A Moveable Famine - Hardcover

John Skoyles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1579623581 ISBN 13: 9781579623586

Publisher: The Permanent Press, 2014

Synopsis

This is the story of a boy from working class Queens who discovers poetry, an unlikely obsession that leads him from a Jesuit college's all male, sex-starved campus to the St. Mark's Poetry Project, and then to the Iowa Writers Workshop. He makes up for his previous lack of romance while at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and goes on to teach at two colleges, with a stay at Yaddo in between. John crosses paths with Raymond Carver, Robert Creeley and John Cheever, and receives guidance from mentors like Stanley Kunitz and strangers like Allen Ginsberg. A Moveable Famine is, ultimately, the portrait of an individual and an age. Above all, it is a book about identity.

About this title

About the Author

JOHN SKOYLES is a Professor at Emerson College in Boston and the Poetry Editor of Ploughshares. He is the author of two non-fiction books, Generous Strangers (1999), and Secret Frequencies: A New York Education (2006), and four books of poetry: A Little Faith, Permanent Change, Definition of the Soul, and The Situation. He has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as fellowships from the New York and North Carolina Arts Councils. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence College and Warren Wilson College, where he directed the MFA program. He has also served as Executive Director of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he had a been a Writing Fellow. His work has appeared in numerous journals including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and Slate, and he had been a guest columnist for The Boston Globe.

Review

"In an autobiographical novel, which parts are fiction and which are fact? Only the author knows for sure. But when such a work is as entertaining as John Skoyles' A Moveable Famine, it hardly matters. In Skoyles' first work of fiction, he invites readers to join him on a romp through 1970s academia, from his bath-time introduction to poetry in his parents' white-collar home in blue-collar Queens, New York, to his circuit of post-grad poetry workshops and classes, from Texas to New England. Nearly everyone is at least a little quirky, these are poets, after all! These poets, students and teachers do plenty of bed-hopping and bar-hopping, with occasional breaks for poetry-related activities, you know, reading it, writing it and teaching it. Skoyles' prose is chock-full of images that must have been drawn from the poetic corner of his creative mind. There may be no rhyme in Skoyles' poetry, but there's every reason to read his delightful book."--Associated Press

"Poet and Ploughshares editor Skoyles (The Smoky Mountain Cage Bird Society) launches this crackling autobiographical novel with a brash preface 'bemoaning... the wasted lives of everyone who [does] not see the world through the lens of poetry.' This passion for the poetic life is treated with both mockery and sympathy, as we follow Skoyles from Queens, N.Y., to the famed Iowa Writer's Workshop in Iowa City; the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass.; and the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Witty vignette by witty vignette, drink by stiffer drink, this leisurely paced autobiography chronicles the peculiar codes of the 'claustrophobic,' competitive workshop culture and the 'extracurricular activities at poetry's finishing schools.' Its structure is pleasurably slack, casually zooming in on those writers living 'grant-to-mouth.' Quietly emerging from this raucous, entertaining book is a portrait of the aesthetic education of a poet and a fond tribute to his 'colony-hopping' fellows: 'Many were eccentric, some were slightly mad, but all were thoroughly human.'" --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Skoyles presents a sharp snapshot of an era while employing thoughtful themes of self-doubt and the search for mentorship. Poet John Skoyles' autobiographical novel reveals his coming-of-age as a writer, from his days at the Iowa Writer's Workshop to his fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and at the Yaddo mansion in Saratoga Springs. Brushes with literary icons, including Allen Ginsberg and Raymond Carver, seamy anecdotes from the early 1970s and 80s, and everyday collegiality as well as rivalry merge to create an episodic tale of ambition. Chapters set in Provincetown take a leisurely, slice-of-life approach. Skoyles emphasizes social gatherings rife with non-sequiturs, along with sexual misadventures. Scenes with writers such as Alan Dugan, Gregory Corso, and Robert Creeley underscore the work center's high-spirited environment. Stanley Kunitz in particular emerges as a well-drawn guide given to making wise remarks, including the advice that the ending of a poem 'should be a door and a window' and that poets should 'live in the layers/not on the litter.' The book's focus on the inner sanctum of a masters-in-fine-arts program and on the wilder side of elite residencies may seem narrow, but Skoyles seldom preaches to the choir. With a narrator who is seemingly shepherded along by luck, A Moveable Famine offers a gently satirical, funny take on a world marked by eccentricity." --ForeWord Reviews

"A series of anecdotes both laugh-out-loud humorous and searingly poignant, Skoyles' narrative is at once fast-paced and poetic. Skoyles is both modest about his accomplishments and adept at noting them in understated prose. Fame, or its more modest brothers, respect and admiration, pop like air bubbles above the narrative's ebb and flow. His narrative feels alive. And satisfying, too. If not a feast, no famine, either. Recite his words aloud and a reader tastes them on lips, teeth, tongue. Yum."--NY Journal of Books

"Writers, in groups, have a reputation for displaying certain behaviors: incestuousness, alcoholism, competitiveness, eccentricity, and pretensions. They have earned this reputation fairly. If you want first-hand evidence of the basis for this reputation, look no farther than John Skoyles' A Moveable Famine. All the deep talk, competition, and moments of pretension come to shape our hero, then, ultimately make him stronger, capable of writing this book with a firm, humane, and always genial hand." --The Boston Globe

"In his personal account of the collision between life and art, Skoyles writes with candor, energy, irreverence, and the high spirits that remind me of a trilogy I have long considered the standard for American comic fiction Henry Miller's The Rosy Crucifixion."--Stuart Dybek author of I Sailed with Magellan

"In this rangy, beautiful memoir, John Skoyles page by page, word by word, paying close attention to the particulars of this world-becomes a poet before our eyes."--Nick Flynn author of Another Bullsh*t Night in Suck City

"For anyone who's interested in the process of becoming a writer not to mention that of becoming a man John Skoyles' A Moveable Famine will be a must read. I wish it'd been around when I was young and still trying to figure out how to do both."--Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Empire Falls

"Holden Caulfield in an MFA program? John Skoyles' A Moveable Famine is a picaresque and hilarious tale of youth regarded from a distance, a novel of romantic, literary and social misadventure and initiation. I think it would be impossible for any writer to read this book without breaking into frequent fits of laughter, as I did, at the cluelessness of our narrator, learning the ropes. It is also one of the best accounts that I know of writerly culture in the time of the seventies and eighties. Did I mention that A Moveable Famine is hilarious?" --Tony Hoagland, author of What Narcissism Means to Me

About this edition

• Publisher: The Permanent Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1579623581
• ISBN 13: 9781579623586
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256