MFA in Creative Writing Program
My book, The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory, was published by Carroll and Graf in 2007 and received the 2007 Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. In 2005-2006, I was a Fulbright Scholar in Japan, researching, Genkan: Entries into Japan, a new book of creative nonfiction that uses the prism of being a gaijin, a foreigner, with a disability in Japan, to look at how a particular culture views difference. In 2002, I was a Creative Arts Fellow of the Japan-US Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts. While in Japan, I wrote "In the Gardens of Japan," a sequence of poems, and collaborated with composers Takechi Yuka and Takahashi Kumiko, and singer Kimula Mika, in setting these poems for traditional Japanese instruments and voice, culminating in concerts in Tokyo, Yokohama, and New York. The cycle should be completed in 2008 and recorded in Tokyo. The poems were also printed as a limited edition Japanese tenugui (traditional Japanese cloth towel) designed by Yasuda Yugo.
My experience in Japan has seeped into my work, renewing my writing and thinking in both content and form. Transforming one's experience into writing meaningful to readers, finding the intersection between one's life and the world in which one lives, are what I always keep in mind, both as a writer and a teacher of writing. As a teacher, I hope to guide my students through the process of writing what is difficult to write by encouraging them to wrestle with what viscerally engages them, to keep the stakes high, and to hone the crucial editorial skills once the initial creative arc has been forged. I aim to help each student find and develop the voice that lifts the work off the page into the reader's psyche. I stress the importance of reading deeply and widely, and of gaining familiarity with other media, especially visual art and music. No matter the subject, no matter the genre, I am concerned with the organic: how form and content reflect, affect, and interact with each other; how details inform the whole; how the entire work relates to its collected parts.
Much of my work the past fifteen years has been concerned with the body, as both subject and metaphor; as the place where the personal becomes the universal; as the site of memory, language, and desire. My work includes: Body, Remember: A Memoir (Dutton, 1997; Plume paperback, 1998; new edition, University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out, (Plume, 1997), the anthology of writers with disabilities which I edited; Desert Walking: Poems (Advocado Press, 2000); Anesthesia: Poems (Advocado Press, 1996); The Healing Notebooks (Open Books, 1990), a sequence of poems for which I received the Gregory Kolovakos Award for AIDS Writing; an earlier book of poems Night After Night (Beaux-Arts Press, 1984); and the play A Human Equation, which premiered at La Mama E.T.C. in New York City. Collaborations have included work with printmaker Carlyle Poteat, painter Kevin Wolff, visual artist Ian Jehle, as well as my current work with Japanese composers Takechi Yuka and Takahashi Kumiko, and singer Kimula Mika. I continue work on Works on Paper, a new book of poems; Half-Truths and Impure Thoughts, a novel; and Beholder, a play I began while in residence with Other Voices at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. My website is www.kennyfries.com.
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Kenny Fries, MFA