Vermont Studio Center

Ellen McCulloch-Lovell lives and writes in Montpelier, VT. Her book, Gone, was issued by Janus Press in 2012. She has served as president of Marlboro College, Chief of Staff to Senator Patrick Leahy, and director of the Vermont Arts Council. She was a VT Week resident at the VT Studio Center in 2018 and is the current Interim Executive Director there. "June Pruning" was published in Green Mountains Review: http://greenmountainsreview.com/june-pruning/ You can also read it below.

JUNE PRUNING

My husband stands under the lilac, clippers in hand,

squints up at bare twigs

among the heavy, spent blossoms.

He parts the heart-shaped leaves with his blade

before he nips the dry wood.

Surely, it’s the wrong season to be pruning,

just as the pendulous flowers rot,

exuding their last perfume.

Surely, there must be other chores

this cool June morning:

storm doors to be removed

so we can walk out into fresh grass,

the mowing, cutting back the burdocks

before they invade the new field,

sawing snow-bent saplings,

which will never straighten,

and will hang, grazing the ground, against all order,

but there he is, inside those dooryard lilacs –

overripe, aphrodisiac –

pruning away dead wood,

preparing for the next

profusion.

Chia-Lun Chang is the author of One Day We Become Whites (ND/SA, 2016). Born and raised in New Taipei City, Taiwan, she lives in New York City. VSC: March, 20. IG: chialun.chang

Andrea Blancas Beltran is from El Paso, Texas. She is a 2019 CantoMundo fellow. Her work has recently been selected for publication in Scalawag, About Place Journal, 111O, A Dozen Nothing, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Fog Machine, Gramma, Pilgrimage, and others. Her chapbook profiles was published by Dancing Girl Press in February 2020. Another chapbook Re- was published by Red Bird Chapbooks in July 2018. You can find her @drebelle and http://www.andreabeltran.com/

Wawa is a Hong Kong poet and VSC alumna (Mar 2017 on a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship & Jun 2018 on a Henry Luce Chinese Poetry and Translation Fellowship). She's currently based in Berkeley, CA. More at www.lomeiwa.com

Samuel Hughes is a student in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He was a Staff-Artist at the Vermont Studio Center 2017-2018, and now lives in Burlington. His insta and twitter handles are both @samhugheslives

Francine Conley is a poet and performing artist. She was a VSC resident in 2015 and 2018. Her recorded poem "Joy" was written at VSC in January 2018 and published at https://www.skyislandjournal.com/issue-7-winter-2019. Her first book of poems, What Sweetness from Salt, was published by Finishing Line Press, 2019. For more on her arts: http://francineconley.com/

Sarah Audsley has received support for her work from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio. Recent work appears in Four Way Review, The Massachusetts Review, Memorious, Scoundrel Time, Tupelo Quarterly, and is forthcoming in New England Review and Pleiades. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and serves as the Staff Artist, Writing Program Coordinator at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT.

Tim Mayo was a Vermont Artist Week Fellow in May of 2006, 2008, and 2018. His second volume of poetry, Thesaurus of Separation, (Phoenicia Publishing 2016) was a finalist for the 2017 Montaigne Medal and a finalist for the 2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award. His poem “The Uncapping” was first published in Verse Wisconsin 102. This revised version may be read at https://winningwriters.com/resources/the-uncapping and is included in Thesaurus of Separation. His most recent collection is Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper (Kelsay Books, 2109). More of his poems may be read at his website: https://www.tim-mayo.net

Sebastian Matthews is the author of a memoir and three books of poems. HIs new collection of micro essays "Beyond Repair: Living in a Fracture State" is due out from Red Hen Press this fall. He was a resident at VSC way back when dinosaurs roamed the mountains.

Carolyn Kremers writes poetry and literary nonfiction, and teaches part-time at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She was a writing resident at VSC in November 2017. Her books include Place of the Pretend People: Gifts from a Yup'ik Eskimo Village (memoir), The Alaska Reader (literary anthology), and Upriver (poetry). She was a Fulbright Scholar at Buryat State University in Ulan Ude, Russia, in 2008-09 and again in 2015-16. Her website is http://www.pw.org/directory/writers/carolyn_kremers. Read about Marina Tsvetaeva below.

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941)

Russian writer Marina Tsvetaeva is considered one of the four major poets of the Soviet era, along with Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and Osip Mandelstam. Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow and grew up in an educated, upper middle-class family. Her first collection of poems, Evening Album (Вечерний альбом) was self-published in 1910 and well-received in Moscow literary circles. In 1912, at age nineteen, Tsvetaeva married Sergei Efron. They had three children: Ariadna ("Alya," 1912), Irina ("Ira," 1917), and Georgii ("Mur," 1925). Sergei joined the White Army in 1917, and Tsvetaeva did not see him again for five years. In 1922 – having lost three-year-old Ira to starvation and having barely survived the Russian Revolution and the Civil War that followed – Tsvetaeva moved with Alya to Berlin and on to Prague, where Sergei had fled and was attempting to finish a university degree. In 1925, the four of them immigrated to Paris. For many years, Tsvetaeva wrote in exile and poverty.

In 1937, after the outbreak of World War II, Sergei and Alya decided to return to Russia. Sergei had become a Soviet sympathizer, and Alya, who was twenty-four, was working for a French Communist newspaper. Tsvetaeva loved Russia deeply, but she was worried about returning. Mur begged to follow his father, however, and so, in summer 1939, Tsvetaeva returned with Mur to Moscow. Josef Stalin's political purges in the Soviet Union had ended, but people who had lived abroad were viewed suspiciously, as were people who had been academics and intellectuals before the Revolution. Tsvetaeva was unable to find work or to publish, and within a year, Sergei and Alya were arrested on charges of espionage. Sergei was executed, and Alya was sent to a prison camp.

In June 1941, when Hitler invaded Russia, Tsvetaeva and sixteen-year-old Mur were evacuated from Moscow to the village of Elabuga (Елáбуга), in the Tatar Autonomous Republic. There, on August 31, in the entryway of the small, wooden house where she and her son were staying, Tsvetaeva hanged herself. She was 48.