Goddard Blog

Goddard MFAW faculty Beatrix Gates: There’s a drought here in Maine, and lately I’ve been studying a seep in the backfield. A seep is a moist or wet place where water, usually groundwater, reaches the earth’s surface from an underground aquifer and pools in a depression. A seep will be found quickly by wildlife and bring new birds and animals to the area. There is every sign that’s true.

Kyle Bass, Goddard MFAW faculty: Like the tikes who showed up again and again in my stories, I preferred the company and troubles of adults. It appears my child-self fits a psychological profile for what I’ve become.

Goddard College MFAW faculty Sherri L. Smith on using the F-Bomb: If Sales is saying it, not changing the line could mean no sales! I could single-handedly obliterate the success of my book by dropping an f-bomb!!!

Goddard MFA Faculty member Susan Kim writes, “When I discovered that the residency theme was “Body, Language” and that I was expected to deliver a keynote, I grew despondent. Maybe what I really was, was overwhelmed. Because let’s face it: anything with “body” in it is one hefty mother of a subject. Writing outside of the body is difficult…and risky. We risk getting it wrong. We risk looking really stupid. And we certainly risk offending, often the same readers we are trying to reach.

Goddard MFA Faculty member Kyle Bass writes, “Dare to ask Edward Albee what the new play he’s writing is about and he will say, “It’s about 90 minutes.” While his prickly pithiness is a means by which to protect the sanctity of his process, Albee’s at-the-ready, stiletto reply cuts to an important truth about art and dimension: a short painting? A full-length poem? Of course not. A thing is complete in its own completeness.”

Next year Duke will once again be in contention for the national championship, you will be in contention for a special place in some theater’s season, and some poor soul in high school will be hoping to be more than just someone’s backup plan.

I published my first stories while an undergrad. I learned the difference between ego and real confidence in my writing and ultimately I learned how to stand by my work even as I reimagined it, recreated it.

Goddard MFAW faculty member Darrah Cloud confesses to reading Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, for the 11th time. “Last night, on the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I put it down and binge-watched a television show on HBO called Master of None…”

In our February residency I’m going to ask my students of memoir to imagine their lives as if they had made all the right choices and gotten everything they’d fiercely wanted and failed to get. In this moment, a few breaths before the new year of 2016, I try imagining my own life the same… Continue reading The Right Story: Rewriting My Life

About two thousand years ago the Roman poet Horace was writing a long critical paper in verse that he titled the Ars Poetica. One of the questions he asked in the Ars Poetica was: What’s the best place to start a story? The obvious place, of course, is the beginning and this is what Horace… Continue reading In the Middle of Things

How to lie down forever in a sentence, so that the sky above you breaks off into black and gold pieces.  The sky falls down to the ground where you lay: posed, supine, and rained upon.  Lie down inside a sentence, then. It hurt me to write sentences at first. The activity of recursion, fundamental… Continue reading How to Write a Sentence

For the first time in seventeen years—since I began writing books in my late twenties when I undertook advanced studies and completed my MFA—I found, in the fall of last year, that I no longer felt the urge to write anything.  It was if for seventeen years I had been, without knowing it, on a… Continue reading Urgency & the Word