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Success in the Digital Age
One of the many perennial essays that gets handed out to would-be writers is Ted Solotarff’s “Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years”. It’s a harsh look at what even talented apprentice writers have...
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Why Super Mario Bros. Will Affect the New Generation of Writers
A few years ago I came across a story of Tom Bissell’s in Best American Short Stories 2005. I can’t remember everything about “Death Defiers”, but I’m pretty sure it involved an American...
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Thoughts on the Short Story Survey
“Do people still care about short fiction?” That’s a redundant, pointless question for the most part, but I find it interesting that the dominant form of literary fiction consumed in this country is...
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Tom Bailey and the Perfect Writing Pedagogy: In Which I Discuss Abortions,...
I attended my first workshop eight years ago (eight years! how did this happen?). We sat around a conference table in the basement of an academic building, the type from a trillion frat movies, all...
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2011 Guide to AWP
I ran into Eugene Cross last year at AWP. We were waiting in line for coffee at about nine in the morning, and we both looked bleary-eyed and terribly hungover. I’d spent the first night of AWP getting...
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What Are You Teaching In Workshop?: O Captain, My Captain!
I’ve been reading Cathy Day’s blog lately and all her insightful posts about her undergrad fiction workshop as they went through NaNoWriMo, and the whole time I’ve wondered why more fiction teachers...
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Here’s Everything I’ve Recommended to Fiction Students So Far This Semester
So, I’m running this advanced fiction workshop and it’s all like woah. One thing I like to do in a classroom setting like this is meet individually with every student after they workshop. I remember...
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Fall 2011 Fiction Recommendations
One of my favorite aspects of teaching is recommending fiction to students. There’s almost nothing better than reading a student story and thinking, “This person absolutely needs to read Lorrie...
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Course Sequences
Over the last month or so, I’ve tried really hard to blow up my workshop syllabus. Things were going really well, and I wasn’t motivated out of some fear that I wasn’t getting through to the students....
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What It’s Like to TA a Fiction Workshop
This past semester was my first opportunity to use a TA in one of my classes. It’s not common knowledge that any instructor can use a TA at Pitt, and I really had no idea until one of the senior...
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