I’m rereading Tom Kealy’s The Creative Writing MFA Handbook, which means I’m thinking of applying to graduate school. When I was in San Francisco, I met Tom Kealy and would run into him from time to time in the Mission District. He was smart and funny and when I moved to Los Angeles, I bought his MFA handbook. Tom Kealy has been busy writing and this September, he has a short story collection coming out and I’m excited to read it.
When I was staying in Connecticut and told my relatives I was thinking of applying to graduate school for an MFA in creative writing, they didn’t say anything. They are teachers and nurses and firefighters. If I said I was going back to school for a teaching or nursing degree, they’d respond. When I told my uncle I edited for a magazine and curated readings, he said, Are you getting paid for any of this? One night, when I was having trouble sleeping, I picked up my blue paperback version of Sister Outsider and thought, That’s it. Those are the two words. So I went to New York and saw Stephen Elliott, Rebecca Rubenstein, and Amy Fusselman.
I recently read this article and believe that not running away from yourself is good writing advice. It’s good life advice, too. The article quotes George Saunders as saying, “You can’t run from who you are…Not your brain, not your inclinations, or your experience. So accept your shit – run toward it, use it.” I wrote an intimate letter for The Rumpus. In Saunders terms, I did not run away. I used my shit for that letter. You can subscribe here.
David Rocklin hosted the one-year-anniversary show of Roar Shack, his monthly reading series, the day after the Zimmerman verdict. The last person to read was Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo who was collecting donations for No More Deaths, a Tucson-based humanitarian organization. Volunteers from the organization help end suffering and death in the AZ-MEX borderlands by giving medical aid and placing water and food in strategic locations, and Xochitl would soon be driving to Tucson with a carload of donations. That evening, she was taking action and she was reading her poems, that evening she was leading, she was light. This week, Cultural Weekly published two of her poems.
