Back to Grad School
I used to blog here about getting an mfa in creative nonfiction, but since I finished classes there’s nothing much to report other than I am working on my thesis. Sasha Fletcher, however, just began his mfa in poetry and he’s writing about it over at his blog. He’s got the talented and lovely Sarah Manguso for workshop, Timothy Donnelly for a poetry craft seminar, Marjorie Welish for 20th century experimental poetry, and a lecture from the adorable Richard Howard titled “The Beginning of the End.”
Expect me to crash the guest lectures while I’m still in the city. Hopefully they’ll be as memorable as the Joyce Carol Oates one last semester.
Drew Toal—
Who wants to go on a midnight run to Barnes & Noble later? Anybody? Uh, anyone at all?
14
Aw, Jim. We salute you, brother.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL7QyMoh01A
(No snark here. I love this song.)
Creative Writing 101
For Thursday (9/10) we read “My Dog is a Little Obese” by Ellen Kennedy, “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl or Halfie” by Junot Diaz, and “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell. The theme was DIRECT ADDRESS and INSTRUCTION. As on Tuesday, we spent most of the time on the fiction piece. I think this is because fiction feels “easier” to talk about than poetry, like you’re not going to screw up the technical terms or something. And I think that having a teacher who is primarily a fiction writer contributes to this atmosphere, so I’m going to work harder in the future to check myself. But I think there’s a second reason as well, which is that a relatively straight prose narrative like the Diaz story (or Hemingway last week) yields itself to a kind of knee-jerk cultural studies reading, where the text is really just a pre-text for the themes and politics it evinces or brings to light. Especially with a piece like this one by Diaz, where the narrator is giving “you” instructions on how to re-arrange your apartment so you don’t look as poor as you are, and then impress the various girls you might have invited over, with particular race-based instructions for each one. I hate this way of reading.
Gigantic Magazine’s new website
Gigantic Magazine has a fancy new website up today and it is good looking. They’ve got stuff from J.A. Tyler, Shane Jones and Chapter 18 of Shya Scanlon’s internet takeover.
And as if the website wasn’t snazzy enough they’re running an art feature of work from Thomas Doyle.
Worth checking out.
Ken Baumann—
Book titles, if they were written today; including:
Then: Walden
Now: Camping with Myself: Two Years in American Tuscany
EDIT: And here are a lot more.
Matthew Simmons—
Jenny Holzer temporary tattoo set for sale at the Whitney. They might make a nice party favor.
Ryan Call—
n+1 remembers David Foster Wallace.
Nick Maniatis, master of The Howling Fantods, remembers David Foster Wallace at Infinite Summer.
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poor tessie
Is there a single story, or bit of writing, something you read, etc., that made you want to first begin writing? It doesn’t have to be a story; you could expand this – a piece of art, a bit music composition, whatever. Can you pinpoint, if possible, an object with which you interacted that made you want to create some real writing for the first time ever in your life and continue to do it until you die and rot?
I would rather focus on that initial first ever commitment to writing. We’ve talked a lot about ways we continue to inspire ourselves to create text (what music we listen to or what art we look at, for example), so this is more of an origins question: the origins of your first ever serious impulse to write. For that reason, it might be a little too hard to answer, but still fun to think about, maybe.
This question courtesy of David Erlewine, who emailed me this:
maybe you could do a post about the story that “got” people into writing. kinda cheesy maybe … and for some there may not be “one” story but i know for me reading shirley jackson’s the lottery absolutely made me want to write/read/etc. for good.