The Brockport Writers Forum is an annual author spotlight series
co-organized by The College at Brockport professors Anne Panning and Ralph Black,
and it includes all genres: fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. The Forum
benefits SUNY Brockport’s creative writing students in particular, who read the
works of the visiting writers as part of a course called The Writer’s Craft.
During class time, students have the opportunity to do a more intimate Q&A
with visiting writers before the public readings.
The current fall
season so far has showcased four writers. Earlier this month, award-winning
poet and Rochester native Cornelius Eady performed and sang live with three
other musicians in addition to giving a poetry reading. The forum also brought novelists
Weike Wang and Stephanie Powell Watts and essayist Elena Passarello to campus earlier
in the fall. A final event on Wednesday, November 28, will feature Anne Panning
reading from her memoir, “Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss.”
Panning
spent eight years writing the memoir about the loss of her mother. “Dragonfly
Notes: On Distance and Loss” (Stillhouse Press, September 2018) is written in
brief fragments in which dragonflies serve as not only a symbol of Panning’s
mother, but operate as a vehicle that takes the reader through different places
and moments in time. The book maps an extensive geography, pulling the reader
to Minnesota, to Brockport, New York, and to Vietnam, and readers are reminded
that every adventure presupposes a risk.
The memoir
also brings to light the difficulty children face in humanizing their mothers, as
women with identities that exceed their roles as protectors and caretakers.
The imagery
Panning paints of her mother is that of a woman behind a sewing machine with
fabric draped over her and “…pins held between her teeth, measuring tape hung
around her neck.” The reader hears the clicking of her mother’s knitting needles
and envisions her through the scenes in which she is creating myriad forms of
soft arts: a quilt, a dress.
“Girls and
their moms have really contentious relationships,” Panning said during a recent phone interview with CITY. “But no
one will ever love you like your mother.”
Likewise, the
reader feels the absence of Panning’s mother in later moments when the book
jumps forward in time, after her death. Here we experience the quiet moments in
the absence of those clicking needles, and the feeling that something is amiss.
Panning said that she felt she should not express emotion in the memoir,
rather, this was an opportunity for her mother to finally be heard and seen.
Panning has
lived in the Rochester area for twenty-one years, and her writing is filled
with many of Brockport’s most beloved icons such as the Eerie Canal and Lift
Bridge Books. In addition to co-organizing The Writers Forum and writing her
own stories, she teaches creative writing at SUNY Brockport.
When asked
what she thought about renowned Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ethos
that, “Writing cannot be taught, you have to learn it yourself, like playing,”
Panning replied: “I actually met him at a conference in Iceland. I can teach a
lot about craft — points of view, writing dialogue — but what I’ve done is
shift how I teach my workshop. I try to go back a few steps and ask: What is
creativity? You have to be curious and tell your students to just go!”
At the
moment, Panning is writing another memoir about her father, one she says won’t
take nearly as long to complete as “Dragonfly Notes.”
Panning says that diversity is a major
consideration in the Writers Forum. “We’re trying to bring
intersectional authors in,” she said, adding that she looks forward to hosting Morgan Jerkins through the program
this spring semester. Jerkins recently published a New York Times best-selling
essay collection, “This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of
Black, Female and Feminist in (White) America.”
Jerkins “focuses
on race, gender, and class,” Panning said. “Her essays are political as hell.”
Jerkins, as well as several award-winning poets, essayists, and novelists will
be visiting the SUNY Brockport campus for the Spring Semester.
Panning’s reading takes place Wednesday, November 28, at 7
p.m., in Cooper Hall, NY Room, at The College at Brockport. Free. For more
information, visit brockport.edu/academics/english/writers_forum.
SPRING SEMESTER LINE-UP:
February 13: Andre Dubus III, fiction writer
February 27: Morgan Jerkins, creative nonfiction writer
March 13: Ralph Black, poet
April 17: Christine Kitano, poet
May 1: Art of Fact Award, Leslie Jamison, author of “The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath” and “The Empathy Exams.” REOC SUNY building, downtown Rochester
This article appears in Nov 21-27, 2018.
