How to find an MFA program

A big part of deciding whether or not to attend an MFA program (both traditional or low-residency) is figuring out where you would want to get the MFA. MFA programs are not like law schools -- graduating from Harvard Law might "guarantee" you a job, but there's absolutely no equivalent when talking about creative writing programs.*  Therefore the most important  consideration in choosing a creative writing program is will it work for you?


Of course, you have to find the darn things before you can determine if they have what you're looking for.

You can read the Poets & Writers fall issue on MFA programs, you can dally around the MFAblog -- but do both with caution. A lot of the "information" given out in both of those sources are opinions and generalizations. (Poets & Writers admits that many of their MFA articles are editorials rather than reporting, but it's easy to get swept away and forget that.) An MFA is a masters of fine arts; it is, by definition, a creative pursuit, and therefore what works for other people might not work for you.

All this is to say that you're really best off if you research programs individually and judge them by how the program's merits line up with your own desires and priorities.

There is a free database to help you out.  The AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) has an official guide to writing programs where you can enter your search criteria and see the names of accredited programs worldwide.  Can't leave the state? You can search by that. Looking for a program that does genre fic? Or Screenwriting? Or children's lit? You can search for that. Looking for a BA or BFA program instead of a grad program? They list those too.

Once you've done a search, the AWP guide will show you the page they have with the program's info. Take this page as a preliminary, not the cold hard facts. These pages are slow to change -- for example, if a faculty member has left/arrived in the past couple of years, it probably won't be reflected in the AWP guide.** BUT these pages provide the web address for the school along with basic information -- and most importantly, they provide you with knowledge that such an MFA or MA program exists.

Another good way to get some info about programs, and to do so in person, is to attend the AWP Conference. In 2012, it'll be held in Chicago (February). Many schools will have table at the bookfair and you can go up to the table and ask faculty and current students questions (depending on who's sitting at the table at the time), and usually pick up materials and application tips. If a school's been cutting costs, they might not have a table just for them but they may have a table that's under the name of their affiliated literary magazine. If the school has a magazine associated with it, it's likely that at least some of the people running it are current graduate students at that program -- and they're most likely to be the ones sitting at the table! Go ahead and ask if they're grad students and if they wouldn't mind answering some questions about the program.


*(Caveat: getting an MFA from Iowa will definitely help you get a teaching job -- or at least an interview for a teaching job -- but you'll still have to work your butt off to publish and do all the other stuff. More on that tomorrow.)


**Note: Always use the school's website for application materials, deadlines, and direct contact info. Any source other than the school itself may be wrong and you won't be able to verify their info unless you go to the school's website anyway.

Friday: Link love + life

This post is exactly what the title implies: I give a bunch of love to links, hopefully make a few witty, scathing, or adoring comments about said links, and drop in a few little anecdotes about my life. You've been warned.

There's a mild bit of buzz in the sf/f community about NPR's list of 100 Top Science Fiction, Fantasy Books. To which I say, meh.  I've not read the entire list but I've read a lot of it and I'll probably read more of it (intentionally) but I'll probably die before I read all of it.  Okay, let's drop the scary mortality-thoughts b/c they totally screw with my twenty-something brain.

There was apparently an open voting period which I did not participate in but many of my friends and acquaintances did.  They complained that there was no write-in option for books that did not make the NPR short list for voting. They claimed there were obvious oversights -- Lois Bujold McMaster for one -- and that the list was skewed toward science fiction and away from fantasy (which is always hilarious in my eyes because fantasy now outsells sci-fi but sci-fi is still considered more "classic" and therefore more "literary."  Ah well, that's fine, if I live long enough I'm certain I'll see fantasy move closer toward the accepted canon anyway.  And there I go with more scary mortality-thoughts.

There's much spatting going on in internet circles about who is and isn't on that list. Me? I'm not going to engage in any spats. Perhaps you have to be a cog in machine of academic standardization before you realize that any "canon" is all arbitrary and none of it matters. Perhaps that is the greatest argument for attending grad school. One way or another, it's just a list.  Moving on.

I sprained my foot this past weekend and the resultant injury has colored my life for the past six days.

Yes, sprained my foot not my ankle.  My ankles are surprisingly hearty, having been rolled many times during years of field hockey practice and never injured until trying to catch the bus to the train station for the 2009 AWP Conference. Odd. Anyway.  Missing the last step of the flight has caused a week of sitting, elevating, and wrapping with an Ace bandage.

The cats, btw, love the Ace bandage. They find the wrapping/unwrapping fascinating. And the tiny little metal clips beg to be batted to the floor -- and they have been, repeatedly, even though they've only left my foot for a few hours total over the past week.

Oh, and the cats think that all the pillows i'm placing on the table/desk/etc for my foot are there for them.  Of course.

Stay true.

Margaret Atwood has been announced as the 2012 AWP Conference Keynote Speaker. This makes three out of four years where the keynote speaker has straddled the lines of literary and the Other for an organization where most of the members (if not the official organization) is conflicted in its feeling toward comic books and speculative fiction.  Sure they could say that Art Spiegleman wrote in the exciting new vein of the "graphic novel" and that Michael Chabon was a literary maverick who indulged our interests in the supernatural, but inviting Margaret Atwood to be THE speaker should be a brilliant slap in the face meant to wake up those who do not believe genre can be literary.  Don't believe me? Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale just made number 22 on that top 100 all time science fiction, fantasy list from NPR.

I always find it strange that literary types claim to have "forgotten" that Vonnegut and Orwell and Le Guin and Atwood are science fiction.

I had thought about going to the 2012 AWP conference just because it will be in Chicago, a city which is within easy traveling distance and, thanks to my brief stint living in the windy city, easy for me to navigate.  Even in fucking February.  Burr.  With Atwood as the keynote ... I think I really will have to go. 

On the Odyssey Workshop blog, bestselling author Carrie Vaughn discusses how she knows when a story will be a novel or a short work.

100 Year Star Ship project + conference.  Need I say more?

I helped plan part of a bridal shower this past weekend. And frankly, I fail to see the point.  Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to have done it for my friend and really excited to make super cute flower vases, except for the part where I was carrying a giantassbox, missed the last step and fell funny on my foot/ankle resulting in much pain and limited mobility -- but that could have happened for any reason.  But I fail to see the point of bridal showers nowadays.

My friend was astonished and flattered at the gifts she got.  She didn't expect or desire the level of gifting that occurred.  She was afraid that by inviting people to both the shower and the wedding she's making them feel like they should provide two gifts. Of course, there are people who feel like they should celebrate the union of two young people and if that means purchasing Corning Ware and Pyrex sets, then so be it.  But she and her fiance are not nineteen-year-olds who've never moved away from home.  They both have places and kitchens and kitchenware of their own.  Do we need to continue the social practice of giving showers? Particularly I ask, do we really need to gather all our female relatives for three hours of small talk, mediocre food, patronizing games, and gift opening wherein we speculate voraciously over how many ribbons the bride will break thereby determining how many children she will bear in this union?

I find the whole "bridal thing" dubious.  And I am in favor of not having one should I ever find myself in the throes of imminent marriage.  Or at least I'd rather have a co-ed "open house" rather than an all-chick shower.

Goat + duct tape + Chuck Wendig.  If that was not enough to entice you (and it should be) consider clicking through to his writing advice as well as the equally crude and wondrous birth and life of a novel.

I've realized that I have to change most of what I do this semester when I go back to teaching composition.  Okay, not most of what I do, but the big projects.  Partly because the textbook was ordered for me and the textbook supports either a gender studies or a cultural studies approach rather than a genre studies with a pop culture studies flavor.  That's okay.  Attempting a gender/cultural bent will make me more marketable. It will also be good for the students. A nice dose of spinach. I'm not entirely sold, eh?   Guess it's time to cultivate multiple talents other than teaching comp.

Ira Glass on what nobody tells beginners:
 
Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

Miracle Whip wants to give you $25,000 for your wedding or divorce -- so long it's a Miracle Whip kind of romance.

And lastly, take a look at the night sky tonight.  The moon and Jupiter are teaming up for a particularly bright Jupiter tonight.  Oddly enough, I dreamed last night that I could see Jupiter.  Not Jupiter how it really is, but a nice little graphic of Jupiter with all its rings pasted onto the night sky.

Addendum: The Hugo Awards Ceremony will be streamed live tomorrow (Saturday) starting at 8:00 PM Pacific Time.

Flash Fiction Panel Discussion

I was going to recap this discussion, but why bother when you can go here and listen to the audio yourself?

What I think I liked best about this panel was that they didn't attempt to define what flash fiction is or how it's different from a prose poem.  Basically they all said we write flash fiction, but hey, if an editor wants to publish it as a poem, we got no problem with that.  Brilliant.

New! With 20% MORE! AWP Recap!

Panel on the Future of Lit Mags: Innovate!  It's not a matter of print vs. digital (both have places and purposes to serve) it's a matter of how inventive, intriguing and innovative you can make your magazine. And, sometimes, it's about tricking your readers into reading.

Panels that invoked the term "Magical Realism": Three

(Panel 1) "Magical Realism," as a term, is passé.

(Panel 2) Someone quoted Marquez (at least they thought it was Marquez): "What you gringos call 'magical realism,' is our everyday life."  (I couldn't find an actual attribution of this but this quote from a NewYorker profile,  "The world Gabo writes about, the one they call magical realism, is actually real; it's the one we live in," Mirtha Buelvas, a social psychologist in Barranquilla, said to me.)  Either way, it did a lot to further my understanding of how magical realism functions in literature and how one should go about writing it (assuming you're okay with being passé):  To write it you have to believe in a world where it can happen.

(Panel 3) "Magical Realism" is the term we use to sneak fantasy writers into the MFA programs; the writers want to write fantasy but to get them them past the hard-nosed  realists in the department we force the students into the Spanish-language tradition which they rarely know about and often have little interest in engaging.

The third panel listed above had several charming stories including one guy who thought he was writing literary fiction -- "just fiction" he called it -- and so he wrote two books and they got shelved in fiction then he wrote the third and his agent said we're gonna sell this as a thriller.  He didn't think it was particularly thrilling, but his agent said more people would read it if it was a thriller so he said okay.  The book did really well, it got nominated for some genre award and so they reissued his first two books as thrillers.  Lesson: There doesn't have to be a difference between a literary and a genre text.

And, bless those guys' hearts, almost everyone of them said that when a student comes up to them and says I want to write [blank] genre, these guys go out and read the seminal works and other big works in that genre.  If they don't know, they teach themselves so that when a student writes about Orcs they know whether the student is writing well or indulging in Orc clichés.

How to get real-world literary experience while still a student: Go local.  Get involved.  Be reliable.  Work for free.  And overdress.

Bonus Materials:
AWP Bingo Card -- Fabulous.  I got a lot of hits but sadly, no bingo.  As always, amusing.  Fabulous (creepy) pictures from BookFox.

AWP Panels and General Thoughts

I've been trying to get my feet back under me since I returned from the conference.  It's been a slow process. 

I spent a lot of my time at bookfair talking to people who approached the Third Coast table, but I also went to seven or eight panels and a couple of readings.  Panel talks were on the teaching the literary fantastic, the future of the literary magazine, something on flash fiction, how to get real world experience while still a grad student, folklore & modern writing, and "genre" in the MFA and beyond.  One other panel that bombed (name & content withheld out of courtesy).  Oh, and I attempted to go to the panel on novelists teaching novel writing -- I'll explain that "attempt" today or tomorrow.

If anyone made it to the one that was supposedly about vampires and zombie literature (aka Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley) -- "Byronic Vampires and Melancholy Green Men: Harnessing Genre for Literary Use" -- let me know how it was.  I thought about going but considering the first line of the panel description was "Perhaps no word can be more anathema to literature than genre" made me NOT want to go -- because, fuck you, there is genre literature out there.  "Realism" does not literature make.  So when lunch with a friend ran long, I wasn't particularly heart broken to miss the panel.

One thing I noticed this year was an epidemic of panel-leaving.  People in the audience walked out of panels after fifteen, twenty, forty-five minutes.  Seriously, how rude is that?

Now, I sat down by one poor girl who left during the panel's introduction speech because, when they started speaking, she realized she stepped into the wrong room -- I understand that. And I'm not talking about people who cut out during the post-panel Q&A, which I have more sympathy for (not all of us have strong bladders and the line for the women's room is crazy long in the 15 minutes between scheduled panels).

But people who leave after ten or fifteen minutes after a panel has begun?  At that point you know you're not in the "wrong" room.  You know all panel run 60 minutes + 15 min for Q&A.  You know that if you sit in the front of the room everyone will see you walk out.  So what the fuck gives?

I don't know if this year's panel-leaving was worse than last year's or if I just noticed it more, but I found it incredibly rude. 

Presumably, if you know that you have to cut out of a panel early then you'll sit in the back by the door and grab a seat on the aisle so that people won't have to move to let you out, not halfway up and in the middle.  So I'm guessing that (a) they got bored and decided to leave, (b) it turned out that the panel wasn't discussing what they thought it would and instead of seeing if they could garner some sort of knowledge from the topic they decided to leave, (c) they walked out in protest [I'm doubtful of this considering the "controversial" topics had fewer people leave], or (d) there was an epidemic of diarrhea at the conference which I was lucky enough to avoid but gave quite a few people the runs at inopportune moments.

My take: no one's making you go to panels -- no one's making you attend the conference, period.  So when you choose to attend a panel that bombs, you suffer through the pain and offer it up to the gods of literary knowledge.  Apparently more writers need Catholic grandmothers who make them sit through insanely long Mass on a tiny, hard, wooden pew.  Comparatively a boring panel is paradise: the seats are padded and no one tells you you're going to hell.

Returned

Spent the past few days hanging out with this guy: the two story tall (blue) grizzly bear that stands outside the Denver Convention Center peering into the lobby


I'm back safely and the conference went well -- except for Saturday morning when my trick-coffee-cup-lid splattered my pant leg with coffee droplets as I walked to the convention center.

I met a lot of really cool people and I'm still excited to have had a chance to talk to all of you. More (substantial) updates will follow as the week progresses. And believe me, I have a few good ones to tell.

AWP Bookfair Update and other Updates

AWP Update:

Meet ME! courtesy of Third Coast's Bookfair table at the AWP Conference Denver!

(If you could care less about ME! I will also fill you in on facts about Third Coast Magazine and submission tips.)

Thursday 4:30 to close.
Friday 8:30-10:15 AM -- (bring me coffee if you expect coherency, I am not a morning person)
Friday 2:45-4:30

And possibly some other times though I should make the most of my "free" time to roam the bookfair general. Must find some time to ambush Fairy Tale Review (the only magazine I have prepared questions for) and speak awkwardly with any other magazine with an interesting looking table.

Twitter hashtag = #AWP10

Thankgoodness for this or I would have forgotten all about bringing sunglasses!

Other updates:
The cats are wearing collars and pissed about it. Normally my cats go naked, strutting about in all their god given kitty glory. When we must travel Ash gets an ID collar but I normally don't bother with Rosie b/c she has an ID chip between her shoulder blades. Well, events had it that someone misplaced Ash's first collar (hmm) and then I bought a second one (ha!), before eventually discovering where the first had been relocated to (double ha!). Now that I own two collars I have saddled both cats with ID-tag-cuteness. There has been much scratching, and sulking and jingling of tiny bells. All this so they may spend a week at my father's house while I am conferencing.

Other updates:
Red Rose tea, so much better than Tetley. I guess you do get what you pay for and that extra two bucks is soooooo worth it.

Other updates:
Hugo Award nominees were posted April 4.

2010 AWP Conference: the preparation

Later this week is the 2010 AWP Conference. I will be there. Come by the Third Coast Magazine table at bookfair if you really, really want to meet me. And if you do meet me, ask for my business card -- they're so cute!

Check out these tips for surviving the AWP Conference. (found via)

How to enjoy the AWP Denver by the Documenting AWP blog. The blog is previewing and highlighting panels. And, from my preliminary list of what panels I want to attend (find the full listing at awpwriter.org), I think I'm going to be attending a lot of panels with this guy. Hey, I made my list before I read yours, so --honestly-- not stalking you, dude.

If you're looking for thoughts on what it was like last year to help you get a feel for what you might be in for this time, there's my thoughts, and more of my thoughts, and the fact that everyone will get sick, and there's this blog of Emerson College grad students which gives a wide range of feelings and reactions from different students. Recap from One Story magazine (which probably appeals to New Yorkers more than other mere mortals).

I got the you-need-to-sign-up-for-the-shuttle-to/from-airport email from AWP which annoys me if only because I didn't have to do/plan for that in Chicago. The beautiful thing about Chicago is that taking the Blue Line from O'Hare to the Loop is uber-fast. For $2.25 you streak past eight lanes of cars that are creeping along the highway. You streak past all the grid streets and then drop underground. You get out and walk a few blocks to your hotel. No big.

I didn't fly in to the AWP last year; I took the train, which also deposits you just a few blocks west of the Loop. In my mind anything less than 15 blocks should not be cause for paying cab fare, so I walked. Then again I know my way around the Loop. Not having that sort of public transportation infrastructure bugs me when I visit. Oh well, I guess the world really doesn't revolve around me and my desires.

TIBAL: What's the Value of AWP?

What's the value of going to the AWP conference?


First things first: what is the AWP conference? The AWP conference (or just "AWP" as many people call it, making no distinction between the organization itself and the actual conference) is a four day meeting put on once a year by the Association of Writing Programs. It usually happens in the first five months of the year (the academic spring semester), and each year it changes what city it's located in -- although someone on the planning committee seems to have a love of Chicago in the bitter cold of February because they return there with some frequency.

The Association of Writing Programs, technically the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, is a 40+ year old organization that grew up out of the attachment of creative writing to the academy in America.

The value of the conference is that it draws in such a large chunk of the community. Where else can you hear a dozen amazing writers read in the same place within three days time? And you'll know that you only heard a dozen because you couldn't be in two places at once listening to even more great writers read.

For me it's that the conversation about writing and teaching and publishing is taken out of the small academic group that I am a part of during the rest of the year, and opened up to the community at large. I found that every day I'd attend one panel that was a complete dud of a discussion; it didn't address anything that I was interested in. This number appears to stay constant no matter how many panels you attend in a day. Attend one and there will be one dud. Attend five and there will be one dud. If you get to enough interesting discussions you'll find something that really gets you thinking -- and you'll leave AWP with the best thing you possibly can: ideas.

The "old" image of the conference is that it's where poets get drunk and sleep around. The cynics still uphold this view. Then again the cynics seem to go only to one or two panels, say that they hate the panels, attend a couple of readings and then hang out the rest of the time in the bar. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place, but everywhere I looked the energy was decidedly more focused on the literary than the sexual. There were still quite a few people doing their best to uphold the image of writers as alcoholics, but as a whole the atmosphere fairly buzzed with purpose: like the airport terminal meets the industrious hive of bees.

Are you going to AWP?

This could almost be a Things I've Been Asked Lately blog post as it does seem to be the question du jour.

And my answer is yes. Maybe not. No, definitely no. I'm thinking about it. Yes.

Sheesh I've waffled a lot on this one. Thankfully my early "yes" stage was when I made reservations which I did not cancel through all of my "no" stages.

The AWP conference will be in Denver this April, and I will be there.

I had a great time last year at the conference when it was in Chicago, and this year not only will I be a repeat marathon panel attendee (I'm a lecture junkie) but I will be sitting the booth for Third Coast magazine. O bookfair, how I dread thee.

Last year I had the advantage of having lived just a few blocks from the conference site and therefore knowing quite a bit about the neighborhood and where to find things and how to get around. In Denver I'll have no such advantage; I've never been to the city. True, at a conference you really have no need to stray more than a few blocks from your hotel/conference center but I just adore having insider information -- I can't help it.

However, I'm quite curious about Denver. My family lived out west for a handful of years but I was far too young to remember it well. I do remember being able to see mountains out the kitchen window when we lived in Salt Lake City. Mountains, even then, held a majestic appeal. I'll have to see if I can find any time or any reason to explore Denver while I'm there.

So, are you going to AWP?

Performance Readings

Being sick has really taken it out of me, but it's been a good excuse to sit around and watch too much TV.

I've been reading more essays from Sloane Crosley's collection I Was Told There'd Be Cake. Now that I think of it, I'm really impressed that she managed to publish a book with the word "there'd" in the title. It's a commonly used contraction but I don't think I've ever seen it in print.

My next submission for workshop is due on Sunday. I've been working on it on an off all February, but of course, I've left the hardest parts for last and, well, now it's time for them to rear up and bite me in the butt.

This time around I've chosen to submit a piece of nonfiction formatted as an essay, (which is undoubtedly Ms. Crosley's fault).

Tonight there is a reading downtown in a coffee shop/bar/pizza place (they're trying to cash in on all venues where students spend money). The readers are MFA candidates -- my turn comes a month from now -- tonight includes one of the writers I like in my fiction workshop. Hopefully he'll perform his piece instead of just read it off the page.

This next bit goes out to anyone who ever chooses to get up in front of a crowd and speak (I understand if it's not your choice that you might be less inclined to care about what I have to say): don't bore us.

We tend to think of "lecture" as speaking aloud to a group, giving instruction through a speech, something like that, but the word originates as a medieval term meaning to read. Yes, once upon a time education was conducted by the guy up front reading aloud from a book on the lectern. This seems silly to me; why not just read it yourself? The practice probably came from religion where the only person in town who was literate was the guy reading from the book and then the practice carried over to the university. Although why it stayed that way for as long as it did I'll never know (even back in the day people at university were literate).

Thankfully, we live in a different era. If I thought the old fuddy-duddy lecturing on political theory was hard to listen to, I doubt I would have survived him simply reading from the page.

[Side note: AWP's guidelines are that its panelists prepare a written speech and then read directly from that writing. Ug! Thankfully, most of the panelists don't follow that guideline.]

In an age of spoken lectures why would anyone read fiction straight from the page without emotion, inflection, pause or eye contact? Why would a writer hoping to promote himself and his work not do everything in his power to make it easier to consume by a listening audience?

I have no idea, and yet I'm seeing it time and again at these MFA candidate's readings.

At the readings at AWP (with an exception of some of the poets) the writers used inflection, they changed up their pacing, their volume, they looked up from their work and made eye contact with the whole room -- look up, look down, look back corner, back corner, near corner, down -- they create an experience where the audience feels like they're listening to an actor read, not like they feel that they themselves are reading the page.

We are hardwired to understand speech and speech patterns. We listen for tone, inflection, volume, pauses, rhythm to determine things that are underlying in the speaker's words. Does the writer have to do all that with mere words on the flat page? Yes. But that's no reason for the writer to believe that a listening audience will be able to subvert their hardwiring and care only for the nuances of words without tone, inflection, volume, pauses or rhythm.

AWP: prose poem vs. flash fiction

Me: still sick. It's a sinus thing. Yuck.

The AWP panel that claimed to discuss the differences between prose poems and flash fiction fell flat. Robert Olen Butler gave his personal definition, but no one else did. This may yet become a defining theory as he judges the Southeast Review's World's Best Short Short Fiction contest every year.

Butler's theory was that prose poems, like all poetry are about epiphanies, bright shining moments. And that flash fiction, like all fiction are narratives about yearning. The difference between long and short fiction is that the yearning becomes more condensed. That the moment when the character realizes the yearning is the end of the story in a piece of flash fiction. "Yearning" being his word for the deepest desires of the characters.

Ron Carlson said he always thought that he wrote stories not poems. But then someone approached him and asked to publish a collection of his poetry, so now Carlson supposes they're poems.

AWP: the short summary version

The conference was great!

I heard poets Paul Muldoon (reading + conversation about growing up in Ireland with all these crazy Irish poets), Donald Hall, and Nick Flynn (whom I'd heard at my undergrad and read his memoir) read poetry. Donald Hall has a collection of poems that are memoir and really cute because he's writing about being a little boy back in the day and some of it is compared to being an old man now. "When you're a little boy your socks slip down, and someone tells you 'Donny, pull up your socks' ... when you're an old man your socks slip down, but no one tells you to pull them up" -- I'm probably not doing it justice but it was lovely. He's also got this poof of crazy white hair that looks like it hasn't been brushed this side of the millennium. He's a character.

Art Spiegelman gave the keynote address. It encompassed a brief history of comics that explained his life, his influences and his eventual production of MAUS. It really got me interested in "comix" -- the term he likes because of its "mix" of mediums -- and caused me to listen to a panel of poets writing about superheroes the next day. They called to my attention the notion of comic book superheroes being the modern form of myth making. That right now we might not have a culture that understands references to Achilles but we understand them to Superman. This interested me because I've been thinking about that kind of myth-making in modern society, but I had only thought of it in terms of the boom of the fantasy and sci-fi genres in the decline of fairy tales and folk lore. Now I have another piece of the puzzle to consider and I'm anxious to do so.

I went to a literary 'rock n roll' reading with ZZ Packer (Drinking Coffee Elsewhere), Joe Meno (Hairstyles of the Damned), and Dorothy Alison (Bastard Out of Carolina) -- Alison gave an amazing! reading. She said when she was younger she wanted to be Janis Joplin; she's totally done it.

Robert Olen Butler and the wonderful Ron Carlson read flash fic/prose poems and then went head to head about what differentiates one form from the other. Which was amusing to listen to even if they didn't come to any consensus.

The NPR show Selected Shorts did a recording Saturday night. Actors read three short stories including Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" read by B D Wong (who's currently acting on Law & Order) and it was a WONDERFUL reading of the short story. I hadn't ever read "Cathedral" before and felt a little like I was the only one in the extremely literate audience who hadn't. I'm always a little annoyed with reading anything that people have put into the canon, so having it read to me by a good actor was a happy way of approaching it.

Then there were oodles of panels on theory, pedagogy, tips, jobs in academia, workshop in academia, comic books in literature and lots lots more. In fact, there were about 15 panels going on simultaneously every 90 minutes. And I got a bunch of free lit journals/books of poetry and one really off the wall sci-fi where women turn into dogs, dogs turn into women and men turn into rats ... I think.

But it wasn't all just literary heavyweights wandering around. I also ran into my undergraduate advisor, a kid I graduated college with, another professor from undergrad and a few familiar faces from Kenyon workshop. And then they all gave me their germs.

I'll spend the week recovering and unpacking some of the thoughts sparked by these panel discussions.

Definition of AWP

AWP: where 5,000 writers get together and share germs from across the country.

And to think, for all the virology conferences I've tagged along to, this may be the first conference where I've caught something!

WOO! AWP!

blogger's note: this is the first and only time I have ever, or will ever [hopefully] write a title entirely in capital letters

The AWP Conference starts tomorrow! I'm packing.

Actually it starts today, but I'm not heading in to Chicago until tomorrow morning early.

I have little to no idea what I'm going to do once I get there. Let me rephrase. I intend to show up, check into the hotel, walk six blocks south, check in to the conference, and attend as many freakin readings and panels as I can. I have the phone numbers of several people in my program who will be there as well. But other than that, I have no idea what to expect.

The uber-jaded instructor I had class with last semester described it as a place to drink and get laid. He says that, but I'm betting it has a lot to do with the crowd you hang with. Team-beer-pong for example.

My friend who attending last year said it was essential in her choice of MFA program and that the panels were amazing. That it was eye-opening to see the (minimal) size of the writing community.

I don't know what it will be like for me. I intend to go to as many panels as I can and to go to the ones that interest me. That I'll be friendly to the person sitting next to me and hopefully all will go well.

Barrelhouse has their guide to the conference. They claim that as a newbie I should take their hand and let them show me around. That. Is. Not. My. Style.

Meanwhile, I'll be doing my part for the Obama administration: spending money. Wait, I mean, stimulating the economy. It turns out that the extra teaching gig I picked up covers approximately the cost of attending both AWP and the Kenyon Review workshop this summer. At this point, it's worth it. If it wasn't I wouldn't be spending the money.

On that note, I've decided not to go to Prague this summer. Western Michigan hosts the program and some of the faculty there is WMU regular faculty, some of the faculty there is special to the program but still listed on WMU advertisements (Stuart Dybek I'm looking at you). Not picking up the credit hours might hurt me eventually, but I don't have 1) the cash to get over to Europe and 2) any desire to be mugged. Maybe "mugged" implies too much violence. I have no desire to be pickpocketed.

Other than that, I hear the program is wonderful. People rave about it. They can rave all they want; I'm going back to Kenyon.

As the week winds down, I don't know how much day-to-day blogging I'll be doing at the AWP, as I'm not planning on taking my computer with me but I will report after the event. Next year the AWP is in Denver. And it's in April not February.

I've always wanted to go to Denver. Actually, I've always wanted to take a train out west even though it would kill a whole week travelling that way. Hmm.

The 'Duh' Moment

Happy New Year! Seriously, is it already 2009? My blog celebrates 14 months of regular entries this January. It’s been alive since spring of 2006 but it was so sporadic that I think I checked my junk email account more than I posted to my blog. After my first trip to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop in 2007 I vowed to post fiction once a week and did so through October of that year. That November I left law school in order to pursue an MFA and a life writing, teaching and hopefully publishing.

For many of you, these facts are old hat; you’ve actually been around since that November. I owe many of my original readers to Jud who took the time to read and recommend this blog to other bloggers. Quite a few of my “lurkers” are people who have met me in real life. Friends from college and high school, family members – my twin cousins stalk the blog for pictures of my kittens, here’s your prize:

and the last group would be people I met through writing related stuff: Kenyon, commenting on the MFAblog, almost going to UNH with you, or other reasons.

[BTW, we totally need to meet at the AWP Conference. Do you think we can get on the schedule as “Bloggers Cocktail Hour” – You’re followed their blogs for months, now meet and greet with your contemporaries and counterparts to discuss the experience further in person (and coordinate your blog posts for the weekend), cash bar.]

Regardless of who you are or how this blog came to your attention, I’m grateful that you’re reading my rants, recommendations, epiphanies and in general being a sucker for kitten pictures and B&W photography of snow.

All this retrospection came about after the ‘duh’ moment that gave the title to this post.

My well intentioned father, completely confused by such titles as nonfiction, memoir and essay as applied to bound books today, bought me two collections of essays for Christmas, Naked, David Sedaris and I Was Told There’d Be Cake, Sloane Crosley. The reason he did this was because I told him about my last workshop experience where two people called my short story “essayistic.” He then spent the next few weeks pressing me to answer his question if a novel could be written as a memoir.

I was completely confused.

Like Frey? I relayed the Million Little Pieces scandal to my father, but that didn’t answer his question.

Finally (after I became super frustrated and pissy) we came around to the real issue: the only difference between a memoir and a literary novel with a first person narrator is that the novel depicts fictional events. Ideally, the memoir is completely real – or at least completely the memoires of the author.

Tomorrow I’ll get into how I explained what I’m doing to my father which is worth writing out just to share his reaction. But for the time being just know that he bought these two collections of essays to help and inspire me.

The second collection, I I Was Told There’d Be Cake, certainly did inspire me. The writer is a young woman with a hillarious voice who rants on certain topics personal to her and yet sympathetic for everyone. That’s it. It is, of course, in the form of an essay.

I got one page into the fourth essay in the book and suddenly ohmigdImsoooostupid! I’ve been doing this exact same thing for the past ten years! Of course, with varying degrees of readability and knowledge of grammar, but basically with a little tweaking to fit form, any of the pieces I dubbed “comedic rants” is an essay. This is frequently what my blog is (thus the reflection earlier).

I’m going to spend some time working very hard on writing, researching and submitting essays to the appropriate markets.

Grading Hiatus

So I should be grading like mad. Instead I'm feeling under the weather. Yuck.

So instead of thinking about my grad class projects, I'm trying to plan my trip to the AWP conference in February. The first hotel's already sold out. I know people were talking about getting hotel rooms in "cheaper" areas, but, as someone who has lived not four blocks from the Hilton on Michigan Ave., I would like to caution everyone: February in Chicago is cold and dark and, while New York may be the city that never sleeps, Chicago has a strict bedtime. The Loop empties out by 7:oo or 8:00 pm on weekdays and in the winter the tourism isn't alive enough in the park district to make up for the businessmen leaving.

Yes, there will be young people on the L at night as they travel to bar hop and party, but the streets get fairly deserted save for the people who live on them. Places that are cheaper may be far away from public transportation stops or require transfers.

And people who think they'll just drive need to know that parking is at least $30 a day in the surface lots and that your hotel doesn't give free parking with your room; you need to buy that car a place to sleep too.