Creative writing series continues with poetry and fiction readings

Fiction writer Nell Freudenberger and poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg read from their works yesterday in the Film Theater at 185 Nassau St.

The reading was one in a series sponsored by the creative writing department that has included the poet Sharon Olds and will include novelist Dave Eggers on Nov. 19.

Schnackenberg read several poems from her newest volume, "The Throne of Labdachus."

Freudenberger, who is currently working on her first novel, chose to read "Letter from the Last Bastion," a story in her recent collection, "Lucky Girls."

The story, written from a 17-year-old girl's perspective, touched upon the narrator's first sexual experience and her musings on a novelist who chose to fight in the Vietnam War.

Creative writing department chair Edmund White described her as "one of the most accomplished new writers of recent years."

Her sentences are "always multifarious, often deceptively straightforward," White said.

Schnackenberg read several poems inspired by Sophocles' "Oedipus."

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Her work moved through time and perspective in the Oedipus myth. It included a poem, "The Shepherd Speaks," envisioning finding the infant Oedipus, and a poem "about the moment where Oedipus realizes who he is and what he is," she said.

Schnackenberg has published other collections of poetry —"Portraits and Elegies" and "A Gilded Lapse of Time" — and she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

In her poetry, "the wit is underscored by the formal aspect of the verse," said poet and creative writing professor Paul Muldoon, who introduced Schnackenberg.