Can we call it Autumn yet?

Are we really into the third week of classes?! (For some at least).

That's a lot to wrap my head around. A week ago I probably would've said it's felt like I've been here months already. Now, well, the time seems to be flying.

I've settled into the routine I need to be most productive. Second year students have given me all sorts of great advice--including, the value of time spent away from your writing. How you should never feel guilty for watching a movie or walking around town or anything like that because sometimes, to get the clarity you need for a poem, you need to let your mind go elsewhere for a time. I'm sure most students on here can relate to the anxiety of a program's pressure. More often than not, I write drafts of poems in my head. I may jot down a phrase or image in a notebook, but when I sit down to write I feel like the first draft of my poem is partially written. Here, with workshops every Thursday and new poems due at least biweekly, I don't feel like I can have that creative ease as much anymore. Though, this pressure isn't all bad. Like I said, my routine is certainly more productive.

In my verse class yesterday, we talked about writing and habit. It seemed the consensus was that prosers respond more to routine (ie: writing at 11am every day for at least two hours) versus poets who seem to write more when "inspiration strikes," (oh, cliches). For right now, I'd consider myself somewhere in the middle. If I'm going to write, I need to carve out time to do so. But I also don't use that time the same way everyday. As long as I'm writing, editing, or at the very least reading everyday--I'm doing what I came here to do.

For those of you who have already had workshop--what did you think? How are the workshop structured? First years only? Upper classmen with lower? What kind of pieces are you submitting--anything new written over the summer or something you've had tucked away for a time?

Glad to hear everyone had relatively uneventful move-ins! Sorry my posts have been sans exciting photos thus far. For now, a picture of the German Shepherd puppies that live next door. Holy adorable!! I'll be volunteering at the Bookmarks Book Festival in Winston-Salem this Saturday. Should have some pics to share after that. Billy Collins will be in attendance, too. Always a treat to hear poetry read aloud [:

Happy Hump Day, all! I'm going out to pick up some Pumpkin Spice coffee at the grocers today. I don't care if it's 89 degrees outside, I'm from New England and September = candy apples, pumpkin spice and foliage.

Google Wave

by Christopher Cocca

Do you any of you have a Google Wave account? If so, how do you envision using this tool for workshopping? Are any contributors to this blog interested in workshopping pieces over Google Wave during the upcoming semester break?

Place

by Christopher Cocca

I’m workshopping the first parts of Milton County Power & Light this week.

Did you know that there’s a Willa Cather Memorial Prairie in Nebraska? I didn’t know they named prairies after anyone.

“As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.” – Willa Cather, My Antonia

Is your work tied to place? Mine is. Mountains, rust-belt ruins, green and yellow fields in alternating bands, small cities, little towns, Cold War suburbs. A valley. Some rivers. A beach and a sound.

One of my earliest literary memories is of my grandmother reading the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder to me when I was as young as 3. I remember one scene specifically about a lost doll partially frozen to the ground in a fallow cornfield puddle. I hadn’t connected these early experiences to my own vocation before, but this image, 27 years later, is vivid, and our own setting, the bi-level in Whitehall near the old cement plant.

What are your places?

First Week at OSU

By Tory Adkisson

Hey friends,

I can now stand among you (well, sit and blog anyway) as one of the few, the proud, the first workshopped! I have finished my first week at the Ohio State MFA and I am so pleased with the way everything went I could dip myself in butterscotch! Let me just breakdown what happened.

First off, we started school this week on Wednesday, so I have not yet had a full week yet--I doubt, though, that that will have any appreciable effect on my experience next week, and anyway, I need to tell you about what happened this week since it was, for me, the first foot dipping into this whole grad school enterprise. *Phew* anyway...

The first thing I did was teach my English 110 class. My lovely roommates made breakfast that morning, so I had a bite of something before running off to Denney Hall. I showed my friend how to make double-sided copies, printed off the most updated version of my syllabus then rushed off to the computer classroom I teach in on Wednesdays. This Monday I will be in a normal classroom. Our program is really invested in teaching new media and using technology in the classroom. Anyway, I was fine but became very frazzled when I had problems getting the technology to work. Luckily that fright subsided and the class and I began to sync as I found a comfortable footing as their teacher. They were enthusiastic about the topic I chose for the class ("Writing about Reality Television) and very receptive to discussion. Not all of them talked, but it was the first day, so I am not too concerned. I am very happy with my class so far and look forward to working with these kids and watching them grow!

My first class is a graduate level English class which is an introduction to film and film theory. The professor, Ryan Freidman, is a very nice and very cool guy, and the bevy of readings and films we will be discussing in class had got me percolating with glee. I love film theory and the idea of becoming more cultured though film is fantastic (right now we are watching Umberto D.) and exactly the kind of thing I hoped to take as a grad student. The class is themed around the notion of the decline of film and subsequent rise of digital cinema, and the implications that has for study of film as a discipline. Pretty cool, right? I love talking about the decline of things...it makes me feel so "in the know."

As far as workshop is concerned (remember why were here friends?) it was great. Kathy Fagan teaches the fall workshop, while Andrew Hudgins teaches it in the winter and Henri Cole (!!!) teaches it in the spring. Kathy assigned us the dubious task of writing a poem about finality (essentially a kind of death poem) after reading Frost's "Directive" and Yeats' "The Circus Animals' Desertion". It ended up being her birthday on our first day of workshop, so we got her a cake and sang the celebratory song to her as she blushed and thanked us for being so sweet. After that Kathy workshopped us in alphabetical order and, being gifted with a last name starting with "A," I was the first one up on the chopping block. I have to say it was great and an eye-opening experience--sure there was some requisite praise (about my sounds, use of meter, my ending lines) but the class addressed issues I hadn't considered such as the nature of the speaker's relationship to the you, and whether some of the imagery in the poem was useful considering its ultimate trajectory. It reminded me, after several weeks of TA training, that I came to OSU for my writing, and if the first workshop is indicative of what experience at OSU will be, then I am glad to be along for the wild ride.

Additionally, I have been reading slush for The Journal and will soon be reading poetry manuscripts for the The Journal's Wheeler Prize (judged this year by Andrew Hudgins!); I can hardly believe the way my life is going. I am really pleased with everything I have been exposed to so far! Here's to a wonderful year, and a great MFA program (my program) at OSU!

Workshop

by Christopher Cocca

I had my first fiction workshop (Ann Hood’s) at The New School last night. We read, ahead of time, stories from three students and discussed them at length after taking care of first-meeting administrative details. I handed in a story, a new revision of The Shadow Line, to be workshopped next week.

Obviously, the idea here is for us to become better writers through the process of having our stories discussed and being told what’s confusing, what’s overdone, what’s clear, controlled, effective, what bad grammar we’re able to see in the work of others but are blinded to in our own, how what others think we’ve done differs from what we think we’ve done or are trying to do. As helpful as this will be, I think this is also about becoming a better reader. The more imperfect work we read (alongside the renowned work from our prose lit classes), the more practice we get at understanding, in very general terms, the kinds of things we might be doing in our own (and certainly imperfect) work without knowing it.

Some notes I took during class:

Revision is literally seeing your work again (via Joseph Conrad)
It can always be fixed (via Ann Hood)
Anybody can write stories but only writers can revise them (via Ann Hood)
For short fiction, everyone important should be introduced by the end of the first page.I think that’s a good general rule, especially for beginners.
Rather than frame a story, think in terms of containing it (that is, temporally: a weekend, a year, an event, etc). This will help keep things tight and moving.
Avoid present participles. (This reminds me of my adverb ban).

I really enjoyed this class and I am looking foward to the rest of the semester.

What I Learned From My First Graduate Workshop

by Emily May Anderson

1. It wasn't as scary as I'd thought. I was a nervous wreck the night before my first poetry workshop in over 9 years. I even sent a copy of my poem to one of my poet friends in Columbus before workshop. But it was not that bad. Robin Becker's approach to graduate workshop is not to "fix" the poems, but to read them, paraphrase them, question them, and try to understand them, and to ask questions about how they might be improved. It was very constructive!

2. I need to read more carefully. I mentioned before I think that the focus of our workshop this semester is on chapbooks. Each week we will read a chapbook or two and respond to them. I read the ones assigned for this week and thought I made pretty intelligent comments, but the people in the class were deep and really seemed to have studied the books a lot more than I had. I felt like I was understanding them better through the discussion, and like if I would have read them sooner and more repeatedly that I would have been better equipped to discuss them.

3. This will be a lot of work. The eight of us are each workshopping a poem each week, plus reading and responding to chapbooks. We critique each other's work in class only, so that does not add to the workload out of class, but it makes for an intensely focused three hours.

4. I am glad to be here and to be doing this. And that's the most important part.

Oh, and if you want to read the first piece I workshopped, I posted it on my blog tonight. (My name links to the blog. It's the newest post.)

First workshop completed

by Whitney Gray

This is going to sound overly dramatic, and I'm certainly playing it up a bit, but there's always a hint of truth in comedy.. right?

Well, today we had our first poetry workshop at good ol' UNCG.. and it was.. interesting. I really loved the pacing of the class. In three hours, we covered six poems out of the ten submitted. Each poem received a lot of time for reading and critiquing. At times, I struggled with the format of the workshop, because the poet is given no time to defend or clarify anything within the poem. (One friend pointed out that if you were reading a poem out of the canon, you wouldn't have the luxury of asking the poet. Point taken.) In previous workshops, we would discuss a poem, and then turn to the poet so that he or she could answer any questions, or to ask his or her own. It helped clear up some confusion for both the readers and the writers. We discussed this with our professor, who said we may turn to the poets in later classes, but for now, we will stick to the layout.

Another interesting part of the class was how the poems were ordered. Stuart Dischell implemented the method that however the poems were turned in, no matter the order, was the order that would be used in class. It just so happens this "random order" stacked all of the first year poets back-to-back and at the front of the pile. I didn't have the pleasure of going first, but being a part of the first group wasn't as intimidating as I had expected. I did, however, go last, and with only a few minutes remaining in class. I was worried that people would begin shuffling around, preparing to leave the course, but no one glanced at the clock and hinted that they were ready to leave. I received an equal amount of attention to my poem that the previous poets received. I appreciated the equality, as well as the pacing of the class allowing us to fit my poem into this session, rather than leave it to next week.

I will say, however, that the experience in the workshop was very tough. My classmates are far more trained that classmates I had in my undergrad workshops. People know exactly what they want to say, and how to say it. When they have any confusion or difficulty with a part of a poem, they say it. I'll admit, my poem wasn't the strongest, but I was very surprised to hear the reactions. My poem was read to be quite hilarious, when really, it was intended to have a very sarcastic, but not necessarily humorous tone. The misreading made it difficult for me to focus. Then, I had that moment every warned me of: The Moment of Self Doubt. I began noting on my poem--"is this poem a failure? What have I done wrong? How can I clarify?" Those notes didn't hold the real questions though. "Am I a failure? How did I get in this program? Do I really know how to write? Does everyone think I'm stupid?"

The feelings, thankfully, have passed, but that little bit of self doubt will always be in the back of my mind. I think this doubt will help drive me to write better poems and to focus on the things I value in poetry: precision, and above all else, clarity. I wrote about the importance of clarity in my Statement of Purpose, for Pete's sake! It was a good dose of reality, albeit difficult to swallow, but it can only help me.

1st workshop--coming up!

by Whitney Gray



Last week, I visited all of my classes and got a feel for what I'll be learning. Thursday was the workshop, and we didn't do anything other than introductions and discussing the syllabus and a poem or two. We turned in our poems on Monday and by the afternoon, we had packets prepared and placed in the mailboxes. (I have a mailbox! Exciting!) I picked mine up after a long day of work in the English department, and looked them over as I walked home.

After I made it home, I sat down and re-read the poems, paying closer attention to the writing and styles. As one of my classmates joked, "we all wrote the same poems." It was interesting how many insects (or other creatures like mangy cats) and dead folks popped up in all of our poems. The best surprise of all? All of the writing was good.

I'm sure we've all been in workshops where there were a few folks who meant well but didn't get it. I don't say this to sound superior or snotty, but I do feel like I can point some fingers at my fellow classmates who joined the classes for an "easy" grade. These are the folks who didn't turn in poems, or would turn in 4-lines about the stalker "who watches the woman at her house/he waits for her quietly like a mouse."

Suddenly the caliber of the work has sky-rocketed and there's an obvious sense of commitment. Each poem is thoughtful, well-written, but with plenty of room for improvement and discussion. The styles were varied, as were the lengths of each piece. I'm looking forward to discussing these poems and really digging into them. I can't wait to read a poem and get a response other than, "I liked it." (I had a class of people who would say "I agree with [name here]" but they would never offer their own comments.)

Has anyone else been to workshop yet? Has anyone else had bad experiences with their workshops (or the people involved)? Or was I the only one fortunate enough to read rhyming poetry about sorority rush?