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Warren Wilson MFA Program For Writers:
A 35th Anniversary Reading
Warren Wilson MFA Program For Writers - A 35th Anniversary Reading by Friends Of Writers
THE RESIDENCY AS A LITERARY JAM SESSION
The music heard on this compilation was written and performed by recent graduates in poetry, Jeremy Bass and Alicia Jo Rabins. Excerpts from this piece will also be featured in our digital archives recordings. We asked Jeremy and Alicia to speak about their collaboration on the piece:
JEREMY BASS: Alicia and I wrote that piece one night during her last residency while we were hanging out with everybody and playing music after one of the faculty readings. When we collaborated for the Friends of Writers recording, we decided to show up to the recording session without any rehearsal or discussion before-hand and instead just sit and improvise and record what happened. After a few minutes of messing around with other ideas, the piece came back to both of us, and we recorded it immediately. We had the recording we needed after the first or second take.
That piece grew from our friendship together, and from the activity that cemented that friendship—playing music at Warren Wilson, supported by and surrounded by that community, an activity that stemmed from and—I think I can speak for Alicia here as well as for myself—was a reciprocation of the love and friendship we felt from the program. The tune itself is also a wonderful expression of who Alicia and I are as musicians—in many ways it forms an intersection where aspects of each of our styles meet and fuse together. Playing that song—indeed, playing any music—has always felt like the deepest reflection I could make of what that friendship and community has meant to me.
ALICIA JO RABINS: …Although writers do collaborate, it's fundamentally a rather solitary art form (unless I'm doing something wrong). Music, on the other hand, tends towards the social, the collaborative, the improvisational; individual players coming together to create something different every time depending on who shows up. Even when we're playing a piece that's already composed, playing any music live has an element of improvisation—as a live art, it responds to micro-shifts in the musicians' moods, breathing patterns and what the air feels like. A breeze might well translate into a phrase played differently than before.
This is all to say the residencies have always felt to me like a giant literary jam session—someone mentions a theme in a lecture, it turns out another teacher was also speaking on something similar; the idea appears at a reading that night, is discussed around picnic tables or kitchen counters at night, processed in dreams on plastic mattresses, and weaves itself into the body of that residency. I have often had an image, during readings, of some listening-thinking-writing part of each of us meeting high in the air above Fellowship Hall, the way I always feel there is a center to the music directly between all the musicians playing.