By
Abriana Jetté
Sayreville,
NJ, USA
It
is sometimes easy to feel lost in a sea of voices when thinking about the large
communities that are literary organizations. Large crowds have the potential to
spark fear: the fear of saying something wrong, the fear of saying something inaccurate,
the fear of saying something other than what you wanted to say, and so on and
so on. When speaking in the presence of respected scholars and writers, this
fear can be overwhelming. The Association of Literary Scholars and Creative
Writers (ALSCW) is dedicated to eliminating such fears. Whether members are
tenured professors, accomplished writers, or first-year graduate students, the
purpose of the ALSCW is the commitment to keep literary discussion thriving.
Over the span of two decades, the ALSCW has continuously supported writers
through generous fellowships and residencies, and, perhaps more importantly, it
has established an inclusive, diverse community for its members to share their
ideas.
I
first joined the ALSCW at the recommendation of a former Poetry Professor in
Graduate school. On our last day of class, she said, with conviction, that if
we were only to be a member of one literary organization, the ALSCW should be
the one. After talking with her privately, I remember, she paid for the first
year of my membership. She said she was offering me this gift because she knew
I would renew it come the following year. Seven years later, she was right.
This memory continues to define the spirit of the ALSCW for me: the generosity
of its members is only matched by their intellect.
Throughout
the year, the ALSCW hosts local poetry readings and author talks, publishes two
journals, Literary Matters and Literary Imagination, and hosts an
annual conference. The 23rd annual ALSCW Conference, which will
occur from October 3-6, 2019, will be held at the College of the Holy Cross,
and the “Call For Papers” is available on its website.
Stay Thirsty Magazine
and the ALSCW share a common mission to promote conversations surrounding the
arts. Because of our shared commitment to the artistic community, portions of the
proceeds from Stay Thirsty Poets - Vol. I, my latest anthology published
through Rove-Over Books, an imprint of Stay Thirsty Publishing, will be donated
to the ALSCW. We hope that with this donation, the ALSCW will continue its
history of supporting literary scholars and creative writers.
This
winter, I caught up with Executive Director of the ALSCW, Dr. Ernest Suarez, to
find out more about the history and future of the ALSCW. Dr. Suarez is the
Chair of the English department at the Catholic University of America. He is
currently co-authoring a book with Mike Mattison (Tedeschi Trucks Band) on how
the blues and rock & roll impact modern and contemporary poetry.
ABRIANA
JETTÉ: Tell us a little about the ALSCW. When was it
founded? What is its mission?
ERNEST SUAREZ: The ALSCW’s mission is ensure that literature thrives in
both scholarly and creative environments. We encourage the reading and writing
of literature, criticism, and scholarship, as well as wide-ranging discussions
among people committed to the reading and study of literary works. The
organization was founded in 1994 by what an article in the New York Times called a “Who’s Who of
literary critics.” We still
have a very rich membership, one that consists of critics, poets, playwrights,
novelists, translators, musicians, secondary school teachers, editors,
filmmakers, and literary agents. Our members have received MacArthur
Fellowships, Grammy Awards, Carnegie fellowships, and more. We’re all about
literature and the arts—and about providing opportunities for people from many walks
of life to interact.
 |
| Ernest Suarez |
People
often ask why the ALSCW was founded. It’s important to stress that the ALSCW
started because of the ascendancy of postmodernist theory in the 1980s and
1990s, but not because of the politics associated with postmodern theory. The
issue was that literary study had become so overly politicized that people were
losing sight of why literature is valuable. Literature and the arts often
contain a political dimension, and that’s an important part of the picture, but
it’s not the entire picture. We read great writers, from Homer to Toni Morrison,
because their work helps us think about what it means to be human. Great
literature has been written by people from different times, from different
backgrounds, and encompasses a range of perspectives. Writers approach what it
means to be human in a variety of ways. That dynamic is what makes literary
study rich and textured. Any method—whether it’s postmodern theories or
approaches that use literature to affirm the greatness of western
civilization—that doesn’t take this into account is lacking. When literature is
turned into a sociological abstraction, the individual human element is lost. A
sense of craft and a sense of literature as an art form are lost. Emotional
subtleties are lost.
ABRIANA
JETTÉ: What changes have occurred in the organization since
its inception?
ERNEST SUAREZ: The organization has grown. The
organization began in 1994 and the first issue of Literary Imagination (Oxford UP) came out in 1999. That journal is
still thriving, and over the last few years Ryan Wilson has transformed Literary Matters, which was a
newsletter, into a first-rate online journal. Our annual conference has also
continued to evolve. We run seminars as well as plenary panels and special
events—readings, musical and dramatic performances, keynote lectures, and other
things. The quality of the seminars particularly is rewarding. People who might
be giving the keynote at another conference work side-by-side with younger
scholars and others. The focus is on the subject matter and the quality of the
exchange, not on what stage of career you’re at. It’s refreshing. Mentorship
remains part of our ethos, but it tends to be a casual and natural outgrowth of
the exchanges that transpire during the sessions and outside of them. The ALSCW
is very non-hierarchical, though people sometimes have a hard time believing it
when they see many of the members’ accomplishment. But once they experience how
the seminars work and how the conferences are organized, they settle into the
flow of things.
ABRIANA
JETTÉ: What kind of opportunities does the ALSCW provide to
its supporters? What sort of opportunities does the ALSCW provide to those who
are not members?
ERNEST SUAREZ: Members receive the publications I
mentioned and have the chance to attend and participate in our annual
conference. They can also submit their writing for the annual Meringoff prizes.
We give awards in the categories of fiction, poetry, and the essay. Each prize
comes with a $2,500 cash prize, the opportunity to read at the annual
conference, and publication in Literary
Imagination or Literary Matters.
We also give out two fellowships every year. Members can apply for the Vermont
Studio Center fellowship for creative writers and translators, and apply or
sponsor a student for the ALSCW dissertation fellowship. Both of these
fellowships are designed to provide the winners with a substantial stretch of
time in a quiet, beautiful setting in order to focus on their work.
We
also hold local events around the country that usually are open to non-members.
This spring we have three in Washington, DC, an event in Chicago, and another
in NYC. These events feature a prominent speaker and/or a performance, and
typically are followed by a reception. They tend to be free and open to the
public. We sponsor the Meringoff High School Essay prize, which is open to
non-members; it carries a $2,500 award. On a larger scale, the ALSCW works to
promote literature and the humanities among decision makers in and outside
government. We study and make proposals for high school, undergraduate, and graduate
school curricula.
ABRIANA
JETTÉ: You mentioned that the ALSCW publishes two journals.
Tell me more about them.
ERNEST SUAREZ: Literary
Imagination publishes essays that explore the
significance of literary works throughout the ages, as well as original poetry
and fiction by writers ranging from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award
winners to folks whose careers are just getting underway. The journal’s
editor—Archie Burnett—is a world-renowned scholar who has edited the verse of
Milton, Housman, Larkin, and others. Rosanna Warren and I are associate
editors. Rosanna is one of our finest living poets and a wonderful scholar. Our
overriding criteria for Literary
Imagination are excellence, relevance, and lively lucid prose.
I
think there’s been a slow and steady shift, especially among younger scholars,
back towards studying literature-as-literature and towards an emphasis on the
relationship between literature and the other arts, and away from seeing
literature primarily as a
sociological phenomenon. The ALSCW and Literary
Imagination have played a powerful role in this transformation. This
doesn’t mean ignoring literature’s political and cultural dimensions. It means
engaging those things more fully and accurately. I like criticism with a
narrative emphasis, scholarship that carefully situates writers and works
within their historical moment and that offers close readings of works within
those contexts—and I appreciate criticism that goes on to explicitly and
implicitly assess how particular writers have impacted subsequent writers and
the implications for our thinking today. I would like to see more criticism by
practicing artists; it tends to help remind us that literature and art are
created by human beings, and contain all the ironies and paradoxes associated
with diverse people at different times and in different places. I think there’s excellent work being done by
narrative theorists, like Brian Richardson at the University of Maryland, who
understand the nuances of literary form and its relationship to human
expression. I also think there’s terrific work to be done on “poetic song
verse,” forms of song that use voice, instrumentation, and arrangement to
foreground richly texture lyrics. We see it as a subgenre of song that’s also a
form of literature. Literary Imagination supports
all of these things. Literary Matters is
our online journal. It’s published three times a year and is free. The journal
has taken off. The quality of the verse, the essays, and the reviews are outstanding.
Like Literary Imagination, it
features work by established writers and up and coming ones. It also publishes
recommended readings, as well as a list of recent books by our members.
ABRIANA JETTÉ: What can we expect from the future of the ALSCW?
ERNEST SUAREZ: I believe we’ll continue to grow. Our
membership has almost doubled over the last few years. One of the challenges is
keeping our annual conference intimate. We want to give folks the opportunity
to participate, of course, but the conference is designed to promote an ongoing
dialogue about literature and the arts over several days as people move between
seminars (four or five at a time) to plenary sessions (one at a time) to
readings and social events in the evening.
We’ve worked at raising money to help graduate students attend the
conference, and will be offering them substantially discounted registration and
banquet fees at the conference. We’ve also made it a point not to raise the
membership fee for students, retired faculty, and people making less than
$50,000 a year. Hopefully more of this is in our future. People have been
extraordinarily generous.
Stay Thirsty Poets
is an example of that generosity. When you have the likes of Jericho Brown,
Billy Collins, Paul Muldoon, Robert Pinsky, and A.E. Stallings donating their
profits to the ALSCW, it’s remarkable. We are very grateful!
With
our annual conferences, local meetings, publications, fellowships, and other
endeavors we stress quality—not elitism, not hierarchy, not self-importance—but
quality, generosity, substance, humor, intelligence, openness, diversity, and a
genuine love for literature and the arts with an emphasis on what it means to
be human. That’s our present and our future.
Links:
Rove-Over Books at Stay Thirsty Publishing
Abriana Jetté is the author of the Amazon #1 bestselling women's poetry anthology 50 Whispers. Her newest poetry anthology, Stay Thirsty Poets - Vol. I, was released in February 2019.
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Abriana Jetté is the author of the Amazon #1 bestselling women's poetry anthology 50 Whispers. Her newest poetry anthology, Stay Thirsty Poets - Vol. I, was released in February 2019.