Category: mfa
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Residency day 6
Our morning seminar was Jason Ockert on writing idiosyncratic characters. How does one go about moving a reader? Balance between writing familiar and distinctive. That which is relatable and that which is somehow unfamiliar. Who cares about idiosyncratic characters? For Ockert it’s rudimentary. He has a terrible memory: the great thing about literature is the stuff…
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Residency day 5
Another full day. It began with Stefan Kiesbye giving a seminar looking at blurred boundaries between fiction and CNF. I was reminded of James Tadd Adcox saying that, to him, CNF was just fiction where the protagonist had the author’s name. Kiesbye looked a number of works, talking about the controversy around the publication of…
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Residency day 4
The reading/writing day of the residency. I got a fair amount of work done, although there’s always more to write. Our workshop time was spent looking closely at “Paper Lantern” by Stuart Dybek (which is finally coming out in a Dybek collection in June) and “Differently” by Alice Munro. Our lone seminar of the day…
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Residency day 3
We began the day with a seminar on revision with Jennifer Vanderbes. There were some nice resonances between what she was saying about specificity and yesterday’s fiction genre workshop. Today was my day to be workshopped, which gave me some excellent feedback on my first chapter of the novel. I’m inclined to do a complete…
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Residency day 2
The day began with a seminar from Erika Meitner and Mary Biddinger on literary taboos. Between the reading that was assigned beforehand and the handout for the seminar there was a lot of food for thought. One student was a bit concerned about “earnest Christianity” being among the taboos so I directed him to Robert…
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Residency day 1
So today (and yesterday) turned out to be quite the odyssey. The original plan was to take a 7.25p flight from Midway to Tampa, arriving at 10.50p. After a lot of delay, the flight was canceled. At 2a. I was able to get a seat on an early flight to Orlando (which was then delayed for…
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Residency day 9
And we’re pretty much done with the residency. A morning seminar with Jeff Parker on his place-based narrative project (I sent him my story earlier this week. It’s interesting to write something in the place where the story is located and that will be read in that same place. This was followed by a final…
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Residency day 8
We’re just about done with the residency. We started with the genre workshop with Tibor Fischer and Corinna Vallianatos talking about beginnings of works. We workshopped a new piece that I wrote this week and despite it being relatively rough in my opinion was well-received by everyone else. I went for a walk after lunch…
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Residency day 7
The pacing of the residency is such that it kind of feels like it’s all coasting from here on. The morning seminar was “Anthology” with Denis Johnson in which we contributed poems that made us want to be a writer. I, being a fiction person, lied and chose “These Poems, She Said” by Robert Bringhurst.…