Event Title: Hell's Bells: A Talk on Tone by Mary Ruefle, Sponsored by The Poetry Foundation
Description: Mary Ruefle is the author of numerous volumes from Wave Books, including My Private Property (2016), Trances of the Blast (2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (2012), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (2010), which was the winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Ruefle is the recipient of many honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.
Location: Ballroom B, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Date & Time: Friday, March 9, 1:30 p.m.–2:45 p.m.     
  

Q: What book or books that you’ve read over the last year would you most highly recommend?
A: In the past year I have read so many fine books it is impossible to isolate one or two, but I did experience one total failure as a reader, attempting to read a famous novel by the Nobel Laureate Heinrich Boll, and being so bored I stopped at page 89. I am currently reading, with great pleasure, James Wright’s translation of Theodor Storm’s The Rider on the White Horse.

Q: What are a writer’s main responsibilities in this particular cultural moment?
A: Each writer must determine for herself what she means by “responsibility” and what hers is. Would that not be in itself an act of freedom? To write at all is an act of freedom, so any form of writing on any subject injects freedom into a world where we might not recognize it at large.

Q: Has public funding for the arts made a difference in your life and career as a writer?
A: Public funding for the arts has made an enormous difference in my life at crucial times, abetting my survival when I could not otherwise have gone on.

Q: When AWP was found in 1967, there were a dozen creative writing programs, now there are approximately 1,800 undergraduate and graduate programs. What do you think has changed for readers and writers since creative writing became ascendant as an academic discipline?
A: It seems obvious that the exponential growth of writing programs has given us more good writing, and more bad.

Q: If you could run into any author, contemporary or historical, at #AWP18, who would it be and what would you talk about?
A: I would like to have met David Markson and talked about the weather.

Mary Ruefle is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and essays, including My Private Property; Trances of the Blast; Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism; and Selected Poems, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Ruefle is the recipient of many honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.