 The nonfiction grad students are planning a Talkeetna Winter Retreat in January to discuss each other's work, have some fun, and share their writing with the public. Organized by second-year student and human dynamo Monica Stein-Olson, the event is the second such midwinter gathering; last year they gathered in Homer to critique each other's work and meet with Homer faculty mentors. The 2020 retreat will include manuscript workshops, dogsledding and skiing, and a public reading sponsored by the Denali Arts Council. This year a few nonfiction alumni will attend, too, in addition to virtual participation from writers who can't make the journey to Talkeetna. If you're in the Talkeetna area, make plans to attend the reading and support your fellow students!
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 Switching your brain from creative writing to academic writing isn't always easy. Your third-year mentor will help you identify and define the topic for your thesis essay* (and we're sure it's BRILLIANT), but you're the one who's up at 2 a.m. trying to turn a pile of notes into a well-written, useful analysis of some aspect of writing craft. Even if you're two or three drafts into your paper--maybe especially if you've written two or three drafts--you probably need some help with organizing, revising, and writing. Karen Sabine's article "Writing a Craft Paper" is a great place to start, beginning with her explanation of the purpose of a craft essay: "Your thesis is your contribution of original creative work and thus serves a different purpose as an extension of what is expected in graduate level work. A craft paper is not a literary analysis-–its purpose is to look at an element of craft and analyze it across several texts, or to take a single text and analyze it across several craft elements." Sabine describes the process of forming a topic, reading like a writing, outlining your ideas, and more. Professor Pat Thomson has an excellent website, "Patter," with practical advice about writing scholarly papers without confusing or boring readers or yourself. A few posts that may be particularly useful (but look around her site for others!)l: Professor Thomson has collected her posts on writing a thesis here, but note that some topics are aimed more at doctoral dissertations or research-based thesis. Nevertheless, she offers good general advice on writing an abstract, avoiding long quotes, structuring a thesis, and more.
If your paper seems like a giant muddle, try reverse or backward outlining. This technique can help you recognize repetitions, identify gaps, and find places where concepts and arguments need better connections to the main idea. (It works well with creative prose, too.) Finally, Commonplace's Thesis Resources includes links to basics such as grammar and MLA style as well as writing, surviving grad school, and more. CWLA's Blackboard site also includes examples of previous thesis projects under "Thesis Information." If all of this feels overwhelming, remember: The minimum requirement for the thesis essay is 20 pages. You've got this. * The thesis essay is sometimes called a craft essay or a critical essay. You'll find a longer description in the Student Handbook.  You can hear Tara Ballard (Class of 2013) read her wonderful poem "What Comes" as part of its publication this month in Dialogist. Tara also recently took third prize in the Nâzim Hikmet poetry competition. What's especially impressive is that it was one of 337 poems submitted by poets from around the world. Her poem was published in hasret/longing, the journal of the 11th Annual Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Festival, held in North Carolina in March. The festival is an "annual celebration of poetry bringing together poets, scholars, and poetry fans in the humanistic spirit of the internationally renowned poet Nâzım Hikmet Ran."
We're always happy to see Tara and her husband, Chaun Ballard (Poetry, Class of 2017) when they visit the summer residency, now that they live in Anchorage after teaching for several years in the Middle East and West Africa.  You've finally finished that poem/essay/story, and now comes the really hard part: Publishing it. The good news is that approximately 10 trillion journals, magazines, anthologies, and webzines are seeking new creative work. The bad news is that finding the right one can be tough. Who's likely to publish your kind of writing? Is there a submission fee? Does the journal allow simultaneous submissions? Should you submit by email, snail mail, or online?
Here are some helpful resources dedicated to gathering the details and narrowing the possibilities:
Now you have no excuses. Go forth and publish.  Lisa Sellge (you may know her as Lisa Pachuta) recently published a craft essay in the well-known creative nonfiction publication Brevity. "You Know That Book I'm Writing? You're In It" describes a dilemma that most memoirists face, which is how to explain to family, friends, and others that they're part of your story. Lisa's essay sparked a lively discussion in the comments. This piece was only her latest publication this year. She also published a lovely lyric essay in Atticus Review titled "Brigette's Love, Tipping." And for the second consecutive year, she appears in the anthology Beach Reads, with an essay titled "Craigslist Capers." The anthology is published by The Third Streets Writer, and the theme of the 2019 collection is "Paradise." Lisa is in her final year of the program's creative nonfiction track. She's already seeking an agent or publisher for her completed memoir, The Seamstress, and is currently wrassling her thesis essay into shape. Go, Lisa! PSA: Too shy to publicize your successes? Let us do the bragging for you! We're eager to announce publication news—well, any kind of good news, really—from current and past writers in the Low-Residency MFA. You can drop us a note here, email it to Head Honcho David Stevenson, or pass it on to Loki, your all-powerful webmaster.
 We're thrilled for Raquel Vasquez Gilliland (Poetry MFA, '17), who recently revealed the cover of her forthcoming YA novel, Sia Martinez and the Moonlit Beginning of Everything. The publication date is Aug. 4, 2020, from Simon Pulse (Simon and Schuster), but early readers are delivering rapturous reviews at GoodReads. The book is described as an "astonishing, genre-bending novel about a Mexican American teen who discovers profound connections between immigration, folklore, and alien life." Or, as one of her readers says, "Vasquez Gilliland's beautiful, poetic, heartbreaking voice builds the desert world of Arizona into a wonderland of in-between spaces and histories within histories." You can pre-order her novel from Amazon, BAM! (Books-A-Million), and Indiebound.
We've had a facelift! Our old layout was, well, old, and needed some help in the areas of mobile compatibility and organization. Everything from the previous site is still here; things just look different now. If you have questions or comments, feel free to visit the "About Us" page and fill out the contact form!
In the meantime, please look forward to more activity and new posts. The 2019 residency is about to begin, and of course there's still half the year left for writing adventures! Tons of Alaska writers will attend the annual AWP conference in Portland from March 27-31, and a good number of them will be reading on Thursday at Broadway Books. Details here, courtesy of poetry mentor Erin Coughlin Hollowell:  Also, in case you haven't emerged from your hibernation den to hear about this, don't forget to attend the CWLA reception at 7 p.m. on Saturday night at Kimpton Riverplace Hotel. Email the director for more details.
 Throughout his MFA studies, nonfiction writer Matt Komatsu worked on an essay about the death of his grandmother in the 2011 Japanese tsunami. With support from the Pulitzer Center, he finished the story about his return to Japan shortly after the disaster. His piece, "After the Tsunami," was published this month by Longreads, which publishes personal essays, investigative journalism, and other longform work from the literary nonfiction world.
Matt also recently interviewed novelist Tim O'Brien for the New York Times magazine on O'Brien's decision to write for the acclaimed television series "This is Us." O'Brien tells Matt, "Most films focus on the suffering of the individual soldier, not how it affects others. When I go silent at the dinner table with my own kids, they know what’s going on inside me. Their dad has been writing about Vietnam for 50 years." We'll let you know when Matt publishes his first piece in The New Yorker.  Jennifer Tarnacki photograph Congratulations to nonfiction writer Jennifer Tarnacki, whose application essay was recently published by Zoomorphic. Jennifer's essay, "Looking into the Eyes of a Grizzly," describes how the experience of watching bears inhabit their world at Hallo Bay in Katmai National Park changed how she dreamed, thought about, and responded to the presence of bears in Alaska. "Their power, their vigor, seemed to emanate from them, larger than the confines of their form," she writes. "I felt a strangely fierce and dizzying love of this power. It felt important--a metaphor for wildness."
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