End o' year thoughts

by: Raina Lauren Fields



Whew! What a semester! If you’re interested in reading about wrapping up: my first year of graduate school, my first semester of teaching, getting engaged, and what I think is in store in fall 2010, then read on!


CLASSES:
This semester, I took:

Poetry Workshop – Erika Meitner
Editing a Literary Magazine – Bob Hicok
Practicum – Matthew Vollmer
Modern African American Fiction – Virginia Fowler

Classes were stressful this semester. I took my first graduate literature course and felt in the dark, a lot of the class. It was a lesson into what I need to do to step my game up in these literature classes in the future. We read a lot of great literature – some of which I read before, but with a much more refined eye to the texts: Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, were just a few of the books we read during the semester.

Poetry workshop went smoothly and I felt like this semester was a breakthrough in my level of writing. Unfortunately, none of the pieces I produced this year were published in any literary magazines or journals, but I hope with some work and some love that I can place them somewhere in the future.

The literary magazine course I took involved reviving The Minnesota Review, a leading critical magazine’s work and bringing up the status of the literary work that is presented in the magazine. I read slush for the poetry section, along with several of my classmates. I also was involved in researching marketing and advertising opportunities. Next semester, I will act as the General Editor, providing support and guidance to the publication. In addition, my classmates and I have started an online literary magazine under the guidance of Bob Hicok. While it’s not formally affiliated with the MFA program (in that it’s not being funded by the university), it’s a great learning experience in the inner workings of a magazine.

TEACHING:

Teaching…is hard. For the spring semester, I taught one section of Virginia Tech’s ENGL 1106: Writing with Research. Side effects included student drama, continued feelings of overwhelm and fatigue, and dear God, what did I sign up for! Next semester, I will be teaching two sections of ENGL 1105: Introduction to College English. This summer, I’m spending some time to get together my syllabus, lesson plans, and researching different exercises and activities that are not only intellectual but fun.


PROFESSIONAL STUFF:

I went to AWP in Denver! I was a blast! Met a ton of great folks, including some of my poetry idols, Rita Dove, Allison Joseph, and Patricia Smith. I spent way too much money at the book fair, but the only consequence of that is being smarter! (Oh and a smaller wallet, but you win some and you lose some). I also was on a panel entitled “The 21st Century MFA student.”

I am back in VA after two weeks of the Callaloo Writer’s Workshop, which took place in College Station, TX – also known as Aggieland, also known as the town of Texas A&M. I’ve never experienced workshops like that ever before. Every day was emotional, every day was learning something new not only about your poetry but yourself. I am so thankful from that experience and am still decompressing and still writing.

Nest semester, I hope to get more involved in and out of the department by volunteering, tutoring, etc. I've also started the ground work for a professional certificate that I could complete by Spring 2012, but am playing with the idea of trying to design my own certificate in education. Not sure if the graduate school will buy it, but there's always trying!

Oh, there's that pesky thing called a thesis I'm starting to think about. And always mapping out what will happen in the future, once I've finished this darn MFA. But I'm trying this new thing called "living in the moment," so let's see how that goes.

PERSONAL LIFE:

For Spring Break, my boyfriend and I visited Paris and London. It was a great, romantic trip. We also got engaged in Paris! My fiancé, Ross, and I had been dealing the effects of a long distance relationship since I started my MFA program in the fall. (He’s in NJ, I’m in VA – an 8-hour distance). He also works full time, so seeing each other more than once a month, just isn’t an option. Methinks we will be getting married Summer 2012, though no date is set yet.

Ross recently got into the MFA program in poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University with full funding! We are now going to be 3.5 hours apart, which is much better!

Hopefully, I’ll be spending the summer in NJ with Ross, though finding any semblance of a summer job is so difficult. I do need to keep up with my apartment and my car payments, so I’m praying something goes well. I have a few internship offers in NY, which I’m really grateful for, but they would be unpaid and it may not be practical to do something like that now.

So, we shall see!

Congrats to everyone who finished their first year! We did it!

Long overdue!

by Whitney Gray

Whew--finally got around to writing a detailed report of my first semester in the UNCG MFA program. It was a long semester, and yet it flew by. I made it through with all A's (which is not an accomplishment), no drama and no tears.

Wrapping Up My First Quarter at OSU

I meant to write this ages ago, but since it is still a little more than a week before the next quarter, I don't feel like a complete lame-o writing my wrap up now. So let's see, where to start, where to start...

I enjoyed workshop for the most part...We had a class of thirteen, including one fiction writer moonlighting as a poet, and it was for the most part very free form: no assignments, no mandated types of poems, etc. Basically we were told write what we wanted to write. Kathy Fagan, who ran the workshop in the fall, was very accommodating and friendly, and always let me come to her office to freak out, complain, or just palpitate wildly, which I was glad for. The workshop was actually a little more genial than I'm used to, and there were times where I was people bared their teeth a little more, but I did find the support encouraging just as I found several good, productive readers of my work who were unafraid or unwilling to tell me where I needed improvement. Next quarter will be different, I'm certain, but fall was nice and the workshop was a good place for adjustment. I wrote maybe three poems I still currently like, so that's something. We'll see how it goes from here.

The reading series we have at OSU is pretty awesome. We have three really, a visiting writer series, a student-faculty reading series, featuring second years reading with the faculty, and Mother Tongue, a much less formal student-run reading series held at the bottom of a rather overpriced bar. We had Linda Bierds come and dazzle us with her work (we read her Selected Poems in workshop) as well as a host of others including Amit Majmudar and Dan Anderson. The student-faculty readings were great because I was introduced to Andrew Hudgins' work (I hadn't really read him before) and got to here the second year's work which, in the case of the prose writers, I wouldn't have heard much of otherwise. Mother Tongue was always a blast because of the hilarious introductions and light atmosphere that characterize the events.

Additionally we held Writer's Harvest where we beat out the MA's and PhD's in a canned food drive for the Mid-Ohio Food Bank. At the event some fellow writers performed stand-up, sang music in tandem with faculty, raffled off dinners to be made by fellow MFA'ers and all kinds of other fun stuff. It was a gala event in my estimation.

I also read slush for The Journal and for the OSU Wheeler Poetry Prize, which publishes the winning manuscript. It was an eye-opening experience and an unplanned confidence booster considering how much bad poetry came through my desk while I was deciding what to send forward to Andrew (who was the judge this year). I read 50 manuscripts with a partner, and we had a few standouts, but most of them were varying degrees of awful. Yes it's all subjective, but if you have your physician writing the forward to your book of poetry, and he ends the two page preface by saying "hello," you probably need to reevaluate things a bit. Slush reading was much the same, some good stuff, a lot of bad stuff. I tend to think I have a broad range in my tastes, but I surprised myself with how much I was left wanting more from the stuff I read.

The other class I took (GTA's only need to take 9 credit hours and most grad lit/workshop classes are 5 each) was a graduate level intro to film theory and film criticism. I just loved this class. I felt prepared since the required critical theory class I took at UCLA for my major was a special topics class taught by the dean of the film school, maddeningly subtitled The Regime of the Visual and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion. Many of the texts I read for that class (Eisenstein, Saussure, Mulvey) reappeared in my film class, and many of the films we analyzed were ones I hadn't really seen before. It was a lot of work (two short papers, one 15 page final paper) but I found it more enjoyable than vexing. In a way, it confirmed the suspicion I've had that a critical path of study could work me too if I go down that road at some later date. Now I am happy just being an erstwhile MFA taking glee in the fact that he wrote his final film paper on WALL-E.

Teaching was by far the most exhausting and difficult part of my adjustment, but now I feel more than prepared to tackle it next quarter. I've gone through the curriculum now and have a stronger handle on it, and I know some of my weaknesses as a teacher and feel I can account for them. Aside from one minor kerfuffle with a student, last quarter I had a wonderful, patient, and understanding group of students, and I do think they learned from me. However I think I may have been to colloquial with them from the outset, and not as much of a taskmaster and school marm as I should have been. I had a good relationship with a number of my students but I am not sure I had as much respect as I would have liked. My theme next quarter will be more conducive to handling things a little more professionally, but at the same time, part of my persona is being relaxed and somewhat casual. It's a balancing act. Hopefully I can keep on the wire the entire next quarter and not err to far on one side or the other.

Well there you have it. My life as an MFA'er this past fall. Stay tuned for more details!

Wayward Child: End of Semester Recap

Hey guys! First, sorry it's been eight years since I've posted. I apologize for not keeping posted all through the semester. I'm not sure I've written a blog post in the last year where I haven't apologized for my absence at the beginning, so this is kind of par for the course from me.

To recap: Hi, I'm Katie. I'm a fiction writer at Southern Illinois in Carbondale. And an hour from now, I'm going to walk into my afternoon class and finish teaching my first semester of grad school. It's insane. While I was congratulating and praising my first class for their awesomeness this morning, I kind of unexpectedly choked up a little, and got the slow-clap thing from them-- it was nice. I've really enjoyed teaching. This semester, I taught composition, which presented a lot of challenges; however, it was on a department wide syllabus, which is a wonderful thing SIU does that helps.

But I got my teaching assignment yesterday: I'm moving up to 102, which is still Composition, but I'll be writing my own syllabus and making my own assignments. I'm excited, I'm scared, but more than anything, after this semester, I'm ready.

My workshop-- my first fiction workshop of all time-- wrapped on Monday, and was great. I'd say all three of the stories I turned in had major failings in them, but I can see each time some improvement. I'm starting to publish-- poetry at a journal called "Big Lucks" and fiction at a journal called "The Meadowland Review"-- and next semester, because I'm a glutton for punishment, I'm signing up for a poetry workshop and a fiction workshop. Yikes! So again: I'm excited, I'm scared, I'm ready.

This semester has been exciting in other ways, too, though: I've continued writing for the Evansville Courier and Press, even though I moved away, and that granted me the ability to do some really cool music interviews. This semester, I interviewed everyone from Uncle Kracker to Loretta Lynn-- in fact, a few minutes ago, I got off the phone with the singer from the Oak Ridge Boys (they sing "Elvira"). Just a huge, huge semester for me.

But what blows my mind is that it's almost over. Sure, I've got some grading to do, but not much else. So my question to you guys is this: Now that it's winding down, what are you doing over break to prepare? I'm going to try and get a working syllabus for 102, write a few stories for workshop in the fall (Pinckney Benedict!) and some poems ready for my poetry workshop (ALLISON JOSEPH). Also, I'm having my family up from Texas to celebrate Christmas in Illinois and Indiana with my boyfriend and me this year-- so I've got to go Christmas shopping on a grad student salary! Double yikes. (Suggestions for gifting are also welcome. :) )

I basically just wanted to check in, promise I'll do better at updating next semester, and say that I've genuinely enjoyed reading everyone's updates and getting to know them this year. You guys have really helped me feel like I've got a community. Thanks to Jonterri for setting this up and letting me participate.