creative writing
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Funny Women: Personal Statement for Creative Writing MFA Applications
Dear MFA Faculty at Private University,
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Voices On Addiction: A Conversation with James Brown and Patrick O’Neil
James Brown and Patrick O’Neil discuss WRITING YOUR WAY TO RECOVERY.
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The Joy of Play: Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces (10th Anniversary Ed.) by David Biespiel
Biespiel offers a number of best practices—not just for writing poems, but for living a creative life.
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The Rumpus Interview with Alice Mattison
Alice Mattison discusses her newest book, The Kite and the String, a meditation on her lifelong journey through the craft of writing, the joys of teaching writing, and the importance of community.
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Writing Badly
Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self. The person who will admire it first and last and most is the writer herself. Over at the Guardian, writer Toby Litt explores what makes…
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Writers: Be Bold!
To risk something real as a writer is to risk making a fool of oneself. … It is a difficult joy to risk something new as a writer. But it is a joy nonetheless. Author and translator Idra Novey knows…
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Whose Workshop Is It?
Here’s what I mean by not centering the author of the workshop piece: I always tell my students, following the lead of my favorite MFA professor, that the truth is that workshop is most helpful to the person talking, not…
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Learning the Hard, Creative Way
In my father’s world, which still bore the markings of the class system he had fled seventeen years before, thinking that you were better than the life you had, which had actually allowed him to escape, was also a betrayal…
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Across the Divide
The proof of their friendship came through years of devotion.
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Competitive Writing
If you win, then you talk to the other winners, congratulating and praising them. If you lose, then you read through your submission, noting mistakes that weren’t there five minutes before, wondering where you went wrong,” she adds. “You tell…
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Mountains, Lowlands, and Archipelagos
Horace Engdahl thinks that creative writing programs and the walled-off communities academic programs create are hurting western literature. Since writing courses help monetize writing—and fund writers as professionals—Engdahl worries that the courses are removing writers from the real world. Engdahl…
