January 2021

Summer Writing Workshops Return, Online; Application Period Opens Soon

They’re back. They’ve evolved. The Kenyon Review is delighted to offer a full range of writing workshops this June and July, for both adult and high-school writers. As in the past, The Writers Workshops (for adults) will include sessions in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, spiritual writing, and literary translation, along with a workshop for teachers. The Young Writers Workshop will offer a variety of week-long multi-genre workshops throughout June and July. Each workshop will use a specific lens through which to explore creative writing, and high school students may apply for multiple workshops. For Young Writers, the application period will open in early January. For The Writers Workshops, we will start accepting applications on January 14.

What’s new? Given the ongoing uncertainties associated with the pandemic, all Summer 2021 workshops will be online, centering on synchronous Zoom sessions. In addition, the adult writers will have a choice of options—for example, one-on-one conferences with instructors and small-group conversations with journal editors.

What’s the same? Our workshops are “generative”: you produce fresh work, in abundance. You work in small groups, under the guidance of superb instructors. You have plenty of time to write outside of class. Readings and other special events enrich the experience. And you’re part of a community: online this year, but still intimate, energizing, supportive.

We won’t be together on campus, yet. But we will be together, writing. For all the details about the workshops and the application process, check out our website: for The Writers Workshops here, for Young Writers here.

Welcoming KR’s New Editor

Since last July, Nicole Terez Dutton has been immersed in her job as the new editor of the Kenyon Review. But the pandemic hasn’t allowed us to introduce her to the KR and Kenyon College communities in person. We’re marking the new year by doing the next best thing. Join us on Tuesday, January 12, at 7:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time for a live virtual event, at which we’ll welcome Dutton. After brief remarks by Kenyon President Sean Decatur, the noted poet Carl Phillips will chat with Dutton. A question-and-answer session for the online audience will follow. Also on the program are readings by KR Fellows Misha Rai and Molly McCully Brown as well as Kenyon student Tariq Thompson, winner of the 2020 Adroit Prize. Register in advance for this Zoom-based event.

Short Fiction Contest: Submit Now!

January has a bleak reputation, but it’s always a bright spot in the Kenyon Review year, because we get to see astonishing work by writers submitting to our short fiction contest. The submission period opened on January 1 and runs through January 31. Entries must be no longer than 1,200 words. The winning author will receive a scholarship to attend the 2021 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and the winning story will be published in the Jan/Feb 2022 issue of KR. Click here for more information and guidelines.

To Read: Jan/Feb Issue of KR

“On the day my dead brother came home I awoke to the smell of salty broth.” So begins “Fish Stories,” by Janika Oza, winner of the 2020 KR Short Fiction Contest. Oza’s story is one of many pleasures to be found in the Jan/Feb issue of the Kenyon Review. The new issue offers wonderful new work in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including stories by Rachel Heng and Nay Saysourinho, essays by Sonya Larson and Ian Williams, and poetry by Diane Seuss, Vievee Francis, and the late Lee Sharkey. Subscribe or order a print or digital copy today!

To Hear: Kenyon Review Out Loud

The stories, poems, and essays of the Jan/Feb issue come to headphones, earbuds, and speakers via KR Out Loud, our regular audio feature. It’s a great way to enrich your encounter with our writers, who in most cases read their own work. Have a listen.

Why We Chose It

BY KIRSTEN REACH, FICTION EDITOR

“The Queen of Sheba” by Nay Saysourinho, appears in the Jan/Feb 2021 issue of the Kenyon Review.

We often start Why We Chose It columns with what we first notice about a story. But with Nay Saysourinho’s “The Queen of Sheba,” I’d like to start with what the character notices: the peak lapels of a well-made coat. It’s something I never would have noticed—would you? The character’s singular focus transforms the details of a simple garment into something exceptional. There’s nothing more exciting than an author who can teach us new ways to look at the world around us. This year, that world feels small—but we can still appreciate a good coat. Read the rest of Why We Chose It.

From the KR Blog: “Wandering through Wonder: Parallelism and Syntax in the Poetry of Carl Phillips”

BY PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS

December 18, 2020

If [Missy] Elliott’s work runs parallel with Phillips’s, then too the notion of astonishment runs parallel. Astonishment is possible because what arrives to a listener’s ears or to a reader’s mind defies any predictable trajectory. A map is created via patterned syntax and grammatical structures, but how one uses pattern can upend orthodoxy, making of seemingly related syntactical gestures a figurative sleight of hand. Why not consider parallelism a type of prestidigitation, where subtle shifts in prosodic execution stack in such a way that we do not get the chance to see how quickly and sometimes violently the poem has changed? Read the rest of this piece, a lecture that Williams gave comparing Phillips’s poetry to the work of rapper Missy Elliott.

On Books and Their Harbors

On the pandemic-raging day in March 2020 that Lindsay Sproul’s young adult novel, We Were Promised Spotlights, was published (by Putnam/Penguin), she took the risk of accepting a congratulatory hug from a friend—and came down with Covid. She was too sick even to think about promoting her book, but she discovered the world of teenage Instagram book bloggers, who posted creative photos featuring her novel and “restored my inspiration in books as . . . precious objects.” Sproul writes about the experience in On Books and Their Harbors, our series in which writers publishing new books during the pandemic reflect on the communities and booksellers that have supported them. Another recent posting in the series is by Kimberly Grey, author of the poetry collection Systems for the Future of Feeling (Persea Books, 2020). Grey recalls her “opposite of Eden” arrival at Stanford for a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and her serendipitous discovery of Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, a place for writers “to take refuge in this ever-increasingly difficult world.” Click here to read these pieces as well as others in the series, and to buy the writers’ books.

JANUARY 2021 
CONTENTS
Writers Workshops
New Editor Virtual Event
Short Fiction Contest
Jan/Feb Issue
KR Out Loud
Why We Chose It
In My Time Series
From the Blog
On Books & Their Harbors

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