by Dylan Hogan April 2, 2026
Dr. Scott Foran has spent five years shaping young writers at Montreat College, and he is stepping into a new role as director of the Montreat Creative Writing Festival. This comes as Foran releases a new poetry collection, Mad as Birds, exploring how memory shapes us—and what happens when it begins to slip away.
At the center of Mad as Birds is a deeply personal subject. The collection draws on his encounters with family members who suffered from dementia, where conversations begin to repeat and awareness slowly fades. Rather than explain that experience directly, Foran turns to poetry as a way of expressing what can’t easily be said. “Poetry… is just kind of a natural expression of my interactions with life,” he said, noting that many of his works begin with personal moments before expanding into something more universal.
That expansion often happens through symbolism. Birds appear throughout the collection—”crows, ravens, and owls—figures long associated with death, wisdom, and the unseen.” Foran also draws from mythology, pointing to the Norse god Odin, whose two ravens represent thought and memory. In that story, it is memory—not thought—that is most at risk.
Foran didn’t begin as a poet. In fact, he admits he once avoided poetry altogether. “I didn’t understand it… didn’t want anything to do with it,” he said. It wasn’t until he started teaching literature that he began to see what poetry could do—how it can hold meaning in layers rather than explain everything outright.
Across the collection, form plays a key role in meaning. Foran notes that structure—”punctuation, lineation, even fragmentation—is meant to mirror the breakdown of thought itself.”
That idea shapes both his writing and his teaching. Foran hopes that “someone might read a poem and recognize something they have felt but could not articulate.” The collection, he said, is meant to help readers feel less isolated in their experiences and more understood.
With Mad as Birds, that recognition comes through difficult territory—memory loss, fear, and the limits of control. But for Foran, that’s where poetry matters most—not in solving problems, but in giving them form, and a weight that lingers after the poem ends.