Jeanne Leiby was one of my greatest mentors, yet I never had a single class with her. While I studied writing and later taught at the University of Florida for nearly six years, I was never a member of her staff at The Florida Review, nor a student in her fiction workshop. But I got to know Jeanne through classmates who worked at the journal, and she always seemed to be around, eager to talk about teaching and literature. I remember she stopped me in the hallway to congratulate me on my MA thesis defense, and I mentioned I still wanted to pursue an MFA somewhere but wasn’t sure about moving. “You should check out the top low-res programs, Warren Wilson, Vermont College, and a few others,” she answered. I was barely even aware of such programs and not even close to considering them. But I took her advice. Six months later, I arrived at my Vermont College residency and began one of the greatest adventures in my literary career. ( Read more )
Blog
Future Abandoned: The Untimely Loss of a Rare Mentorship
posted on December 20th, 2011 by Vanessa Blakeslee
Ten Lessons of Fictional Writers in Film
posted on December 12th, 2011 by Ashley InguantaGuest Post by Cynthia Hawkins
Funny Farm
In Funny Farm, Chevy Chase plays a writer who moves to the middle of nowhere in order to jumpstart work on his manuscript in solitude. When he’s finally done, he rents a hotel room, chills champagne, hands his wife his manuscript, and sits with his hands folded together in anticipation—watching intently, reading her facial expressions as the pages turn, leaning to check whether or not her laughter erupts in just the right places. Lesson? Don’t do that.
Subject: Trees — a poem
posted on November 16th, 2011 by Dina MackI do
miss November,
she still lives
South. ( Read more )
MFA Programs, Stream of Consciousness, Submitting to Lit Mags
posted on November 4th, 2011 by Mr. NonsequiturDear Mr. Nonsequitur:
I was recently accepted into K***** University’s MFA program. Do you have any preparatory advice? Any reading lists or tips?
–Freaked Out Frosh, Princeton, NJ ( Read more )
An Interview with Heather Aimee O’Neill
posted on November 2nd, 2011 by Ashley InguantaHeather Aimee O’Neill is the Assistant Director of the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing at Hunter College. Her work has been published in several literary journals, including Many Mountains Moving and The Truth About The Fact: An International Journal of Literary Non-Fiction. Her poetry collection, Memory Future, was selected by Carol Muske-Dukes as the winner of the University of Southern California Gold Line press award and was published this summer. A freelance writer for various publications, she writes the monthly book column Across The Page for MTV’s AfterEllen.com. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their son. This interview was conducted over e-mail. ( Read more )
Jeanne Leiby, and the Responsibility of Storytelling
posted on October 31st, 2011 by Nathan HolicMemories of Jeanne Leiby, 4 of 4, by Nathan Holic
Back before Jeanne Leiby convinced me to come back to the University of Central Florida for grad school, I spent a year and a half working for a national fraternity headquarters. During that odd (and pretty awesome) time in my life, I got to hang out with a few fraternity brothers from the College of Charleston, one of whom gave ghost tours on the weekends. Each of his ghost stories was a fully developed experience with a complete cast of characters, various moments in each story reliant upon the sights and sounds of the city of Charleston to finish the experience: “And you see that building over there? That’s where it all took place. And if we step close enough, we can just make out the face of a child in the window…” ( Read more )
Featured Book
15 VIEWS OF ORLANDO
Edited by Nathan Holic
From the neon strip of Little Vietnam to a desolate Albertsons parking lot, 15 Views of Orlando takes the reader on a secret tour of the City Beautiful... (more)