Bienvenido!

Hello, all, and welcome back to the ever-stellar FAU MFA Creative Writing Blog! For this post, I'll be your host (and I promise not to continue rhyming).

Who is this, you ask? Well! I'm the English Graduate Advisor, and I'm here to help you navigate the salty waters of your degree progress. Please don't be shy - email, call, or drop by and ask me any questions you have. I might not know the answer, but I will find out what it is! My detective skills have grown immensely during my tenure as your devoted advisor.

So! What are you in for this coming year? Well, our Sanders Writer-in-Residence this year is, drum roll, please: Justin Torres. He'll be here 3/27-3/31 for the MFA workshop, and will be giving a reading Thursday, 3/30. You'll need to apply for a spot in the workshop - information on this will be sent out later this semester. You can check out an interview with him both here and here, find an editorial he wrote on the Orlando Pulse shootings here, and reviews of his beautiful book, We the Animals, here and here. We are so excited to have him!

We are also hosting several wonderful readings: Ira Sukruangrang on October 13, Victoria Fedden on October 20 (more on this in the next action-packed paragraph), and Jensen Beach and Elizabeth Powell on November 16. All these readings will be held in Live Oak D at 7:00pm. 

Victoria Fedden, an alumna of our Creative Writing MFA Program (!), will be here for the National Day on Writing. You can check out some reviews of her latest book, This is Not My Beautiful Life, here, and here, and you can find an excerpt from the book here. Her author page is here, and it includes a lot of good stuff: hilarious blog posts, writing advice, information on her books, and a reading guide for This is Not My Beautiful Life. We're thrilled to have her!

Our Literary Magazine, Swamp Ape, will be launching January 2017. Get involved with the magazine reading submissions, working on marketing, or however you’d like to participate. Be a literary midwife and help birth this baby!

I want to encourage you to apply to stuff, go to events, and basically do all the things. You might feel busy, but trust me, this is the time in your life to really focus on the reading and writing community that you are a part of! It won’t be forever (I can vouch for that, ha). So while you might feel like you need to do everything else (and binge watch old episodes of Supernatural or whatever), do the writing stuff instead. Apply for Swann funding. Travel. Go to the readings (it bears repeating: go to the readings! These are amazing opportunities for you to learn from and meet writers outside our program). You will get so much out of these experiences. The time goes by so quickly. No lie, apple pie.

Ahem. Okay! Weird endearments notwithstanding, are you nervous about your degree progress, the Plan of Study, the thesis, the thesis defense, graduating, choosing classes, teaching, or anything else? Good! That means you're human. Now come and meet with me.

MR Sheffield, aka Mary Sheffield-Gentry, is an alumna of FAU's MFA Creative Writing Program and your graduate advisor. Her work has been published in Hayden's Ferry Review, Fiction Southeast, The Florida Review, and other publications.

The Blog Goes On Break, But Before That, It Offers Suggestions About Life You May Want To Take Heed Of

Hi. Guess what? You've survived the Fall semester. And not only have you survived it, now you get a break full of lights and holidays and sweater weather. Pretty good stuff, I think. But before you burrow into your (softest, warmest, coziest) bed and hibernate for several weeks, I want to tell you something.

Me. The blog. Not me, Mary. Not me a person sitting at a computer trying to think of how to tell you this. Me, the blog, full of wisdom and authority. That me.

Use the break to write.

Sounds simple, right? And you're probably already planning to do this, but listen. Things will get in the way. You'll get into a fight with your sister over French toast. You'll lose the keys to your car and lock yourself out of your house. You'll get a terrible haircut and feel compelled to hide your shame cuddled up in bed with a book or a video game or a movie.

So I'm suggesting a date. With yourself, with your writing. A time, a place, an amount of time or of words. And keep your date each day. Take that time for yourself, even if it means writing something like: This is stupid. I can't think of anything to write - why is that blog so bossy! Why am I even listening to a blog? What am I doing with my life? How can I make amends for the French toast thing... Right? Because eventually you'll get somewhere good. Somewhere necessary, at least. Such is the nature of writing. I don't know about you, but as a blog, I rarely know where I'm going until I get there. I mean, there might be a vague goal shimmering somewhere off in the distance, but it isn't always there, and sometimes I don't even make it there anyway. I end up someplace else, someplace unintended and inconceivable before I get there- there's something kind of magical about that, you know?

So write. Each day. Think of it as self care. Or if you hate that, think of it as talent care. Life care. Care care.

Okay, I've made my point as forcefully as I am able. Now I'm giving you some writing prompts. Feel free to use them on those days you sit down and find yourself with a b-l-a-n-k page and a b-l-a-n-k mind. Remember you can always go back and revise during those times as well.

Winter writing prompts:

1) Things get messy with the French toast
2) A poem is a machine
3) Your character forgets everything s/he wanted
4) Your character got one thing wrong
5) Just confess - everyone knows you did it
6) A story travels through time
7) Everything is a conversation
8) How to start a bad habit
9) There are infinite ways to be born
10) Research the background of a product you use every day or can't live without

There are more. You can look them up online, there are books of prompts, and you can write prompts for each other. Get together and read your stuff. Invite Mary - I understand she loves readings.


The blog is your trusty blog, home to the musings of past, present, and (possibly?) future MFA students in FAU's Creative Writing Program. Follow us on Facebook. Contact us at mfa@fau.edu.