Lily Hoang
https://literature.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/lhoang.html
Lily Hoang has published some books and won some awards. She is Director of the MFA in Writing at UC San Diego.
James Franco + Hart Crane
Two posts in one day after not posting for a century, but then I saw this:
James Franco, Hart Crane, discuss.
MFA fiction workshop syllabus
So, I’m teaching my first MFA fiction workshop this spring, which is exciting and pretty cool. I’ve decided to play with the traditional workshop model, which is two submitted stories per term. Here’s the syllabus.
ENGL 574 Syllabus
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This will be an intensive graduate workshop. I am working with a different model, one that emphasizes both generative practices and revision. You will be required to write three new stories very quickly (during the first nine weeks of class), which we will workshop, then we’ll spend the last five weeks of class workshopping one revision. It doesn’t take a mathematician to realize that we will be “flying” through the stories in the first part in order to focus our time on the revision.
Fan Mail #4: Ben Marcus
Dear Ben Marcus,
I just finished The Flame Alphabet. I woke up early on a Sunday morning to finish reading. And it was magnificent. I have read your books, or several of them at least. I read Age of Wire & String and Notable American Women the summer before starting grad school. They are audacious books, the syntax unlike anything I’d read before – call me a limited reader, of course, I’ve since read a lot more and come to understand its lineage – I wanted to emulate your style, your language, the way you created complex narrative by parataxis. I thought you were a fearless writer, and back then, I was young and afraid, although I didn’t show it in workshop, I wanted to be liked, as we all do when we’re young and insecure, but you, you were brazen, your writing was full of effrontery, and that’s what I wanted most in my writing. In short, you were an inspiration, maybe the biggest and most influential to me as a student.
Lily Hoang—
Let’s say someone cares enough about you to write your biography. Title it: this is fantasy anyway, so why not have fun?
45
Page Turner Festival: GO!
PAGE TURNER FESTIVAL
http://pageturnerfest.org/#festival
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2011, 11AM-7PM
POWERHOUSE ARENA, 37 MAIN STREET, BROOKLYN
$5 PER EVENT / $20 ALL-DAY PASS / $30 ALL-DAY PASS (W/ AFTERWORD PARTY)
Come rub elbows and knock knees with your favorite writers at one of Brooklyn’s best alternative literary festivals: the third annual PAGE TURNER: The Asian American Literary Festival. Celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the festival features a Korean taco trunk, two stand-up comedians, five National Book Award finalists, seven Guggenheim Fellows, a killer afterparty with the best playlist of all time, and you! READ MORE >
Inside an MFA: Call & Response #1.5
Last week, I put up student responses to the following questions:
Can you teach creative writing? How? How would you teach creative writing that is different from your MFA? How would you “innovate” or “renovate”? What have you “learned” from your MFA? What has been the biggest surprise? Disappointment?
Here is a long response, penned by Jeff Pickell. Enjoy. & read it all. It’s worth it!
- Shitty syntax begets shitty phrases. Shitty phrases beget shitty sentences. Shitty sentences beget shitty paragraphs. Shitty paragraphs beget shitty sections. Shittiness begets shittiness begets shittiness.
- The MFA enrolls in a creative writing program. He does not enroll in a written creations program. Asked what he studies, the MFA replies “creative writing” or simply “writing.” He doesn’t reply “creative.” This is because the MFA doesn’t have a creative deficiency. He has a writing deficiency. He should know this, too. A lot of MFA’s—the shitty MFA’s—don’t. The shitty MFA is a strange creature. More on him later.
- Many contend writing can’t be taught. This is absolutely false, as any MFA with a journalism background knows.
- The shittier the story is, the harder it is to revise. READ MORE >
Dreams dreaming drone drum ho hum
Look at these cute golden retriever puppies. They’re probably dreaming. That’s cute. I like that.
But this post is not about golden retriever puppies.
Yeah, so last night, I had a dream. I died, but it wasn’t bad. I went to some version of afterlife. I went down an elevator (cliche, anyone?). Someone tried to escape by jumping out at sub-level 8. I don’t know what happened to that person. I think he looked like Mike Kitchell crossed with Adam Jameson. And when I got out of the elevator, I definitely wasn’t in heaven.
In the In
Last week, I had this awesome conversation with a grad student about theory. And he was like, Have you read this guy?, and I was like, Who?!
And so I come to my problem: What is going on in theory these days?
When you’re in school – in school like a student – you get this fab readings lists, from professors, from friends, from other students. You’re always in conversation, whether in the classroom or out of it. Either way, ideas are just around you. All you have to do is listen.
Inside an MFA program: Call & response #1
We’ve had a bunch of pedagogy posts recently from inside the creative writing classroom, from the professor’s point of view. I thought it would be pretty cool to let some students chime in. And as luck would have it, I happen to have access to a bunch of MFA peoples (at New Mexico State), because I’m professional like that. So, last Thursday night, during my 500-level Form & Techniques in Fiction class (themed Constrained Prose), I put out my laptop and posed the following questions:
Can you teach creative writing? How? How would you teach creative writing that is different from your MFA? How would you “innovate” or “renovate”? What have you “learned” from your MFA? What has been the biggest surprise? Disappointment?
Below, you’ll find the responses. If you have other questions you’d like discussed/answered, this will be an on-going segment for me, so shoot me an email or something.
A Process Post
I’ve been thinking about length a lot. Or numbers, maybe. The number of words in something and how thinking of the number of words in something changes our entire approach to it. It’s just a number, the number of words you put down, and it shifts process. I don’t know why this seems like such a big deal to me, but it does.
When I approach the process of writing a novel, I am slow. It is slow. I take my time. After all, what should be the rush if it will take me months, if not years, to complete? Why hurry to write one page if this one page is a mere fraction of what there is to write? Why rush if this one page will likely be cut in the end? Novels require patience.