Literary Life Tests

Thoughts and Musings

Goddard MFA Faculty member Victoria Nelson talks about literary life tests: the ones you face out there in the world after you graduate. “Pay attention to the outside cues…”

The Right Story: Rewriting My Life

Thoughts and Musings

In our February residency I’m going to ask my students of memoir to imagine their lives as if they had made all the right choices and gotten everything they’d fiercely wanted and failed to get. In this moment, a few breaths before the new year of 2016, I try imagining...

In the Middle of Things

Thoughts and Musings

About two thousand years ago the Roman poet Horace was writing a long critical paper in verse that he titled the Ars Poetica. One of the questions he asked in the Ars Poetica was: What’s the best place to start a story? The obvious place, of course, is the beginning...

Love by Drowning

Thoughts and Musings

“BETTER THAN GONE GIRL” proclaimed the headline on the Huffington Post story about the new novel by my longtime friend, writer C. E. “Buzz” Poverman, and I had to agree. I’d read and blurbed Love by Drowning in galleys and was blown away...

Commencement Address

Thoughts and Musings

Welcome graduates and families and friends, welcome students, welcome everybody to the Goddard MFA in Creative Writing graduation ceremony here at Port Townsend. And congratulations, graduates, for successfully completing a rigorous and life-changing two years of...