First Semester MFA Takeaways

Remove dust jackets from hardcover books before use;

Drafts should be completed and started over from the remembered remnants;

“Real writing” takes place over winter break;

Anxiety is normal and should be encouraged (i.e. the productive kind);

Workshop leaders will continue to confuse first-person narrators with their progenitors — even in graduate school;

Writing about one’s homeland is one’s birthright and opens the deepest, most intimate veins of narrative; (Where is my homeland?)

Proper literary criticism assumes an author anticipated and intended all undergraduate-level interpretations;

Plot problem? Have sex/a gunman enter a room/leave a room;

Write with AUTHORITY;

Telling is quicker than showing;

Columbia MFA work goes in the priority pile (what is the priority pile?);

One can assume that strangenesses that don’t quite cohere to a narrative are taken directly from an author’s life.

More as I think of it….

James McGirk