Winter Break is Dwindling down...

By Casey Tolfree

It's been a very productive winter break. I was a little nervous when the semester let out that I wouldn't want to do anything for the month. Just sit around, reread some book I'd read a million times already and veg, but that wasn't what happened at all.

I spent a lot of my first semester revising and I was tired. I needed something fresh and new to work on. What I really needed was the time to think about.

I took a writing prompt I'd written for my workshop and created a short story out of it. I consider myself a novelist so this was a great achievement. The first short story I've really ever written. You can check it out on my blog, it's called Reunion. After writing the short story I actually came up with an idea to change some plot points and add a lot more and created an idea for a novel based off the same character and a similar but not exactly the same situation. That's on my blog too (the beginning) it's called Ennui.

But the writing is always there. I have to write. Even if I don't put anything on the page, I'm always writing and rewriting in my mind all day. I read a lot over break. I started off with a cute book called Knit the Season by Kate Jacobs. It's the third book in the Friday Night Knitting Club series. It was nice to visit old characters.

After that I checked out A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore and Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy. Both were on the NYT Book Review Top of 2009. I don't read a lot of what is considered literary fiction and though I was interested in both books, they weren't all that exciting. The Moore novel felt like it wanted to be something it wasn't. It was reaching for something it couldn't quite get a grip on and the end came all too quickly and randomly. The collection of short stories was intriguing, though I felt most of them ended where they should've began.

I also read A Raisin in the Sun, it was homework for my African American Women Playwrights Class. It was a quick read but very in depth for a play. It almost read like a novel. I just started Don DeLillo's White Noise. We talked about him a lot last semester and I had never read anything of his, so I picked it up. Now I just have to finish it before next week. As someone who entered my MFA from a journalism program, I often feel I missed out on a lot of literature and I'm slowly trying to play catchup to the English majors. It's a process.

I'm excited for the semester to start. I missed my classmates a lot this break. Not only is the semester sure to be a blast but even better - the AWP conference is in April and I just bought my plane ticket. I have a lot of new and different things to present this semester and I can't wait to see how my classmates react to it.