I. I teach in a graduate writing program where to suggest we ought to be prescriptive (i.e. start with first principles to apply to the work at hand) in our workshop comments or revision suggestions would be like insisting we ought to admit few to no black students, or queer ones. It’s taken in faith [...]
In looking at the upcoming term’s calendar to see when classes began (Aug 22, for any UAers reading), one date listed was Constitution Day, September 17. Columbus Day? No. We don’t get Columbus Day off, for obvious reasons. But Constitution Day, yes. I had never heard of Constitution Day, so I Googled it and found [...]
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This post is maybe 40 percent good intentions and 60 percent vanity, but this is a blog so what do you expect? I started revisions this morning on the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo in 2010. I’m using FocusWriter because I like how it fills the screen with nothing but a blank field. Very useful. [...]
I’m teaching a graduate seminar on plot and structure in novels and NF books. Today was Skloot’s Henrietta Lacks. The students had concerns about the ethics of writing (and potentially profiting off of) another person’s story. I had concerns about nonfiction writing and our formal or casual assessment thereof. Here’s where I was coming from: [...]
I mean: everyone else is doing it. For those unfamiliar with the hubbub: Poets & Writers magazine released, once again, its poorly conceived rankings of MFA programs in creative writing. These have made everyone angry—everyone except P&W (which is without questions selling a shitload of issues with this) and Seth Abramson, the lawyer/poet/blogger behind these [...]
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I. I’ve been flipping through Stegner’s On Teaching and Writing Fiction. Look at this bit: The apprenticeship for poets is likely to be shorter than for fiction writers, because (at least in our time) poetry is essentially lyrical, which means personal, and the person is aware of himself well before he is fully aware of [...]
