MFA: Here Endeth the First Semester

I survived--somehow. The second session of the MFA program is mid-July. We are up to THREE WOMEN this time. Hurray--that's up from lonely little moi last time. The fiction classes are growing apace--the program has added another teacher to cover the fiction load. There are two sections of fiction, one section of nonfiction (which is nearly large enough to split), and our small poetry section.

I'm satisfied with most of the work I did for the program this spring. I liked what I read, and I was thrilled to receive the mentoring critiques and suggestions, but sometimes I felt that many of my revisions were rote, and I didn't really stretch myself as much as I wanted. I was humbled by formalism. I've started on a long (chapbook length) series of poem for my fall project, and I'm hopeful that these poems will be stronger, less dissonant, than the ones I wrote this spring. There's a new mentor, and I'm nervous about that. Phil Stephens (spring mentor) will be presenting the genre seminar on the long narrative (in the nick of time for me and the project above, I might add), and I really wish he were staying for the entire semester. I like change...I like change...I like change...I keep telling myself that.

Here's the schedule of what we're doing in July:

Intense seminar in poetry--Brian Barker--reading Rose by Li-Young Lee and Judy Jordan's Carolina Ghost Woods.

Genre Seminar in the Long Poem: Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Hudgins, and "Four Good Things," James McMichael. (As a bonus, we are rereading Huck Finn ).

Fiction Genre Seminar--Southern Grotesque: Lewis Nordon's Sugar Among the Freaks , plus selections from these writers: Edgar Allen Poe(Harvey's distant cousin!); Augustus Baldwin Longstreet; Johnson Jones Hooper; Flannery O’Connor; Eudora Welty; Tony Earley; Randall Kenan; Lee Smith; Doris Betts.

There's also a creative nonfiction seminar on humor in nonfiction, but I don't think I'll have time for that, because I have a new project underway.

The readings are by: Andrew Hudgins, Erin McGraw, Kim Trevathan, Brian Barker, and Lynn Pruett.

I've been asked to teach an on-campus section of Intro to Creative Writing/Poetry at MSU. This is a sophomore-level class. I've been away from teaching composition/literature for over 15 years--so all this planning of syllabus, text selection, readings list--is exciting. (Let's see how I feel mid-October when it's mid term). Oh, yeah, they're paying me, too.