Allan Gurganus has returned from his semester teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. An interview on this and other topics, conducted by the Workshop’s Librarian, Kelly Smith, appears in our site’s Reading section.   

Gurganus writes, “Returning to your alma mater, teaching kids the age you were once, all this lets you so far down into your own past. My classes were both talented and kind, a winning combination. I am now older than were my own great Workshop teachers, John Cheever and Stanley Elkin. Finally, by being there and working hard, I understand what they got out of our exchange. Little is more exciting than watching a student parachute into the State Park that is her own talent, as she strides its periphery, judging the scale, size, topography."    

In late June, Gurganus will pay homage to another friend and mentor, James Merrill.  One of Merrill’s late great poems, “Rhapsody on Czech Themes,” 1995, is dedicated to Allan Gurganus. The reading will be held in Stonington, Connecticut as a benefit for the Merrill House. The poet’s residence there is now a retreat for artists.   

Skidmore College’s Writers Institute will feature a class taught by Gurganus, July fourth through tenth. As part of the summer program at Skidmore he will do a reading of his fiction, times to be announced on the Skidmore website.  

The last three weeks of July will be spent at the artists’ colony, Yaddo, in Saratoga. Allan Gurganus has served on its board for over thirty years.   

Work continues on his new novel, “The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church”.     

Recent publications include an essay, “Old Houses & Young Men: Notes on Renovation and Survival” in the Eno Press anthology, “27 Views of Hillsborough”. This is a group tribute to Gurganus’ adopted North Carolina hometown.    

He contributed nine “Narrative Speculations” to the catalogue of the Tyche Foundation, published by the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gurganus was allowed into vaults that contained fifty-one works new to the Museum. His very short fiction grew sprung from a single afternoon’s highly-caffeinated sketching and note-taking.    

A short essay forthcoming in “Southern Cultures” magazine chooses Ross McIlwee’s brilliant documentary “Sherman’s March” as the singularly characteristic movie about the American South.    

Gurganus’s work, “When I Was Engaged To Ava Gardner” originally appeared in the “Oxford American”. It has now been gathered with other love poems to Gardner, a North Carolina native. Essays, poems and stories make up “Ava Gardner: Touches of Venus”, edited by Gilbert Gigliotti for Entasis Press. Contributors of other homages are Margaret Atwood, Jim Harrison and Robert Graves.   

Gurganus will spend the autumn and winter at work on fiction. On October seventeenth, at the Weymouth Center at Southern Pines, he will be inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.