Continued from this first post about George Saunders coming to NYU to give a master class and a reading: George Saunders told us that he always has multiple stories on his desk that he’s working on simultaneously. The point is so that if he gets stuck on one he can just switch to another and stay
Yesterday George Saunders came to NYU to do a master class and a reading. My brain is still exploding. He talked to us about his MFA experience at Syracuse. He had gotten in on this really wacky story about a theme park. Once he had arrived at the program there was one of those parties,
The world—or at least the internet, which seems to take up even more space than the world—is full of sneering bloggers in a rush to criticize MFA students for being gullible and unrealistic. I can’t remember the last time I saw an article on a well-read literary website that ranted or made a snide side
I recently finished Jonah Lehrer’s new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. It feels a little Gladwellish, but if you don’t mind that, it’s a fascinating examination of how our brains work, how we function when we’re being creative and artistic. I found it to be incredibly inspiring and reassuring. One of my favorite parts of
Jonathan Safran Foer emailed my workshop group today with a Hasidic parable. It’s about prayer, but he wanted us to think about it in terms of writing. I loved it so much I thought I’d share it here: There was once a musician, well-known for the great beauty of his music, who came to play
Today I went out to lunch with my friend M and talked about how I constantly have so much doubt about my writing. I said that sometimes the longer I work on a story or a novel, the more doubt I have. He told me, “But the important thing is that it doesn’t inhibit you.
It seems that among creative writing MFA applicants there’s a lot of confusion about what NYU’s funding looks like. I thought I would write a blog post to clarify the situation, especially since some of you lovely readers out there have also been requesting this information. I learned about the below funding packages directly from our
I’m still following the Write Every Day rule. But these days when I sit down to write the work I’m doing is mostly revision. I’ve been editing and cutting and rewriting like crazy for the past few months, trying to sculpt my novel-thesis-monster thing into something better. What I’ve discovered is that crazy, wonderful things
