Joe Millar’s talk on the elegy this morning slit me open like a fish. Loss was one motivator for committing to my writing in a greater way by undertaking this MFA, and the possibilities he opened up in this ancient form–not to mention his analysis of the psychological and mythical dimensions–have my head spinning.
Rain lashed against the windows all night and wind howled all through the hotel ventilation ducts. So I’m bleary-eyed after a long day getting here and a night full of banshees, but fired up after an awesome panel discussion this morning. Here’s an excerpt from my notes: In the Q&A portion, Marvin encouraged us to
On the night bus to Seaside now, in the back row, face aglow from the laptop screen. I’m listening to the iPod shuffle my sister passed on to me as a gift–space to hold enough music to last the journey without getting dull plus a backup of all my MFA-related digital files. It’s a bumpy
I will be in Seaside, Oregon January 6-16th for the first residency of the Pacific University MFA in writing. I just got the tentative schedule, and given that it looks like eight very full twelve hour days bookended by two full travel days (planes, buses, shuttles, oh my!)–I’m really not sure how much of the
If the statistics some people hold up to warn against doing an MFA are true, something like 30,000 Americans graduate from an MFA program each year. A quick look at the total US population and growth rate and the assumption that MFAs have grown since 1937 in a basically linear fashion gives us the following:
I recently bent the ear of two students at Pacific nearing the end of their study in the MFA in writing. The program director made one introduction while I was still sussing out the program before applying; the other was coincidentally a friend of a friend. I asked both of them: What do you know
