To borrow a phrase from another blogger, Wordamour has fallen off the blogging wagon big time and will now attempt to scramble back on. I’ve got a cache of posts I’m working on so hopefully I’ll be able to keep up.
It’s been a busy summer. I finished the third draft of the novel at Dairy Hollow Writer’s Colony–you’ll get to read about my incredible week there soon when the essay comes out on Fiction Writers Review.
I wrote two more essays for upcoming collections and a forward for Joe Rein, David Yost and Chris Dew’s Dispatches From the Classroom: Graduate Students on Creative Writing Pedagogy, which is coming out from Continuum in November. More when it comes out but it’s a great book, these three have got it going on.
Led the Great Bear Writing Project summer institute with Mike Rush, Jane Carpenter, Pam Bagby and Bri Spicer. And got to take a two week vacation that included my family on Nantucket and featured the wonder twins–my godchildren Jake and Jessica–turning one in all their adorableness and my husband’s family in Cobb Island, Maryland.
Also, recently an electric utility power cord brushed up against our house, caused a near fire and fried every appliance large and small in the house except the computers (thank God) which were hooked up to power strips. Fun times.
And now we’re back. School has started, I have some amazing students and have started working on a project I’ll be able to tell you more about at the end of October. Poet’s and Writer’s has published their MFA ranking lists and everyone is getting all riled up again, as they’ve done ever September for the past three years (or whenever the rankings started). Pundits have started talking about the MFA degree again, briefly, but it will probably all die down again until next year.
My two cents: ranking, I’m not sure about. I’m not a big rankings person–I’m not sure US News, Poet’s and Writer’s or anyone else has found a really fair way to do it. I’m not sure a fair way exists. But information–that’s what I do care about and a lot of programs aren’t providing enough information–or weren’t until Poet’s and Writers and Seth Abramson started the list. They still don’t like to do it. Why? Because the information they have doesn’t always make their programs look good. Or, they’re just lazy. Either way, they could do better.
Which I talk about extensively in my book, Rethinking Creative Writing, which came out in library ebook form in May (it costs a small fortune this way, if you want an individual copy wait until the hardcover comes out). We’re looking at January ’12 for the hardcover, with a possible early edition coming out in the UK in the fall (once again, my book is in the UK and I’m not; but that’s ok, as long as it’s having a good time).
Hopefully when it comes out in the US this winter, I can ruffle enough feathers to get the MFA conversation going again.
Bye y’all just for now, really,
SV
