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
I’ve been working on my lecture for the Vermont College MFA residency and one of my author/illustrator friends asked if it was going to have any gardening metaphors in it. Hahahaha. I wonder where she got that idea. Sometimes creating books makes a body feel all glorified like the top of this sunflower getting ready,
How lucky and lovely to visit a daughter who is getting a PhD in 18th century literature and bakes lovey blueberry pies and kale and avacado quiches and other things AND blogs about pies and rolls and grad school and words. http://poorbaker.wordpress.com/category/pie-2/ How lovely to laugh over lousy Scrabble draws and to be beaten almost every time and
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