One year before she became an MFA student at Goddard College, Caroline Catlin had her writing published in The New York Times. For many writers, this would be a capstone achievement. But for Catlin, it was the foundation of her …
MFAW alumna Nita Sweeney’s unpublished memoir, Twenty-Six Point Freaking Two: How a Sedentary, Middle-Aged Manic Depressive Became a Marathoner (with the help of her dog), was short-listed for the 2018 William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition nonfiction category. Read Nita’s …
MFAW-WA alumna Sarah Cannon’s Goddard thesis, turned debut memoir, The Shame of Losing (Red Hen Press), will be available October 2, 2018 in most independent bookstores in the Northwest. If you are a strong supporter, it would be helpful to ask your local bookstore and …
Because Yearning and Dread is the theme of our upcoming Goddard residency, I’ve been thinking lately about the role these emotions play in my own writing, and as I look back over my fiction, particularly my novels, it seems pretty clear that the yearning and dread that fuel my work revolve around my parents.
MFAW-VT faculty member Kenny Fries will be Visiting Writer at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, PA next week. During his time at King’s, Kenny will meet with faculty and students, visit two writing classes, and give a public reading on April 17, …
Online today at The New York Times, Goddard MFA faculty member Kenny Fries asks: “What kind of society do we want to be?” In “The Nazis’ First Victims Were the Disabled,” Kenny Fries writes about the echoes of the extermination of the “unfit” …
MFAW-VT faculty member Rahna Reiko Rizzuto was interviewed for the show Out in the Open with Piya Chattopadhyay on CBC Radio. The episode was called “What Moms Can’t Say.” Hosted by Piya Chattopadhyay, Out in the Open tackles one timely subject each …
Goddard MFAW faculty Michael Klein: The beautiful writer, John Berger, who died a day into the New Year once said to the living: “hope is not a form of guarantee; it’s a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.” For all of you, I wish radical hope.
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.
Goddard’s Port Townsend MFA faculty member Aimee Liu will be interviewing Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi on Tuesday, March 15, in Los Angeles about her new book Love, Loss, and What We Ate. This vivid memoir of food and family, survival and triumph, traces the arc of Lakshmi’s unlikely path from an immigrant childhood to a complicated life in front of the camera—a tantalizing blend of Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone and Nora Ephron’s Heartburn.
Kenny Fries, Goddard MFA faculty member living in Berlin, visits “Homosexualität_en” exhibit at the Deutsches Historisches Museum and the Schwules Museum: “I was reminded of how the word “homosexual” was used for the first time around the same time as the word “normal,” and how historically the issue of “cure” has pertained to both homosexuality and disability. I noted how there have been laws “outlawing” both homosexuality and disability, including the “ugly” laws in the United States, which made it illegal for disabled people to appear in public. Most of these laws were not repealed until the 1970s. Chicago’s 1911 ordinance that stated, “It is hereby prohibited for any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or deformed in any way so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object to expose himself to public view,” was the last to be repealed, in 1974.”
Minneapolis AWP — Check! I write this sitting cross-legged on the nubby zebra-print carpet of Seattle’s SeaTac airport. A friend dropped me off an hour early and I couldn’t be happier with the extra time to just chill. At the …
Michelle writes: “The week has gifted me with numerous pleasures. The best being an opportunity to ask a few questions of a fellow writer and Goddard graduate, Sarah Shellow. Her words always give me a sense of healing and I …
My name is Regina Tingle and I write memoir. According to a recent statement by a fiction writer who will remain unnamed, this makes me an “attention-seeking narcissist.” Fine. I’ll step up to that. In fact, I’ll indulge my narcissistic …
An excerpt from MFAW-VT alum Emily Stern’s memoir When Doves Cry, which is the evolution of her thesis, is in Entropy Magazine today. Author’s Note from Emily: “When Doves Cry is about my mother and her death from complications of HIV/AIDS …
In 2003, I broke the law because I did not believe in one that kept people from knowing each other. I went to live in Cuba for three months, packing my bags with my dream to write, with my years …