Reflections of the My First Day of First Semester in the MFA

Yesterday was the first day of the Converse College MFA, but we all glided into our new setting. We received our packets, school IDs, parking passes, and key (if you're staying on campus). We had our meeting warning us to keep up with the work, follow the rules, and what material we needed to turn in when we leave.

At dinner, there was a hum that can only be attained through people with like minded passions. Individuals jumped from various conversations speaking with fellow students and faculty members. It was similar to writer's conferences that I've been to, but we all know that once this week is over, we're tied to one another for the next couple of years.

I got to meet the ladies who are part of my first group. Kim, Kathy, Sara, and I will be critiquing each other's work under the guidance of our mentor, Cary Holladay. It was so nice last night because Cary sought each of us out in the crowd to welcome us and introduce herself. I was at ease. We had already had the opportunity to spend a few minutes getting to know our fellow students before the faculty arrived.

Any time someone reads your work in progress it can be like being caught on your worst day — no makeup, hair all mussed up, and that pallor you have when first startled awake from a deep sleep.

It is still scary to let people read your finished work, but by that time, hopefully you're presenting your best and not likely to land in the worst dressed list or as they say in the South, "Bless her heart. What was she thinking when she picked out that outfit? Did she not look in the mirror before she left the house?"

I'm looking forward to the second day. We have a full day of craft lectures, critiques, and readings scheduled.

Last night Susan Tekulve and Denise Duhamel were our faculty readers. Susan's novel, In the Garden of Stone was just published by Hub City Press and won the SC First Novel Prize. Denise's latest book of poetry, Blowout is also available

Review of In the Garden of Stone

As I read the first pages of Susan Tekulve’s In the Garden of Stone, the image of my grandmother as a young girl came to mind – the details of washday and baking day evoked the beautiful rich stories of everyday life my grandmother once told me of when she was a girl.

In the Garden of Stone is a novel in stories, which for a writer can be daunting and risky. Many readers favor a traditional plot that remains with the same character throughout the novel, but in Tekulve’s novel, it is the land that binds the passing generations.

Tekulve sets the novel in a coal town in the Appalachian mountains. The story begins in 1924 with Emma as a young woman, “sixteen, old enough to work like a woman alongside her mother and speak her mind.” Later you see Emma as an old woman, ravaged by the same disease that incapacitated her mother, but there is still that quiet strength and resolve that remains with her throughout her life.

The story ends almost fifty years later. The changing landscape continues to resonate with beauty and history throughout the pages of the novel. With each passing generation, the way of life changes — the coal mines close and a new way of life emerges. But for some, the land remains a source of pride and heritage.

The story is told through the perspectives of Emma, the matriarch; Dean, her son; Sadie, Dean’s wife; and Hannah, the daughter of Dean and Sadie.  I found the transition and influence of each passing generation mesmerizing. You could see how Emma’s choices and life continued to influence her child and grandchild.

Character, plot, and setting all come together like a prize winning recipe to make a good story. I’ve had the privilege of having Susan as my teacher and mentor. She’s an excellent creative writing teacher because she is an excellent writer. It was amazing to see her applying the principles she teaches so well. 

Susan Tekulve is the winner of the South Carolina First Novel prize. In the Garden of Stone is published by Hub City Press.

If you would like to read more about Susan and her culinary skills, follow the link for an earlier post for Appalachian Wedding Cake.

Sunday Dinner: Appalachian Wedding Cake

Appalachian Wedding Cake

Today I have a guest post from Susan Tekulve, the author of In the Garden of Stone.

I came to know my mother-in-law, Mary, through the recipes she gave to me. In my memory, I always see and hear Mary in the kitchen of the two-story brick house my father-in-law built after he retired from the Norfolk and Southern Railroad, in the mountain town of Bluefield, Virginia, where Mary had lived all her life, and raised all five of her children.  When my husband, Rick, and I went back to Virginia for a visit, Mary and I often woke before dawn and sat across from each other at the kitchen table, waiting for the sun to rise, and for the rest of the house to wake.  Sometimes, we peeled apples together. Rick’s grandmother still lived back on the family’s home place, on a ridge between a limestone quarry and the town’s cemetery.  Below the grandmother’s house was a green apple tree that continually dropped spotted, lopsided apples onto the gravel drive leading to the grandmother’s house.  Rick’s father wouldn’t throw any of the fallen fruit away.  Summers, he brought home a bushel basket full of bruised and torn apples every evening, after he’d been up to check on his mother.  

Mary and I would stand in the morning quiet of her kitchen, peeling and discarding the damaged spots off each apple, dropping the good slices into a pot of water, sugar, cinnamon and cloves, boiling this mixture into dark brown apple butter. While the apples simmered, Mary baked six thin layers of a gingery molasses cake, three at a time, in three well-seasoned cast iron skillets. When the cake layers cooled, she stacked them, frosting each layer with the apple butter.  The cake was supposed to “age” for a day, so that the apple butter could soak into the spiced layers until they became sweet and delicate.  Nobody in the house ever waited for this cake to age.  They ate it young, right after supper, which was always served at midday at my in-law’s house.  

Mary called this dessert molasses cake, or apple stack cake. Though she made this cake for all kinds of family gatherings, it was once the traditional wedding cake at Appalachian weddings.  The brides who lived on the remote sides of these Southern mountains relied on their guests to bring a thin layer of molasses cake when they arrived at the wedding, and the brides’ family members would assemble the cake, spreading apple butter between the layers. It is said that the popularity of the bride determined the final height of the cake.

This is a humble-looking cake that most women of this region make without a written recipe.  It’s not difficult. It requires only the patience for simmering a bushel of apples into butter, and waiting for six layers of cake to bake. While we waited for the cake layers to cool, Mary often told stories about her family.  She’d grown up in a trailer on the other side of Bluefield, on a ridge known locally as Dump Hill.  My father-in-law always said that Mary’s early upbringing was so rough that the details of what happened to her as a child on Dump Hill could not be repeated.  Though she hardly ever spoke of herself, Mary told stories about the women of her family.  These women married young and faced almost unendurable hardships—poverty, abandonment, violence--and endured.   

Perhaps the bitterness of Mary’s past was what prompted her to adore anything sweet. Perhaps her hardscrabble childhood and early marriage made her into the genuinely kind mother woman who readily adopted me as her daughter-in-law, and taught me how to make the Appalachian wedding cake recipe she’d learned from her own mother-in-law. 

When Mary passed away from cancer, Rick’s father began making all of Mary’s dessert recipes—brown sugar fudge, chess pie, and banana pudding—for the family. The last time Rick and I visited Virginia, I woke early and found Rick’s father in the kitchen. The whole house smelled warmly of the ginger and molasses cakes that he’d been baking while the rest of the house slept.  As he assembled and iced the cake layers, his grizzled face softened, turning almost boyish.  I could tell he was remembering Mary, perhaps recalling her as a young wife, still healthy enough to stand in that kitchen for hours, peeling those homely apples, baking those humble layers of cake.  Larry had baked his cake layers in different sized skillets, and he’d iced the layers with cooked apples rather than apple butter.  The finished cake looked a bit like a lopsided beehive, but there was no mistaking.  It was an Appalachian wedding cake.    We ate it “young,” drizzled with caramel, and dusted with powdered sugar. 

Here is the recipe for Appalachian Wedding Cake.  I use 3  9-inch cake pans instead of 3 cast iron skillets—mainly because I don’t own 3 cast iron skillets that are the same size.  If I don’t have the time to make my own, I use apple butter that you can find at produce stands or at church bake sales.  I pretty up the cake a little, dusting the assembled layers with powdered sugar, drizzling the top and sides with caramel sauce, garnishing it with a few slices of dried apples.  

Appalachian Wedding Cake

1 cup sugar

1 cup unsalted butter, room temp.

1 cup molasses

3 eggs

4 cups all purpose flour

1 tsp. baking powder

½ tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. ground ginger

1 tsp. cinnamon

½ tsp. ground clove

1 cup buttermilk

1 tsp. vanilla extract

2 ½ cups apple butter, preferably homemade

powdered sugar, for dusting

Dried apples and caramel sauce for decorating

Method:  Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  Grease 3 9-inch cake pans.  Combine all dry ingredients and sift.  Cream butter and sugar together.  Add molasses and eggs and mix until combined.  Alternating dry and wet, add in sifted flour mixture and buttermilk.  Stir in vanilla extract and divide half the batter among the three greased cake pans.  Bake for 8-10 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean when tested in the center of a cake.  Let cool for a few minutes, then invert cakes onto paper plates.  Bake the other half of the batter.

When all cakes have cooled, spread several tablespoons of the apple butter on each layer—stacking as you go.  Wrap cake tightly and let “mature” for a day.  Or, if you can’t wait that long, dust finished cake with powdered sugar and serve.

I hoped you've enjoyed Susan's post.

Please check back tomorrow for my review on the She Reads May Selection, Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline.

On Tuesday I will be reviewing Susan Tekulve's In the Garden of Stone.

Write Now: Thomas Kennedy, A Girl And A Fish

A writer must draw the reader in, encouraging the reader to momentarily suspend reality and step into the story. A great way to do this is through the five senses: sight, taste, smell, touch, and sound. It is the small details that bring a reader in . . . coffee and bacon on his breath — two aromatic smells.

The Hub City Writers Project offers several writing workshops throughout the year and Thomas Kennedy was the first this fall. He taught about the five senses of fiction. He gave us some wonderful examples, some of his own as well as other authors. 

He gave us the opportunity to write. He gave us a prompt. Pens scrawled across paper, not a single laptop was there among the students, most of us well over 30. We shared our work, some was not bad, but some was pretty extraordinary for a ten minute writing session. He did not critique our work. He praised and encouraged each student pointing to a particular detail or passage he liked.

He shared with us the first writing prompt he was ever given, two words: girl, fish. He gave us five minutes to write. 

For me it invoked images of my granddaddy. He always took my brothers fishing, but he rarely allowed my sister and me to come along — mostly because then he would have to find a bathroom for us, and my sister always had to go. But this made me remember the feel of a fishing rod between my fingers, the line twinges, and the cork bobs beneath the surface. "Snap it, snap it," he said, but I was too late. The hook emerged from the water, worm less, glistening silver in the sun.

This just might turn into a short story or it may make an appearance in my novel. I'm not sure, but I know someday I will use it.

I have heard about Thomas Kennedy for the last several years. He is the mentor of my mentor, Susan Tekulve, who is a professor at Converse College and her novel, In the Garden of Stone won the South Carolina First Novel Prize this year and will be published in May of 2013.

The Hub City Writers Project offers workshops, conferences, and many other opportunities for writers.

Write Now: Writing in Place

I am going to a writer's conference this weekend offered by the Hub City Writers Project. The faculty includes Ruta Septys, George Singleton, Anna Jean Mayhew, Ray McManus and Joni Tevis.

My professor, Susan Tekulve from Converse will also be teaching a workshop. She just won the SC First Novel Prize and her book will be published by Hub City Press next year.

We are so fortunate here in Spartanburg, SC to have such wonderful opportunities through the Hub City Writers Project.

I am looking forward to meeting new people and reconnecting with old friends.

If you can't make it to the conference. The keynote speaker, Ruta Septys will also be at the Spartanburg County Public Library on Sunday at 2 p.m.

Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Septys is a novel about 15 year-old Linia, who is a typical Lithuanian girl in 1941. She is preparing for art school until the Soviet police barge into the family home and deport them to a Siberian work camp. She secretly documents the experience with her artistic talents. The family is separated from the father. Food and water are scarce. Linia and her mother and brother are forced to work hard and endure horrific conditions, but there are moments when the prison cannot contain their spirit. Will their love and hope survive?

Write Now: Mentor

There are gifted teachers, who are truly passionate about their subjects and students. They instruct, encourage, and mentor.

At Converse there are many wonderful professors, but for me there is one teacher, who is exceptional. She is my mentor, Susan Tekulve. And I am ecstatic that she has won the SC First Novel prize to be published by Hub City next May.

I am so looking forward to reading The Stranger Room. This is a project she has worked on for quite a while. She is such a lovely writer. Her detailed scenes transport you to the places she has written about.

In my first class with her, I resisted changes she wanted me to make to a short story. After cutting the scene she didn't feel was working. I read the piece aloud, but as I got to the spot where I cut the scene, I realized the pace picked up, the tension was building, and the story was better. What I cut was a good scene, but it wasn't right for that story.

I'm also a big summarizer. My story endings were always lacking because of the summary at the end. Once she marked through the last couple of paragraphs of a story and after reading it again, I realized she was right. Her primary goal is to make her students better writers. I am so thankful to have her for a professor and mentor.