Goddard MFAW faculty Aimee Liu: Once upon a time, the story begins… and instantly we are transported. Those four simple words cast a spell around the world, with translations in virtually every language promising a journey to a “time” that is also a place, like a magic carpet or hidden castle that we “once” might have come “upon” in another life.
Goddard MFAW faculty John McManus: I’m thinking this morning of Herbert George Wells, the science-fiction writer and prophetic humanist born 150 years ago this week.
Kyle Bass, Goddard MFAW faculty: Like the tikes who showed up again and again in my stories, I preferred the company and troubles of adults. It appears my child-self fits a psychological profile for what I’ve become.
Goddard MFAW faculty Michael Klein: Apparently, E.L. Doctorow once taught a course that only had one book on the syllabus. The class read the one book and decided from there what the next book should be. If it was Jane Eyre, somebody might then suggest The Wide Sargasso Sea, which was a prequel and written by another writer at a completely different time. Perhaps, reading both books would give a person a rounder sense of the world created by both sets of characters.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the F-Bomb: A Young Adult Author vs. the Four-Letter Word
Goddard College MFAW faculty Sherri L. Smith on using the F-Bomb: If Sales is saying it, not changing the line could mean no sales! I could single-handedly obliterate the success of my book by dropping an f-bomb!!!
Goddard College MFAW faculty member Deborah Brevoort: Tonight I will finally get to see a production of my MFA thesis play, a Noh drama about Elvis Presley titled Blue Moon Over Memphis. I have waited 23 years for this day.
Goddard College MFAW-VT faculty member Jan Clausen: “I get it. I keep trying to build cathedrals when I should be building yurts.” This comment from an advisee, about her struggle to get annotations down to more manageable dimensions, has stuck with me for years as a witty image for one of the perennial dilemmas of critical writing.
Goddard MFAW faculty member Rogelio Martinez on writing comedy: “I place laughs in a play to carefully track the play’s relationship with the audience. If a laugh fails to land then there may be several reasons why. It may be the acting or the directing, but usually it’s the writing. It has little to do with the laugh itself but with those things surrounding the laugh – plot, characters, obstacles, etc. In other words, it’s not whether the joke is funny or not but whether the audience has been paying attention to the play.”
When my younger son was in high school, my wife and I realized we would need to hire a tutor for his French class. Sometimes I would overhear their lesson, and I would think: He’s hopeless. I didn’t mean that word in a critical or disapproving way. If anything, I invoked it out of empathy. I had […]
Goddard MFA Faculty member Susan Kim writes, “When I discovered that the residency theme was “Body, Language” and that I was expected to deliver a keynote, I grew despondent. Maybe what I really was, was overwhelmed. Because let’s face it: anything with “body” in it is one hefty mother of a subject. Writing outside of the body is difficult…and risky. We risk getting it wrong. We risk looking really stupid. And we certainly risk offending, often the same readers we are trying to reach.