RILEY STRAW
Copy Editor
The Mary Louise White Visiting Writers Series has brought many poets and fiction writers to Fredonia, including Rachel McKibbens, Matthew Olzmann and most recently, Jericho Brown. However, after 14 years of various creative writers, Fredonia has ceased the program, and the final visiting writer visited Fredonia last week.
Ethan Rutherford, writer of a collection of short stories titled “The Peripatetic Coffin,” came to McEwen 202 this past Thursday, April 16, for a reading and a craft talk.
There are many reasons that the Visiting Writers Series will no longer be offered in its current form, ranging from a lack of available faculty to a lack of available funding.
“The primary one was manpower,” said Dustin Parsons, a creative writing professor and co-organizer of the Visiting Writers Series. “We’re searching for another professor. Last year, we were unable to hire anyone, and that line dissolved. We don’t have another full-time person to help us.”
The minor in creative writing, offered by Fredonia, has hinged upon the requirements of the Visiting Writers Series class. The future absence of this requirement has left many students in the minor in the dark.
“We’re getting rid of the two [Visiting Writers] courses at .5-hours, and we move, I think, from 22 hours or 23 hours to down one hour,” Parsons said. “It affects the students because those who are graduating this semester will still have to have had the requirements of the old minor, but moving forward, anybody who’s taking it but is graduating after May of ‘15, the credits will just count toward their overall 120 hours.”
As the final installment of the Visiting Writers Series, Rutherford’s craft talk, titled “Endings, or Surprise Orientation, Disorientation and Finality,” seemed only fitting — he spoke in great detail about some of the strengths and faux pas writers have employed while ending their works.
“I’ve been accused of taking pleasure in unresolved action,” Rutherford said of his own endings during his craft talk. “The writer’s first job, before she does anything else, is to keep the reader turning the pages. We read because we are interested in what happens next.”
“In my classes we talk a great deal about decisions that a writer has to make,” said Parsons. “Rutherford did a good job of articulating that point. The same story, for instance, can end in several different places: the end of the physical action, the end of the character’s dilemma, the precipice of decision. And each decision, from the same story, will alter the overall reach of the story, the focus of the piece.”
Rutherford, with his neatly combed hair, green dress pants, and general air of sophistication, held a craft talk and a reading of one of his short stories from the collection. “Camp Winnesaka,” the story of a faulty camp counselor who tries to excuse the many deaths of the camp’s attendees, kept the audience intrigued, attentive and entertained.
“I think his reading of ‘Camp Winnesaka’ was fantastic,” Parsons said. “I agree with students who told me he really inhabited the character, and his deadpan delivery made the diabolical nature of the main character even sharper.”
Though the series ended with Rutherford, Parsons maintains that there will be more writers to visit Fredonia; this marks the end of the Visiting Writers Series — not the end of visiting writers.
“Instead of spreading the $2,000 we have over four writers — $500 doesn’t even cover their plane ticket if they’re coming from the West Coast — now we can offer two writers $1,000 apiece,” he said. “That is an honorarium more on par with what readers expect.”