As a college education becomes more and more expensive and careers become grounded in traditional educations I continually come up against the question: why apply to and pursue an MFA in writing? Why not rely on self-education and self-advocacy to […]

As our country moves clunkily, inequitably—how else?—toward an approximate end to this acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, our work will by all accounts just be getting started. While our whole society confronts the lasting physical and psychological effects of […]

Friday, March 13, 2020, I got on a plane from Madrid, Spain to Washington, D.C.  This was somewhat coincidental. A month earlier, I’d spent Valentine’s Day in Florence with a friend from high school, a costume designer who’d just finished […]

  Starting my MFA as a 44-year-old mother and teacher during a global pandemic has been a trip. Is there ever a right time to do anything? Or a wrong time? I suppose you never really know until you throw […]

I’m currently struggling with a story. It’s the same problem that every writer has…eventually. How to make this story work? How to reshape the character/s? How to finish the story when you’ve already invested hours into its creation? You’re presented […]

Andrew Altschul called me last March offering a spot in this coveted MFA program and, in between frantic packing and nervous drinking, I could not allow myself to be excited about this opportunity. Hours before Andrew’s call, my undergraduate institution […]

I think the short answer is, “we don’t.” As an MFA student here at CSU, I’m meant to contribute something to the MFA blog on the subject of writing. Which is what I start doing. Writing on writing. And then […]

Nearly a decade has passed since my first college writing teacher encouraged me to write beyond his class. In the interim between then and now I have filled up notebooks and read at open mics trying to explain my experience […]

Making the decision to move cross-country and start an MFA program in the midst of a pandemic called me to consider my relationship with uncertainty. For four years in Chicago, I cultivated a career as a performing artist with my […]