 | Glimmer Train Press sends out a nifty bulletin with craft essays and interviews with authors like Tobias Wolff. The essays are brief and insightful on such topics as "The Fear of Not Saying Interesting Things," "Cutting Out the Bad Bits" and "On Rejection." The bulletin comes free through the email, but you can catch up on previous essays in the archives. |
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 How to Cite Criticisms of Your Professors Using the MLA Handbook, Eighth Edition
by Molly Collins McSweeney's Internet Tendency WARNING: This article includes appropriately inappropriate language.  MATTHEW KOMATSU with HANŌKIZAWA AT THE YOSHIHAMA TSUNAMI ISHI Nonfiction writer Matt Komatsu, Class of 2017, recently joined the roster of the some of the world's most celebrated and talented writers with the recent publication of his essay "The Buried Stone" in The Paris Review. The essay describes his visit to a tsunami ishi, or “tsunami stone,” in the Japanese village of Yoshihama. The boulder serves as warning and memorial to a series of devastating tsunamis over the centuries, most recently in 2011. Matt's guide was 89-year-old Hanōkizawa, who shared the village's experiences with tsunamis and his own. The risk of collective memory, unmoored—this is what I see in the barren surroundings of the Yoshihama stone. For if there is a surety, it is this: the tsunami will return. It's a lovely little essay well worth your time. It also means that those of us who know Matt can entertain ourselves with a literary version of "Six Degrees of Separation."
 Carve Magazine has opened its Prose & Poetry contest from Oct. 1 to Nov. 15. The prize in each genre is $1,000 and publication in the April issue. Note the entry fee of $17.
Hurry! The Missouri Review has extended the deadline for the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize until Oct. 15. Clearly they are waiting for your piece. The prize is $5,000 per genre in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Entry fee is $25. Details here. New Millenium Writings also sponsors a writing contest for all genres, open through November 30. Submit your best work and $20 here. Superstition Review, an online literary journal published by Arizona State University, seeks poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art submissions this month, too. Deadline is November 5. See guidelines here. Creative Nonfiction magazine is accepting essays through Nov. 19 about "the role of games and play in our everyday lives" for a special issue, and through Feb. 25 for an issue dedicated to memoir. Information about these calls for submissions and others is posted here.  Wikipedia Commons Finding good places to submit your poems, short stories, and essays can sometimes seem like more work than writing them in the first place. Fortunately, a few sites aggregate links to publications and other writing opportunities. Good places to begin include:
 At the 2017 summer residency, CWLA's low-residency MFA program celebrated its 10th anniversary. In days of yore, the department operated as a traditional three-year program. For several reasons, the faculty proposed shifting to a low-residency model and university administrators immediately understood the brilliance of their plan. The low-residency program opened for business in Summer 2007 with a lot of enthusiasm, the faith of a brand-new group of students and mentors, and (let's be honest) a teensy bit of trepidation. Twelve days later, Director David Stevenson and his merry band of faculty celebrated the residency's success and then took a long nap. Alumni of the low-residency and original program joined current students and faculty for a celebratory reception.  In any creative writing program, successes and accomplishments come every day in ways most others don't see. Anybody who keeps writing after graduation is hugely successful. So are those who find and contribute to a literary community. The simplest way to track these kinds of accomplishments is to take note of the number of students who have published short stories, essays, poems, anthologies, articles, and books. We'd need another 10 years to list every single publication, but look here for some highlights. Here's to another decade of great writing by good people.
Zack Rogow sends along this announcement for fiction students:
Well, some fun ones, too. The program's Facebook page has photographs from the summer residency, as well as publication news from student writers and mentors and the occasional interesting link to stories about writing and such. You might also want to join the ultra-exclusive Blue Fox Literary Society, which posts news and links from current and past students and faculty. It's a closed group, but get in touch with one of the members (including your friendly faculty mentors) and you're in like Flynn.
On the practical side, the Graduate School's web presence seems to shift through time and space, but here is the latest verified link: UAA Graduate School. Of supreme importance to you third-years is the 2015-16 Graduate Student Handbook. You'll also want to memorize every single page of the Thesis Formatting Handbook, revised in Spring 2014. Enjoy! It's Raining  What Dan missed By Dan Branch
July 2015 It’s raining. I’m walking into a sea of middle-aged Motley Crue fans, each a stunning example of bad wardrobe choice. I am wiping rain off my glasses while wondering, “Did that woman ever look good in that cut away blouse with her breasts unsupported by a bra?” It’s raining. I’m walking into a room full of MFA students, taking a seat in the Non Fiction ghetto. I’m wondering how the environmental movement survived Abbey, how many loggers ended up in hospital when their chain saw hit a tree spike, whether Craig Childs ever sleeps, ever slows down, ever sips tea while listening to Corelli. It's still raining. I am sleeping, dreaming about Childs’ desert until the Blue Fox empties out and liquored-up writers jam up against the dorm door like salmon at a weir. It’s never going to stop raining, not even for me, one virtuous enough to wheel my folding bike out of the dorm at 7 a.m. for a two-hour ride on the coastal trail that soon goes wrong. I’m wet when I reach where the Sandhill Cranes fed yesterday morning. Their absence is the first of a string of unfortunate events that will deny me a chance to answer writing prompts at the Science Center. I will never ponder what it is like to be a mosquito just before the swat. Never watch a moose chase Rob Pockat into the teeth of a bear. I wish I could blame a moose for making me late by blocking the bike path but none appears, even after a Cook Inlet wave soaks my left shoe, which a moose would have found funny. I can’t blame bears, brown or black. They didn’t even leave scat for me to swerve around. I can blame the rain that doesn’t stop. Without the rain, I might have brought a street map, might not have gotten lost in a South Anchorage desert where people suburb along streets with berry names, and bird names, and flower names; would not have found myself going the wrong way on Arlene, circling back to a busy berry street that I had left 30 minutes ago. I might have fallen in love with Arlene if she had led me to the Campbell Creek bike trail. It’s raining and I am heading the wrong direction on Martin Luther King Junior just before the bus leaves and, to be honest, more important to me, just before someone grabs the last Cobb salad box lunch. It’s raining, and I’m eating Cobb salad in my dorm room, listening to Corelli, thinking about how I am going to explain my absence from the science center, writing about Arlene, Cobb salad, an empty seat on the bus, feral writers, glam rock fans lacking glamour, and, did I mention, the rain. By 2015 fiction grads Lynn Mellor, Nick Dighera, Stephanie Smith and Dan Mickelsen One of the first things that you notice about David Stevenson is that he has incredible hair. It’s ginger, and his thick looping curls, when kept short, create a waviness that evokes the classic look of a dapper 1940’s artist and intellectual. When asked how he keeps his hair looking perfect every day, he simply responds: genetics. This is what you get with David. He is humble and succinct. As the director of the Creative Writing and Literary Arts program at University of Alaska Anchorage, being succinct is a necessity. With fifteen faculty members, and around fifty students, all of whom are writers, he is essentially managing chaos. And he does it with aplomb, kindness, and an immense understanding of craft. David has been teaching creative writing for over twenty years. In addition to UAA, he has taught at the University of Utah, University of California Davis, and at Western Illinois University, where he was full professor and director of the Graduate Program in English. He was educated in the west at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington (BA '78), and the University of Utah (PhD '94).  At his book signing David is also an accomplished writer in essays, short fiction, and has written a novel, Forty Crows. His recently released Letters from Chamonix received high praise and won the Banff Mountain Fiction and Poetry prize. It was also nominated for the Boardman Tasker Prize. "The Bear Outside the Door," a short story from his collection, won the Rick Bass/Montana Prize for Fiction sponsored by the Whitefish Review, and his short story, "Native," won the Boulevard Award for Emerging Writers. Next year the University of Washington Press will publish his essay collection, Warnings Against Myself: memoirs of a superstitious mountaineer. He writes often about the mountaineering experience and is a staple of the genre, both fiction and nonfiction; he has contributed to journals such as Ascent, Alpinist, Isotope, Weber Studies, and The American Alpine Journal. He maintains a blog, “I May Be Some Time,” at http://ddstevenson.blogspot.com/, which is not intended for a particular audience because, “Thinking about your audience, I think, is for ‘careerists’ and technical writers and undergraduates in composition courses. Thinking about your audience is not for artists, or even wannabe artists such as myself.” “Wannabe artist”? Much like his hair, David’s writing is beautiful and nuanced. In Letters from Chamonix, climbing gear, mountain summits, hypothermia, and characters--as disparate as they are interesting--are described in loving detail that is real and vivid. Tension, conflict, ascent, and death emerge through the theme of mountain climbing in ways that push language and inspire his graduates.  For David, there are two lives: The life of the writer and everything else. At the Summer Residency in 2014, he spoke of blending these together. He states that, “…balancing between being a writer and, well, just about anything else, a caring human being who functions as smoothly as he can in the world: that’s the hard thing to balance. How do I do it? When I [do] it at all, it’s with great difficulty.” David Stevenson is, again and always, humble. Because to anyone who knows him, he makes the balance look effortless. He has been referred to as the kindest, gentlest, most understanding person to friends, faculty, and students alike. His compassion is apparent in eye contact that goes directly to the soul. Students remark on his intelligence, but in the same sentence refer to how approachable he is. In short, he cares. In a big way. His self-admitted greatest accomplishment as a teacher is his students’ work. He states, “Every summer when I say that the night of the graduating students reading is my favorite night of the year, I’m telling the truth. When those students get up on stage and read I just think, ‘Wow, we’ve all really accomplished something here.’”  Yet another inspiring talk from David. Or maybe he's just explaining the parking situation. David is all that you could ask for in a mentor, director, teacher, writer, and friend. He is respected, respectful, prolific, and, by the measure of his students, extremely accomplished. His appreciation of the true art of writing is pervasive. On the subjects of beauty and struggle, David said, “It’s part of the deal we all signed up for when we were born; it’s in the nature of the contract: You have X number of years, the years will end and may do so at any time. It’s up to you to give the time meaning, to use it well. [And this is] all part and parcel of the great, usually unstated, directive of the artist. The first time I read Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech (a classic artist’s manifesto) I loved it, but almost immediately was thrown into a quandary: how was Faulkner’s own writing working to embody these really lofty ideals? The answer is: indirectly and with lots of complications…Look, I probably can’t break your heart: the bar is too damned high. But, trust me, I will be trying to do it in the next, and every, thing I write.” We all should look forward to having David crush us under the weight of such esteemed heartbreak. Because when he’s done, he’ll be the one to pick us all back up.  |
Welcome!This unofficial site is part of the Low-Residency MFA program at the University of Alaska Anchorage. It is not officially sanctioned by any officials at the official University of Alaska Anchorage. They probably don't even know we're here. We hope. So What's New?Check out Thesis Resources for a stupendous list of links that will help you write and format your stupendous thesis.
See On Writing for regular updates on what smart people have to say about, well, writing. Useful LinksDepartment of Creative Writing and Literary Arts
University of Alaska Anchorage UAA Graduate School 49 Writers Alaskan Writers Directory Cirque Advice for Writers Ten Words You Need to Stop Misspelling The American Scholar The Rumpus Brain Pickings Contact Web DivaWith your jokes, links, Archives
October 2018
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