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 …