Creative writing unites community

A shared love of the written word and a desire to unite not only UW students, but also the Laramie community is what drives UW’s Creative Writing MFA, a UW program celebrating its 10-year anniversary next month.

Hosting visiting writers from across the country and the world to share their work with the Laramie community has long been a function of the program. Notable writers like Rebecca Solnit, Salman Rushdie and Claudia Rankine have all read before Laramie audiences as a result of the program’s efforts.

“We want these readings to be for all readers,” Jeff Lockwood, director of the Creative Writing MFA Program, said. “Going off-campus is a way of connecting to the community and hiding our light under a basket.”

Places like the Night Heron Books and Coffeehouse, Second-Story Books and the Quadra Dangle end up being the perfect place for the group’s regular public readings. The MFA program is dedicated to advocating for independent bookstores and places that feature public discourse, Lockwood said.

Ken Koschnitzki, the owner of Night Heron Books said the readings are critical and encourage education.

“It needs to exist. We need to encourage public reading and the sharing of literature,” Koschnitzki said.

The public readings are part of a series of talks that feature different writers across Laramie. Within the MFA program the Emanate Writer and Resident Program hosts a visiting writer at the university for a public reading and a short Q-and-A session for creative writing students. The next of these readings will take place on Tuesday.

For the reading at Night Heron Books, the program asked nationally renowned writers Melanie Thon and Lance Olsen to share some of their most recent work.

Rhanden Lind, a Night Heron employee, said people seemed to enjoy the readings. ,

“I know a couple of people were very excited to see these folks talk,” Lind said. “The general consensus was that they were very satisfied with the whole thing.”

Olsen is a writer who revels in experimentation and breaking the rules. His readings came from one of his own books with different stories on either the top or bottom of the page that interlock with one another thematically.

Thon works within the borders of wonder and sensuality. She shared a piece of, as of yet, unfinished work about the lives of plants and creatures, and by extension human beings, on the border of Mexico and Arizona.

Lockwood said Laramie is in an interesting position in the writing world, being a smaller community. “We can provide the quiet, we can provide the beauty and we can provide, to a certain extent, the isolation,” Lockwood said, “but we can also reconnect with the larger writing world.”