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Winter Student/Faculty Reading: All You Need Is Love, or Something Like It
Professor Erin McGraw read an excerpt from the opening of her latest story Milk, which describes a man falling with eyes-wide-open awareness into midlife-crisis love with a younger woman while mulling over the state of his own reconciled marriage. McGraw's reading proved true to Catie Crabtree's introduction, where she quoted Erin's students as reporting that her stories "hit the ground running" and "are true in the sense of good carpentry being true."
Poetry MFA student Maria Caruso followed McGraw, reading several poems from her growing portfolio. Her poems covered a wide range of topics and emotions, revealing Maria's way with words that her fellow-poets have described as a "careful way with all aspects of language, especially sound, rhythm, and readers' associations."
Fiction MFA student Gina Ventre finished the evening, reading an excerpt from her novel Mansfield, which Gina's colleagues have described as fulfilling Stephen King's criteria for good stories that "care about my feelings as well as my intellect." Gina's grittily realistic story about two college girls who know the power availability has over hours on the treadmill held the audience's fascination and left them wanting more.
