an emphasis on work habits, and constructive critiques that do not rely on oft repeated formulas but seek to accept and explore each students' work on their own terms towards their own goals. To this end, I believe in such things as mutual respect and mutual exploration, a rigorous attention to detail and consideration of formal implications: I want students to begin to think about not just word choice but why books are received the way they are.
I currently teach the advanced fiction class "Realizing Your Novel" and essay writing at the New School for Social Research, where I am also a workshop and seminar instructor in the Summer Writers Colony. In this latter capacity, I have hosted such contemporary writers as Dale Peck, Colm Toibin, and Joyce Carol Oates. I've taught memoir at the Writer's Voice and poetic prose at Poets House; I've lectured at Cornell University and San Francisco State to aspiring writers. In 2000, I published my first novel, Outline of My Lover, with the then budding Soft Skull Press, while completing my MFA in fiction. This novel was subsequently published by Picador UK, adapted by the Ballet Frankfurt with Anne Carson's "Irony Is Not Enough: Essay On My Life As Catherine Deneuve (2nd draft)" for their multimedia production Kammer/Kammer, and named an International Book of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement. I was nominated for the American Library Association's GLBT Book Award and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. I drove myself across the United States supporting this book. In 2005, I published a novel of biographical fiction, Branwell (Soft Skull Press), and a book of autobiographically linked stories, They Change the Subject (University of Wisconsin Press). I've drafted a novel/study of the painter Balthus, the poet Hart Crane, and the painter Francis Bacon, which structures itself through the connections of their mythopoetic concerns, and I have completed a second autobiographical novel, Once You Go Back. Last Early Poems, a collection of work spanning 1995-2005, will be published in the spring of 2008. Critically, I have written lyric essays on Kathy Acker, Virginia Woolf and the photographer Sally Mann, Sylvia Plath, the metaphysical poets Andrew Marvell and Thomas Traherne, Toni Morrison, The Lost Boys, pornography, the affect theorist Silvan Tomkins, and the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. My work has been included in the anthologies Bend, Don't Shatter: Poets on the Beginning of Desire (Soft Skull Press), Slam (Alloy/Penguin), Dangerous Families: Queer Writing On Surviving (Harrington Park Press), Best Gay Erotica(Cleis), Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House), and New Writing 11(Picador UK). I have published poetry and prose in Lit, The Dublin Review, The Literary Review, and Nerve.com. In addition, I am a co-author of the haiku year (Soft Skull Press), a collection of poetry which also serves as record of friendship, and "Accurate Key," a broadside project including, among others, Alice Notley, Robert Creeley, and Eileen Myles.
|
Douglas A. Martin, MFA, PhD