FACULTY Deborah Brevoort‘s opera Steal a Pencil for Me, written with Gerald Cohen, had its world premiere in Scarsdale and New York City on April 28-30. Jan Clausen had a sestina from her poetry collection If You Like Difficulty, “Pigs Advance as Organ Transplant Factories for People,” appear in an all-sestina anthology edited by Marilyn Krysl… Continue reading April 2013 Achievements
Category: MFA in Creative Writing
Turn the Key, an Interview with Virginia Woolf
Originally published on Her Kind, the blog for Vida (Women in the Literary Arts). Why did I resurrect Virginia Woolf? I am British. (Working-class roots. Cypriot ancestry.) With this birthright comes an acute sense of class. So every time I hear about Virginia Woolf’s five hundred pounds per year inheritance, which relieved her from the… Continue reading Turn the Key, an Interview with Virginia Woolf
March 2013 Achievements
FACULTY Deborah Brevoort‘s opera Steal a Pencil for Me, written with Gerald Cohen, will be presented in two concerts in April in Scarsdale and NYC. An article appeared in Opera World with all of the details. Beatrix Gates read and spoke about her poems and creative process in a program shared with artist Rebecca McCall as part of… Continue reading March 2013 Achievements
"This Place Is Magic"
This beautiful piece was read by my colleague, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, at the end of our January residency in Plainfield: As I put the snow and icicles of Goddard behind me for another semester, I was thinking about the question of whether one can teach writing. I don’t know if we taught it, or whether… Continue reading "This Place Is Magic"
February 2013 Achievements
FACULTY: Jan Clausen has a poem, “Ghazal: For Us” in the second issue of the poetry journal Theodate. Darrah Cloud’s latest play, Our Suburb, will premiere at Theatre J in Washington, D.C. next season, directed by Judith Ivey. Kenny Fries has work (poems) in the new edition of the just published The Disability Studies Reader… Continue reading February 2013 Achievements
Patricia Powell
Patricia Powell is the author of Me Dying Trial, A Small Gathering of Bones, The Pagoda and most recently, The Fullness of Everything. A recipient of a PEN Award and a Lila Wallace Readers Digest Writers’ Award, Powell teaches in the MFA program at Mills College. She is currently at work on a memoir.
A Writing Prompt
One thing you notice when you teach in an MFAW program is that students love writing prompts. And who can blame them? When Lynda Barry was our visiting writer / cartoonist / guru two years ago, a bunch of the faculty sat in on the remarkable workshops she offered in the Haybarn Theatre. The exercises… Continue reading A Writing Prompt
January 2013 Achievements
FACULTY Ryan Boudinot‘s Blueprints of the Afterlife has been named a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. The winner will be announced on March 29 at Norwescon, in Seatac, WA. Deborah Brevoort‘s play “The Velvet Weapon,” a backstage farce about democracy, will receive a staged reading in the NJ Playwright’s Contest Festival at William… Continue reading January 2013 Achievements
Nikky Finney
Nikky Finney, National Book Award Winner for Poetry, was born in South Carolina, within listening distance of the sea. A child of activists, she came of age during the civil rights and Black Arts Movements. At Talladega College, nurtured by Hale Woodruff’s Amistad murals, Finney began to understand the powerful synergy between art and history.… Continue reading Nikky Finney
Karen Englemann
Engelmann is a writer and designer. She was born and raised in the American Midwest, then moved to Sweden after completing university studies in drawing and design. The city of Malmö was homebase for eight years, but she now lives just north of NYC. The November issue of O, the Oprah Magazine reviewed The Stockholm Octavio, her… Continue reading Karen Englemann
December 2012 Achievements
December was a big month for Goddard’s MFAW program with our alumni and faculty earning major kudos in the professional world! This month The Silver Linings Playbook (shown at right), a Hollywood film based on Goddard alumnus (MFAW ’07) Matthew Quick’s thesis novel, was released by the Weinstein Company. Starring Robert De Niro, Bradley… Continue reading December 2012 Achievements
Silence
With November recently behind us, writers across America are slumped over their keyboards, having endured another NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, in which the name of the game is cranking out as many pages of one’s novel as possible in thirty days. Years ago when I first heard about this month of extreme page… Continue reading Silence
November 2012 Achievements
FACULTY Paul Selig spoke and signed copies of The Book of Love and Creation at the Ark Bookstore in Santa Fe, NM on November 15th. Michael Klein has just been asked to write a bi-monthly column starting in 2013 for the Los Angeles Review of Books. A terrific review of Michael Klein’s new book, The… Continue reading November 2012 Achievements
October 2012 Achievements
FACULTY NEWS Richard Panek has won the 2012 American Institute of Physics Science Communication Award for his book The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality. Jeanne Mackin (aka Anna Maclean) was invited to be the guest speaker at the annual meeting for “The Friends of Dickens New York,” a… Continue reading October 2012 Achievements
Writing Schedules and Inspiration
by Ryan Boudinot I get asked a lot of questions about how to develop good writing habits. Mostly this boils down to the idea of keeping a schedule. Depending on what stage I’m in with whatever novel I happen to be working on, I’ve found that my writing schedule changes. When I’m writing a… Continue reading Writing Schedules and Inspiration
Bricks and Mortar
It’s late 2012, and the long-promised death of print (predicted somewhere on a Mayan calendar, I’m told), has yet to happen. I live in Seattle, birthplace of Amazon and the Kindle (full disclosure: I worked for Amazon twice, once from 1998-2000, again from 2004-2007), and yet I still see people leaning against bus stop posts… Continue reading Bricks and Mortar
Fall 2012 Achievements
The faculty, alumni and students of the Goddard College MFAW program are enjoying great success in the publishing, literary and theatrical worlds. Here are their recent accomplishments. Faculty Audio versions of two of Rachel Pollack’s novels “Temporary Agency” and “Godmother Night” will be produced by Audible Books. Rachel also gave a reading at the… Continue reading Fall 2012 Achievements
Program Director Paul Selig’s October 2012 Events and Appearances
New interview on the cable show Waking Universe: Paul Selig will be on a new episode of the BIO channel’s “The uneXplained” this Saturday, Oct. 6th at 10:00 PM ET/9:00c. Upcoming workshops and book signings for The Book of Love and Creation (Tarcher/Penguin 2012): Heart and Soul Center of Light in Oakland, CA on Friday,… Continue reading Program Director Paul Selig’s October 2012 Events and Appearances
Reading Diets
One of the wonderful things about being in an MFA program is getting assigned books one would otherwise never read. I treasure those books that I discovered only because an advisor pushed it in front of me and insisted that it would blow my mind. My attitude as a student was to seek out… Continue reading Reading Diets
MFAW Program Fall 2011 Achievements
The Alchemy of the Word: Writers Talk About Writing, an anthology written by members of the MFA in Creative Writing Program faculty, was published by The California Institute of Arts and Letters (July, 2011) and was launched at the fall Plainfield and Port Townsend residencies. Our visiting writers and guests included acclaimed novelist Meg Wulitzer… Continue reading MFAW Program Fall 2011 Achievements