Category: mfa
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Residency day 7
We began the day with Josip Novakovich’s talk on negative motivation in fiction. Again, the large size of the group tended to work against it being a proper seminar. I’m also seeing Josip being fond of using exercises as part of his writing instruction. For me the problem is that these sorts of exercises address…
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Residency day 6
Today began with a seminar by Peter Meinke which seemed to have been better-planned for a small group of poets than the entire student body courtesy of a last-minute cancellation of the opposing talk on experimental fiction. Meinke’s views on poetry are a bit opposed to mine. I stand more with Charles Bernstein, who wrote…
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Residency day 5
The midpoint of the residency. The morning was designated as a reading/writing period & I took advantage of that to get a fair amount of work done in the morning. The first activity of the day was “synthesis” which turned out to be a sort of free-wheeling discussion of the residency, one which I hope…
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Residency day 4
Today was St Petersburg day. We were taken in vans from the University of Tampa campus first to the Hotel Don CeSar on St Petersburg Beach. We had workshops on the veranda of the hotel overlooking the beach, then after lunch a bit of free time that I used to take a quick swim in…
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Residency day 3
The day began with Jeff Parker’s seminar on “repetition” which he turned into a seminar on “not-knowing/repetition” building a great deal off of the essay “Not Knowing” by Donald Barthelme, an author I’ve found I greatly enjoy. A handful of good things and Parker ran his seminar a bit more like a seminar, although having…
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Residency day 2
And now things begin to really happen. The first agenda item was a meeting of people interested in working on Tampa Review Online, a bit disorganized in terms of planning etc., but I signed on to be a reader for fiction. Thence to the first workshop, about which I will say nothing (what happens in…
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Residency day 1
Today was a largely administrative day. I overslept and missed the escort from hotel to campus, but I did manage to still arrive for the breakfast/checkin/meet and greet in the morning. This was followed by a brief orientation session and an introduction to the blackboard system that we’re to use for all of our assignments.…
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Residency day 0
This is the first of a set of daily blog posts I intend to write about the residency for my MFA at the University of Tampa. I’m currently on a Southwest Airlines flight from Chicago to Tampa, with a suitcase full of clothes and books, a carry-on with a bunch more books, manuscripts, iPad and…
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Counting down to the first residency
There’s only three weeks until I begin my first residency for the MFA. I’ve had the residency packet for a couple weeks and have been doing big piles of reading in preparation for this. They’ve added a few new instructors and since one of the workshop sessions will be what’s billed as a “wildcard session”…