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Why do the spaces look smaller than the words that used to fill them? Abby Frucht, Polly’s Ghost.

In the woods, bewildered, in a peck of troubles, at a loss. To ascend a pulpit, to cant, to remove one’s vestments with one’s teeth, to chase foxes at clicked in a hedge, to stand stooped in a pillory, cunny-thumbed, one who has eaten shame and drank a dram after it. Lawrence Sutin, When to go […]

Did lifeguards look like lifeguards only after they‘d saved somebody? And what if they failed? What did they look like then? Abby Frucht, Polly’s Ghost.

I want to do everything I haven’t yet dared to do, and to escape everything I’ve already done. I want to die in a cataclysm of my own making, not in a world war fashioned by great nations. And I want to leave a written record of my passage across this earth, so that others […]

In her contributor’s note in Best American Short Stories, Katherine Bell writes: I loved the way Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield handled point of view and I wanted to see if I could manage shifting among several characters’ consciousnesses from paragraph to paragraph, or even sentence to sentence, without ever zooming out. (360) Bell manages […]

I wanted to believe him and he wanted to be believed, and I guess that’s the beginning of hope anyway, a tiny seed you hold real careful in the palm of your hand. Robert Vivian, The Mover of Bones.

The morning seminar was entitled “Reading Like a Writer” but was ultimately about what sorts of things to do with our annotations in the course of the tutorial period plus some general information on how things will work in the MFA. For our final workshop, we did a couple of writing exercises. I played with […]

Hector liked the saints best in the early paragraphs of their lives when they were still being tempted. Lawrence Sutin, When to go into the Water.

We’re beginning to draw to a close. The schedule is starting to open up a bit. The morning seminar was Roy Peter Clark and Tom French from the Poynter Institute talking about the importance of sequencing in writing. They offered up what might be called the 2-3-1 formula, where the most important thing comes at […]