Spring Break
New faculty thrill Creative Writing program
Jessie Burche
Issue date: 10/1/07 Section: Culture
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"It's as though it's Christmas for us in the Creative Writing program to have our two new colleagues with us tonight," Boisseau said. "Already Kansas City feels like it's getting too cool."
Hadara Bar-Nadav, Ph.D, and Christie Hodgen, Ph.D, read Friday, Sept. 28 at the Writers Place on 3607 Pennsylvania Ave.
It was packed for the reading. So packed, the green and white plastic lawn chairs had to be brought out so people would be able to sit somewhere.
There were many faculty and students from the Creative Writing program at the reading as well.
Bar-Nadav read first from three manuscripts. Boisseau told the audience Bar-Nadav used to be a medical editor.
"She wrote the medical things that go with prescriptions that no one is supposed to read," Boisseau said. "The crazy stuff they made her write came back in a crazy universe of language."
Bar-Nadav shot her words at the audience. Every word is succinct and every sentence is staccato.
She admitted her love for poodles and said her poetry has a lot of references to the animal.
One of the best poems she read was "Woman With Plum" from her book "A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight."
Strange and wonderful lines hit the audience and kept them spellbound.
"The world has become flat again/People walk off the edge," Bar-Nadav said.
Another of my favorite lines from that poem had a beautiful rhyme.
"To be thin in the wind/To walk upright like wheat."
Some of Bar-Nadav's unpublished poetry was also read.
Bar-Nadav chose very unorthodox subjects for her poems. One, named "Abandoned Dome," was about Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome.
"I never thought I'd find a use for icosahedron," she joked, referring to the shape found on the dome.
Boisseau also gushed over Hodgen, who used to work in a lobster restaurant and once spilled melted butter on George H. W. Bush's shoes.
"She could be dead," Boisseau said.
Hodgen read a new piece for the audience.
It was about a woman who was paralyzed in the hospital while pregnant. She goes in when she is 20 weeks along and stays at the hospital until she gives birth.
Hodgen's heroine loves to watch "Tom and Jerry" on TV. She described Tom.
"Yellow-eyed cat, teething, slobbering, Ahab-mad," Hodgen read.
In the story, the heroine seems to be having a constant internal dialogue where she lectures herself and others without mincing words.
"Your life has turned into a French novel … where the main character does nothing," Hodgen read. "Now here you are in perpetual pajamas like Hugh Hefner."
The main character confides in her audience this inner voice won't stop unless it's preempted by Peter Jennings.
She is also constantly being told by Edith, her nurse, how much better her situation would turn out if she would just have a good attitude.
Hodgen's piece is not finished and she would not reveal the ending.
Boisseau closed out the reading by expressing just how excited she was to have Bar-Nadav and Hodgen on the faculty.
"Yippee!" Boisseau said.
jburche@gmail.com
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