Goddard MFAW faculty Bhanu Kapil: It’s the last day: December 31, 2016. The year of shit and magic has, in other words, almost come to an end.
Jan Clausen, Goddard MFAW faculty: Using the hashtag #writersresist, a group founded by poet Erin Belieu of VIDA has called for writers to come together and defend “[the] most basic principles of freedom and justice for all.”
Goddard MFAW Faculty Keenan Norris: While life still goes on as unpredictably as ever, the sabbatical itself is proving to be the perfect vehicle for productivity. It’s the safest means of going off the grid that I think exists outside of utilizing all that trust fund money I don’t have and selling my majority share in that wildly successful company of mine that doesn’t exist. In all seriousness, I feel really privileged to have this time away from teaching to write, to read, to explore some new creative directions for my work and to assess and re-develop my teaching strategies.
Goddard College MFAW faculty Richard Panek: When I think about giving thanks, I don’t think about what or whom I’m thanking. The feeling is more a sense of general gratitude, even relief; it’s a reminder to myself to be aware of what’s good—an exercise that has become more poignant in recent days.
Goddard College MFAW Director Elena Georgiou on Elena Ferrante and what it means for a writer to answer the question, “Who are you?”
Goddard MFAW faculty Susan Kim: I saw a cartoon on Facebook last week of Bart Simpson by his usual blackboard. Only this time, he has written “I will not compulsively check FiveThirtyEight.com” over and over.
Goddard MFA in Creative Writing faculty member Micheline Aharonian Marcom, along with four other artists and writers, for the past year and a half has been working on The New American Story Project, a digital oral history project recording the stories of children who have fled violence in Central America and have come to the United States as refugees. JoAnne Tompkins, a current student in the Goddard MFA in Writing Program in Port Townsend, WA, interviews Aharonian Marcom about The New American Story Project.
Goddard MFAW faculty Beatrix Gates: There’s a drought here in Maine, and lately I’ve been studying a seep in the backfield. A seep is a moist or wet place where water, usually groundwater, reaches the earth’s surface from an underground aquifer and pools in a depression. A seep will be found quickly by wildlife and bring new birds and animals to the area. There is every sign that’s true.
After graduate school, I joined a migration of writers to New York. My homeland was Skokie, a suburb outside Chicago, where our mostly old neighbors had just survived the holocaust and I could walk all by myself to their houses to play cards with them. We lived in identical small ranch houses, mine distinguished by being a place where adults spelled out the word “divorce” over my head like profanity and always in relation to other people. There was dinner every night, breakfast every morning, cocktails and television, piano lessons, BBQs on the patio, a set of World Book Encyclopedias and 12 novels, one of which was Gore Vidal’s MYRA BRECKINRIDGE, which I read on the sly when I was 12.
GoddardMFAW faculty member Victoria Nelson on Oscar Wilde: Unbidden, a voice rose inside me: Oscar, get over it… How honest are we writers when we deliver our version of a real-life story in our memoirs and autobiographical fiction? Do we tell the hard truth about ourselves as well as the other guy? Or do we, every now and then, use our art to justify ourselves and settle scores–we poor victims with better words?