English Instructors Share Their Recent Publications
By: Joonyoung Heo, Selim Kim, Aden Lee
On Tuesday, April 12, Instructors in English Alex Myers, Erica Lazure, and Todd Hearon gathered for a reading of their latest published pieces. It was both a celebration of their creative talent and an inspiring opportunity for prospective writers in the Exeter community.
The event was organized by the library and held in the Goel Center for the Performing Arts. Typically open to the townspeople of Exeter, this reading, due to COVID-19, was only an option for students and faculty at the Academy. While English instructors Matt Miller and Ralph Sneeden were invited to the reading, they were both nominated for the Poetry Society of New Hampshire’s “Book of the Year” award, which hosted its award ceremony on the same day. Sneeden took home the award.
Myers’s piece is entitled The Symmetry of Stars. “It’s based on the Orlando legends––one part of that features two sets of twins and two women warriors,” he said. “I was curious about what a ‘sidestory’ to the main legend is and wanted to expand on it.”
Hearon’s piece is entitled Crows in Eden. “I became aware of the term ‘sundown town’ a number of years ago,” he said. “It refers to areas in this country that have been made, and maintained, all-white. After doing some reading on the subject and realizing that these are not exclusively southern towns, as I had assumed, but are widespread throughout the American Midwest, Pacific Coast and even up through New England, and discovering that I had been born into a probable sundown town in Texas, had grown up just across the mountains from such a community in North Carolina, I knew I wanted to write on the subject. The ‘Eden’ of my book is an imagined amalgam of hundreds of sundown towns that I researched, where very similar occurrences have taken place.”
Lazure’s book is entitled Proof of Me and Other Stories. "It’s a short story collection that is set in a fictional town called Mewborn, North Carolina…The collection is linked in that each section has stories that are somewhat connected to each other, whether through family ties, geography, or other themes. Some of the characters in the collection may not even know each other, but you'll see one character showing up in another's story—but they're all more or less a part of the same community,” Lazure said.
Lazure continued by mentioning the decision to center her piece around a fictionalized community set in the American South. “I’m not from the South [and I don’t] consider myself a 'Southern' writer. But I first started writing fiction after I moved to North Carolina and had the chance to read so many wonderful Southern authors, that I feel my writing is influenced by a Southern literature tradition,” Lazure explained.
Miller’s piece is a collection of poems entitled Tender the River. “The book is a look back at the town and river valley I grew up in, but not just my personal history but the history going back to the last ice age, the coming of the indigenous peoples, to the colonists and the industrial era, labor protests, to the economic and social issues of a post industrial immigrant town that keeps trying to find love and life along the banks of the Merrimack River,” Miller said.
Each of the instructors’ creative processes has a unique structure and consistency. “I like to work from existing texts, taking these as the backbone for a work of fiction,” Myers explained. “Other times I make things up entirely. I try to write every day, even when I don’t feel like it. Sometimes, even if I think ‘I don’t know what to write,’ if I just start writing, then more emerges. For editing, I usually share a draft with someone and get feedback, let the draft sit for a while, and then try to revise. How I do that depends on what stage the manuscript is in.”
For his piece, Hearon did a significant amount of first-hand research. “My creative process involved tons of research and reading and even travel—visiting communities where this sort of thing (violent exclusion of African-American communities) had happened, talking to people there, collecting their stories, then beginning to arrange and develop them into a long narrative poem sequence,” he said. “The best way to avoid writer’s block is to stay active and keep reading.”
Miller went through a similar process. He explained what crafting poems around a river with a rich historic past required, saying, “Lots of research into the history and language of place and people, going back to the Laurentide ice sheet that covered and carved this area, to the indigenous people who settled it first, to colonization and industrialization and the fall out of all of that. And the biggest thing I wanted to do was honor the stories and struggles of the people that lived and died and dreamed in this valley.”
Lazure’s collection was finalized and polished through the editing process. "The collection itself is kind of a long time coming…I was the Bennett fellow here at Exeter about 12 years ago, and was working on this collection, and I thought it was finished then. Then, every few years, I would come back to it and reorganize and revise it. This time around, I was able to revise it in such a way that it was ready for publication.”
Lazure continued, “When you write a collection of short stories…you have to kind of keep in mind all of the different things that are going on. You can't just think about one story. You have to think about the story before it, and the story that comes next—how are they in conversation with each other? And so, wrapping your brain around, not just one story, but 20 or 21 stories, and how they connect with each other, is extremely challenging. There were early versions of these stories where there was no real connection, or I wasn't thinking about them in terms of, ‘Could these people all live in, or be connected to in some way, to this one community in North Carolina?’ The more I was able to spend time thinking about it and connecting some dots, I was like, ‘Actually, they can.’”
Miller also found the editing process integral to making his creation “I try to rescue the poem from terrible first drafts. But really I love revising. I love playing with words, with form and structure, with the possibility of what else the poem might want to be,” Miller said.
The organizer of the event, Beth Rohloff, sees these readings as an opportunity for everyone involved. “I think it’s great that hosting reading events is another way for the Library to celebrate and support our faculty,” Rohloff said. “Whenever possible, we try to organize these events when a faculty member publishes. It’s an amazing opportunity for the students as well. Normally they see their teachers in their classroom, and the teachers are the ones reading and making comments on what the students write. But at these readings, the students get to see a different side of their teachers, almost like a second life. I think it really inspires them to be creative and try something new.”
Many in attendance similarly believed that the reading was a worthwhile experience. “It was a really good reading,” upper Phil Avilov said. “I thought Ms. Lazure’s short story about capitalism and mistletoe was cool. Mr. Myers’s book about space entities that keep arguing with each other was pretty funny. One line was like, ‘If I had eyes I would roll them.’ And Mr. Hearon, he read a few poems about a destructive landscape, like copper mines, and that was really cool as well.”
Prep Amara Nwuneli shared similar sentiments. “The readings were very powerful, especially because I heard it from the writers themselves. Each syllable, word and phrase was read as they wrote it to be and each piece had a lasting effect the entire night!” Nwuneli said.
Though Miller and Sneeden could not attend the reading, their time at the ceremony for the “Book of the Year” award presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire, proved to be eventful. Both Miller and Sneeden alike expressed great gratitude for being nominated for such a prestigious award.
Miller shared,“I was honored and it was great to be part of those three finalists. [It’s] nice to have work recognized like that. I was a finalist for the Eric Hoffner prize as well, which is a national prize, and it’s just nice to know all that work landed with people… It was great Mr. Sneeden won the New Hampshire Book award. That book of his was a long time coming and deserves every award.”
Their achievement was also recognized by the instructors at the reading. “When the in-person reading was over, some attendees all huddled around a phone in the Goel lobby, to watch the New Hampshire Poetry Society’s awards ceremony,” Rohloff said. “It was great to see two of our faculty members recognized for their work and Ralph Sneeden accept the award for best poetry book of the year.”
Hearon believes that the support of faculty works doesn't stop there. “I would encourage the community to support your local faculty authors. You can order Crows in Eden through the Irish publisher, Salmon Poetry. Copies of my new novella, Do Geese See God, are available in the Academy bookstore,” Hearon concluded.
