The Physicality of Place

During a panel at the 2019 Miami Book Fair, a woman spoke softly into the mic and asked Jill Ciment, Karen Russel, and Kristen Arnett about what it means to write about place. I felt my body move to the edge of my seat and I quickly took out my phone, hoping to be able to retain as much information as possible when they spoke. All three writers Florida residences, all three writing about Florida, and all three with different brilliant answers.

Ciment answered that as a Montreal native and someone who previously had lived in New York City it takes a long time before you can write about a place. Russel spoke of how writing where you lived can be hard. You want to get it right. Arnett, a Florida native, answered that place is a physical experience and when writing it should function as such. She said what does it feel like to move through a Florida summer? The muskiness that hits your tongue or the sweat pooling across your skin as you move. She spoke of the sound of cicadas and the annoyance that fills your body when you hear them. That yes of course you see place, but you also feel it, you smell it, you taste it.

Place is more than setting. It is not where the story physical happens. It’s the space between what is happening and where it is happening. Ciment is right, it takes a long time to write about a particular place. Russel is too, you want to get place right. But I think Arnett nailed it on the head.

“There is a physical experience of place.”

There is. When you step into a corn field in the middle of a spring evening in Northwest Missouri there's a buzzing. On your skin, in your ears, between your scuffed up flip flops. It's the way water pools in the rows that draws the mosquitoes and June bugs. A Colorado sunrise after a snowstorm is a warmth like none other, the blinding reflection of rays onto frozen water molecules can give you a sadistic sunburn if you stay out too long. Your skin starts to get hot around your face the way it does on a beach when you’ve forgotten your sunscreen, but you realize you’ve remembered too late. The road outside the Fox Theatre in downtown Oakland during October smells like popcorn, Chinese food, and T-shirt ink. The gentrification of the block feels heavy and you notice it the most when you get your artistic gelato. You should feel guilty. If you get stuck on the side of a riverbank in Bluff, Utah during mid-March, because you forgot that when you paddle board the San Juan River its best to have a car parked at the end point first so you'll be able to get home, there will be a group of Mormon Cub Scouts whose troop leader promptly tells the tall teenage boy to get in his truck and drive “you ladies” back to your campsite.

Write the peculiar ones, the normal ones, and all the places in between. But whatever you do, write the physicalness that place forces us all to experience.


Merkin Karr is a first year MFA student at Florida Atlantic University. She loves standup paddle boarding, her dog Olive, and quiet hookah bars. When she’s not writing true crime she’s listening to podcasts or teaching herself how to snorkel. (One is going much smoother than the other).

Writing and Traveling

I’d missed my flight. Maybe everyone should miss a flight at least once in their lives, just for the experience, I thought--framing the situation like I often do, delicately sidestepping the whole moderate financial mishap thing.

My girlfriend, always handy with an optimistic scheme of an idea, affirmed for me that I wasn’t dying, that there were worse problems, and then suggested booking a different, more circuitous itinerary that would prove less squashingly expensive to re-book. The next day I got on a plane to Vegas, where I would pick up a miraculously affordable rental car and start driving several hundred miles to my destination of Oakland, California.

That next morning, I woke up in a campsite that faced a mountain range of Death Valley, and the day after that, woke up along a river near Lake Tahoe, California, until at last, I took the final leg down the highway that runs, itself like an inevitable water, into Oakland. Within those three days of highly unplanned travel, I’d quickly hiked a canyon before the barometer hit 110 degrees, met a group of hippies who told me about growing up in a nudist camp, watched cows graze on the greening mountains of the melting Sierra Nevada snow peaks. I took notes at a small desert bar filled, interestingly enough, with young Russians. It’s an understatement to say that it had paid, as I realized later, to have relaxed into the initial supposed crisis, to have done a thing I would never have otherwise planned.

Writing, I’ve come to learn, is often a lot like this. We miss the flight. We thought we were writing a novel but we’re writing little vignettes that we decide to turn into postcards and send to all of our friends, and some of the friends will keep the papers forever and some of them will gently send them to the recycle. We write five hundred pages, believing we’re chasing some great work of our lives, and then what we’ve got is five hundred pages of a messy, funny, poignant, moving good try, but maybe try again.

The remainder of that summer, the almost too dreamy three months of a break between the second and third years of my MFA, was like one darn long extended metaphor as that lesson continued to reveal itself in so many shapes.

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As my girlfriend and I worked house sitting jobs across Northern California, taking day trips to redwood forests in Marin County and evening drives into the cities of the Bay, the beautiful-but-bootstrapped writer’s retreat I thought I had designed for myself was clearly not quite happening. California was gorgeous, but for the first week after I arrived, I wasn’t really writing. (The two facts might have been a little related.) Revising stories? I thought, sitting at the desk of a man who owned a beautiful home in a small town known for its bocce ball tournaments and the historic site of John Muir’s home. Someone’s revising stories? I said, staring at the blank computer screen--and not writing.

Why this little drought? I had come a long way, had planned and anticipated what this West Coast light and air would stir to life, and there it was: Something in me was demanding time off.   

It was unlike me to really, truly dip out of my planned writing practice. I keep to it. For many years, writing what Julia Cameron calls “morning pages” kept me alive to the dream of being a writer, and it kept me alive to the truer undercurrents of my life, heart, and creativity. It kept me, quite honestly, afloat in the uncertainty and unconventional priorities that marked my twenties.

I sat on the porch of that couple’s house, petting a cat who wasn’t mine, and thought: How do I need to write, now? What’s the form? I tried to relax, avoid the self-doubt that I was no good for writing until further notice. I tried to sidestep the fear, and search instead for another route to the goal of staying awake as a writer.

I kept notes, journals. I tried my hand at short short stories, realizing that the spontaneity of traveling felt more important than the demands of a four-hour morning devotion to twenty-page story projects that consumed the best part of my day. I shifted a little, moved into a mode of observing and noting short bursts of stories, letting go of the daily jobliness of my usual writing. And when I arrived back home at the end of the summer, settling back into the place of my job, settling into the final year of my MFA, those notes glowed and sang from the vantage point of recollection, and I found them forming into longer pieces I couldn’t have foreseen in the midst of the travel itself. 

Writing, like love, seems to demand a constant attentive listening, where we ask every day: What do you want from me now? What do we need to do next?

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When traveling, I noticed, I didn’t need to force myself to have the same kind of writing practice. My foiled intentions to write in a certain kind of way made me uneasy, but in fact, I owed myself a needed release from the pressure of plans and structure. Through travel, we have the freedom and the privilege to direct our attention where instinct moves us, looking where we may have never expected to look, feeling from spaces and positions and views we had never expected to feel. 

After all, traveling can be a chance to refill the well in ways we couldn’t have predicted. Driving once from Florida to my family’s Michigan home, the distance I covered began to feel like it was expanding my stories’ scope, suggesting a new and bigger stage from which I began to imagine the collection I was drafting for my MFA thesis. What was happening in this country, so big that only driving or riding by horse seems to be an appropriate means of comprehending its scale and variety--what all was there in the world, in Ohio and Kentucky and Tennessee, in all of these cities and towns, in all of these homes, while I had been tucked away in my small apartment, so quietly writing for workshop in Florida? Writing about place, writing through travel, can force us to ask ourselves and to reassess: What is it that seems most important, most vital to observe in the world?

And yet, even as the idea of travel writing can just glimmer with such idyllic promise, what happens when the work or the place doesn’t quite run the blissful, easeful program we had imagined? Both writing and traveling are big gifts to ourselves, ones that we often work hard to afford and make space for in our lives. But when I write as I travel, I can find myself assessing the appropriate ratios of art to life. Am I doing this travel thing right, I wonder? Am I living the best life, the best writer life? Am I making the most of my time?

Relaxing into what we have in front of us, the task of listening to the instincts that say, Go for a walk now, or Talk to the person at that end of the bar, or Scribble that down! That thing, the purple polka dot van converted out of an old bus!--all the notes, the thinking, the attention, the settings and characters we jot in messy notebook handwriting are all just as important, and sometimes even just as hard to notice and to find a way to keep, as the desk time work of writing. And who knows? That polka dot van could one day drive you exactly where you had wanted to go. 

Cherri Buijk is a third-year MFA candidate and teacher at Florida Atlantic University. She is working on her first collection of short stories.

The Forms Memories Take

Memories are not always clear and linear. I know many of my own memories can be hazy, nebulous, and somehow all the while vivid and crisp—surreal, even. Interestingly enough, these strange recollections are the ones I turn over the most, as if the very fact that these seemingly insignificant details have transformed into colorful memories that have stuck with me all this time must mean there is a profundity in them that deserves examining.  I do most of this scrutinizing in my writing. Perhaps my favorite aspect of writing is the flexibility through which I can choose to express and explore (and at times dissect) my psychological ties to the images and sensory detail from my memory.

As a writer who has dabbled in both creative nonfiction and poetry, I could say there is a method to the way that I choose whether I’d like to convey these kinds of memories in an essay or a poem. Would I rather bare my soul in paragraphs or stanzas? Sentences or lines? And then from there, how can I be clever with my structure, how can I lead my form to follow function?  The truth is there is no real answer I can give, no way I can adequately clarify how I make certain distinctions.  What I can say is this: either way, writers will have to go with their gut.  For me, if the memory I want to convey in my writing is something that is specific and can be arranged chronologically, I might turn to an essay format (though admittedly, I particularly enjoy writing lyrical essays which may utilize a poetic device or two.)  Even in essay format, I find it difficult not to incorporate lyricism when unpacking a memory, but then again, for me, nostalgia has always been hard to deliver without a song. For my more bizarre, dreamlike memories, I turn to poem format much more often.

My poetry, not unlike my other writing, is usually approached with a degree of emotional distance rather than erring on the side of confessional.  When describing or conveying a memory in my poetry, I think this distance allows me a kind of dexterity, an ability to manipulate form and language to illustrate the stranger details of a memory—for instance, a peculiar scent that recalls candy, flowers, plums, and rubber from when I was five years old, the one that would make me ache with the absence of fancy-free youth if I smelled it now. Something about the brevity, and concurrently the great depth, of such a memory certainly lends itself to poetry, which in some ways seems to perfectly serve this type of memory in its own format—brief and insightful.  Phrases that sound like the taste of my grandmother’s spaghetti on Easter weekend, words that feel as toasty as the fireplace in my childhood home—sometimes only the musicality of language in poetry can express that flash of emotion and color buried in my mind’s eye.

Maddy García is a first-year poetry MFA Candidate and instructor of English composition at FAU. Much of her work grapples with identity, ambiguity of form, and the human experience juxtaposed against the cosmos. She is also a visual artist and, in her free time, she enjoys cooking and surrounding herself with cats.

A Matter of Focus: Thoughts on Craft in Poetry

When A Thing happens, when I feel a poem begin, I feel it as the base of my brain stem humming. It happens when I notice river-water curling around the legs of a motionless heron on the opposite bank. It also happens when I feel the weighty comparison of petty bickering on the Food Network contrasted with a multi-car pileup, the burned-out wreckage alongside my commute. 

It happened when I went to church and it happened when I saw my bare feet framed by stars through my best friend’s windshield way past curfew. I feel the same sensation when I begin a nonfiction piece, or the beginnings of inspiration related to an academic paper, but with a poem it’s different. Less puzzled, more exultant. Less in the front of my brain, more in the back where my molars are anchored, where I hold tension, where tension holds me.

Do I notice the times I describe above, these generative moments, easily? Do I record them? My body certainly records them, my sense of living anxiety as good as a notepad for taking ideas. Not that I don’t use my journal (or even the Notes app of my iPhone) to jot down phrases that sound pretty or stir my sensibilities. 

But more often, it’s common for me to feel the poem in my chest and my stomach before my mind can articulate the words that my guts seem to be singing. When this happens, it’s best for me to get to some paper, pen, and some silence so the poem can emerge, mostly whole, as quickly as possible. Often, this visceral response to a situation is so broad and feels so specific (a macrocosm and microcosm all at once) that my main decision in terms of craft is to appropriately focus the lens of my perception. My poems, painted in large swaths, are unwieldy, licking at the seams of cells with the same fervor that they attempt to use in devouring the stars. 

To rein in my poem, I focus on pulling that abundant response to the world back to what I can ostensibly know about my environment, my body, my immediate surroundings. This might mean using my senses only: what can I touch with my skin? What type of dirt is stuck under my fingernails right this second, and where did it come from? What is it about this particular Marlboro that tastes differently, and what does it taste of?

When that exploration of detail becomes mundane, or indistinguishable from the experiences of anyone else digging in the same field or smoking the same brand of cigarette, then I begin to explore the broader questions (at the risk of challenging my earlier, established focus). Why did that dirt cause me remember the farm I took my first job at, my grandmother who tended those fields, my grandfather who faithfully ran the tilling machines? Where did the smoke of the cigarette go that enchanted me to follow it? 

It’s in this connection between the stimulus and what memory was stimulated that I find the poem. It is the attempt to feel a chill and write, while shivering, what it means to be cold before I am warm again. My decision of craft is less a carefully measured editing or author’s mechanism and more a dreamer’s earnest attempt to explain the dream, to grasp at it with language before it fades from the body upon waking. Eileen Winn is a first year MFA student with a concentration in poetry and an interest in nonfiction. Originally from Ohio, Eileen lives in Florida with their husband and their cat. Without purple pens, much of their work would not exist.

Dear Grad Students: How to Make It as A GTA

First of all, you don’t make it. Instead, as you rush out of your apartment on the first day of class, you skip a block on the staircase and tumble down the rest — right knee and left ankle dislocated. Also, you fall so thoroughly and quickly, like a blink, that you think you imagined it. You, with an entire weekend of lesson planning, bathroom rehearsals and slowly cooked optimism. Naa, this can’t be real, you think. Or! It is a prank, maybe. A joke from the universe stretched too far so you hahah in your head and un-imagine yourself from the ground. Pain, awkwardness and the desire to call your mother. Welcome to the Academia! 

Follow the story to before the chaos begins. Before the fall and the limp and the pool of student’s eyes drilling into you. Before that first phrase: Good morning, Class! And the clear white silence that greets you back. Before that awkward stretch of time, eternity crammed into one teaching session, as you exhaust your lesson plan in the first ten minutes. You know, before that small riot in your head, that slow killing tension, before you realize that your mouth is open, and the words pour out and you are cannot pull them back and force them down your throat – too late! You tell the class about your fall. Laughter follows, sympathy too, and you realize that is not the day you die. 

So yes, before all that. Maybe then to begin at Orientation? That first morning when you skip into the room, bright-eyed and alive with your American dreams. New beginnings shine on your skin. Three years of studenting and teacherly things – how hard can it be? Except you have class activities due for essays one and two. Easy, breezy, you think at first, until night when the words begin to blur and tease and mock, because your English has crossed the Atlantic and now you are simply no longer sure. Also, what is this lingering headache and obsession with bread. What is cognitive distortion? *you cry hot tears! 

It occurs to you on Day Three of Orientation that you are not prepared for this, that you do not know the first thing about teaching and maybe even writing? Because heck, school people like their commas and most times you are too lazy and anxious to care about them punctuations.  But! There is free food and nice smiling-people and the guy from the elevator, so you push aside your doubts as quickly as they enter. Who cares if you ruin the American educational system with your rabid inexperience? 

After three weeks of teaching you will meet K (Yes, K, because you won’t write real actual names in this post; what if K gets you arrested/deported?). The first thing about K is that you think he is a student. You think, from that drowning look in his eyes that he is a freshman trying to piece together an essay, seeking help from an instructor. And then, by means of casual introduction you will find out that K is a Program alumnus with three years teaching experience under his ‘proverbial’ belt. Also, shame on you for thinking otherwise. 

You will learn from K that a student can call you out for looking ‘un-teacherly.’  That anxiety can seep through your pores and leave your palms dripping with sweat. That it is not a good idea to keep the markers in your pocket because those stains are tough to clean out. That some students will sleep in class. That words and your mind will fail you as you lose your thoughts mid-sentence. So maybe then that no matter what you do, the first time was always meant to be a mess. 

Flip the coin. You, Grad Teacher, are also a student. You will begin to use words like Epistemological in sentences and you will do it with a straight face because well, this is your life now.  You will shelve out two separate spaces in your head for reading plots and for your students’ names. Hopefully, you won’t ever address a student by a novel character. (Doesn’t matter that both names start with S and end with A.) Of course, you will learn how to prioritize. There is the unending backlog of papers to grade and your course assignments to wrestle with, but you, my friend, must choose Netflix. Chat all day with your friends from home. Join a dating app and laugh at the absurdity of people on it. Remember that you are a person on it. Leave the app. Cook some meals. Burn hours on Facebook. Try to get some work done. Fail at it. Miss home. Etcetera.

This is the journey and you are figuring it out. Hopefully!


Tochi Eze is a former Lawyer turned wannabe writer. She is a first-year MFA student at Florida Atlantic University, a Program she hopes, among other things, will cure her of her compulsive laziness and procrastination, so that maybe one day she could actually start the novel she has written in her head.

Conjuring Houdini's Papers: Swann Grant Travel Funding

I spent my summer crying over books. I can’t imagine this is too atypical when speaking to a community of readers and writers. But specifically, I spent a week of my summer crying over escape artist Harry Houdini’s books and other writings in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Harry Houdini (1874-1926) was a writer. It can be easy to forget his intellectual pursuits because even most of his biographers relegate his career as a writer to be secondary to his career as a performer, escapist and magician. Yet, Houdini wrote. A lot. He wrote seven books (mostly on magic), edited a monthly magic magazine, wrote short stories, professional articles on magic, movie treatments for his silent film career, and letters (so many letters), professional and personal, especially love letters to his wife Bess. Houdini left behind a lot more than strait-jackets, leg irons and lock picks. The Houdini Papers are thankfully preserved and collected at UT Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, and I am grateful to have been a recipient of the Swann Grant this summer, which funded my travel, research and tears.

I’m writing an alternate history novel where Houdini doesn’t die in 1926, and I’ve known since I discovered the archive that I would need to visit the Ransom Center. I had done so much Houdini biographical research and yet still struggled with major gaps in understanding Houdini and Bess as people.

When I decided to apply for the Swann Grant, I first spoke with a student who won the award last year to get more information and ask questions on their experience. Then, I met with Dr. Carla Thomas, a medievalist. If I can offer new students any advice, it’s to reach out to your professors, even the ones you haven’t taken a course with and even the ones whose research does not seem to line up with your own. In passing, Carla had once told me she would be more than happy to speak with me about digging around in archives. I made an appointment to meet with her and voiced my concerns. I had never been to an archive before, and while I vaguely understood the genre of the research proposal, I couldn’t quite determine how to write such a proposal for creative work. Carla left me with very practical advice on how to articulate the research I had already completed and show how the specific materials in the archive would contribute to my novel.

At the Ransom Center, even though I was allowed to take (but not share) pictures on my phone, I spent most of my time deciphering Houdini’s handwriting, or copying Houdini’s handwriting by hand into my own notes. As a writer who does a lot of my drafting by hand, it mattered that if I was touching and reading his letters, then I was writing his words. What did those sentences feel like scratched from my pencil? Archival work became even more of a physical experience.

But the best part of the receiving the Swann Grant, was getting to hold the physical published copy of Houdini’s book, A Magician Among the Spirits (1924). This is the only copy in existence with Houdini’s notes for a subsequent edition that was never sent to print—Houdini died before the project could be completed. In reading his revisions—the slash of red ink, the physical inserts of pages glued into the book’s gutter, the asterisks delineating details for new material—I was struck by what I had already known as integral to my understanding of his character all along. Houdini was a writer. And I am so proud and honored to be in that company.

Cheryl Wollner is a second year MFA student studying fiction. Their work has appeared in the anthologies Today, Tomorrow, Always; Hashtag Queer Vol. 3 and The Best of Loose Change. If you ask, they will tell you how Houdini really died (it was not performing a trick).

On Fluidity in the Creative Process

My creative process is young.

Most of the time, I get an idea for a piece stuck in my head and kick it around a while. I’ll think on it, go about my life, and come back to it from a different angle. I know it has potential if the idea follows me around long enough. Usually, I’ll work out the first sentence or so in my mind before I sit down to write anything. Sometimes it’s a couple words that I focus on, sometimes a whole paragraph. I think about the words while driving. I think about the words while talking to someone about an unrelated matter. I think about the words while I’m teaching class. While I’m taking class.

Ideally, I like to meditate before I write, but this is not something that’s always possible. If I’m at home, I’ll burn sage, read a passage from the Tao Te Ching, and lay flat on my back with my palms open. I prefer the lying-down meditation to sitting or walking. I’ve read a bunch of books about meditation and practiced many styles, and this is the one that works best for me. It took a while for me to get there.

I like to squeeze the writing moment for all it’s worth. I write in large bursts, and I like it that way. I don’t do a little at a time. I’m an extreme person, always have been. This area is no different. Kerouac’s philosophy of “spontaneous prose” is fascinating to me. I’ve never written 50,000 words in a sitting while on large doses of speed, but I don’t think it’s a bad approach. Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of experimenting in that way. I’ve worn out my welcome in the drug department.

So, I create a mood and I proceed to exhaust every bit of energy out that mood as I can. I purge myself onto the page. I don’t really like the word “purge,” however. It implies I have something bad to rid myself of. But I guess a lot of times I do. At least “purge” sounds better than “ejaculate,” the other descriptive word that comes to mind, even though the invocation of orgasm is more positive. Writing is much closer to a purging for me, an evacuation of thoughts. The process doesn’t always feel good as a rule, and I’m not always satisfied when it’s done.

I’m forcing myself to write with greater frequency, which means all these little steps I’ve outlined become less feasible. For instance, I did none of this before writing this piece right now. This is a good thing. I can’t expect conditions to be perfect—or even good—all the time. I do what I can to mitigate anxiety and I write. I get as much on the page as possible, and I work it out later. But the spirit of the moment is always paramount.

My creative process is idealistic.      

Jonny Rawson is an MFA student in creative writing at Florida Atlantic University, where he’s working on a memoir about addiction. He’s from New Jersey, which he actually considers an asset. You can check 

Teaching High School Students to Write Science Fiction and (Not Always) Blow up Their Alien Worlds

Teaching high school students how to write science fiction is exactly like reading science fiction; it’s fun and weird, but a lot of the time you’ll have to do mental gymnastics to figure out what’s going on. For the 2019 FAU SciFi Collab Lab, Christopher Notarnicola (my co-teacher) and I took the classic science fiction trope of a hive mind and used it as a lead into collaboration for a group of high school students to write works exploring the complicated and bizarre. As a class, we dug through classic science fiction writers like E. M. Forster, Ray Bradbury, and H.P. Lovecraft, as well as more modern science fiction stories like Mass Effect and Zima Blue.

We began the “collaborative” aspect of the workshop with exercises combining individual writings into collaborative pieces called “exquisite corpses.” These exercises were a low-stakes way for students to get to know each other and practice writing together.  Each student would write a single sentence on a piece of paper, then pass the paper to the next student.  We started with ten separate pieces of paper, then after each person wrote a line, they would pass it on. We ended up with ten odd and unique stories.

Our ultimate collaborative work came in the form of two (much more structured) short stories.  One was Red Alert, the story of a secret agent infiltrating a post-apocalyptic government in order to save her remaining family.  The other was Shmoppo: The Story of a Grumpy Hero, where the “Froppie” protagonist must survive strange and unpredictable weather.

Of course, no writing summer camp should exist without writers getting to put together their own solo works.  Each of our writers came up with grippingly weird characters and plots ranging from a superheroine in space fighting to find herself to anthropomorphic amoebas trying to survive a science experiment.

Throughout our time writing and analyzing works of the past, we viewed everything through the lens of craft, with discussion geared toward answering the question: how do you write good science fiction?

The trickiest thing about teaching high school students the answer to that question was getting them to acknowledge the narrative points that they took for granted.  For example, having a swashbuckling space pirate with the power to cause supernovas might sound cool, but unless she has human concerns like making sure her dog has food, or a fear to use her abilities because she once accidently destroyed a burgeoning planet with sentient life, the story is almost literally all flash.  Initially, nearly all the students were focused on an over-the-top power or “sciency thing,” while ignoring the element that makes readers care. 

So, my favorite writing element I worked to get them to consider was contrast, something they used to devastating effect.  We went through the first issue of Robert Kirkman’s “The Walking Dead” to see how the calm, (relatively) happy times make the forthcoming zombie apocalypse that much more upsetting. 

In one story, a student wrote about a hellish, fiery apocalypse (obviously, it was delightful).  We spoke about contrasting in more positive elements, so the student added a dream sequence of flowers in a meadow, a concert with glittering bright lights, and a white house in the country with a freshly cut green lawn.  Then she went back to killing off humanity.  Sure enough, her (still slightly worrying) story hit all the harder, and she was thrilled with it.

Effectively, teaching this workshop is just like teaching a first year ENC class but with students who all want to be there.  The happier Chris and I were teaching—the more we nerded out about the stories—the more comfortable the students were trying new things.  Craft was important, but this was also a summer camp, where the expectation is to have fun, so that was always our goal.  When in doubt, put on another YouTube video with Wall-E knockoffs racing through a meteor shower.  High school students love analyzing robots getting blown up.





Justin Piesco is a second year MFA student in Creative Writing at Florida Atlantic University.  He has worked as a Writing Consultant at FAU's Center for Excellence in writing since 2014, and he has taught first-year English since August 2018.  He enjoys teaching and writing as both provide avenues for the gaining and sharing of knowledge.

On Sharing Ourselves

I have had the opportunity to work with Ayse Papatya Bucak, professor at Florida Atlantic University, for a few years now. She patiently read and responded to my creative work as an undergrad (even through the terrible zombie-dystopian-Twilight-gothic years) and has encouraged me throughout my graduate studies (reminding me that I am on the right path, that I am not a failure at what I do). These are all things that keep me going and are very important to me—but what I think I’ve enjoyed most about working with this phenomenal instructor is how much of her writing process she is willing to share.

Professor Bucak’s debut collection, The Trojan War Museum and Other Stories was released into the world last week. I’ll have you know; she blew up on the internet. Every email shared, interview posted, and podcast linked littered my Facebook timeline, repeated throughout my Instagram stories. We (her FAU cohort) could not be any prouder or more excited. She premiered her collection at the lovely Books & Books in Miami. The room was full, the excitement palpable, and the appreciation for this wonderful writer abundant, ever-present against the backdrop of floor-to-ceiling walls of books; shelved stories not unlike our own. She read “Good Fortune” from her collection. Lines like, “Before: a nephew-stranger, a brother-replacement, an old beginning. After: still fear but less, still stone but less, still Gudrun but more,” read like magic, defined a main character (Gudrun) and played with sentence structure, which she is always reminding us (her students) to do. We leaned toward her, away from our seats. We listened. Not only did we get to dive into this story as a collective, delighted audience, but she also showed us her notebook, her scribbles. She shared the evolution of her sentences, her notes, her writerly mind. And me, a mere student, a mere fangirl, thought, I have notebooks like that too. I have sentences waiting to be evolved too. Of course, this reading wasn’t for me. This reading was for Papatya, to share herself and her hard work. But how wonderful it is, to find inspiration in others, to be a part of a lineage of hardworking artists who don’t mind sharing themselves.

I am in my third and final year at Florida Atlantic University’s graduate program in creative writing. As expected, I have made countless connections to the writing community, gained quite a few new friends, written a lot of words, had many a breakdown, worked my little writer-nerd’s self into the ground, and—most importantly—learned to share myself. In what other world do people have the opportunity to share their words, their art, their bones and trauma and joy so professionally and so completely? I think we can find circles who support us throughout this journey of life, but to find friends and mentors who openly share their process, their successes, and their advice so willingly and so supportively is truly unique. In my experience, Professor Bucak has always opened her door to students looking to create a world on paper. She remembers our names, our stories, and she helps us practice our craft, all while accomplishing feats in the sometimes-paralyzing but always fascinating publishing industry. Her collection of short stories is a pleasure to read, and an inspiration to those of us who look up to her as a writer. Her reading in such a local, bookish spot was a culmination of all the things the MFA at FAU represents; a community of supportive colleagues and writers witnessing the magic of a new book being articulated into the world by an author we love.

            Congratulations, Papatya. 

Emily White is a third-year MFA still attempting to complete the daunting task of finishing a story. She is a bit further along now, though.

Welcome to Fall 2019!

Welcome to the Fall 2019 semester! I hope you had a wonderful, productive summer. Finding time to write is one of the most important jobs for a writer. Professor Bucak has something to say about that here.

And speaking of Papatya (and her new book!), please come to her reading Thursday, September 12th, at 7:00pm in the Student Union.

And speaking of readings, please also come to the reading of our wonderful visiting fiction professor, Dantiel W. Moniz, Wednesday, October 16h, at 7:00pm in the Student Union. You can read one of her stories here.

And speaking of and, come out to the Swamp Ape Review's open mic nights the first Sunday of each month! It's at Mad Robot Brewing (2621 N Federal Hwy, Boca Raton, FL 33431) from 5 - 7pm.

What else? Hm. I want you to come meet with me so that we can revise or create your Plan of Study as needed. If you're graduating, let's go over deadlines and concerns. New folx, returning folx, come see me with your questions, your queries, your quests...

Okay, maybe not quests, though who even knows at this point. I could probably help you figure it out. My number one job skill is knowing who to call with questions. I am only sort of kidding about this.

My advice (other than to meet with me)? Attend readings, make friends, create a writers group, get involved with Swamp Ape Review, take your vitamins, get that rash checked out, I think I'm getting off track.

Listen - I'm also looking for blog posts about writing: the craft of your genre, choices you've made in revising, how you know a piece is finished, etc etc etc. Please let me know if you'd like to contribute. Thanks!



MR Sheffield is really Mary Sheffield-Gentry, a person who sometimes goes by MR, but not that often, and who is your creative writing advisor, which is why she's writing this in the first place. Her first book was published with Sundress Publications this past winter. She's got a stack in her office if you want to see.

Cracking Shells

Invariably, my favorite part of any workshop has been the community that gets formed throughout  the semester. The inside jokes, the unique intimacy, an understanding of peers that can only come from picking apart their writing. The vulnerability that comes with sharing your art leads, inevitably, to a sense of trust and camaraderie. So while I was stoked, this spring, to learn from a poet I greatly admire, I was disappointed that the workshop would last only a week. Too short a time, I thought, to develop that kind of bond. Of course, I was wrong.

Danez Smith came into the room, so overwhelmingly themself, so comfortable and ready to begin. There was no academic veneer, no stuffy posturing, no attempts to mute their personality. They had us laughing, and, on the first day of passing out poems--to the left--had us singing “Irreplaceable.” A chorus of “To the left’s” erupted, and the energy in the room was light, lively, accepting. Now, it takes me a while to warm up to people. I hold a lot back. (A friend has said of me that it takes a while to crack the shell, but once you do, you find “a pretty weird fucking bird.”) Point is: I’m reserved, upon first meeting people. But Danez Smith had me, on that second day, table-drumming and belting Beyonce. If that’s not a testament to their teaching ability, then the rest of this blog post better convince you.

It wasn’t just the affability or realness that Danez brought to the table. They forced us to reconsider our relationship with language, to step outside the comfortable. For one assignment, they had us list the poetic strategies we rely on, and a second list of all the topics that appear in our work, and then had us write poems in which we abandon those crutches. Writing those poems felt like stepping out expecting a stair, and tripping awkwardly down. Eventually, though, I found my footing, and was able to see language from an entirely new angle. Defamiliarizing myself with my language allowed me to enter a fresh, generative space. By the end of the week, I felt rejuvenated, closer to writing than I had in awhile.

Danez spoke passionately about language, life, community, and communication. The lack of pretense, the lack of a professorial guise, the complete absence of a fake-self, allowed them to speak directly to us, to the point. The cliche I'm about to offer you is that they taught me not just about writing, but about being. Their parting bit of advice for us writers, the last wisdom they imparted, was a small phrase that I don’t think I can hear enough. “You want to be a writer? Then write. Just write.”

Aiden Baker is a first year MFA candidate in Fiction at FAU. Originally from Chicagoland, she now lives, writes, and sweats in South Florida. You can find her work in The Ninth Letter Web Edition.

The Annual Poet Invasion of Delray Beach

For 15 years in a row, Miles Coon and his wife Mimi have brought poets from all over to Delray Beach. It is a week-long event of workshops, craft talks, readings, and bonding over a love of poetry. The Palm Beach Poetry Festival creates a space for poets who might be seeking their first publication to work with and alongside poets who may be finishing a manuscript and writers looking to train in a new form. There are hundreds of participants who work in the same workshop group all week, taught by some truly incredible poets, and some of us are lucky (or perhaps naive) enough to volunteer our time to help for the week.

Florida Atlantic University is a short 20-minute drive from Old School Square in Delray Beach, where the festival takes place. Thanks to the proximity of our campus, Florida Atlantic University MFA students make for the ideal volunteer interns for the Festival. There were four of us from FAU this year—Caitlyn GD, Colton Martin, Kelsey Moghadospour, and myself—along with some students from Florida International University’s MFA program and some independent volunteers both local and from far away. The diversity amongst volunteers matches the diversity of the Festival faculty.

I was lucky enough to work with two poets in my workshop, Jessica Jacobs and Nickole Brown (and their sweet golden retriever, Solace). Our workshop group progressed so much from our first meeting on Monday through the end of our time together on Saturday. What really made the experience worth it to me was picking up great tools for my own writing and getting some new methods for my teaching. Plus who doesn’t want to hang out with poets like Laureanne Bosselar, Sharon Olds, and Tyehimba Jess for a week? It’s a lot of work, but it’s something I’m already looking forward to next year. In the workshop time, I was able to compose two new poems and got inspiration for some assignments for my Teaching Creative Writing course. I also made some great friends from FIU, got closer with my FAU cohort, made connections with staff from some journals and presses, and bonded with my workshop faculty. Jessica, Nickole, and I have been eagerly making plans to meet up in Portland at AWP later this month. Volunteering is never easy work, but it is a vital part of being a model literary citizen. I’m so grateful I had the opportunity to be a part of the PBPF this year.

Kelsey Allman is a first-year MFA student at Florida Atlantic University. She earned her BA in Writing & Linguistics from Georgia Southern University. In addition to writing creative nonfiction, poetry, and tweets about football, she is working on a graphic memoir about mental illness. Her dog Remington controls most of her life decisions.   

Lessons Learned from a DIY Book Tour

As I write the first draft of this post, I’m on a plane heading home from North Carolina, where I did readings from my debut book, One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl’s Search for the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture. Now that I’m somewhere in the middle of my self-imposed tour, I’m glad Mary Sheffield-Gentry asked me to pause and reflect on what is a brand new experience for me.

Here are some things this amateur-hoping-to-become-a-pro has learned:

Make a plan and start early. Unless you are a proven best-selling author, your press will not send you on a tour (bummer). That means you’re in charge, which can be daunting or liberating. I’m choosing to see it as liberating because I can set my own schedule and embrace my tendency to want to control/plan everything book-related anyway.

Think about how much traveling you can afford, how often you can handle appearing in public, and how much time you will be able to devote not only to the readings, but also to the much heavier workload of securing, planning, promoting, and preparing for those readings. I did not anticipate how much time I would need to spend just on sending and answering emails involved with my book tour, for example.

Contact bookstores three to six months before you want to read there. Universities require more lead time; if you want to read sometime in the fall 2019/spring 2020 school year, for example, start reaching out in early 2019, preferably before. Applications for literary festivals and book festivals are due anywhere from a year to six months before the actual festival.

Another thing: a book tour doesn’t have to be a line-up of back-to-back readings that takes you away from home for weeks at a time. I scheduled two to four events per month for the first four months after my book appeared, and I am working to arrange a few more for the rest of the year. A book tour also doesn’t have to be travel-oriented. You can do a blog tour (asking prominent book bloggers to review the book) or a radio tour, and arrange for author interviews on important book-related sites, like I did here.

Partner with someone local. Bookstores want to know your reading will bring a crowd, and inviting someone from the community to participate will help make that happen. For my Asheville event, I asked Dr. Mary Saunders Bulan, professor of environmental studies at Warren Wilson College (an institution just outside the city), to join me “in conversation.” She interviewed me about the book in front of a live audience, and I also did a quick reading. Look to local writers, professionals, and other people whose work coincides with yours somehow. Ask bookstores about their book clubs, too; you might be able to get a club to read your book and host you for a discussion, as I’m doing at The Book Cellar in Lake Worth in April.

Another option for partnerships is community organizations. When I wanted to put something together in Tampa, for example, I reached out to The Sustany Foundation, a local group working to advance sustainable agriculture initiatives. They agreed to make my reading an official Sustany Foundation event, invited their members, and did much-needed promotion. In Greensboro, I put dual strategies to the test by being in conversation with local environmental writer Lee Zacharias and asking Green Drinks Greensboro, a group of environmentally minded people, to have the event serve as one of their monthly gatherings—and I ended up with an engaged group of 15-20 people, which I’ve learned is a decent turnout for a relatively unknown new writer.

Whether or not you partner with a person or organization, always reach out to local groups, institutions, universities, and the like to inform them about your event. Do some research to find out who is likely to be interested in your book.

Think outside the bookstore box. Yes, bookstores are great places to read—but they aren’t the only venues. People love the option of enjoying a drink or some food while you talk, so consider places that offer one or both. I held my book launch party at a brewery with a history of supporting the arts, and it was amazing! Think, too, about places that tie in with your writing somehow—a store, a public place, anywhere that makes sense. In Tampa, I read at an independently-owned wine shop specializing in organic and natural wines, which connected with my book’s argument for regenerative agriculture. Don’t forget about libraries, too.

University readings are a bit more difficult to land, but definitely try because they help you establish and maintain important connections with writers who also teach. Approach your alma mater first, but also write to other universities with a reading series or programs that complement your work. In the coming weeks, I plan to identify and then reach out to university English departments that focus on research writing, environmental writing, and literary journalism and see if they would be interested in bringing me to their campus. Wish me luck!

Be prepared for rejection. For every “yes” I get, I have received at least ten “no’s.” Most people you query about a reading either won’t answer or will decline. That is normal, so do not get discouraged. Another thing: be prepared for readings that go horribly. By that I mean no one shows up. This, too, is normal, even for writers who are well known.

That said, do your best not to set yourself up to fail. Do readings in places where you have connections and people you know, and promote the heck out of events in places where you lack these advantages. If you have a few spare bucks, consider doing some advertising on social media. Share everything you schedule with your publicist so he/she can alert local media.

In closing and in the spirit of continued promotion, I humbly invite you, dear reader, to come out to one of my events in the coming months—and let me know about yours!

Stephanie Anderson is a writer living in Boca Raton, Florida. She holds an MFA from Florida Atlantic University, where she currently serves as an Instructor of English. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Flyway, The Pinch, Hotel Amerika, Midwestern Gothic, Grist Journal, The Chronicle Review, Sweet, and others. Stephanie is proud to have grown up in South Dakota, and her work often centers on the prairie and rural life. Her debut book titled One Size Fits None, a work of literary journalism focused on regenerative agriculture, appeared with University of Nebraska Press in January 2019.

Testing the Waters

I walked into Danez Smith’s workshop with the extent of my poetry knowledge limited to Shel Silverstein and an introductory course during my undergraduate studies at Penn State. I was lucky to be prepped with a few mini-lessons on form from my fellow Graduate Teaching Assistant and friend, Renae. She is exceedingly patient and kind, explaining to me the intricacies that are line breaks and tension. As a fiction candidate, I like to stick to what I know when it comes to writing and, more specifically, what I know I can write well. In a poetry workshop, I was a Type A fish out of my neat and tidy Type A water.

I took my seat at the table where we would gather for the week, and Danez asked us to introduce ourselves with additional tidbits of information – where we were at in the MFA program, what our primary genre was, where we were from, and what our favorite fast food restaurant was. Right off the bat, I was flummoxed, misstating that I was in my third year at FAU (I am a mere first-year) and letting the rosiness on my cheeks signal my embarrassment. I turned to Renae and reiterated, “I am out of my element.”

Soon enough, however, I felt myself embraced by Danez, who was successful in explaining poetic form by comparing entities like The Powerpuff Girls to a crown of sonnets. According to Danez, much like the crime-fighting trio, this form consists of unified “sister poems,” also known as poems that are “same same, but different.” Danez was able to break down concepts to more manageable ideas, and I’m always a sucker for a solid pop culture reference. We laughed as we compared one type of poetic sequence to the 2016 collaboration between Rihanna, Paul McCartney, and Kanye West for “FourFiveSeconds.” Danez explained it as something that makes no sense at all, yet somehow, it works. Cartoons and celebrities? This was very much my speed.

As the week went on, I found myself inspired by what Danez had been talking about. Not just poetry as a form, but poetry as a way to express thought and feeling through writing. During their reading, Danez stressed that being honest in your work is something they focus on, and I felt a resonance with that statement. Maybe poetry was the outlet that would allow me to talk about my experiences and the ideas I so often tried to integrate into my fiction. I ended up walking away from this workshop with a new sense of what poetry was, and I felt inclined to thank Danez for their time working with us during the week. I shook their hand, thanked them while smiling, and felt the same nervousness I had on the first day. This time, however, it was nervousness in the form of excitement and the potential to get started. Having tested new, sometimes uncomfortable waters, I now feel confident in expanding my writing wheelhouse.

Abigail Reinhard is a first-year MFA candidate at Florida Atlantic University with a concentration in fiction. A native Jersey Girl, she received her bachelor's degree in English from Penn State University in 2016.

Dangerous Seed

Having read Don’t Call Us Dead in both my African American Literature course and my Poetry workshop, I was eager, and nervous, to meet the author behind the words. This was my first workshop hosted by an outside author at Florida Atlantic University, so I didn’t know what to expect. After meeting Danez Smith, the nerves quickly faded. They were so welcoming and motivating throughout the entire workshop, I almost felt as if I had met them before. Perhaps because their poems evoke that same, welcoming aura, and perhaps because they always seem to have a smile on their face.

            Throughout the workshop, Smith emphasized the importance of writing for specific audiences, which is something I had previously not put enough consideration into. We all belong to different communities, and can therefore write to those groups in a specific language of sorts. This doesn’t have to mean a literal different language, but by including specific insiders, one invites people in while concurrently holding others at a distance. Smith had us put this idea to practice by taking one of our poems and reworking it, keeping three separate audiences in mind as we revised. When we all shared our new pieces, the poems seemed to change form completely, solely dependent upon who the speaker was addressing. Moving forward with my own work, I will be sure to decide who exactly I am speaking to before I begin writing.   

While attending Smith’s reading at the end of the week, I found myself smiling along with them as they read. I was sitting next to fellow MFA student Abigail Reinhard, who I met through FAU’s MFA program and now consider a best friend, when Smith read their poem “acknowledgements,” specifically dedicated to friendships. Abigail and I found ourselves nudging each other whenever something applied to us (specifically the line “I text you & you say, I was bout to text you bitch”). While reading all of their poems, they had the room laughing and aching at the same time. To evoke those senses simultaneously through writing is to evoke something true. Listening to Smith read was admirable, and reminded me of the many reasons why I love to write.

At the end of the reading, I waited in line for Smith to sign my copy of Don’t Call Us Dead. When it was my turn, I made sure to ask them if they meant for the italicized lines in “summer, somewhere” to read both down and across the page, to which they said yes, they did intend this, but not initially, like a happy accident. As a writer, I lingered on these words—that feeling of doing something exciting subconsciously is a moment I, and I assume others, strive for.

I walked to the parking lot after the reading feeling full (and not as a result of the provided food, which was lovely). I opened my copy to see what was written. They crossed out their own name and wrote, “Renae! Be a dangerous seed!” I think these words capture what Danez Smith was teaching us during the week-long workshop—take risks with your writing, and know that your words mean something to someone and, most important, that they hold power.

Renae Tucker is a first-year MFA creative nonfiction candidate at Florida Atlantic University.

Observing like a Writer

When I received the writing advice to slow down in my prose, it felt like (unintentional) life advice. But life advice, I’m sure we all can take. 

            Whether you’re reading this as a current/former/hopeful MFA student or as a writer of any stripe, it’s safe to assume you’re a busy person. Fair chance, writing isn’t your only obligation and to slow down seems impossible because you can’t drop your job(s), children, classes, teaching, spouse/partner, etc. And you can’t drop your writing (I’d hope).

            But you can slow down in your writing, particularly when thinking about setting and details.

            I should have realized sooner that my aversion to sitting in a setting and providing a reader with the unfolding details of a place was a reflection on my aversion to sitting in a setting and taking in the unfolding details of a place in my life. I eat breakfast during my office hours, with a book in one hand and a pen in the other. I meet a friend for lunch and my mind is confetti on the next dozen things that need to get done (the next scene to write, the next paper to grade, the next paper to write, etc) and so place becomes transitory. At lunch with this friend, I won’t be able to recall afterwards whether the chairs were wood or metal, whether the table had both ketchup and mustard but no mayonnaise, whether all the Splenda was gone, but the Sweet n’ Low was packed too tight. If I can’t slow down and notice the details in my life, why was I surprised that I couldn’t slow down and provide those details in my prose?

            Chances are, I’m not alone in moving through the world as if each space is only a bus depot to hop to the next transitory location.

            I know mindfulness is a buzz word that can feel cheapened recently, but there’s something to say about writerly mindfulness. We learn how to read as writers and (hopefully) read to feed our creative work. Reading becomes part of the work of writing. We learn to dedicate slowness with published work and understand that if we don’t read (and don’t read with the purpose to learn and expand possibilities) then we don’t improve. We learn to read mindfully. Can we also learn to observe mindfully? Can observation become the deliberate work of a writer? I’m a fan of carrying a notebook everywhere, but even then, I don’t take down every detail of every room I enter—that’s exhausting for one, and also when you notice everything you can’t hone in on what’s important. But, I can take down one or two ideas. Just the ketchup bottle alongside the mayonnaise packets. Just the Sweet n’ Low with the bent pink corners.

            But even then, taking notes can still be exhausting or cumbersome. Another observation technique is to build your observations into the work you already do as a reader. When I read as a writer, I read for setting. I read for how the writer walks me through a room (or not), how the writer directs my attention. I observe and take notes on the places I would never think to set a story or place a scene.

            I don’t expect any of us to get less busy, but I hope that slowing down can create writerly mindfulness so we can observe with intention. I hope that observation can become a part of your writing life, something as integral as reading. The places we inhabit are not transitory and I, at least, needed a reminder of that, in my life, as well as in my prose.

Cheryl Wollner is a first year MFA student in fiction, currently working on an alternate history novel about Bess and Harry Houdini. She 100% believes in magic.

Let's Do This

Hello, and welcome to the Spring 2019 semester! So, yeah, my picture is from October, but come on. Who can resist that little Pikachu and his big brother? Anyway.

I'm including the picture so you can see why I've been absent from this blog. Those two kept me busy for a full semester of parental leave (I'd thought to get a draft of my novel done - it turns out they had other plans). And as much as I miss their little cherubic faces every day, it really is nice to have the full use of both of my hands.

But enough about me.

There is a lot going on this semester, some of which has already transpired. We had the Alumnae reading with the lovely Brittany Ackerman, Stephanie Anderson, and, you know, me. Not sure lovely applies there. Maybe the adjective needs rethinking. We could go with indomitable. Indefatigable? Hm. Probably we are all three some of these things to some degree. But! Our reading was so fun, and we thank all in attendance. You can find Brittany's book here, Stephanie's book here, and my book is here, or I have a box of books in my office (CU 306F) if you're so inclined.

Last week literary agent  Renée Zuckerbrot spoke, and this week Danez Smith will be giving a reading (2/14 at 7pm in the Majestic Palm Room of the Student Union - do not miss it! Maybe this link to the FB event will work).

There are additional exciting events to look forward to as well. On 2/28 Mary Blossom Lee Poet, Sy Hoahwah, will be giving a reading at 7pm in the Majestic Palm Room of the Student Union, and on 3/21 the next Off the Page reading will be given by John Keene (7pm, Majestic Palm Room of the Student Union).

Remember to meet with me to discuss your program of study. Probably we should update your Plan of Study. Maybe you have questions on thesis guidelines or deadlines. Maybe you've just, you know, missed my office. I know I have... Come on in! I take appointments MW 10:30 - 1:30 and TR 11:00 - 12:30. I'm also happy to speak with you over the phone if those hours don't work.

I'm looking forward to the rest of the semester. We are going to have some great blog posts in the near future. I, for one, cannot wait to read about the Lawrence Sanders Writer-in-Residence Workshop. And listen. I'll probably be bugging some of you for a blog post. Please add your voice to this! YOU are what make this blog interesting. I'm just here, you know, curating.




MR Sheffield is the Creative Writing Advisor for the MFA program at FAU. You can reach her at mfa@fau.edu to set up an appointment. Her debut book of poetry, Marvels, was released by Sundress Publications this winter.