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Photograph of people workshopping around a table

When a Workshop Goes Bad (Part 2)

Last week, I wrote about some bad experiences that I’ve had in writer’s workshops. Some of my past workshops fell apart because of: Tit-for-tat commenting: Writers exchanging immature cheap shots with each other. Generic commenting: Lazy comments that don’t help anyone in particular. Focusing on political issues: Arguments that have nothing to do with the…

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The Literary Flash Mob: A Call to Mischief

This November, word went out on a network of Boston-area choral singers: a flash mob was being proposed, and the organizers wanted to know who was game. About forty of us signed on, learned the parts we’d been assigned on the group’s Facebook page, and then—following one quick rehearsal—staked out the open-air famer’s market downtown…

Photograph of plain white empty envelopes

Simultaneity

Not much fazes me in the World of Creative Writing—a terrifying realm, to be sure—and though occasionally bummed, I don’t get too shaken up by phrasing such as “Dear Writer,” “we regret to inform you,” and “over x hundred/thousand/million/billion applicants.” So it goes. There are six words, however, that cause me to recoil involuntarily when…

Cover art for Glaciers by Alexis Smith

Glaciers

Glaciers Alexis M. Smith Tin House Books, January 2012 112 pages $10.25 Isabel, the protagonist in Alexis M. Smith’s new novel Glaciers, was only a month old when her family departed Seattle by ferry, returning to their roots in Alaska. She can’t recall the trip, but as an adult envisions that, “Like other great creatures…

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Writing Fiction, Writing Plays, Writing Voice: an Interview with Carol Gilligan

I first met Carol Gilligan in 1994. I’d read In a Different Voice in college, and had been intrigued by that book’s observation that women’s voices change the moral conversation…so when I met Carol I was prepared to see her through the lens of that groundbreaking work and all the political conversation it had generated….

Closeup photograph if the eye on a US dollar bill

The Great MFA Debate

If you’re interested in poetry and/or literary fiction and have been reading the Internet at any point over the last decade, you’re probably at least vaguely aware that there’s some controversy over the MFA degree: the number of people pursuing it, the effect it has on American writing, and its overall usefulness in our capitalist…