Okay, I know I still haven’t talked about my disappearance from the blogosphere and the reason for my sudden return. I will. I promise. Somebody emailed me months ago wanting to know why I had stopped blogging. I saved the email for weeks, trying to decide how to reply, what to say, how to explain it all, how to make sense of it myself, even—and then, finally, I deleted the email without responding. I’m sorry, whoever you are (if you’re even reading this). It wasn’t that I wanted to ignore you or that I felt it was none of your business. It was just that I wasn’t ready, yet, to talk about it all, I guess: the depression, and the depths it took me to this past couple of years.

And I guess I’m not ready still, beyond saying that I’m on a new antidepressant (a generic form of Lexapro) and am feeling a little better (though not back to 100%). The important thing, though, is that I’m writing again, and writing has always been my number one most reliable antidepressant.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today. I have a proposition for you. Anybody want to write a novella (or, hey, why not a whole novel) with me? So here’s my thinking: I had such a great (and productive) time taking Hannah Tinti’s One Story online class this summer, I wanted to keep the creative juices flowing with some more project-specific prompts. After working my way through Tinti’s daily prompts, I ended the class with an (almost) complete draft of a new story. I’d like, next, to get a complete draft of a novel.

Who’s with me?

Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m developing a series of novella-specific prompts intended to take us from character profile to finished draft over the course of—well, I don’t know yet how long it’s going to take. Six weeks? I do know the novella will be parceled up into six chapters: one chapter for the set-up, one for the inciting incident, two for the escalating events following the inciting incident, one for the climax, and one for the resolution (or conclusive lack thereof). I’m going to create a prompt for each chapter, and I’ll post the prompts on my blog, so anyone who wants to follow along with me can do so.

I’m going to actually create four separate tracks of prompt sets, because my goal is to write a full novel that will be comprised of four novellas interwoven together to create a larger story arc. Why do it that way? Because I want to write a novel, but right now, the idea of actually writing 300 pages or so of one story feels overwhelming. My novel involves four key characters, though, so I thought, hey, if I look at it as four stories, one following each character, four stories that, when woven together, will create something larger than the sum of its parts—well, that seems manageable. But I don’t want them all to feel like they’re following the same, I don’t know, template, so I’m going to create four separate sets of prompts for the novellas. I’ll post all four sets here, so you can do all four, or pick and choose as you see fit.

Still undecided? Here, why don’t you take a look at my step one? This is the pre-writing stage of all four tracks. Just give it a try, why don’t you? And if you do, I’d love to hear what you think. I’m open to tweaks or suggestions for this worksheet (and any of the prompts that will follow it), and of course, I’d love to hear how YOUR writing is going. Nothing motivates me more than swapping writing experiences with other writers and holding each other accountable.

 

All Tracks, Step 1:

Character Profile Worksheet:

Physical

Eye Color:

Hair Color/Length:

Body Shape/Size (i.e. skinny, muscular, chubby, etc.):

Defining Physical Characteristics (i.e. scars, freckles, etc.):

Physical Self-Image:

Personal

Interests/Hobbies:

 

Education Level:

 

             Major/Specialization:

Job:

 

Attitude (i.e. optimistic, cynical, etc.):

Emotional

Perceived Need(s):

 

Actual Need:

A fellow writer/mom just made a Facebook post that got me thinking about my state as a writing mama. The Facebook post talked about completing and submitting a draft of her dissertation, and it also talked about the job applications she is sending out and the two (two!) novels she has completed and begun submitting, too.

She is the mother of a toddler, a one-year-old. Where does she find the time????

Another writer friend of mine is also putting me to writing mama shame. Jayme Russell’s son, Dylan, is, I think, eleven. He was eight when I first met him, and he was so tiny and adorable and sweet and fun (he’s still most of those things, except that he’s not really so tiny anymore). In spite of having her hands full as the mother of a spirited school-aged boy, Jayme still found the time to earn her MA in poetry and is now working toward her MFA at the University of Notre Dame. Jayme has published nonfiction and poetry alike, and recently she made a vow to write a poem a day for the entire month of October (you can read about her progress in her blog).

She’s writing every. Single. Day. AND earning her MFA. AND being a mom.

Meanwhile, my relationship with writing has been very on-again/off-again since Amie was born, since I found out I was pregnant, even. It’s hard for me to find, not the time, maybe, but the energy to sit down and write when I spend most of my day chasing Amalie around, trying to prevent her from sticking everything she ever finds in her mouth and choking on it, and stressing out about whether I’m stimulating her mind enough and whether she’s hitting her developmental milestones on time. By the time I get Amie down for a nap or to bed at night, I don’t even feel like reading, let alone writing. To be fair to me, during a good deal of her sleeping time I grade papers or plan lessons, but I do have some genuinely free time . . . and I spend it watching Mad Men or playing Super Mario Land 3D.

I honestly think if I hadn’t already published a book before I had Amie, I would probably just give up on the whole idea of being a writer. I’m in my thirties, I would probably tell myself. I have a kid. It’s time to grow up and stop dreaming about something that’s never going to happen. But I did publish a book before I had a baby, and that, combined with whatever small success I’ve had so far, is enough to make me feel not like a would-be writer, but a writer, unqualified. It gives me the confidence to believe I should be doing this, should keep at it, that I am not wasting time dreaming the impossible.

So rather than looking at my writer/mama friends and telling myself, “I guess I’m just not a real writer, like they are. If I was, I would have found a way to be as productive as them,” I look at those ladies and feel inspired. I say, “So it is possible to juggle motherhood and the writing life. So I can do this.” And then, I do.

This week, Damien received several boxes at work, packed with the newest issue of New Ohio Review. It’s always exciting when the new issue arrives. He puts so much energy into designing and editing it that it almost feels unreal, I imagine, holding the final product in his hands. He brought a copy home and read aloud to me some of his favorite poems from the issue. I loved them, too, though it’s safe to say that as simply a reader, I don’t have quite the same experience reading the journal as he does, having been in on the issue from its inception, having watched it grow and become what it eventually became.

His enthusiasm, sharing the new issue with me, reminded me of why I decided to volunteer to work as an Associate Editor at Bound Off. Certainly, the amount of work I’ll put in at my position is nowhere near the amount Damien puts in at New Ohio Review (and a good thing, too, since he gets paid for his efforts, while mine is just a volunteer, few hours a week kind of job). Still, I look forward to having that satisfaction again, that feeling of accomplishment every time a new edition goes out (especially when a story I recommended we accept is part of that new edition).

I’m also looking forward to the ways slogging through a journal’s slush pile will improve my own writing. As writers, we sometimes forget that our work must first win over an editor before it can ever make it in front of a reader. Editors read slightly different from readers. While readers go into a piece expecting it to be good (because, after all, the bad stuff has been filtered out through the publication process), editors have no idea what they’re going to get every time they open a new submission—they may be about to read something brilliant, but it’s just as likely that they’re about to read something terrible. The most likely scenario, though, is that the story will be neither brilliant nor terrible, but will exist in that hazy world between. Those are the submissions it’s most difficult to decide on, but decide we must—and quickly! Quickly! We don’t have a lot of time to devote to each submission!

A reader goes in to a piece planning to like it, but an editor must reject 99% of everything he or she reads. This means an editor must read looking for reasons to say no, planning to say no. Knowing that 99 out of 100 submissions you receive will be rejected puts the odds in the “no” pile for every new submission you open. In a reader’s hands, then, each piece is innocent until proven guilty, but to an editor, the burden of proof (that the piece is worthwhile, that the piece deserves a spot on the page, or in Bound Off’s case, in the podcast) lies with the submission.

And it’s useful to remember this as a writer. It’s useful to remember it when you get rejected, because it takes the sting off a bit; it’s useful to remember it when you get accepted, because it hammers home how good you must be that your stuff is making it past the editorial hurdles; and it’s useful to remember it when you’re revising, because if you really want to make it into the hands of some readers, you do need to take the opinions of other smart, with-it, literary types into consideration. You do need other people’s feedback, and you need to seriously consider anything other people might say. The things your beta readers or workshop classmates are getting stuck on might be the same things that cause an editor to slide your submission into the “no” pile.

This doesn’t, of course, mean that every piece of feedback you ever receive should be taken or that you should change your work in a way that you, as the writer, don’t like. But. You should listen, and more than that, you should really seriously evaluate any feedback you receive if publication is one of your goals, and let’s be honest, for most of us, it is.

So for the past few weeks, I feel like I’ve been struggling to stay afloat in the new semester. I’m working two part-time jobs—teaching two classes and tutoring online through Pearson---and it’s A LOT, when you add it to being a stay-at-home mom. Damien is also teaching two classes, also working another part-time job (as Managing Editor for New Ohio Review) for about twenty hours a week. Trying to get the hang of the new, busy busy busy schedule has been a handful. And to put it bluntly, I haven’t been writing. Not at all. Not a sentence. Not a word.

We’re into week five of the semester now, though, and we’re finally starting to feel in the swing of things. It doesn’t really mean we’re any less busy, of course. If anything, things are starting to get busier as we’re beginning to collect papers from our students. But we’ve at least started to figure out how to deal with my online tutoring hours in the midst of Damien’s New Ohio Review workload and both of our lesson planning and grading obligations. One of us is always there with Amalie, and for the most part, Amalie doesn’t seem to notice how busy her parents have become, or that she’s spending larger portions of time with one or the other of us (and less time, unfortunately, with both of us at the same time).

And so, I’m feeling ready, again, to start adding a writing schedule back into the mix. And to do it, I’ve enlisted the help of my friend and fellow UAF MFAer Jenni Moody. Jenni and I have both been planning on getting to work on a novel. For me, this will be my third go at novel writing (maybe three times will be a charm?). But even though I’ve written and revised two novels before, I still feel completely insecure at the outset about my ability to do this (who knows, maybe it’s because I’ve been down this road before—a road that has yet to end in publication for me—that I’m so anxious about starting down it yet again). Even though I feel really excited about this idea I have, even though I have a lot of ideas for what might happen in the story, still, STILL I’ve been having trouble mustering up the courage to just sit down and get started.

And that’s where Jenni comes in. Jenni and I have committed to doing a joint goal system for our respective novel projects. We’re both hoping to have a full draft of our novels done by next summer. To get there, we’re going to set goals together and encourage each other—checking in along the way. It should help to make the long, lonely road of novel writing a little less lonely, and it should help to keep us motivated. I know for me, I’ll feel embarrassed if I have to admit to Jenni that I didn’t meet a goal, so the fact that we’re doing this together will push me that extra little bit to really DO it.

We’re starting off fairly slow. Our first 10,000 words are supposed to be completed by November 15^th. At that point we’ll check in, hopefully applaud each other’s success at meeting the goal, and set a new goal for the next chunk. I suspect after having the first 10,000 words behind us, we’ll be ready to pick up speed a bit and set a bit more strenuous goal for the next milestone, but even if we don’t, this slow and steady pace should still see us with a finished draft, each, by next summer.

I’m excited to have someone to share the novel writing experience with, and I know it’ll be fun checking in with Jenni along the way. I’m ready! I’m determined! Let's do this thing! Go!

Fellow UAF MFAer and good friend Shane Dayton recently made his MFA thesis, a novel called My Brother’s Keeper, available as an e-book on Amazon. I’m sure the decision to self-publish wasn’t made lightly, but after numerous personal, encouraging responses from editors and agents but still no book deal, I think Shane came to the conclusion that it was time to put the book out there and move on.
 
Personally, I was excited to finally get to read the book. Shane’s work was always among my favorite in workshop. His prose is somehow both gritty and lyrical at once, and his stories take on topics that a lot of other literary fiction writers don’t tackle. He doesn’t write about ailing marriages, about mundane situations causing great epiphanies. He’s not, like so many writers of our generation, trying to be Raymond Carver—I’m sorry, guys, Raymond Carver’s stuff is great, but you need to find your voice.

Shane’s work also never sacrifices plot to focus solely on the sentence. His sentences are good, but so are his actual stories, and My Brother’s Keeper is an excellent example. My Brother’s Keeper takes the reader into the mind of sixteen-year-old Gyle, a misfit with only three friends. Gyle is tired of being pushed around by the other kids at his high school, tired of being ignored by his father in favor of his athletic brother, and otherwise bored with his humdrum teenaged life. Gyle’s life is such that, as he puts it, “The days everyone ignored me were the easiest to get through.” It’s no surprise, then, that when Gyle meets Brent—a mysterious, Tyler Durdenesque boy who appears to be not much older than Gyle himself but who lives alone in a cabin in the woods—he is instantly drawn to the excitement and danger a friendship with Brent seems to offer.  

As Gyle begins to spend more time with Brent, it becomes clear that Brent views their relationship as that of a mentor to a protégé, yet Gyle, at first, is fine with this set-up. He admires Brent, even fears him, a little. Gyle wants to be strong and brave like Brent; he wants to be the sort of person who doesn’t get ignored. Slowly, Gyle finds himself changing in what he at first sees as positive ways, but as the story unfolds, Brent’s mental instability begins to rise to the surface, and Gyle begins to feel less comfortable with the new person Brent is pushing him to become.

When the story reaches its thrilling conclusion, all the loose ends are not neatly tied in a bow. The ends are frayed; they’re damaged and broken from the events of the story. The ending is complicated and messy and real. When asked, in the last scene, by one of his three friends if he is the person he was before this all began or the person she came to detest during the height of Gyle’s progression towards Brent-ness, Gyle doesn’t know what to say: “She wanted a quick answer, but I didn’t have one for her.” Finally, he tells her, “Neither,” but he can’t really elaborate further than that. I won’t give away the last line, but it’s beautiful and perfect and leaves you highly aware of just how changed Gyle is.

My Brother’s Keeper is a psychological thriller with the sensibilities of literary fiction. It’s darkly comic at points, intensely frightening at others, and it maintains the steady momentum of a plot driven novel, though not at the expense of character and sentence. It’s well worth the $2.99 Shane is charging for it, and I highly recommend it to anyone who really values story—plot—not just elegant writing.

Happy, happy Mother’s Day, everyone! This is my first Mother’s Day as a mama, and it also happens to be my little Ami B C’s eight month birthday—happy birthday, baby bean! This week, I bring you the close of my discussion of the AWP panel, “Barefoot, Pregnant, and at the Writer’s Desk: Managing Motherhood and the Writing Life.”

Hope Edelman is a nonfiction writer with five books to her name. Like Kate Hopper, Edelman said that before motherhood, her writing days were unstructured. Not so, now that she’s a mother. To work her writing time into her hectic mommy-life, Edelman keeps an office outside of the house and schedules writing time around the family schedule. In addition, Edelman has become a binge writer: she’ll often check into a motel something like 100 miles out of town—far enough to justify not popping home for dinner, but close enough that if a true emergency arises she can easily get back home—and spends the entire weekend just writing.

Edelman said that she sees her life as a sort of pendulum, which swings back and forth between her life as a mother and her life as a writer. She doesn’t seem to have much trouble maintaining the right balance between the two, and she says her kids really don’t have a problem with her disappearing sometimes to write—though her husband, she pointed out, doesn’t always like it.

Edelman gave a hilarious list of things she can’t do because she’s a mother and a writer, but she followed it up with a list of things she can do only because she’s a mother and a writer: her writing is enriched with details and a range of emotions that she’s only privy to as a result of the experiences she’s had as a mother; she’s much better now at budgeting time (though part of that is a result of reduced expectations); she can help her kids with their English homework way better than most parents can; she can offer her kids the exciting, interesting experience of going on a book tour.

Edelman said that of course motherhood has cut into her writing time—of course she could have written more books by now had she chosen not to have children—but she doesn’t mind. She’s focusing on the children she does have, not the books she doesn’t. I LOVE this attitude—this is exactly how I feel. I know I’m less productive now that I have Amalie, but that’s okay with me. I’d much rather have Amalie than the extra stories I could be writing.

Jill McCorkle is a fiction writer who has published eight books to date, five of which appeared on the New York Times notable list. Immediately after becoming a mother, McCorkle noticed the effects of motherhood on her writing. She’d been struggling with a novel that was just not working. After having the baby, she was able to go back into the draft from a new angle, focusing her attention on the character of the mother in her story, and suddenly the whole novel came together.

Like the other authors, McCorkle said all of her established rules for writing went out the window after she’d had a baby. She had to really convince herself that writing is a legitimate way to spend her time, that it does count as work and it’s okay to set up boundaries to make sure she has time to do it. Still, she noted, “Some of my best work has been written in the carpool lane or outside the grocery store . . . No one ever seemed to mind if I said, ‘I’m going to the grocery store to get dinner.’” So she would drive to the store, spend five minutes quickly shopping, then spend another half hour sitting in the car writing in a notebook.

She would also just take little notes throughout the day—everybody can find a minute or two to jot down an interesting idea, an image that really strikes them, a sentence or two that will evolve into something greater down the road. She would store these notes away until she was able to scrape together a chunk of time to write. Writing, for McCorkle, is not like a faucet that she can turn on and off, but rather, “a slow, steady drip.”

Like Edelman, McCorkle felt that being a writer enhanced her as a mother, and her children have developed a true appreciation for literature. No doubt the same will be true of Amalie. At a reading this weekend, someone was marveling at how well Amalie does at these events, and I pointed out that she went to her first reading when she was only two or three weeks old. She attended her first conference at five months old. She’s growing up in a house with overflowing bookshelves. She’s growing up surrounded by writers—not just her parents, but the vast majority of her parents’ friends and colleagues, too. She’s getting a very different view of literature than most children do, and I just don’t see how this all could not affect her (I believe in a good way).

The countdown to AWP is upon us. We’re heading off first thing Wednesday morning and will be in Chicago until next Sunday. I’m excited, though for different reasons than last year. Last year was my first ever AWP—just the idea of going, of being in the same place at the same time as all those other writers, of having so many interesting events to attend, was thrilling.

This year is going to be a very different experience. For one thing, I’ve got baby in tow and don’t know how many events I’ll actually be able to attend, or how many I’ll have to leave early because Ama’s getting bored and talkative. When I originally registered, my main intent was to spend some time wandering around the book fair—by far my favorite thing about AWP last year (well, not counting reconnecting with old friends). After I’d already registered, I found out that the book fair is free and open to the public on the last day of the conference—doh! I could have just gone, kicked around Chicago with Amalie, and then checked out the book fair for free on Saturday. Ah well.

Since I did register, though, I do plan on at least trying to attend some events. I’ve been reading The Blind Assassin this past week (and falling in love, hard, with Margaret Atwood) and would really like to attend Atwood’s keynote address. There are also some panel discussions whose topics sound really interesting.

But I know, with a five-and-a-half-month-old in my charge and daddy Damien working the New Ohio Review table for half the day, every day, I’ll be at the whims of Amalie’s moods (and feeding and napping schedule—if you can call it a schedule . . .). And that’s fine. Because AWP feels different for me this year not just because I’ll have a baby this time. It’s different, too, because I’ve been through it once before, and while I had a ton of fun, the magic has sort of gone out of it already.  

I know I’m not going to meet an agent in an elevator, suddenly become charming and outgoing, pitch my novel to him/her, and land myself a book deal (I didn’t even have the guts to sign up for a scheduled pitch session with an agent last year). And I know that at my book signing, I’ll be lucky to sell any copies to people I don’t already know—and since the people I know have already bought their copies, I’ll be lucky to sell any at all this year. And I know that, while I like the idea of all these people with shared interests and goals congregating together and sharing this thing with each other, there’s something overwhelming about seeing 10,000 writers together all at once and realizing that they’re all competing for the same publications and the same jobs—it really hammers home your chances: slim, at best.

But like I said, I’m excited, nonetheless. I got some Christmas money that I have yet to spend, so I plan on really letting myself loose on the book fair this year. And I’m looking forward to a fun vacation with Amalie. And I’m going to see some old friends just like last year (I’m really excited about seeing fellow UAF MFAer Jenni Moody!). And I’m definitely looking forward to my off-site reading. I like doing readings, oddly enough (odd, because I’m shy and introverted, and because readings tend to be a sort of dismal affair, where hardly anyone shows up, and of those few, maybe one buys a copy of the book, if you’re lucky), and this reading should be especially good, since several people have already committed to attend.  

Oh AWP, for me, you’ve changed. But that’s okay. I still love you, all the same.

(Don’t forget to check back next week, when my March interview series kicks off with an interview with self-published author Ken Brosky.)

A friend of mine out here in Ohio, Kelly Kathleen Ferguson, published her first book a few months ago: My Life as Laura: How I Searched for Laura Ingalls Wilder and Found Myself. Kelly has agreed to let me interview her regarding her experience publishing the book, which I plan to post sometime in March. (She also talks a little bit about the process at the end of the book, if you’re interested.) 

In the meantime, I wanted to talk a little about how much I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed the book. It’s funny and poignant, sad at parts, but that plucky, you-can-get-through-this sort of sad. The book details Kelly’s exploits retracing the Ingalls family’s journey west, at the same time exploring Kelly’s relationship with a man she refers to as “My Manly” and her desire to figure out what it is she wants out of life.

Part of the reason I was so pleased that this book was so good was because I remember, a couple of years ago, talking to Kelly about the book while she was writing it. This was not long after I had met Kelly, not long after I found out that Kelly’s first fiction publication—that’s right, her very first—had appeared in no less than the Gettysburg Review. (That same story ended up being nominated for a Pushcart, and it got her noticed by an agent!)

I remember it very clearly: a small group of us were having lunch at Casa Nueva—a highly overrated restaurant in my town, which serves food that kind of, sort of, if you really squint your eyes and hold your nose, resembles Mexican food—and Kelly was talking about working on the book. She really should be home writing, she said, but she knew the second she got home she would probably just curl up on the couch with the cats and take a nap. She was joking around, of course, but the sentiment behind the joke rang true: sometimes she just didn’t feel like writing. She had to get this thing done, she told me, because she’d already lined up a publisher for it. Still, there were definitely days when she had to force herself to get to work.

Cut to a little over two years later: the book is out and it’s fabulous. The work she did definitely paid off, and based on the number of Amazon book reviews it’s already garnered (my book’s been out more than a year and only three people have reviewed it on Amazon), I think it’s selling pretty well. And as I was reading it, I couldn’t stop thinking about that day at Casa, how she hadn’t felt like writing. She hadn’t felt like writing, and yet when she sat down and forced herself to do it anyway, this lovely book is what resulted.

I find it all very reassuring, don’t you? ALL writers have to force it sometimes, even the really, really good ones like Kelly. Nobody walks around in a constant state of inspiration. Some days we stare at the blank screen for what feels like hours, willing the words to come. Others, we have trouble even getting that far. But it’s the writers who sit in front of that computer anyway who eventually produce excellent books like My Life as Laura. We should all take a page out of Kelly’s book.

Sorry, kitty, no nap for me today. I’ve got work to do.

This week the Huffington Post released their new list of the top 25 underrated creative writing MFA programs, and I was thrilled to see that the University of Alaska Fairbanks made the cut. It felt to me like very well-deserved (and long overdue) recognition for the program that is so close to my heart.

My reaction to the news, though, was a little shameful considering that I’ve always shunned creative writing MFA ranking lists, believing that they’re mostly self-perpetuating (the Poets & Writers list, for example, which is the definitive ranking list people turn to when researching and applying to CW MFA programs, bases its numbers largely on the opinions of people who are currently applying for MFA programs, many or most of whom used last year’s P & W rankings to help them formulate those opinions.)

Still, I have to admit that part of my distaste for these sorts of rankings results from the fact that UAF, which I know is an excellent program from my own personal experience, is usually overlooked. It’s a bit spiteful and jealous, I know. But the problem with ranking things is that, just as somebody’s got to come out on top, somebody—many somebodies—have got to come out somewhere in the middle or on the bottom, and it isn’t always true that the “top” programs are any better than the rest.

It often feels to me like any program that doesn’t make it to the top 25 (or at least top 50) gets unfairly shunned and ignored by MFA applicants (and many others in the CW world), when really, probably most (who knows, maybe even all) accredited CW MFA programs are damn good, absolutely brimming with top-notch writers, both faculty and students alike. UAF is a great case in point: the P & W list ranked them 105 last year out of 130 (although UAF did receive an honorable mention for funding). Programs ranked that low don’t even appear in the list printed in the magazine—you have to go to the website and click “Additional Rankings” to even see the rankings below the top 50.

Yet my alma mater, as I’ve said, is an excellent program. This is not cognitive dissonance talking; if I’d gotten a bum deal from going to UAF, I’d say so. In fact, I’d probably spend far too much time ruminating on what a waste of time it had been going there, what a bad decision I’d made (I could, after all, have gone somewhere else. UAF wasn’t the only school that accepted me, but it was my top choice program from the beginning). But the truth is, the time I spent at UAF was, to date, the best three years of my life, and certainly the most fruitful and instructive. I entered the program naïve and lazy; I left the program having completed two book-length works, one of which was accepted for publication just one year after I graduated. The other students in the program, and the faculty, were all incredible writers, and many of them have had significant publication success. It’s clearly a good program, but at spot 105, it’s overlooked by most everyone.

So yeah, I’m excited about this small bit of recognition, but I know, at the same time, that a spot on any of these lists doesn’t mean much. The truth is, I wish rankings didn’t exist at all. I don’t see how we can reasonably say that certain programs are better across the board than others, when really, personal needs, style preferences, etc. all play an important role in finding the right program for you. UAF was definitely the right program for me, whereas Iowa probably wouldn’t have been (not that I would have stood a chance of getting in, nor would I have wasted my money in applying). Rankings, then, bring the value of my degree down a bit, since people are often quick to assume that a program, ranked so low isn’t a very good program. It’s harder for me to find a job than someone who graduated from a higher ranked school, and it’s harder for me to find an agent, too. Even so, I’m proud to have graduated from UAF, and I don’t regret having gone there one bit. Underrated it most definitely is, and, while the same is probably true of several other programs that didn’t make the Huffington Post’s list, it’s nice to see someone out there acknowledging it.

I had to make a very difficult but unfortunately inevitable decision recently, which I’d like, now that I’ve informed all of our submitters and Duotrope, to share with you: I decided, after three years, to close down MFA/MFYou as a literary journal. This decision was based on a number of factors, the two main ones being that my co-editor and husband, Damien Cowger, who has been doing double duty as our co-editor while also working as the Assistant Editor of the more prestigious print journal New Ohio Review, has been hired, now, as the Managing Editor of New Ohio Review. It’s an excellent opportunity and we’re both thrilled about it . . . but it does mean that he really doesn’t have time, anymore, to work with me on MFA/MFYou.

And let’s face it, I don’t really have time anymore, either, with a new baby on the way. I decided recently that, having been up and running for three years now, the journal was at a sort of crossroads. I needed to either push it up to the next level or throw in the towel. It’s been a dream of mine for, I don’t know, ten years to run a small, independent lit journal, and so, as you can imagine, it was difficult for me to accept that closing the journal was probably what I needed to do. But, alas, it is what I need to do.

I haven’t, however, made up my mind yet whether to shut down the website itself. I’ve been toying with the idea of maybe keeping the site going, but changing it from a literary journal into a sort of online resource for writers who might be considering getting an MFA. The site, in this case, would include a discussion forum where MFA and non-MFAers alike could come and share experiences and discuss topics relating to creative writing degrees and writing in general. We’d also probably publish essays written by people on both sides of the spectrum, talking about their specific experiences in or out of MFA programs. Interviews would also be a nice addition. Running a site like that would be less work, I think, than running a literary journal, as material would be updated on an as-needed (and as time allows) basis. The forums, of course, would just be open to discussion all the time, and anyone who comes to the site would be able to post or respond to topics.

It would be a fun and interesting way of keeping the discussion open on the topic, since I’ve really, really enjoyed reading the contributions to our MFA/MFYou Experience pages. I also get emails sometimes from people considering applying for MFA programs, wanting advice or asking specific questions based on my own experiences as an MFA graduate. I would love to open up more of a space where a variety of writers can share their experiences on the topic and offer advice to writers who have yet to decide what’s the right path for them.

At this stage, of course, it’s still in the very early conception stage. This, too, will take its fair share of time, and it will only really be worth doing if I can entice enough fellow writers to come and share their thoughts and experiences on the site. I may still just shut the site down altogether, but this option is very appealing to me right now and, after I’ve thought it through some more, I may just give it a shot.

I just got back from the AWP conference in Washington DC, and while I had a lot of fun, I’m utterly exhausted—there was just so much to do and so many people to see. I did a book signing for Peter Never Came at the Autumn House Press table; I went to tons of awesome, interesting panels (and a few flub panels, but that’s just the way it goes, isn’t it?); and I got to spend a lot of quality time hanging out with people I don’t normally get to see.

The sheer volume of people in the industry was a bit overwhelming at times, and many people at the conference seemed to have one of two opposing viewpoints about how it felt to be surrounded by thousands of other writers for four continuous days. Some people talked about the sense of community, how nice it was to get so many people with similar interests and career goals together in the same place. Several people, though, said that they knew they should feel that way . . . but they didn’t. Instead, they found it kind of depressing, having such a tangible, concrete reminder of just how many people are submitting to the same places, how unique we each absolutely are not. 

I lean more towards the former opinion, and there are a few reasons why:

1. Even though a huge conference like this is a cold reminder of how much competition you have, it’s also a reminder that people do make it in this field. Many of the writers in the sea of people had books out, had published in a variety of journals, had won awards, had landed agents—and most of them are not any better or doing anything much different than the writers at the conference who hadn’t yet reached those achievements. The breaks, they do come; you just have to stick with the game long enough to start getting noticed.

2. The book fair reassured me that there are many, many possible venues for publication. I’ve been researching, submitting to, and getting published in journals for so many years now, I sometimes feel like there are probably no journals I haven’t heard of—but there are. And being new to the book publication game, there are also many small presses that I either am not very familiar with or haven’t heard of at all. There are tons of places I can send my work out to, and I suppose I say this in part because I’ve had enough small-scale publication success to feel confident in my abilities as a writer, but just the knowledge that there are so, so, so many options available makes me believe that anything I try to publish, will get published eventually—I just have to keep sending it around.

3. Even though I understand the complaint I heard from many other writers at the conference—that it got to be grating being immersed in this limited world where everybody you see is in the same field and everywhere you go people are having the same conversations—I really like talking about writing. Talking writing, even when it’s nothing new, even when it’s just the same conversations I’ve heard or the same panel discussions I’ve sat through hundreds of times before, still gets me going. I leave this kind of thing feeling totally keyed up and ready to write.

That’s not to say there aren’t depressing things, too, for example, the stark contrast at the book fair between the people working the tables, who were mostly trying to convince people to buy their books, journals, and paraphernalia, and the people stopping by the tables, who were mostly looking for places they could submit their own work. I have to admit, I find it disturbing that unknown authors who publish with small presses don’t always seek out and read other work published by unknown authors through small presses; likewise, people who want to publish their work in journals don’t always read journals. I would be a hypocrite if I only read work published by major publishing houses and famous authors—if I don’t even read unknown authors like myself, how can I expect other people to give me a chance?

This has been especially on my mind because I did see one such hypocrite up close at the book fair. She was an editor from a small press (I won’t say which one), and she was a bit curt with an editor at another small press table for trying to tell her about some book she had never heard of. “I believe you that it’s a good book,” she said, “but I don’t know who this author is. There are probably tons of good books that I’ll never read. I want to buy something I’ve heard of.” How did she live with herself when she returned to her own small press table and tried to sell the unknown authors and books her press publishes?

Still, overall, I found the conference far more encouraging and motivating than depressing. I left the conference exhausted, as I said, but also anxious to get back to work. I had a ton of fun, went to some cool panels, and bought some new books I would probably never have heard of anywhere else. I could definitely see doing this every year if I could afford to.

With Borders Bookstores drowning in debt—on the verge or not on the verge of bankruptcy, depending on who you ask—and Barnes and Noble putting itself up for sale, unable to compete with the online shopping habits of book-readers the world over, those of us who write and read, let’s face it, the sort of artsy, intellectual literary fodder that is never likely to sell well with the masses, are left with a frightening prospect: is it true, what many people are predicting for the not-too-distant-future? Are brick-and-mortar bookstores rapidly becoming a relic of the past? Will the children born from today forward never have the experience of wandering through the aisles of a physical bookstore, picking books off the shelf, examining their covers and reading the first few pages, discovering new authors that will not come up if you simply click “Browse” at an online store?

Damien and I fell in love at a Barnes and Noble. Well, maybe that’s oversimplifying things a bit, but one of our go-to dates back when we first started dating was to head over to Barnes and Noble, each get a coffee or tea, and then find some aisle or corner with no other customers and sift through the books there together. In fact, our very first date was having coffee together at the Barnes and Noble café.

It makes me feel like an old biddy, complaining about the basic fact that the world is changing. Of course the world is changing, Damien reminded me when I brought this up with him the other day. We don’t have Victrolas anymore, either. We don’t have to crank the phone to talk on it—in fact, most of us don’t even have landlines at all (Damien and I don’t).

True. But I’m someone who loves to stumble upon authors by rolling my sleeves up and sorting through the aisles, who is horrified at the thought of never stumbling across the sort of books that I’m most likely to read—the ones that publishers either can’t (in the case of small presses) or won’t put a lot of money into marketing. Those books will be harder to find without the physical shelves of a bookstore on which to find them. It will be like only hearing about new music from the radio, which naturally only plays the top, moneymaking hits. The major bookstores, of course, mostly sell the top, moneymaking books, but you can still find the less popular books hidden on the shelves, if you really take the time to look.

I know this is doomsday, extremist kind of worry. As brick-and-mortar bookstores slowly die off, we’ll find new ways of discovering good, “underground” sort of books. Small press authors will have to step up and change with the times—something that scares me, I must admit, as I feel somewhat overwhelmed by it all, not at all sure how to get my book into the hands of the people who will want to read it—and surely, surely this increasingly virtual world that we live in will bring with it new, innovative ways to market books. Facebook, Twitter, and author blogs (like this one) are useful once you’ve already got people interested in you, but what ways will come about, I wonder, that will help literary fiction authors reach audiences who have not already heard of them?

While I do believe that authors and readers alike are going to have to find new ways to find and market books, it’s also true that we can at least try to keep the small, independently owned bookstores in business. Businesses like that are, as a rule, financially unstable, so if we can, we should shop at them. They are our best bet at keeping brick-and-mortar bookstores alive, and as long as there are physical bookstores, the lesser known authors will continue to get their books on the bookstore’s shelves and do readings/book signings at them.

Perhaps the truth is that I want physical bookstores to stick around for sentimental reasons, but I do want them to stick around. And if you do, too, well, we’re going to have to make even more of an effort, now, to make that happen. But I say, let's do what we can. I want there to be as many access lines as possible to the really good books that will, at the online stores, get buried beneath the noise of the bestseller lists.

I talked last time about how I think I’m in need of a change to my system of writing goals, and I asked for feedback on how each of you stay motivated and set goals. Your responses were fascinating and have made me completely rethink the way I look at goal setting.

Many of the people who responded talked about the importance of freedom in writing, of not trying to force yourself into a work-like routine. Others talked about setting project-based rather than time or word-based goals, and a related topic: the value of deadlines. Some of you also addressed the importance of flexibility and of not getting down on yourself when you’re simply too busy to write much—for those of us who teach, for example, perhaps we shouldn’t push ourselves too hard when school is in session, and instead, hit it hard during the winter and summer breaks. 

For one thing, learning how the rest of you are handling your own writing goals and routines makes me feel much better about those times when, for whatever reason, I don’t write as much as I think I should. Maybe the key words there are “I think.” Maybe the truth is, there is no “should” when it comes to writing.

Your responses have also made me rethink my idea of setting time-based goals. I still like the idea of writing for two or three hours a day, but the truth is, the individual projects are what matter, not the amount of time you put into them. If I throw an hour or two of my day away because I was really trying to force it, but ended up just staring at the computer—typing a sentence, then deleting it, then retyping it, then deleting it again—was that really time well spent? Yes, I met my goal, but did I really accomplish anything? Should I, instead, have just not worried about writing that day and told myself that as long as I finish X draft by Y deadline, it doesn’t really matter if I work at all today.

Over the years I’ve learned a fair amount about how I work and what tends to work best for me, and I know that I can’t go lengthy periods without writing. I get depressed when I don’t write, if nothing else, but also, I rely heavily on momentum. So I know that I need to pick goals that will effectively keep me going at a steady pace. A missed day or even week now and again isn’t a big deal, but taking a whole month—or months—off from writing simply would not work for me. 

However, I think project-based goals, which rely on deadlines for respective aspects of a project—specific chapters or drafts completed by specific dates—would effectively keep my momentum going, without the regrettable side-effect of making me feel down on myself when I don’t make the goal on any given day or making me feel guilty about doing anything other than writing—reading, grading papers, spending time with friends or my husband . . .

So I’m going to set a new sort of goal for myself for the remainder of the year. During the break, in addition to developing a half-online creative writing course for the college where I work, I’m going to focus on completing yet another revision of my MFA thesis. I’ve had a handful of partial and full manuscript requests from agents, and while the feedback has always been encouraging, I have a pretty good idea of why it keeps getting rejected. I’m going to use the idea of imposing a deadline to motivate me—I want to have this current revision ready to go by the end of the winter break, so I can submit it to the AWP novel contest in January. I’ll also work on short stories and my newer novel as the desire hits, but my overall goal will be to finish this new draft of my older novel.

I have a long commute to work, and recently, to fill the time, I’ve been listening to an audio book called Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. The book is about cognitive dissonance theory, and it is fascinating.

As I’m learning about cognitive dissonance, I’m beginning to understand why people sometimes act in ways that seem so totally baffling. Cognitive dissonance occurs when our vision of who we are—our sense of identity—is called into question by something that happens or something that we do. For example, if I see myself as a nice and reasonable person, but one day I snap and do something mean and unreasonable—say, flip somebody off for accidentally cutting me off in traffic—that action creates a feeling of cognitive dissonance in me. I’m a good person, why would I do something so not good? To get rid of that uncomfortable feeling of dissonance, I make up some reason to justify my action—well, it was that other jerk’s fault. He cut me off! And really, I’m helping him to learn from his mistake—so now I feel better about my action, and my sense of identity is once again intact.

See how that works?

Well, among many other mind blowing realizations (forgive the hyperbole, but this book is truly awesome), the book has helped me to understand a couple of common things that I often see writers do. The first is a bad thing, the second, just sort of an interesting thing.

First off, the bad news. Follow along with my scenario for a second: You see yourself as a very nice, caring person, right? You’re not the jealous type. You’re a good friend, and you want good things to happen to your friends. But then one day, your friend Writer McWritey-Well calls you up, ecstatic to share the news that he just got a publication acceptance, or won a contest, or was picked for inclusion in one of the Best American anthologies, or . . . Your first reaction? Jealousy. Bitterness. Maybe even the feeling that you’ve somehow been wronged. Why don’t good things ever happen to me?

This is not the way you would have expected yourself to react. He’s a good writer, and he works hard. You should be happy for him. You know you should. And yet you aren’t. But why? You’re not that kind of person, not at all. This feeling goes against your image of yourself. So you justify it. You tell yourself, the reason I’m upset is not because I’m jealous. I’m upset because ol’ Writer McWritey-Well is bragging. He’s so full of himself. What a jerk.

Voila. Your image of yourself as a nice, caring, good person is unharmed. The problem is, your friend McWritey is left wondering why you’re acting like he’s a jerk for wanting to share his good news. He didn’t do anything wrong. You’re his friend. He just assumed you would want to know. He assumed you would be happy for him.

And sharing good news with your friends is not bragging.

I think cognitive dissonance is just a part of the human experience. It’s probably not something we can just turn off. The same is true of jealousy, I would guess. But maybe being more aware of what’s going on in our brains can help us to be a bit more rational about things. I don’t think it makes you a bad person if your first reaction to someone else’s good fortune is jealousy. Those feelings just happen. What matters is what we do with them.

Well, let’s not end on that sour note, so here’s a benign thing that I think can also be traced to cognitive dissonance: have you ever noticed that many writers claim that they’ve always wanted to be a writer? That they were born to write, that they’ve always felt called to this profession? Here’s what I think is happening: being a writer is such a part of so many of our identities that it’s difficult to accept that there are any number of other paths we might have taken and that it’s partially luck, partially just small steps we’ve made in this direction along the way that have turned us into writers. When we’re faced with that reality, the result is cognitive dissonance.

So when we tell ourselves (and other people), “Even when I was a little kid, I always wanted to be a writer,” I think what’s happening is we’re closing that dissonant gap by ignoring the fact that we also wanted to be a movie star when were little, and we wanted to be the president, and an astronaut, and a fireman, and . . . When I was a teenager, I kind of wanted to be a fashion designer. And a filmmaker. But sometimes I tell myself, “Nah, I always wanted to write,” because I wanted to do that, too. I wanted to do many things.

I bet you did too.