An online home for the American University Creative Writing MFA community
In keeping with my recent grammar–centric posts, this piece was initially going to be about long sentences. While researching a possible angle, I poured over celebrated sentences from Faulkner, Woolf, David Foster Wallace, sentences that span paragraphs, winding through all the light and dark spaces…
On applying to graduate school in the first place: do it. On taking a workshop outside your genre, even though you’re still trying to find your footing in the genre you know and love: do it. On going to your professor’s office hours: do it.…
I’ve been a writer for four years. Four years is not a long time, especially when one considers that three of those years were spent in an MFA program for creative writing. Do you know what four-year-olds do, often? They fail. Hard. Have you ever…
Part of my journey is a writer is a constant striving to find a cadence that rings true — meaning that it rings me— across genres. Every form of communication has its own conventions, but good writing is good writing, right? Good writing is two…
“I lost it at Whole Foods today,” Marione Ingram confesses. She’s only been in the room for five minutes, and we are all already a little in love with her, so we lean in. “They were selling Passover cakes with train tracks drawn on them in…
Let’s talk about relative pronouns. The fate of humanity hangs in the balance. To review: our most common relative pronouns include who/whom, whoever/whomever, whose, that, and which. Aside: The that versus which distinction is not an issue that threatens our way of life. That said,…
Café recently interviewed Patricia Park, who will join AU’s MFA faculty this fall– if we don’t lose her to the beguiling world of actuarial science. CA: What are you drawn to write about? PP: I write about minorities within minorities. It’s “bad” enough when mainstream…
I found out about Artomatic on the very last day of the very first one, back in 1999. It was one of those sunny, dusty, urban spring afternoons, and a friend and I trekked to the 1300 block of Florida Avenue NW, to what used…