MFA in Creative Writing Program
I consider myself an experimental formalist writer: someone who likes both to invent forms and to mess around with (ok, destroy) culturally received forms in pursuit of extreme play. For instance, in my long poem, The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, I wrap together an historical biography of the inventor Sir David Brewster with both a personal travelogue and a narrative of a dissolving relationship into a single, mutating and fragmentary poem that uses collage, white space and repetition to help recreate the experience of “looking” into a kaleidoscope. Likewise, my next nonfiction book (tentatively titled The Book of My Husband), blends aspects of fiction and poetry with nonfiction, creating one long essay that must be read in “installments” of prose poems. My interest with formal experimentation can probably be traced back to my early training as a scholar of English medieval literature and history: a period of time in which both English and English literary forms were themselves building out of the remnants of Latin, Greek, Norman French and, of course, Anglo-Saxon language and culture, leading to the creation of some of the strangest and most original works in Europe. That said, as a teacher, I often try to understand and encourage the same experimentation in my classroom. Students look at both traditional and non-traditional models of writing—whether it’s the essay, the poem or the short story—then look at how contemporary and ancient authors have consistently challenged them. For instance, we’ll look at the work of Montaigne and Marguerite Duras and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, to examine how the lyric voice of a poem or the narrative force of fiction can be translated into the essay form, to help students see how the playful intermixing of genre expectation can help enhance a piece of writing.
As for my traditional biography, I am the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee (Pantheon 2000 and Vintage 2002), two books of poetry, A Crash of Rhinos (University of Georgia Press 2000), and Six Girls Without Pants (Eastern Washington University Press 2002), and a chapbook, The Invention of the Kaleidoscope (Black Warrior Review 2003). My work has received a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, an NEA Fellowship, and American Library Association Award for Young Adult Nonfiction, the University of Georgia Press’ Contemporary Poetry Series Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, several Pushcart Prize nominations, and the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review. My poems and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New York Times Magazine, NPR, Nerve, Ploughshares, Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review and Quarterly West, among others and I currently also teach in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Utah.
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Paisley Rekdal, MA, MFA