College of Creative Studies

Spring 2008 Literature Symposium

Wednesdays, 4:00-5:00 p.m. Old Little Theatre (Building 494)

Apr 2 - Barry Spacks, known mainly as a poet and teacher, has also been a painter for over forty years. He was named the first Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara in 2005. He has published novels, stories, nine collections of poetry, and three CDs of poetry readings while teaching literature and writing for years at M.I.T. & UCSB. He has adapted his first novel, The Sophomore, for the screen. His tenth book of poems, Food for the Journey, will be published by Cherry Grove Collections in August 2008. His reading will include poetry from older books, his new collection, and a few written very recently.

Apr 9 - Cassie McGrath won the College of Creative Studies Brancart Competition for Fiction in 2007. She also won the California Media Association Award for Best Arts and Entertainment Story, 2007, and placed second in the Corwin Screenplay Competition in 2007. In addition to stories and screenplays, she writes reviews and memoirs. Currently she is working on a Masters in Education at the UCSB Givertz Graduate School and is teaching seventh and eighth graders at Santa Barbara Junior High School. She will read from the story that won the Brancart Competition.

Apr 16 - Lan Tran, Writer/Solo performer, will presentexcerpts from her solo shows. ELEVATOR/SEX premiered off-Broadwayin New York at the West End Theatre inMay 2006.Her shows have been featured on NPR and produced at numerous off-Broadway theaters as well as at New York City Hall. Her one-woman show "How to Unravel Your Family" played to a sold-out audience in the Lincoln Center Theater. She has published fiction, creative nonfiction,and poetry in literary journals. "Lone Stars," a tale about her Vietnamese-Texan upbringing, appeared in Waking Up American (Seal Press). She is a 2005 recipient of the PEN/Rosenthal Fellowship.

Apr 23 - Spectrum reading: This symposium will be a reading of poems and prose by students published in the 2008 issue.

Apr 30 - Russ Baggerly, or Chato, has studied and played flamenco for forty years. He lived in Sevilla for six years where he learned flamenco from Miguel García, the lead guitarist for the Jose Greco Dance Company. Flamenco song is now a part of his performances throughout California, and in his presentation, besides playing a variety of songs, including a “deep song” by the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, he will explain some of the history and development of flamenco music and song lyrics in southern Spain.

May 7 - Marvin Mudrick founded the College of Creative Studies in 1967. The existence and survival of CCS have depended on the ideas for education that Mudrick set down after Chancellor Cheadle asked him to “work up an academic plan for this campus.” After the Regents approved it, Mudrick ran CCS as its Provost for nearly twenty years. Moreover he taught a literature class and a class in the writing of narrative prose every quarter. His classes were exciting, funny, and unlike anybody else’s. Besides being a teacher and administrator, Mudrick was a brilliant and prolific writer. He published essays quarterly in The Hudson Review without missing a deadline for over twenty-five years, and most of these essays are collected in his books. But as good as his writing was, his talk was even better. He had the gift of gab and used it. In the classroom, according to Max Schott, Mudrick “took delight in arguing, loved hyperbole, had a propensity for intellectual provocation and irreverence and blasphemy, took pleasure in kicking against the pricks, and was convinced and tried to convince others that talk and the thinking in it (even about serious things, or especially about them) could and should be entertaining.” Mudrick spoke in this way in a number of CCS symposia: starting with certain notions and improvising as he went along with a lot of wit and a lot of enthusiasm, trying to ignite a feeling for literature and music in others. One of these, an Art Symposium called “Am I Enjoying Myself Yet?” was videotaped in 1985. It will be shown for this symposium.

May 14 - Brooks Hansen was born in 1965 in New York City. He attended Harvard where he received a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and English. Since then he has written six books. The first of these, a fictional oral biography entitled Boone, he co-wrote with Nick Davis. Since then he has written three more novels: The Chess Garden, Perlman’s Ordeal, and The Monsters of St. Helena; all three were named New York Times notable books and compared to the works of Nabokov, Poe, and Calvino. Hansen has written and illustrated one book for Young Readers as well, Caesar’s Antlers. He has also worked as a screenwriter. At present he is completing a new novel/history entitled John: the Life of the Baptizer, for which he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. His forthcoming book The Brotherhood of Joseph, a memoir due for release in June, narrates the grueling, sometimes comical, and sometimes heartbreaking path that led Hansen and his wife to their first child--all the way from the sterile labs of East Coast fertility clinics to far off Western Siberia. In addition to reading from this forthcoming memoir, Hansen will speak about the experience of writing it.

May 21 - Sara Holmgren & Patrick McFate: Before graduating from CCS in June 2003, Ms. Holmgren won Pocket Money Awards for prose and poetry, two Pillsbury Awards from the Santa Barbara Foundation, and the Brancart Prize for Fiction 2003 for her story "I'm Here with Your Mom and Your Dog.” With co-writer Jesse Keenan, she won the grand prize for the Santa Barbara Screen Writing Competition in 2004. Her poems and stories have been published in magazines, including Spectrum and Into the Teeth of the Wind. She received her MFA from Saint Mary’s College of California in 2006. Patrick McFate also received an MFA from St. Mary's in 2006, graduated from CCS, was awarded two Pillsburys from the Santa Barbara Foundation, and published his prose in Spectrum. In addition, he received an Agnes Butler Scholarship for Literary Excellence and has published stories in Glimpse magazine. The two writers will read recent stories.

May 28 - Caroline Allen teaches literature and narrative-prose writing at CCS. She writes short stories and paints landscapes, interiors, and portraits. She received a grant from the Santa Barbara Foundation for an exhibit called Santa Barbara County: Changing Urban Seen, which included Allen’s paintings and writing, her husband Bob DeBris’s photographs, and sketches written by CCS students. Allen is co-director of the CCS Arts Institute for junior high and high school students in Santa Barbara and Goleta. Currently, she’s writing a novel, short stories, and artist profiles. Her stories have been published in literary magazines and her paintings exhibited in Santa Barbara galleries.

June 4 Melissa Seley and Alex Scordelis: Melissa Seley just finished up the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College. Sometimes she writes for magazines. Lately she's been really excited about working on oral history projects with author Gerry Albarelli. She loves listening to lively talk, reading great literature and making ravioli with Caroline Allen. Also: beautiful shoes, funny people, people who defy convention, the letters of Anton Chekhov, Jamaica Kincaid's Talk of the Town pieces and the works of William Maxwell, MFK Fisher, Chaucer, Dawn Powell, Sybille Bedford, Ian Frazier, Fred Astaire, Johnny Cash and June Carter, Jo Ann Beard and Rebecca West. And yellow polka dot bikinis. Alex Scordelis graduated from CCS, is working on an MFA at The New School in New York, has written and illustrated a children’s book, and is writing a history of pranks for Harper Collins.