Stony Brook Writers Speak for First Time Since Pandemic, Host Open House

The Stony Brook Southampton writers program is putting its students and faculty back into the spotlight on Wednesday, December 6 with the first Writers Speak Wednesdays reading since the pandemic, and a special open house event aimed at reintroducing the program to the East End community.

This reading, which follows the open house, will feature 10 students and three faculty members — Susan Scarf Merrell, Amy Hempel and Paul Harding — from what is now officially titled the Lichtenstein Center Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing program. All will be reading their own work, and the public is welcome to attend free.

“It’s taken a while, but we haven’t had a Writers Speak out here since before the pandemic,” explains Christian McLean, incoming associate director of the MFA program and director of the annual Southampton Writers Conference. “The goal is that this one, which is the student-faculty one, will be the first that’s opened up to the public in connection with the open house,” he continues, adding, “In the spring we’ll start doing more of them.”

During the open house, taking place from 6–6:40 p.m. in Chancellor’s Hall on the Stony Brook Southampton campus (39 Tuckahoe Road), guests will get to meet with faculty members and learn about the curriculum, get insights into the admissions process, along with financial aid, and meet with students to get an honest, firsthand perspective on the program.

The Writers Speak portion of the evening begins at 7 p.m., and the school hopes it will prove to be a showcase of the talent on both sides of their classrooms — teachers and students.

“There’s nothing more important for writers than learning how to put their work out into the world,” faculty member and novelist Susan Scarf Merrell says. “I love the way the faculty and students share this event because in this writing business, we’re all teachers and students all the time.”

“It’s always been a really nice part of our program and it’s always been a way of connecting with the East End community, so it will be really nice to have it back,” McLean adds of the event, which has students signed up from the first and second year of the program, as well as at least one currently working on their master’s thesis.

Most importantly, McLean says he wants this night to announce to the community that the program is still going strong. “Trying to get people to realize we’re here, even before the pandemic, was hard. We just haven’t been doing anything to connect with the community … this is hopefully a way of getting that larger East End community connected again,” he says.

McLean points out that the program expanded to New York City, so it now has students in Manhattan and in Southampton, and the current crop is interacting well and doing quality work. “Getting to know them has been really fun. They’re engaging with each other in all the right ways — it’s great. I feel like we’re getting back to the energy we were at before,” he says. “They seem to be taking care of each other, which is always important as writers. It’s good to feel connected to each other.”

The faculty readers have powerful literary chops, like all professors in the program.

Stony Brook Faculty Writers Speak

Merrell most recently published her novel Shirley — a fictional account of Shirley Jackson that was adapted into a feature film starring Elizabeth Moss. She co-directs the Southampton Writers Conference, is co-director (along with Meg Wolitzer) of the novel incubator program, BookEnds, and her book reviews and short fiction have appeared in vaunted publications such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Washington Post.

Paul Harding, who also serves as interim associate provost, is the author of the novel Tinkers, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His second novel, Elon, was published by Random House in 2013. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the PEN American Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers. He was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Harvard University and Grinnell College.

And Amy Hempel is the author of Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home and more. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, The Ambassador Award, The REA Award, The PEN/Malamud Award and The Vursell Award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

For more information about the open house and Writers Speak reading or the Lichtenstein Center’s MFA in Creative Writing program at Stony Brook University, or to register for the open house, visit stonybrook.edu/mfa.