Vermont Studio Center

VSC President Emeritus Gary Clark was born and raised in New Haven county, Connecticut. He graduated from Dartmouth College with a BA in English and Drama in 1986, and from the University of Oregon with an MFA in Poetry in 1992. From 1996 to 2014, Gary led the Writers Program at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont, where he lives with his wife Laura and their three children. He was a staff artist from 1993 to 1994. His email is [email protected]. You can read "The Old Ways" below.

THE OLD WAYS

For awhile I turned to honesty and openness,

but all that happened was the people I loved got tired.

After careful consideration, I have decided

it is now time to go back to the woods, build a fire, find a rock,

sit down, and share a poptart with my shadow,

as I used to do, see the flames flickering in my face

as the one place no one knows is there.

There used to be a time, not too, too long ago,

when things that sounded like this were actually like this,

when through a hole in my Carhartts I entered

new nowheres, great beautiful fluids bubbling up out

of the moss at my feet, distance and wind and quiet and dark

and clean and weightless and empty and easy and gone

and all the same thing as me, back then,

back there, where I argued and fought and cheated without fear.

One time, in an orchard sloping down toward a big lake,

arithmetic made sense, and so did leaving.

There was nothing to do, the cold apples were everything,

I drafted a letter made of miles and apologies.

Looking back now on everything, I wish a couple things:

first, that I could understand where things have gone,

and second, that you and I could always go.

Things could be easier, that little bird says, the way

they never were; we could be friends, I could learn to speak,

we could share a soda and pretend we were free

of the old ways, broken free, finally free.

Shangyang Fang grew up in Chengdu, China, and composes poems both in English and Chinese. A recent graduate from Michener Center for Writers, he is a 2020 Stegner Fellow at Stanford. He was a resident in August 2019 and wrote this poem during that time.

Hanae Jonas’s poetry has appeared in ZYZZYVA, The Iowa Review, jubilat, West Branch, The Volta, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ox-Bow School of Art, Kundiman, Mineral School, and the Stadler Center for Poetry. She was the VSC/Kundiman Fellow in November 2018. “Ritual for Spelling Silence” originally appeared in Twelfth House. Website: www.hanaejonas.com

Los Angeles based painter and poet Kamaria Shepherd (b. 1991 in Houston) has exhibited nationally and internationally at Ochi Projects in Los Angeles, CA; New Release Gallery in New York, New York; Human Resources in Los Angeles, CA; SoCal MFA Juried Exhibition at the Millard Sheets Art Center in Pomona, CA; Black Light at the Otis Graduate Studios in Los Angeles, CA; Palazzetto Cenci at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Rome, Italy; and Circolo Degli Artisti in Rome, Italy. Kamaria earned an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from UCLA in 2018 and a B.F.A. in Painting concentrating in Literary Arts from RISD in 2015. Kamaria is the 2018 UCLA recipient of the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship. She was also the Swan fellowship recipient during her September 2018 residency at the Vermont Studio Center.

HA RECOLLECTION

Y’all ain’t coming to da house

You know tha house

The one with yo relatives you never see

The ones that never see you, or acknowledge you

Y’all ain’t coming to da house

Tha out house the old heads spoke of

Hi they didn’t have basic plumbing and slept on a mud floor with just walls,

No ceiling looking at the stars every night and how the rain seeped in

Y’all ain’t coming to tha house

With the bed that held all of them together siblings and all

said it wasn’t right for boys to be in the same room with girls, even brothers

That’s why her children each had separate beds

Y’all ain’t coming to tha house

Her momma told her not to have a lot of babies by a man

They don’t treat you the same and definitely not any better

Don’t you marry a dumb man but you can be a dumb woman

It is honored

It is recommended

Y’all ain’t coming to that house

You are too pretty to be so mean

Stop that talk

Just be quiet and sit pretty

Y’all ain’t coming to that house

I was twenty-nine in that photo, and skinny, and my hair was long

After I had left that house

I got married, I wasn’t gong to stay there and get whipped by my daddy

Y’all ain’t coming to that damn house

Doesn’t look hi she used to

Doesn’t answer hi she used to

Doesn’t smile less she has to

Y’all ain’t coming to that damn house

Doesn’t try less she has to

Doesn’t write less he has too

Doesn’t cry like a baboon

Doesn’t whine by blue moon

Emily Pittinos is a Great Lakes poet and essayist currently teaching in Boise, ID. A December 2019 Poetry Fellow at VSC and an Associate Editor for Poetry Northwest, her recent work appears, or will soon appear, in Denver Quarterly, New England Review, Ninth Letter, The Adroit Journal, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. "I Grow Less Visible" was originally published in Third Coast Magazine.

Khaty Xiong is a poet from Fresno, California. She is the author of Poor Anima (Apogee Press, 2015), which holds the distinction of being the first full-length collection of poetry published by a Hmong American woman in the United States. Her work has been featured in Poetry, the New York Times, How Do I Begin?: A Hmong American Literary Anthology (Heyday, 2011), as well as Academy of American Poets and Poetry Society of America websites, and elsewhere. Xiong was a Vermont Studio Center Fellow in the month of January 2020. The poem, “Banished,” was first published in 2019 on The Margins, the digital magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop: https://aaww.org/trials-in-the-winter-two-poems-by-khaty-xiong/ Twitter: @khatyxiong Instagram: @khatyxiong

Joshua Aiken is a writer based in Connecticut whose poems have been featured in publications such as Assaracus, Forklift, OH, juked, Nepantla, NightBlock, TENDER LOIN, fog machine, and Winter Tangerine Review. He is a Cave Canem Fellow, a winner of the Martin Starkie Prize, and was a May 2018 and July 2019 resident at the Vermont Studio Center. He is currently a JD/PhD student in History and African-American Studies at Yale. "Demand" was originally published in BOAAT and can be read here: http://www.boaatpress.com/demand Instagram: jaikes101 Twitter: jaikes101 Facebook: facebook.com/joshaiken

Andrea Martin was a resident at VSC in October 2016 and was the Writing Program Coordinator staff artist from 2017-2018. She received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is currently living in Iowa City, where she's finishing a Master's in Library & Information Science at the University of Iowa.

Kylie Gellatly is a poet living in Northern Vermont. Her book reviews and interviews have appeared in Adroit Journal, Green Mountains Review, Pleiades, and The Rumpus. She is the Book Reviews Editor and Editorial Assistant for Green Mountains Review. Kylie has been awarded the Factory Hollow Press Scholarship to the Juniper Writing Institute and two Vermont Studio Center fellowships. She was a resident in 2019, in May for Vermont Artists Week, and also in August and October. Instagram: @kyliegolightly

Carlene Kucharczyk is the current Writing Program Manager at VSC and was the Writing Coordinator staff artist the year before. She was the Henry David Thoreau fellow at VSC in September 2017. “On Beholding the Beloved’s Rotting Body” was originally published in Tupelo Quarterly, and you can read the poem here: http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/on-beholding-the-beloveds-rotting-body/ Thanks for listening!