A writer who has won numerous awards and she is described by Director of Creative Writing, Mark Neely, as one of the most interesting young writers working today read some of her work for students.
Danielle Cadena Deulen, the first speaker of Ball State’s English Department’s spring creative writing series, read from her collection of poems and her own memoir Wednesday night.
Creative writing professor Jill Christman said the passion in her writing is obvious.
“Reading her work is not a passive activity,” she said.
Her memoir, The Riots, won the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award when it was published in 2011. Her collection of poems, titled “Lovely Asunder,” was published the same year and won the Arkansas Poetry Prize and the Utah Book Award.
Deulen’s stories put pinpoint focus on the personal stories of her characters, even to the extent that they nearly ignore the backdrop of an equally chaotic world around them.
In one such poem from “Lovely Asunder,” a girl is pregnant with a child of a man she should not marry and her mother is trying to help her miscarriage; all during a time when the world they live in is every day moving closer towards some of the darkest days in human history.
Taking place in 1920’s Europe, the characters take little notice to the Fascist movement in Italy or the Nazi Party in Germany.
Maggie Voss, a sophomore photojournalism and creative writing major, said she got some new ideas for her own writing from the event, and it is beneficial to hear an author read their own writings.
“They know what they’re trying to convey with their own words,” she said.
Deulen’s writings take her readers inside the troubled lives of her characters, and her memoir shows her ability to describe to her audience with explicit clarity, the events of her own life.
Deulen read “Talking whiskey, smashing furniture; proof of his arrival,” from her nonfiction piece in which she describes her father during her childhood.
MaLeah Mitchel, a sophomore psychology major, who was unfamiliar with Deulen’s writings prior, said she thought Deulen’s work was deep.
“I thought it was really intense,” she said. “You could see everything she described.”
Deulen’s memoir takes a lighter note when she tells of how she came to meet an eccentric, intimidating music professor who was both comically awkward and scary at making introductions.
While Deulen was more than capable at making her audience laugh, she just as easily made the entire room fall completely silent in which she tells of the professors death.
“I wasn’t expecting that ending,” junior photography major Rochelle Martin’said in reaction to Deulen’s nonfiction story.
Deulen said she has reflected on that professor’s death for over a decade.
“This isn’t a story,” she said. “It happened. In a story there’s shape, there’s meaning.”
With such prestigious works as her memoir and collection of poems, Deulen is currently an assistant professor of poetry in the creative writing program at the University of Cincinnati.
Deulen said she had some advice for aspiring writers.
“Read voraciously and with great love,” she said.
