Monthly Archives: February 2011

MFA Monday

Posted on by
10

So apparently on Friday I accidentally posted my Friday Wrap-Up blog to Referential‘s blog. OOPS! I left it up there though! Didn’t want to delete and lose comments.

For those of you who have been following along you’ve been through: introductions, your first class and your first seminar. Now – the inevitable – you need to have your first workshop where your poems are critiqued and/or where you critique the work of your fellow BlogMFA “degree seekers.”

I debated different ways to do this, especially given that I wanted to avoid people being concerned about posting work in progress that they might want to publish later, so I have set up a Google Group! It is private for now so that what we talk about and post isn’t included in google searches.

Here is what I need you to do if you want to be part of the group: Email me at jessie.carty (at) gmail.com with your email address, name and indicate whether or not you’d like to be the first person to be workshopped. You will have until Sunday March 6th to send your request (I will continue to take requests to join after that date, but just not for the first workshopped person). Once I have all the requests in, I will then add everyone to the group who has requested and I will announce the workshop guidelines as well as who will be the first to have their work critiqued/reviewed/discussed etc.

If you are the selected poet you will submit one poem to start and then once everyone has had a chance, perhaps will consider doing more than one poem at a time.

In the interim. How about a laugh to start your week?

Looking forward to starting the group!

Writing Wednesday

Posted on by
12

Last night I finished the perfect bound chapbook Breakdown by Richard Krawiec.

What do you think of when you hear the word breakdown?

Mental? Communication? Vehicle? There are so many associations with this word and while this chapbook focuses most of all on a specific type of breakdown, there are other subtle poems dealing with the hope of avoiding additional collapses.

There are tough topics in this chapbook, and I had to read it slowly, but I appreciate when writer’s tackle the difficult subjects. I’m also fascinated by words that have so many different denotations and/or connotations. For example, I use the word breakdown in my poem Beaters (2nd on the page on this link) but in a very different way than the implications of that word in Richard’s chapbook.

Sometimes when I can’t write, I go to the dictionary and look for random words that get me thinking. Feel free to use “Breakdown” but I encourage you all to flip through the dictionary, thesaurus, online OED or any other source with words and see if one just calls to you in unexpected ways and asks you to challenge the meaning of the word. See how many different ways you can use a word. Etc

This thoughts/writing prompts are intended for your use and it is not required that you post whatever you write here because, if you do, I’m afraid I won’t be taking it down. I do that on Thursdays :)

But, feel free to ask me questions and/or discuss any of the topics I post. Look forward to chatting with you!

Tuesday Shout Outs

Posted on by
10

Morning, ya’ll! I, for the most part, love my spring schedule because on Tuesday and Thursdays I have time to focus a bit more on my home computer before heading into classes.

  • This Thursday is the NCWN Writer’s Night Out event that I am hosting at Dilworth Coffee off I-85 exit 55 in Concord, NC. 5-7 writers meet up. 7—- is the open mike. Fellow teacher and poet, Rob Abbate, will hold down the fort until I can get there at about 5:30 cause my 4pm class has a final paper due that day and I don’t want to shorten class or have a sub.
  • There is some video and pics from the reading I gave last week in Alexander County (about an hour and a half north west of where I live). You can see me, Helen Losse, Nancy Posey and Molly Rice if you click through on video or slideshow (and sadly, I think that is me coughing throughout!)
  • I finished reading Billy Collins’ collection 180 More Poems and there were a handful that really blew me away, but as far as anthology goes, I don’t know that it is one I would highly recommend. I gave it a 3 out of 5 stars on Goodreads. It is a decent collection of contemporary poets and you might start an interesting debate by reading the introductory essay that Collins’ wrote and how he defines “accessible” poetry. My favorite poem was probably Anagrammer by Peter Pereira
  • I recently finished the show Jeremiah on netflix streaming. I have a fascination with post apocalyptic books and shows (as I may have mentioned before). This show aired from 2002-2004 on Showtime which means there are (in the first few episodes) some pointless scenes of nudity that all for pay cable channels seem to require of their shows. (I’m laughing about this, cause it is funny how many shows seem to do this just because they are on cable!) but after the first few episodes that were hit or miss, I kind of got sucked in even if we are talking about a show starring Luke Perry and Malcolm Jamal Warner. The second season, in particular, was really well done. You can see when there were better directors coming in. If you are interesting in sci-fi, post-apocalyptic stories and/or watching a show develop, then this might be interesting for you.
  • There are actually quite a few other events going on this week but I’ll mention that Friday seems like it’ll be hoping and I hope I’m FINALLY feeling 100% so that I can visit with one of my my writer friends and perhaps make it to one of these events which include readings around the 6:30 -7 hours at Dialect Design and Green Rice Art Gallery both in the NoDA area of Charlotte.

So these are just a few things going on, or that I’ve read or watched or just felt I wanted to mention to you this week.

Now I have 30 minutes to scribble down this short story idea I have before heading out to walk, grab some lunch and head to world lit to teach slave narratives and emancipation.

Yay!

MFA Monday

Posted on by
24

So you’ve made it through introductions and your first seminar. What next?


Many people enroll in an MFA with a thought towards teaching, and, even if you aren’t thinking of teaching at the college level, it is good to acquire some knowledge on how to teach aspects of creative writing because most of us learn well by teaching others.


With all that being said, my low-res MFA and this virtual MFA will ask you to “teach” before it is all said and done. In the class of the blog MFA this will be a guest blog (way, way in the future). For my low-res program, we had to teach a 30 minute seminar the week of our graduation. This is taught to a faculty advisor and to anyone else in the program who wants to attend.


So today, you are going to attend an example of a graduating student seminar. The topic of this one is “Can Creative Writing Be Taught.”


This is an ongoing debate and part of this “seminar” is for you guys to discuss what you think can or can not be taught in creative writing. Instead of me presenting a lot of theories (and would be done in the seminar or guest blog post for you guys), I want to open up the discussion about the topic and I’ll provide you one link on Fiction Writing that gives you an example of what a grading rubric could look like for creative writing.


So – chat!

Friday Wrap-Up

Posted on by
13

Look guys, we made it!  I’m still feeling a bit under the weather with a persistent cough that no OTC medication seems to be able to tame, which made being one of four lovely featured poets last night at a library quite interesting. I read for about 10 minutes including two newer poems, one from each of my chapbooks and then quite a few from Paper House. I’m at that point now, where I am kind of tired from reading from the old collections. My first chapbook At the A & P Meridiem is down to only about 6 copies in my possession. I don’t think I’m going to reorder (at least for a while) once those sell. I’m ready to move onto new things and I have plenty of PH and Atom copies to sell and then Fat Girl will be out in September. ANNNND I have a reader looking over what might be a 4th chapbook that I can start sending to publishers :) I may not be writing anything new, but I keep working on revisions and sending my stuff out there.

Speaking of which:

  • Submitted: 3 items: group of photos, set of poems and 1 essay.
  • Accepted: Zilch
  • Rejected:  Nothing. THAT IS WEIRD!

I procrastinated this afternoon by going through more of my online folders to see which photos I thought appropriate to send out. I’m slowly working through them all, then I want to make my way to other computers (phones etc) and even the printed pictures and slides I have from pre-digital years to see what I should scale in. It is a slow process.

The poems I sent out were the last of the new material that I thought were keepers. I typed everything from my notebook and, except for the one still up on poem Thursday, I’ve cleaned house and no new ideas are coming to me right now which is ok (I know I know, I talked about this before). I know as soon as I start reading some work I really enjoy, I’ll start writing again. That’s always how it works with me. I’m inspired by other writers. I will always say my first love is reading.

My lone essay was one I pulled from 6 months of no response. I only changed one word which means I’m either way too in love with the essay or it is just perfect (HA!). I doubt the latter.

A few more notes on publication stuff. I forgot to mention my Fabio poem is now up in Wild Goose Poetry Review and that one of my stories Sex of Food is up in Steel Toe Review (PG-13, ya’ll!). Still not sure what I am going to do with the remaining fiction pieces I have. Under 5000 words of flash fiction does not a chapbook make! And, one of my previously accepted photographs titled “Once” is now up in LitSnack.

Last thing. What do you guys think of editors publishing their own material in their magazines? I read a new print publication recently called fresh. It doesn’t appear they are taking non-solicited material at this time. Do a lot of magazines publish mainly themselves and people they know when they start up? I know, my start-ups have often involved people I knew – at first – cause that’s how word got out, but I’ve always held back from publishing my own words in my own mags. What do you guys think?

Hope you guys wrote, submitted or at least though of words this week! See ya around the web

and around

and around