Finger Lakes Writing Workshops in Poetry & Prose

An Interview with Workshop Leader Antonio Vallone

Antonio Vallone has taught at Purdue University, McNeese State University, and Indiana University at Kokomo. He held a creative writing internship at SUNY Brockport and a creative writing teaching fellowship at Indiana University at Bloomington.

At present, he is an associate professor of English, creative writing, and film at Penn State DuBois. Antonio is the author of four collections of poems, The Blackbirds’ Applause, Grass Saxophones, Golden Carp, and American Zen. He is the editor of Pennsylvania English, the journal of the Pennsylvania College English Association, and publisher-editor of MAMMOTH books.

Q: What do you love about poetry/fiction, and what about it do you think can be taught or learned?

A: What I love about poems or stories (good ones, anyway) is how they can—across time, geography, gender, religion, personal experience—come into my life and change it in some way for the better. They entertain me, teach me, move me, startle me into recognition and awareness, sustain me.

I think in everything that humans do—writing or waiting tables or anything else—we can see a spark that sets a really great performer of that particular activity apart from others. That spark, made by striking talent/creativity with desire, can’t be taught. It’s the spontaneous exuberance of the Crocodile Hunter versus the (hopefully) feigned and frightening total disinterest of rappers. Everything else besides that spark can be taught. And that’s quite a bit!

Q: What kinds of things are you going to be doing during the week?

A: I want to start with the basics, the fundamentals, like a sports camp. Out of those basics can come some fine poems. Then, later, can come innovation. Good poets either do what everyone else is doing and do it very well, or they do something different but engaging.

Q: Will people be expected to submit work ahead of time, or will the work be created at the workshop?

A: I would like people to create poems at or out of the workshop. New work. But I would look at older work, too.

Q: Who are some of your favorite poets/writers?

A: There are so many! But poems by three poets have literally and significantly changed my life. Hearing James Dickey’s Cherrylog Road my first semester in college made me realize poetry was still being done and wasn't a dead art like cave painting. I switched from business to English as a major. Hearing a poem whose title I never could find out by Lucien Stryk made me switch from writing fiction to writing poetry in graduate school. Reading Lightning Bugs Asleep in the Afternoon by James Wright that appeared in an issue of The New Yorker on my 21st birthday made me realize I should stop feeling like a failure and, as the last line of the poem proclaims: “open my eyes and shine.” That’s the power of poetry.

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