Category: mfa
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Residency day 6
It’s beginning to feel like the time is coming to an end. We began today with Tibor Fischer who talked primarily about the pre-Richardson/Fielding novel, with some examples from The Satyricon, Callirhoe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Amadis of Gaul which is apparently a bit of a pre-occupation for him. We had workshop in the morning and then…
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Residency day 5
The tradition has become that the mid-point day of the residency is a bit lower-key than usual. We have the morning free for our own reading and writing, although I managed to be far less productive this residency than last. After lunch I led the first of two synthesis sessions. Last residency, this was done…
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Residency day 4
The day began with Tony D’Souza’s seminar, “The Writer’s Toolbox.” We looked at some of what we can pick up from earlier writers. The middle of the day was a double dose of workshop in which my work came up. Generally good commentary offered. And then in the afternoon, one of the items I was…
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Residency day 3
Lack of sleep is beginning to catch up with me, and I was in a bit of a haze all day. I wasn’t the only one who was lacking sleep though—the first seminar was delayed because Parker overslept for the first time in five years as he claimed. Our day began with Eli Horowitz, former…
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Residency day 2
This was really the first real day of the residency. I’ve decided to not to continue with Tampa Review Online, so I had some open time in the morning which I dedicated to some last-minute critique work. And thence to the first workshop session. No details about the work, but Tibor follows the Iowa format…
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Residency day 1
And so the madness begins again. Apparently my tradition for the residency is to oversleep the first morning but this time around I knew that being late for breakfast/meet and greet was not that big of a deal—except of course that I was late in signing up for the wildcard workshop, which meant that my…
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Point of view in “The Casual Carpool” by Katherine Bell
In her contributor’s note in Best American Short Stories, Katherine Bell writes: I loved the way Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield handled point of view and I wanted to see if I could manage shifting among several characters’ consciousnesses from paragraph to paragraph, or even sentence to sentence, without ever zooming out. (360) Bell manages…
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Residency day 9
The morning seminar was entitled “Reading Like a Writer” but was ultimately about what sorts of things to do with our annotations in the course of the tutorial period plus some general information on how things will work in the MFA. For our final workshop, we did a couple of writing exercises. I played with…
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Residency day 8
We’re beginning to draw to a close. The schedule is starting to open up a bit. The morning seminar was Roy Peter Clark and Tom French from the Poynter Institute talking about the importance of sequencing in writing. They offered up what might be called the 2-3-1 formula, where the most important thing comes at…