Tag: cwmfablog

“The biggest mistake you can make is going before you’re ready.” I remember feeling absolutely crushed when someone who I looked up to, someone who I admired, said those words to me. We were on the phone, I was asking her questions about the life she had made for herself…

I received an email in March of 2021 from Andrew Altschul announcing that I had been accepted to the MFA program in Fort Collins, CO. I was more shocked than happy, and I’ll explain why. A month prior to that email I had sat my mother down and explained to…

In August of 2020, I received a letter from my high school self. As an assignment for the first creative writing class I ever took in my senior year, our teacher had us write a letter addressed to the post-college version of ourselves, with whom she promised to one day…

It’s been a long past 18-months, and a fast last three weeks. I spent the last year and a half living with my parents (although I don’t lead with that). And I’ve come to realize that, even in the middle of a pandemic, I was still being performative—I was “Tutoring…

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 propel my writing career? What value would an MFA give…

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 the illness and the ways we’ve responded to it, we’ll…

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 a contract on a cruise ship and was treating herself…

  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 yourself in and see. So far, my decision to attend…

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 with a fork in the road: call it quits (which…

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 made the decision to send its students home as the…