This is it. One more day and I’ll have my MFA in hand and a noticeable amount of time now available to write things of my choosing. I don’t want that to sound like I’m complaining about the work I did in the MFA—many of my published short pieces came directly from assignments. But I do have drafts of four different novels that I haven’t had time to go back to, so this summer will include a fair amount of editing and revising.
But I’m just about done. Tonight I’ll read a portion of my thesis to what’ll probably be a medium-sized group of people, and then commencement is tomorrow. I even get one of those fancy hoods. Ooooh. 🙂
It’s crazy to think about what’s happened since I enrolled in the program. The plan was always to do one class a semester, but then covid hit and lockdown plus a two-year-old makes all plans go out the window. When I started, my son was one. He turned seven last month. When I started, I was working at a finance job I’d been at for over a decade. Now, three jobs later, I’m interviewing for teaching positions. When I started, Trump was president. Now… oh. Shit.
My first published piece resulted from one of my classes making me write creative non-fiction. Several fiction publications followed, and just a few days ago I heard that a poem—yes, a poem—of mine was accepted into a magazine. I didn’t write it as part of MFA coursework, but I did so while surrounded by MFA people.
I doubt I’ll divorce myself entirely from the program. Reading for Water-Stone will hopefully be a thing this winter, and the MFAC (children’s lit MFA) program has lecture passes that I’ve already made use of. Not to mention the people.
There aren’t many places where you can find people who can give good, quality feedback on your writing. I was lucky enough to find some in my wife and best friend, but they are just two people, and, as I learned after writing a horror story, they can’t be good readers for everything. But when you leave with your MFA, you also leave with a community.
I’m hoping life both will and won’t change. I hope it will so I can get those books finished. 🙂 I hope it won’t in that I might stop by Hamline’s Creative Writing house and chat with Meghan or I could attend events at which alums and students are reading. However it works out, the MFA was a wonderful experience and has transformed me from a person who sometimes writes into a writer.
Twenty-two years ago I moved from Washington State to St. Paul, Minnesota, starting my adult life at the small liberal arts school, Hamline University. My expectation was that I would obtain an academic education (at the time I thought I was going to be a journalist) and that Hamline was the next step in my journey.
While I did get that academic education, Hamline also provided me with community. The culture was welcoming to all and the faculty and students were phenomenal, especially putting up with my ignorant, youthful bullshit. After graduation I lived with classmates, attended their weddings and baby showers, and they attended mine. I stayed in Minnesota because of that community.
Imagine my heartbreak when I heard that that very community was under attack. Hamline’s Creative Writing MFA program, the oldest and largest in the state, as well as its literary Journal Water-Stone Review, have been told by administration they will be sunset, and that no new students will be admitted. Given the age of the program and its integration in the literary community, both in Minnesota and beyond, this abrupt decision seems unfathomable.
If you’re unfamiliar with what sunsetting a program looks like, it means that all enrolled students will finish their degree, but as more and more graduate, the variety of course offerings will diminish as will their community of colleagues, with no new students joining the ranks to collaborate and learn with each other.
Water-Stone Review won’t even have the luxury of a slow death spiral. Its budget has been cut, and unless something changes, will become the next literary magazine to die. As one of the oldest print magazines still in production, Water-Stone Review is a very well recognized and respected magazine in the literary community, receiving Pushcart Special Mentions, and appearing in Best American Essays, Best American Short Stories, Best American Poetry, and Best Nonrequired Reading. There are even undergrads who come to Hamline because of Water-Stone and the promise of being a part of its production.
I understand that literary magazines and academics programs do fail from time to time. If this was a normal situation treated fairly and transparently, then there wouldn’t be an issue here beyond dismay. But there are some serious underhanded shenanigans going on by the interim administration, who for some reason seem to have it out for the program.
The normal process for sunsetting a program is to have the faculty vote on it, and then if that’s approved, it’ll go to the board for a final decision. Instead, the administration put out an announcement saying the sunsetting was going to the board, before the faculty voted. This obviously can’t happen, but what it does is sends a message to the faculty that it’s a done deal. Those who didn’t have an opinion on the matter might be swayed by this.
Do I think the MFA will go away? Probably not. The faculty seem to be supportive of the program and will hopefully not vote for its sunset. Water-Stone Review is another matter. The literary magazine has existed on its budget, a mere $26,000 when compared with Hamline’s profit of over seven million a few years ago (I don’t have access to the most recent tax returns) and that it pays its interim president over half a million. Obviously a very fiscally focused decision.
What’s particularly galling is that this underhanded effort to destroy the program and magazine is being spearheaded by interim administrators. Interim President Kathleen Murray and Interim Provost Andy Rundquist are both on their way out, permanent positions having been hired and starting in the fall. Yet these two have taken it upon themselves to target the program before they leave.
One of my classmates actually reached out to Interim Provost Rundquist to try and get clarification and understand his position. He was dismissive and unprofessional, and when she, a grant writer, offered to get funding to save the lit mag, he wouldn’t even acknowledge the idea. Like, refused to respond and address her.
So what is the MFA program doing about this? Obviously they’re fighting it with everything they have. I’ve read some communications that aren’t open to the public, and they’re giving it their all. The only problem is there’s only so much they can do. Will they save the program? Probably. It’s within their power to appeal to faculty for that vote. What is not within their power is budget decisions. The cutting funding for Water-Stone can happen regardless of the vote.
And it’s not like the MFA is asking for a lot. They’re not demanding a larger budget (which has been drastically cut since the interims have taken charge) or for any handouts. All they want is a delay in the decision. With permanent administrators starting in the fall, it is only right that they, administrators invested in Hamline’s future and not already walking out the door, weigh in on what happens to the program. If the new administration agrees it should be sunset despite increasing enrollment, and follows the proper steps with which to recommend and enact a sunset, then the MFA faculty will work with that. They only want a fair shake.
A third thing, which may not seem as important to someone invested in the arts but not specifically to Hamline’s program, is the termination of Meghan Maloney-Vinz. She is Hamline’s Creative Writing Programs Coordinator, meaning the MFA, BFA, and MFA in Children’s Literature, the latter two not currently at risk of sunsetting. She is also the Executive Editor of Water-Stone Review. She’s a graduate of the MFA program and has been with Hamline for years. Her institutional knowledge helps maintain the three programs, and her loss would hobble the MFA as it tries to prove its efficacy and worth to the new administration. And, knowing and working with her for the past six years, she’s a wonderful person.
Hopefully, even with this brief overview, you’re somewhere between annoyed and appalled at the actions of the interim administration. You may not have the same investment as I do, may not have your heart sink as you see someone trying to rip this community apart, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do.
Sign this petition at Chage.org to show your support. If you have a personal connection, share that. The decisions haven’t been finalized yet. The board hasn’t met. If they see the community rallying around the program, they might choose to ignore the interim administration’s recommendation. And they might instruct the administration to leave Water-Stone and Meghan alone. But only if they know how important they all are. And they are important.
If you want to know more, here are some articles and a news report about what’s going on. And if you want to talk about or share a story here, by all means do so. I’ll be in LA in two weeks at AWP talking with many others in the professional writing and educational community, and hearing your and their stories will only help the MFA’s cause.
I’m a couple of weeks late on this, and for that I’ll, without reserve, throw my kids under the bus. Just before and just after New Years I went to the emergency room twice (one a piece), and there’s just been a surplus of vomit in the house. Totally their fault. Especially since my wife and I got incredibly sick after that. And then the grandparents. Norovirus is nasty. Also, an unconventional way to kick start a New Years weight loss goal.
2024 was a big year, more on the life side than the writing side, but there’s always going to be a balance there. This biggest change was I have a new baby. She’s nine months old now, and since I’m stay-at-home-dadding, those nine months have seemed very long. Kara is now crawling (she fully figured it out when her brother was opening presents on Christmas Eve and she wanted them), and I can tell she’s itching to walk.
We also found out in March that two of my brother’s wives were also having babies in 2024. Knowing that, I tried really hard to talk a third brother into having a baby this year. He literally ran away from the conversation 🙂
I also started my MFA thesis this fall. I picked a project I’ve been thinking about for at least five years, the first of an eight book fantasy mystery series following a dark elf private detective. Feedback from my advisor had been great so far, and I’m about to start draft two as thesis wraps up this spring before graduation.
My most exciting writing news of 2024 came right after Election Day (which was a very timely piece of good news). I’ll give a brief bit of backstory first. Two years ago at AWP, I saw a literary magazine called F(r)iction. They fully illustrate their entire magazine, and beautifully so. I knew immediately that if I could be published in any magazine, F(r)iction would be it.
So I sent off a story to them immediately. I didn’t realize at the time that they had themed submissions, and so after nine months I got a rejection, saying it wasn’t a fit for their issue, but to please submit again. So when I saw one of their upcoming themes was Oceans, I had just the story for that (I stole a character from one of my novel ideas and tweaked their story a bit).
I submitted it on Nov 4, and on Nov 7 one of their editors reached out and said he loved it, and wanted to work with me to present to his higher-ups for consideration! Hot damn, was I excited. Then I did edits. And more edits. And was sent to the next level up. And then I did more edits. Finally, the week before Christmas, the story was pitched to the editor in chief and they said yes. I’m going to be in one of F(r)iction’s 2025 issues! Validation!
And not at the same level of excitement, but still exciting, another of my shorts was sent up the line in a different magazine, one where they do full audio productions of the pieces. So if that bears fruit, that’ll be amazing as well.
Sort of bookending the 2024/2025 holiday season, I worked with Water~Stone Review and the Scholastic Writing Award. For Water~Stone I helped screen fiction submissions for the upcoming issue. For the Scholastic Writing Award I was one of the regional judges for the high schoolers who entered their writing. Both had pieces that surprised me (pleasantly and otherwise), and offered good insights into the minds of other writers and their worlds.
Looking forward to 2025, a huge milestone will be finally completing my MFA. I started before covid, and only going one class per semester, it’s certainly taken some time. But when I finish, I’ll be ready with tools and time to really dive into this goal of writing as a career. Kara will be in day care starting August, so I’ll be able to have actual workdays where I can write uninterrupted. With no homework and no kids, I’m going to be more productive than I’ve ever been.
I’ll be going to AWP again in 2025. This year it’s in LA. I’ve never been to LA, and only last year went to California for the first time when my wife had a business trip in San Diego. I’m hoping with momentum from F(r)iction, as well as the other pubs I’ve had in the last couple of years, I’ll be able to make some good connections and find some doors to open.
TLDR: 2024: Had a baby. Started thesis. F(r)iction said yes. 2025: Graduation. AWP. Full-time writing.
Hope you all had a better (healthier) New Years than I did, and stay tuned for more news, books reviews, and random thoughts.
Hello everyone and welcome back. A while ago I briefly mentioned a brainstorming strategy I used when coming up with story ideas and promised to go more in depth later on. Well here that is. But that’s not all! I promised one brainstorming method, but today I’ll give you three! (For the record, I hate exclamation marks. I don’t use them lightly. I believe in the current draft of my novel there are exactly two.)
The first one I’ll go over is historically my favorite and one I still use. It requires a copy of the board game Dixit. I will admit I may be spoiled in its creative capacity due to having all the expansions, but when I first used it I only had the base game and that worked just fine.
If you don’t know the game, it’s basically Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity, except the cards are all illustrations and the age level restrictions are entirely what you make them. We first played with our son with he was three and while his answers were simpler, they worked just fine. But how to brainstorm with them?
I’m going to give two different examples of when I used them and how I approached it. The first example was to create a short story. I didn’t go into knowing the length or the genre, I just wanted to spark something creative in me that was unexpected. So I shuffled up the cards and dealt myself five. I’ve found that dealing more will present too many options and it’ll be hard to focus.
I threw a couple back that were obviously outliers and drew replacements. After a couple rounds of discards I had a set of cards that I knew could work together. As you can see, there are a couple themes that the cards share, with each having their own unique message and imagery.
I’ll use some generalities to explain the story since I don’t want to give it away (it’s currently submitted to a super cool magazine and it’s the piece I used in my MFA application). I knew there was going to be a heavy nature theme, and there would be some form of isolation. From that nature theme, I wanted both plants and animals to feature strongly.
The card that stuck out initially to me as “woah, that could be fun” was the porcupine. The idea of a porcupine shooting its quills as arrows was super fun. But porcupines can’t actually do that. Unless they’re aliens. So science fiction. But if sci-fi, why would they use their quills as opposed to tech? That’s where the card blended with the nature oasis in the city.
So now I have a setting, a species, and a society. Now I need a story. If the focus of the story is within this unique setting, I needed to lean into that setting, so I combined the scary forest and the lonely barbed tail cat. A scary forest is a good reason to need to shoot quill arrows, and a barbed tail cat makes for a scary denizen. But a nature vs nature story? Where’s the fun in that?
Enter the bad guy. The bad guy doesn’t appear on these cards (neither does the POV protagonist), and I’m not going to give away his role or how that impacts the story, but I will say the last card definitely plays a role in all the other cards.
So with only five cards I was able to create a story I doubt I would have thought up on my own. Once, fingers crossed, it gets accepted by that really cool magazine, I’ll be sure to share so you can get all the details. Now for the next story where I used the cards in a different way.
The prior story I used five cards, and it was for a short story. This next one, I only used one, and it ended up being the driving force in the creation of the novel I’m working on. For this one I was attempting to do the same brainstorming tactic, and there was one card that didn’t fit with the other four. When I went to discard it though I paused, taken in by the image.
To be fair, being captured by an image can happen anywhere at anytime. But with the Dixit method, you’re intentionally inundating yourself in creative imagery, so in that way you’re increasing the odds. This one card, a man cycling across a wire/string/thingamajig overtop a city made me think, “why”? What year is this city in where the man is riding a penny farthing where there would also be a wire strung up?
At the same time I was also super into Hamilton (and let’s be honest, kind of still am), having listened to it at my brother’s bachelor party (yes, we’re that cool), and the relationship dynamics of Hamilton and Burr as well as Hamilton and the Schuyler sisters were on my mind. I’m going to play this one really close to my chest, but between finding an answer for what the city was and determining characters and motivation I had a full outline drawn up the very next day.
Let’s move away from Dixit now and onto one that I had high hopes for and which is still fun, but not quite as good for story generation, as least not for me anyway. What it is good for is writing warmups. Sometimes it’s hard to find prompts online, especially if you’re in writing groups with varying interests. Enter Story Cubes.
Each Story Cube die has six different images, and each set comes with nine dice. As you can imagine, that leads to a ton of varied combinations of images that can be interpreted many different ways. The result is fun warmups where each person utilizes what sticks out to them the most and you learn different ways to approach similar ideas.
Metaphor Dice are slightly different, and I only just acquired them at AWP this past year. It’s less for creating stories or even prompts, but more to make fun character decisions or observations. It’s especially good at creating unique character background or personality traits. How it works is you roll the dice and follow them red/white/blue. I just now rolled a set and got passion/handed-down/brand new toy. So I’d say “passion is a handed-down brand new toy, that is to say her touch traced the contours of her ex’s chest on his own”. Off the cuff not amazing, but you get the drift.
From here the question, as with the second Dixit example, is “why?” Why does this character feel that way about passion? Is it with a particular partner? Is it because of some past experience? How does this influence their everyday life? I now have a brand new angle to use for my character.
But what if my story doesn’t dictate a romance? What if I know my character is all about, say, honor? Or revenge? Or creativity? If you have a trait you know is essential, but that you’d like to explore, just set that as your red die concept. Roll the others, see what comes out of it. It can turn the superficial character concept in your head into a complex individual with compelling motivations.
The last thing I’ll write about only briefly and will make a post dedicated exclusively for it is ChatBotGPT. I want to go on record and say I DO NOT use AI generated writing, but instead I use it for brainstorming, something it is very good at. I’ve been using it a lot for the last few months, trying it out and seeing what the big fuss was. Sometimes it tries to write for me, but mostly it just answers questions or provides lists. It is not a good writer. But it’s an excellent researcher. But more on that later.
Brainstorming is sometimes a challenging and daunting task, whether it’s new stories or expanding on existing ideas. Hopefully by using some of these tactics you can have an easier and more fun go of it.
Back at AWP, which seems forever ago now, I was going through the bookfair and came upon F(r)iction, a lit mag that caught my interest like none others all weekend. If they select your story, they will find an illustrator to fully illustrate your story. The magazine looks like a graphic novel. It’s amazing. Unfortunately the exciting news isn’t that I’ve been accepted there (though my story has been submitted).
F(r)iction also has an online contest they do twice a year called Dually Noted where they have a singular prompt that people write on each week and each week they publish a winner. The stories have to be less than 500 words. The prompt this round is “god sends out a resignation letter”. I don’t have a ton of experience writing flash, but I thought “why not?” and wrote a story. And they picked it!
A Divine Appointment is about Heavenly HR worker Winston and a particularly bad day at HR HQ. It’s a quick read, so I’ll let you see what happens.
Now for other updates.
This week I had my last class this semester for my MFA. The class was all about POV. You all know the basics of what first, second, and third are, and perhaps you’ve heard of collective and omniscient and objective. It’s all that and more. Infinite possibilities as my professor Sheila O’Conner says.
The end of class is nice in that I’ll get some more free time to write, both on projects and on this blog, but is sad for a couple of reasons. One, no more weekly meeting with fun classmates. Two, Sheila is retiring.
I had her for Novel Class as well as POV, and she’s just super smart and insightful and it’s going to be perpetually drearier on campus without her.
With class done, I’ve decided this summer to focus on short fictions. To get some publications under my belt. I’ve only submitted off and on the last couple years as I’ve written things for class or been inspired, and a 2/20 acceptance rate isn’t the worst. But there are grants and fellowships out there that care about publications, so I’ll be working on that.
On Sunday I submitted a fantasy origin story of sorts for a character I’m planning an eight-book arc for. Today I started outlining a sci-fi romance with a hint of espionage. Next on the docket after that will be re-tooling a literary fiction short I wrote a few years back now that I’ve got some more tools in my belt. One every other week might be too optimistic, but any goal is better than no goal.
Before I sign off, if there are any writing subjects, or not writing for that matter, that you’d like me to talk about, feel free to let me know. The level of expertise may vary, but I’ll try to engage in whatever way I can.
Eric Taveren 