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Creative Writing Program's May Student/Faculty Reading

At the final Student/Faculty reading of the year, Creative Nonfiction writer Elizabeth Ansfield and Fiction writer Cami Freeman, both second year MFA students, and poet-cum-professor Kathy Fagan read selections from their work to an enthralled crowd.

Elizabeth Ansfield came in to the world with style, grace, and originality. She was conceived in the Carter Whitehouse and born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. She holds a BA in English and an Integrated Liberal Studies Minor from the University of Wisconsin - Madison, studied at The University of Barcelona and the University of Burgundy in Dijon, France, and Earned an MA in English at The University of Missouri.

Before coming to OSU, Elizabeth says, she was looking for love in all the wrong places. I'm not sure if she means this literally, metaphorically, or perhaps a little bit of both, but where her openness and vulnerability perhaps once seemed to do her a disservice, it's just the thing a writer of personal essay and memoir requires to write the truth. Another carryover from the open-hearted days: along with nearly every piece of writing I have seen Elizabeth hand in for workshop, she writes a little note: "Please be gentle."

Of a character in an essay, Elizabeth writes, "His sensitivity to the physical splendor of things, ordinary things, exhibited some understanding of the world that I didn't have." I would have to disagree. Elizabeth's writing is subtle, careful, and intricate. It is nothing if not sensitive-a quality required by some of the most difficult subject matter any of us wrestle with: the experience of ambiguous loss; the origins of one's definition of family; love and its strange counterpart, tragedy. Her research interests are emotionally and socially important as they are varied. They include Liberia and the Liberian Civil war, the infallibility of memory in experiences of trauma, post-memory (the passing down of traumatic memory from generation to generation), the reform Jewish experience, and the ethics of practicing medicine. On the page, Elizabeth is most interested in exploring the psychology behind people's actions and interactions, the motives behind their words. And at its most poignant, her writing is a reminder, as we move through what can be a world full of loss, to be gentle.

Cami Freeman (a.k.a Camelia Bradley) grew up in Corvallis, Oregon. She graduated from Oregon State University with a B.S. in Biology and minored in Psychology, Chemistry, and Writing. Before coming to OSU, she wandered around the state of Oregon on foot, among other things.

Cami's writing reveals her affection for the strange, the mysterious. It also shows signs of her old habit of walking around for hours with friends, walking with such intensity that there would be no difference between them and the air they were walking through and their voices in the night. When I asked Cami to describe her goals for her work, she quoted Gretel Ehrlich from her preface to The Solace of Open Spaces: "The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding. [...] loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life."

Cami achieves this when she describes a character hitting golf balls off of a cliff in her story "On the Edge of Everything." She writes, "He imagined them suspended like pearls, ornaments, globes as they drifted softly to the rocks and sand below. He imagined they glowed until they hit the bottom and then flickered out, becoming part of the old reef."

Cami's writing-and the characters she creates-are as wild and restless as the Rogue River winding through her home state. She explores the characteristics nature and humanity have in common: their potential for strangeness, danger, beauty; their ability to evoke emotion strong enough it feels like something we walk through: heartbreak; a riverbed; the night air.

Kathy Fagan is the author of four collections of poetry: The Raft, winner of the National Poetry Series; MOVING AND ST. RAGE, winner of the 1998 Vassar Miller Prize for Poetry; The Charm; and the newly-released and luscious Lip, which is available for purchase at The Wexner Center and on amazon.com. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, FIELD, Ploughshares, The Colorado Review, The Laurel Review, and The New Republic, among many other publications, and has been anthologized in collections such as Poet's Choice, The Extraordinary Tide, and Writing Poems. Kathy is also the recipient of fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ohio Arts Council. However, many of us here know her as teacher, mentor, and Poetry Editor of The Journal.

Reviewer Mary Ruefle writes of Lip, "In addition to being dazzling examples of one woman's art, the poems in Lip...trace the human mind in its efforts to make sense out of the world and to find a place in it; they bring us up to date, so to speak, and if they have lost faith in many things, they have not lost the courage to speak. They will not back down, they hold to that essential thing, and the voice within them becomes a beloved instrument of breath among the shrieks."