The University of Connecticut’s creative writing program hosted their second Long River Reading Series (LRRS) event of the year on Wednesday, Nov. 13, in the Austin Building’s Stern Lounge. The event featured writers Amelia Sherman and Sterling-Elizabeth Arcadia. It drew a sizeable crowd, with over 20 audience members in the room for the event.
Kyle Barron, associate director of the creative writing program, kicked off the event with an overview of the Long River Reading Series. He said the event has provided writers, both inside and outside the UConn community, a chance to read their work to an audience for over 20 years. It will be held four times this academic year, twice in the fall and twice in the spring.
Sherman, a seventh-semester English student at UConn, read first. She filled in for Charlotte Ungar, a scheduled reader who got sick before the event. Sherman read from a collection of poems curated from a creative writing class she is taking.
Sherman’s poems covered different experiences and connections she has had throughout her life. Her first poem, “Square Breathing,” focused on the burden of anxiety and managing it, with the internal struggle taking place during a mancala game.
Another poem, “Desecration of Clementine,” captured an experience Sherman had in school as a child, when a young boy violently squeezed a clementine right in front of her. The boy meant to taunt Arcadia as her sister is named Clementine, and the experience stuck with her.
Daniel Suriel, a seventh-semester English major, said he enjoyed “Desecration of Clementine” the most, praising the unique subject matter and powerful imagery.
“It was so personal, such a kid moment, and she probably didn’t think about it that deeply then,” Suriel said. “It was such a cool presentation of an orange getting squished.”
Afterwards, Arcadia, a UConn English PhD student, read from a chapbook she’s been working on since 2018, titled “transmasc marvel girl.” It contains a collection of poems with reflections on and inspired by movies she has seen over the years. She described the process as “reading movies through a trans and queer lens and applying them to my life and my thoughts on reproductive politics.”
Printed copies of the poems were passed around so the audience could follow along as she read. In the titular poem, “transmasc marvel girl,” Arcadia reflected on her enjoyment of the “Deadpool” movie franchise despite its stereotypical masculine appeal. She concluded the poem by looking past gendered stereotypes of media and deciding her interests do not dictate her identity.
Some of Arcadia’s other poems reflected on movies like “I Saw the TV Glow,” “The End We Start From” and “Alien: Romulus.” Her witty, comedic timing and sensual lines caused the room to erupt into laughter on multiple occasions.
Sam Fong, a ninth-semester English major with a minor in film, said she enjoyed the movie connections Arcadia made. It is not something she usually sees in poetry and thought Arcadia’s reflections were profound.
“I feel like a lot of people try to avoid [intertextual references] so it’s not derivative,” Fong said. “But I feel like it was done in a way that wasn’t derivative at all. It was very personal, even though it’s talking about something someone else made.”
After the featured readers finished, Barron opened the floor to the audience to present writing of any style for the last 25 minutes. Four readers presented different poems they had written, which covered a variety of topics, reflections and life experiences.
One of the presenters was Fong, who read two of her poems that were recently published. They covered love, describing it as a form of vampirism. She was a featured reader for the LRRS last year, so the experience was not completely new to her.
“So I did this last year, and I was like, ‘I’m going to this event, I might as well read,’” Fong said when asked about why she wanted to share her work. “Things are kinda different now though. Since my last reading I’ve been published, so I thought maybe [I could share], you know?”
After the event, when Barron was asked whether the reading was meant to focus on poetry, he said it was a complete coincidence. When he schedules authors, it depends on their availability, but he tries to group forms of writing together if he can. In contrast to this event, the first LRRS of the year featured prose writers, and both prose and poetry were presented by the audience during the open-mic section.
Barron also went into his process for choosing authors for the LRRS. He said he starts by reaching out to creative writing professors at UConn for students with promising work or other writers who were recently published. But he said an interested writer can reach out to him or one of the other directors of the creative writing program, Sean Frederick Forbes or Ellen Litman, and they will take it into consideration.
Barron recommends students who are interested in creative writing to immerse themselves in the program.
“The creative writing program here is really robust, really well run, there’s a lot of things to do.” Barron said. “Get involved, get as involved as possible.”
The next Long River Reading Series will take place on March 5, 2025. It will feature Sophie Wallis Buckner and Grace Xiong, who will both be reading their poetry.