Beginnings
Beginnings are exciting, sometimes terrifying, but always an adventure for those willing to step off the curb and begin the journey. WVWC MFA Blog co-editor Megan has begun a new stage of life and has some wonderful news to share: we have a baby boy! Brian and Megan's arrived at 4:26 p.m. July 10 and was 9 lb., 7 oz. and 21 inches long. His name is Logan Wayne, and the family is doing very well! Below are a few pictures of both proud parents with their new little one. Join us in celebrating this new life.
Everything we do requires a beginning, and those beginnings, as Mary Shelley once said, are tied to the things that went before. The creation of a child marks that child's beginning of life as a human being, and on a parallel level, the parents' beginning of life as caregivers to another human being. This cycle evolves from generation to generation.
The ancestry of the child and the way life ties to those that went before brings to mind The Way to Rainy Mountain, which was required reading for the 2016 summer residency seminar given by Mary Carroll-Hackett, "Gettin' Lyric With it: Exploring Lyrical Prose and Hybrid Forms as Subversive." Momaday's lyrical stories were told in three voices: the ancestral voice, the historical voice, and the writer's personal voice. In the preface, Momaday writes: "There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout, a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself" (33). This leads us to understand that beginnings are really not something new at all - they are a continuation of what has gone before, and what has been learned through the stories of the ancestors. Momaday writes, "A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things. By means of words can a man deal with the world on equal terms. And the word is sacred" (362-363).
Just as families have generations, so has the MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan College. It began with Irene McKinney and her dream of creating a community of writers. Barely after her dream had lifted off the ground and taken wing, Irene was taken to the next life. What continues to evolve, though, as generation after generation of writers begin their journeys at WVWC is so much more than a community - these writers become family, bonded by language, sacred language.
In the spirit of the beginnings of each residency, we'll leave off with a poem by Irene McKinney, our founder from Have You Had Enough Darkness Yet?:
