by Sari Krosinsky
Daily Lobo
The pieces you'll hear at a Works-in-Progress reading may be unfinished, but they are still well worth hearing. After all, how often do you get to hear good writers share their work before it's received the final polish?
Works-in-Progress is a more or less monthly reading series featuring unpublished, unfinished poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction by graduate students, faculty and local writers.
Last Friday's reading featured Paul Bogard, a graduate student in the English Department, Blas Falconer, a lecturer in English, and Julie Shigekuni, an assistant professor in English and editor of Blue Mesa Review.
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Bogard read a selection from his work in progress, A Book on the Value of Night. The selection centers around the relationship of a son reconnecting with his mother, touching in the process on such subjects as the influence of parents throughout life and fear for a parent's mortality.
Through a vivid instinct for detail and natural language, Bogard brings out the tension of the story. For example, he describes the mother's frustration in trying to play piano, which she has done throughout her life. She says, "My heart is willing, but my hands aren't anymore." This simple detail brings out the sense of the mother's declining health, and the decreasing amount of time left to spend with her.
Falconer read poems on a variety of subjects, from sex to family to poetry itself. Much of the poetry he read uses simple, beautiful language to convey difficult concepts. In "A call from Whitman Walker Clinic," he reveals a view of disease and death through such phrases as "how easily the one small cell slips by." The poem says that the grandfather, who is its subject, loses dignity in this clinic, but the language of the poem restores that dignity.
But Falconer was not all seriousness. His parting poem, which he said was a sonnet to the love of his life, was titled, "To a black lab." You can guess what that was about.
Shigekuni read a selection from a novel she wrote the first draft of in 1998, and has recently resumed working on. Her even, fluid reading voice brought to mind the voice of the book in the "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" radio series.
The selection centered on the marriage of the narrator's friend and the impending transformation of this friendship. The story also dipped into the narrator's relationship with her mother, probably promising further development in the rest of the novel.
Shigekuni writes with simple, poetic language with strong images, exemplified in such phrases as "our powdered faces pressed together for the photos" and, describing the mother, "with all the silence bred into her through the generations, she held her tongue."
The Works-in-Progress series provides an opportunity to hear some of the great writing being done at UNM. The next reading, featuring Dianna Zimmerman, Lisa Chavez, and Kate Fitzgerald, is at 7 p.m. on Nov. 22, at R.B. Winning Coffee Co at 111 Harvard Dr.
