Southern Literary Festival awards Lipscomb creative writers for poetry, essays
Janel Shoun |
| "It is amazing to see the quality of their poetry without having had any formal instruction." -- Dana Carpenter
Communion for Taylor Smith by Andrew Krinks
My dear brother— you who have given yourself to open doorways and prayer like breath for those strangers— listen to what I have to say: I am with you, and I think that I can see you with your friend’s dog along the Indian Ocean where you photograph storms at sea. You understand And I trust that
God has found His way to you— communion, as you say— by becoming the sand betwixt your toes and also, very likely, the salt water in your nose, and the colors I imagine in the eyes of the running dog. |
The nearly 100-year-old Southern Literary Festival has helped develop many of the South’s most talented writers, and this year the festival awarded four of Lipscomb’s own English majors with honors for their writing.
The Southern Literary Festival draws hundreds of entries from public and private universities throughout the Southeast, many with large creative writing programs. At this year’s competition, four Lipscomb students were awarded:
- Amanda Tumblin, a senior, was first place for her formal essay, “A Confederacy of Unwashed Masses: A Confederacy of Dunces and Bakhtin’s Ambivalent Laughter;”
- Lauren Bickel, junior, won honorable mention for her formal essay, “Cinema Purgatorio: Juggling Worlds in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer;”
- Andrew Krinks, a senior, won honorable mention for his poem “Communion;” and
- Anna Laura Reeve, a senior, won honorable mention for her poem “10/23/07.”
- Andrew Krinks also won first place in a national poetry competition at Hollins University with his poem “The Fox” earlier this year.
Lipscomb tied with Rhodes College in the number of students placing in the contest, and the students are invited to go read their works at the 2008 festival held at Southeast Louisiana State University.
“It’s a testament to the kind of talent our kids have,” said English professor Dana Carpenter, who worked with the students to submit their works. “I love teaching Lipscomb students because they don’t stop at fulfilling expectations, they transcend them.”
Creative writing has developed a strong following in the student body in the past few years. About six years ago, students came together to create a student creative writing group and to publish Exordium, the university’s literary magazine.
Carpenter, faculty sponsor of Exordium, has taught two creative writing courses in the past two summers and will hold a third this summer: Creative Non-Fiction. (which still has spots available). Lipscomb is working to establish an academic program in creative writing, she said. Five Lipscomb graduates have gone on to enroll in master’s of fine arts programs since the creative writing group was established, Carpenter said.
Lipscomb student Erin Townsley Ethridge won a first place in poetry at the Southern Literary Festival three years ago.
“I think we are attracting really great English majors,” Carpenter said of the English program. “We hear about Lipscomb attracting business and science students a lot, but I think Lipscomb also appeals to a student interested in developing a sense of spirituality through the liberal arts.”
| Exordium | |
| Andrew Krinks and Anna Laura Reeve served as editors of this year’s literary magazine, Exordium. “With all the demands placed on (Andrew and Anna Laura), to see them, on their own initiative, build a creative community and keep it alive is quite inspiring,” Carpenter said. If you are interested in purchasing a copy of this year’s Exordium, or any of the past editions, contact Andrew Krinks at krinksan [at] mail.lipscomb.edu (krinksan[at]mail[dot]lipscomb[dot]edu) or Anna Laura Reeve at reeveal [at] mail.lipscomb.edu (reeveal[at]mail[dot]lipscomb[dot]edu). |
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"They are both very pure types of poetry. They are powerful in their simplicity," --Dana Carpenter
10/23/07 I had scratched silhouettes of birds, Today I rubbed in two of them, This may be hard for anyone else to understand,
but the place where the other two had been is so empty. I don’t understand how the canvas can so forgive, how the birds can so fly. It was as if a hunter
trained his sights and shot, but oh it is so troubling to find no ripple in the paint, no explosion of feather, so sound of grief. |
“Amanda’s was one of the best examples of academic writing I have read in my eight years at Lipscomb," -- Dana Carpenter
A Confederacy of Unwashed Masses Karl Mannheim suggests in Ideology and Utopia that the intelligentsia is the social group in any society “whose special task it is to provide an interpretation of the world for that society” (Holquist xiii), a difficult task in any society, but particularly during periods of great social upheaval, where the events of the period threaten to outstrip any capacity to interpret them” (xiii). This would be true in much of Southern history, particularly in light of the themes of Southern literature. Groups are constantly redefined, marginalized, liberated, oppressed, and re-categorized. Blurring of race categories is a major issue, and to a lesser degree, conflicts based in family and regional groupings. The 1960s was a time of particular upheaval in the South and was the decade in which John Kennedy Toole wrote A Confederacy of Dunces. Social change, particularly through the Civil Rights movement, was changing the way Americans dealt with each other. Michael Holquist suggests that those who have just experienced such a revolution find themselves in a “gap between cosmologies,” a time where the power has shifted and new categories for organizing the world have yet to be defined (Holquist xiv). Toole uses satire in Confederacy of Dunces to examine these categories that are being reorganized and suggests his own organization of one single category for the world. Utilizing the South’s grotesque traditions to suggest that the demographics are arbitrary, Toole suggests that everyone individually is marginalized and implicated in the problems of the age. Toole creates a novel where the reader must participate with those being laughed at as he laughs, often out-loud and uncontrollably, and often with personal reservation and guilt. |
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“Lauren is an incredibly gifted writer. Some students come along and you just wonder if you have anything new to teach them.” -- Dana Carpenter
Juggling Worlds in Walker Percy's The Moviegoer |
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