Ohio University alum Holly Wendt ’05M won an award from the Louisville Literary Arts for her poetry, reports Lebanon Valley College.
Dr. Holly Wendt
Wendt earned a M.A. in English from the College of Arts & Sciences at Ohio University.
Lebanon Valley College’s Dr. Holly M. Wendt, assistant professor of English, recently won the Writer’s Block/Memorious Poetry Contest for her work, “What is here inserted comes from a Credible Hand and attested by some now in Boston.”
Wendt’s poem depicts an old widow who grows two extra teeth, to the amazement of the locals. Wendt says that her poem “does connect the concepts of growth and decay, though in the very real sense that to grow is also to grow old, which brings with it inevitable physical deterioration.” Wendt achieves this through the implication that the widow has contracted some fatal disease, the decay of her body drawing parallels to that of her family and teeth.
Wendt received her bachelor’s degree from Lycoming College, her master’s degree from Ohio University, and her doctorate from Binghamton University. After teaching writing and literature at Casper College in Wyoming for five years, Wendt joined Lebanon Valley College’s English Department in 2014. She is currently working on a novel about 18th-century piracy. In order to research the subject, Wendt recently spent a month in residence at the American Antiquarian Society. Read the entire story.
Wendt also was interviewed by Louisville Literary Arts about winning the poetry award.
Congratuations! You’ve won Louisville Literary Arts’ Writer’s Block/Memorious Poetry Contest. Ironically, you typically write fiction. What inspired you to compose this work as poetry? What brought you to the subject matter?
In July, I spent a month in residence at the American Antiquarian Society as a Charlotte and Robert Baron Fellow, researching piracy in the early eighteenth century for the novel I’m working on. When I arrived at the AAS, I had some very specific questions in mind that I needed to answer for the book, but, as all research teaches us, part of learning is also discovering how much we don’t know. Within a day, I understood that I needed a much more comprehensive understanding of the period than I had, and that put me in the really enjoyable role of professional sponge: I needed to read as much of everything as I could and soak up material, linguistic, and geographical details from all manner of primary sources. As I read journal after journal, newspaper after newspaper, I found myself drawn to strange details of all kinds. I knew that they had no actual place in the novel, but the writerly magpie in me couldn’t keep from collecting them anyway. I made a new file devoted entirely to these oddments, and during the first week of the residency, the Widow Quillin piece was the first to hum poem to me. (And I admit that I was incredibly relieved that this piece’s first leanings were toward poetry, as opposed to another piece of long fiction.)
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