Just another writer
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Beautiful sentences
Hector liked the saints best in the early paragraphs of their lives when they were still being tempted. Lawrence Sutin, When to go into the Water.
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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…
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Residency day 7
We began the day with Josip Novakovich’s talk on negative motivation in fiction. Again, the large size of the group tended to work against it being a proper seminar. I’m also seeing Josip being fond of using exercises as part of his writing instruction. For me the problem is that these sorts of exercises address…
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Residency day 6
Today began with a seminar by Peter Meinke which seemed to have been better-planned for a small group of poets than the entire student body courtesy of a last-minute cancellation of the opposing talk on experimental fiction. Meinke’s views on poetry are a bit opposed to mine. I stand more with Charles Bernstein, who wrote…
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Residency day 5
The midpoint of the residency. The morning was designated as a reading/writing period & I took advantage of that to get a fair amount of work done in the morning. The first activity of the day was “synthesis” which turned out to be a sort of free-wheeling discussion of the residency, one which I hope…
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Residency day 4
Today was St Petersburg day. We were taken in vans from the University of Tampa campus first to the Hotel Don CeSar on St Petersburg Beach. We had workshops on the veranda of the hotel overlooking the beach, then after lunch a bit of free time that I used to take a quick swim in…
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Residency day 3
The day began with Jeff Parker’s seminar on “repetition” which he turned into a seminar on “not-knowing/repetition” building a great deal off of the essay “Not Knowing” by Donald Barthelme, an author I’ve found I greatly enjoy. A handful of good things and Parker ran his seminar a bit more like a seminar, although having…
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Residency day 2
And now things begin to really happen. The first agenda item was a meeting of people interested in working on Tampa Review Online, a bit disorganized in terms of planning etc., but I signed on to be a reader for fiction. Thence to the first workshop, about which I will say nothing (what happens in…
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Beautiful sentences
So what people think makes you special is just the disappointment of their own lives. Robert Vivian, The Mover of Bones.