Distinguished Writers Share Work With Community
Bennett Fellow
Every year, a selection committee chooses a George Bennett Fellow from hundreds of applicants to bring to campus, honoring an unpublished author looking to develop his or her own writing at Exeter. The award provides a stipend for the school year along with housing and other benefits.
This year’s Bennett Fellow, Peter Anderson, made himself available to the community in many forms: he gave a lecture in the Assembly Hall, provided excerpts of his current project, held question-and-answer sessions throughout the school year, led discussions in English classes and hosted writing workshops to share his craft.
Bennett Fellow, Peter Anderson presents his writing in the library. (Photo Credit: Rachel Luo)
Anderson has taken this opportunity at the Academy to make a switch from his usual literary genres. Having pursued journalism and written essays, poetry and children’s books during the course of his 30-year-long career, Anderson has recently merged a “hybrid” of these styles by working on a mystery novel, which he touched upon at Assembly in the winter. The novel is set in small mountain town in Colorado, called Mirage; Mirage is based off of the town of Crestone, where Anderson has lived for the past 15 years.
Anderson described the Crestone as an unusual place that “keeps re-inventing itself.” “Its identity is hard to pin down, so creating a fictionalized version of the place has been a great adventure,” he said.
As Anderson explored this genre of mystery, a style unfamiliar to him at the start of the year, he had to rethink some of his most basic writing techniques for his piece, explaining that he was forced to use much more imagination than he normally uses.
“Walking is a passion of mine and also an important part of the overall creative process for me. Good walks generate good thinking.”
E.L. Doctorow, a famous American novelist of the 2oth century, once said,“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
Unrestricted by literary structure, Anderson has used Doctorow’s thought as a guideline for his work—he doesn’t start off with a concrete ending in mind, but rather with an outline of where he wants to take his piece. Anderson remained open to all kinds of input throughout his writing process, an important aspect to successful creative writing.
No stranger to adventure, Anderson has also served as a backcountry ranger, river guide, small town newspaper reporter and editor/publisher. He has recently co-edited Going Down Grand: Poems from the Canyon, an anthology of Grand Canyon poems, and his publications include several children’s books about the natural history of the American West. His poems have been featured in New Poets of the American West and other anthologies.
Most of Anderson’s works have been “about people, their geographies and the relationship between the two.” His publications focus on the dependency of people within the world. More specifically, Anderson believes looking at how society is constructed and our awareness of its effects is an important role we play as citizens.
“Writing about [a] place is one of the ways I have chosen to do that,” he said.
The Bennett Fellowship was named in honor of George Bennett ’23, who served as a long-time teacher and chair of the English Department. The award provides “time and freedom from material considerations” to a writer or someone genuinely pursuing a career in the field of literature.
The fellowship provides a one-year stipend as well as housing for the writer-in-residence; the recipient must live in Exeter for that year and make him or herself available in unofficial ways to aspiring student writers, including student literary magazines and English classes.
Anderson applied for the Bennett Fellowship due to his interest in an entirely new type of project, and he felt the opportunity at Exeter gave him the “gift of time to pursue it.” He has found the Academy very welcoming and hospitable, and has favorably experienced the great spirit of generosity symbolized by the school’s “non sibi” motto.
A professor of composition, creative writing and literature, Anderson has enjoyed experiencing the Harkness method in English classes he has visited, and he hopes to bring that experience back to Adams State University in Colorado when he returns there next year.
Anderson also credits the trails in the nearby woods and along the river with helping his creative process.
“Walking is a passion of mine and also an important part of the overall creative process for me. Good walks generate good thinking," he said.
As with many writers, Anderson admits the creative process is not always easily accessible.
“Sometimes the words come, sometimes they don’t,” he said. “My job, anyone’s job as a creative writer, is to show up, settle into the page, and see what happens.”
The fellowships allow students, faculty and the writers themselves to gain perspective on their studies and their futures, and, in the words of Anderson, “be curious, live an interesting life and pay attention along the way.”
Lamont Poets
In 1982, Corliss Lamont ’20 established The Lamont Fund, which supports the Academy Library’s Lamont Poetry Series and annually invites two established poets to give readings on campus and to attend English classes. Prior honorees have included Nobel Laureates Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott. This year’s Lamont poets were professors Phyllis Levin and Vijay Seshadri.
Phyllis Levin, the Lamont poet featured this spring, has written five books of poetry to date: “Temples and Fields” (1988), “The Afterimage” (1995), “Mercury” (2001), “May Day” (2008), and “Mr. Memory & Other Poems” (2016).
She has won many awards for her writing, including the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award in 1988, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2007.
“[Seshadri] is a great poet, like all the poets that have come through here, but...he brings his own style, voice, experiences, aesthetics and energy to the most ancient of literary art forms.”
In addition to writing poetry, she also compiled and edited a popular sonnet anthology, “The Penguin Book of the Sonnet” (2001). She is a professor of English and a poet-in-residence at Hofstra University.
Many Exeter English classes analyzed Levin’s sonnet anthology, which she called, “an autobiography, not of any one person, but of the life of a literary form that ever since its conception has given birth—or rebirth—to many poetic identities and to countless poems.”
Levin said that she did not set out with the intention of creating an anthology, instead writing the sonnet anthology out of necessity.
Lamont Poet Vijay Seshadri reads his writing on the assembly stage. (Photo Credit: Jena Yun)
She taught a college course on sonnets, and she had always supplemented the course’s anthology with other sonnets. When that anthology, the only one that was available at the time, went out of print, Levin decided that she needed to create her own to continue teaching the course. After persevering through criticism, working with copyright laws and carefully choosing which sonnets to include, Levin’s book was eventually published by Penguin Books, Inc.
In a question-and-answer session with students of lower and upper English classes, Levin discussed her writing process. A poem first comes to her in her head, and she has nearly the entire poem memorized—every word, punctuation mark, line break—before she ever touches pencil to paper. And yes, she does handwrite the first draft the old-fashioned way, before ultimately typing out her finished work.
Vijay Seshadri, Exeter’s other Lamont poet this school year, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet currently serving as the director of the graduate nonfiction writing program at Sarah Lawrence University. He has received the James Laughlin Award for his 2003 work “The Long Meadow,” and his collection “3 Sections” won the the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2014.
The Pulitzer committee described “3 Sections” as “a compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness, from birth to dementia, in a voice that is by turns witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless.”
Seshadri was born in India and immigrated to the United States when he was five years old. Since then, he has received fellowships from various foundations, including prestigious instutions such as the Guggenheim, the NEA and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
This past October, Seshadri read selections from his collections “3 Sections” and “The Long Meadow” to the Exeter Community. For each, he described in advance those poets and previous works that had inspired his writing.
Seshadri was chosen as a Lamont poet because of his variety and unique style. English instructor Todd Hearon, who taught a senior poetry course this fall, noted that the selection committee chose Seshadri “because of the quality of his poetry and the variety of style and voice it contributes to our range of other selections.”
“[Seshadri] is a great poet, like all the poets that have come through here, but...he brings his own style, voice, experiences, aesthetics and energy to the most ancient of literary art forms, ” English instructor Matthew Miller said. “He makes the art new and in doing so continues the tradition.”
Exeter’s efforts to bring experienced, published writers to campus benefits both students and those writers invited. Students are mentored by some of the most acclaimed writers of the time, and the writers experience a rigorous academic environment with students who are eager to learn about the process of writing and faculty who are encouraging and knowledgeable.