Revision time. I am in Boston on the edge of my annual writing retreat…it’s shocking to think that this group has been getting together for something like seventeen years. Our lives, our writing, our despairs, our soaring bits…they are woven together. Nancy Werlin and I went to Dian Curtis Regan’s wedding in Colorado Springs this
What happens when we become unmoored? The image–I think–is instantly uncomfortable. Floaty. At sea. Everything slipping past. Often, though, when we become unmoored we open our eyes and hearts in new ways, which always happens to me on author visits to places where I’ve never been. I was thinking about this in Switzerland as I
Novelist John Gardner said a lot of interesting and important things about details including this: “A novel is another world, one with so much detail we can imagine ourselves living in it.” As many of my VCMFA students have discovered, it isn’t as easy as it sounds to find the exact and vivid details to build a world. When I was
I often remind myself and my writing students that life is pretty random but fiction is about patterns. One of the challenges is that writers have to use their clever brains–and their organic connections with their characters–to be careful that the patterns aren’t obvious and predictable and thus uninteresting. This week, a young reader and
At some level, writing can be play. As Sarah Ellis pointed out in her faculty Vermont College MFA lecture, play is the thing humans do with no pay-off in mind–the thing where the pleasure is in doing the thing itself…which doesn’t mean that play = easy. Some of us work enormously hard at our play. After
Whew. An MFA is a terminal degree (which sounds ominous but just means as high as a person can go academically) in the arts. So of course it’s tough. This low residency one has only 10 days for students and faculty to meet in person on campus and look at writing together, listen to faculty
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