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I dreamed I was an artist; my medium was cottage cheese. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “For the Etruscans,” The Pink Guitar.

Boys who habitually stole from grocery stores. Boys who loved fire and burned up dry grass fields in summers, hay barns in winter. Boys who would not stop fighting, broke the noses and jaws of smaller boys. Mean, stupid boys who could not be taught the difference between right and wrong, never having seen it […]

Given time his dreams might have come true, and he might have found himself with the woman he loved, but the road was too long and it brought him nowhere.  Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby.

I happened to notice the picture below on the desktop of my MacBook: Glancing over the image, there are some obvious things that can be noted. The two biggest words are the name of my protagonist and his antagonist’s title. There’s an assortment of other character names and descriptive terms that all feel appropriate for […]

Courtesy of MFA scheduling and my own travel plans I had a short last day of the residency. The afternoon workshop was optional for all but first term students, I’d already taken care of my contract consultation and flying out Friday night meant that I would miss the closing reception. The morning workshop was Amy […]

If you truly love Los Angeles, you want to be buried in Forest Lawn. Ann Patchett, The Magician’s Assistant.

Our day began with Jason Ockert teaching about writing the Short Short Story. Notably, I thought I got something actually usable out of a writing prompt. Then morning workshop. In the afternoon, we had synthesis. A diagram that we drew to draw connections between seminars and common reading was well-received by the synthesis group. I […]

And now it’s really flown by. Only two more days on campus. The opening seminar of the day came from Jessica Anthony who talked about articulation in fiction. She had us look at a collection of twenty first lines and pick first our top five, then our favorite from those. The obvious choice to me […]

It’s beginning to feel like the time is coming to an end. We began today with Tibor Fischer who talked primarily about the pre-Richardson/Fielding novel, with some examples from The Satyricon, Callirhoe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Amadis of Gaul which is apparently a bit of a pre-occupation for him. We had workshop in the morning and then […]