Nance Van Winckel

MS. Critique

I have worked with many writers on book manuscripts, and several of these books have gone on to be published.

The feedback I give is both detailed and comprehensive. I comment on a book's construction, its thematic development, as well as its strengths and possible weaknesses.

With a poetry book, I often look at a large group of poems and make suggestions about the best poems to use, as well as an arrangement of those poems.

Just a few of my former students' books!

"Nance was simultaneously able to zero in on problems with individual poems and also steer me toward an alternative vision of my project I could not have seen without her insight. The order she proposed was exciting, and one I would not have been able to see on my own; nor have I been so fortunate to have a reader able to work with me in this way, given my interest in the surreal and unconventional modalities."
—Sara Michas-Martin, winner of the 2012 Fordham Prize in Poetry Book Award for Gray Matter.

TESTIMONIALS

Nance's feedback—timely, smart, caring, clear—was not only instrumental in helping straighten my novel-in-stories around, but was so necessary in bringing my first book to publishable form. I only wish that I had sought her help earlier.
—S. Asher Sund, first place, Marjorie J. Wilson Award, judged by Joyce Carol Oates

Nance helped compress and reorder my first collection of poems to create a “stream-lined incarnation” that found a publisher and is a finalist for a book award. Her feedback was honest, practical, and supportive. In addition to writing notes on the manuscript, Nance sent a four-page, single-spaced letter in which she indentified the collection’s strengths and weaknesses, helped me cut ¼ of the book, and commented on sequence, sections, and individual poems. She suggested journals and publishers to follow and send work to; as a result, I discovered new venues, found a good home for a poem, and a publisher for the manuscript. Most of all, she helped me see and shift old patterns while learning from my strongest poems what I needed to revise others. Her feedback on my first book is helping me write the next.
—Chivas Sandage, author of Hidden Drive.

BOOKS OF FICTION

NANCE'S NEWEST FICTION: EVER YRS, a novel in the form of a photo album/scrapbook.

A 99-year-old great-grandmother tells the story of a family filled with quirks, foibles and downright strangeness through a series of photographs and family memorabilia. The photographs are all captioned, some at great length, by the family matriarch. They describe life in Butte, Montana, surrounded by the great copper mines of the early 20th century, and, later, by the environmental devastation left behind when the mines failed.

Here, in 1999, as the town awaits the Y2K meltdown and a 'virgin birth' is apparently about to occur, Grandy hurries to divest herself of the secrets concerning both her good and bad contributions to Butte and her own descendants.

CURTAIN CREEK FARM

Linked stories, each told by a resident of a commune in Eastern Washington.

PACIFIC WALKERS

"Nance Van Winckel has long been one of my favorite poets—a voice I turn to again and again for imagery and music and to remind me of the loveliness and intensity of the subtle narrative woven into the subtle lyric. Pacific Walkers shows her at the peak of her powers. It is a riveting book, accumulating in strangeness and fearsome magic as it moves through the mysteries of existence and mortality." —Laura Kasischke

OTHER BOOKS OF POEMS

NO STARLING

"The poems of NO STARLING project life through a strange, wonderful prism, part heavily refracting language, part heady, playful imagination. Nothing is stranger than what is true to life. Nothing is more necessary." —THE CINCINNATI REVIEW

SAMPLE POEM

"You People," a poem from NO STARLING

received the Friends of Literature Award from POETRY MAGAZINE.

Fiction

BONELAND: Linked Stories

Mariano Zaro's Interview with Nance about her text and image work.

In this edition of Hyphenated Poets, Nance Van Winckel explains how she combines poetry with visual art in a form she calls PhoToems. She has authored 8 poetry collections, including "Our Foreigner" (Beyond Baroque Books, 2017), winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series Prize. She has received 3 Pushcart Prizes, a "Poetry Magazine" Friends of Literature Award, 2 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships, and awards from the Poetry Society of America, among other honors. Her poems have appeared in "Poetry," "The American Poetry Review," "Field," "Volt," "The Kenyon Review," and "Ploughshares." She teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts low-residency MFA in Writing Program and lives in Spokane, Washington. (Hyphenated Poets is a series hosted by Mariano Zaro and produced by www.Poetry.LA)