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Tuesday we had our “PictureThis” event where creative writing students from both poetry and fiction classes  Program Covercame together to read their work for an audience of about eighty people–fellow students, family members, teachers, and friends. They read in response to photographs (most taken by the students themselves) and in response to “obstructions” given them [...]

We kicked off a unit on microfiction in my creative writing class the other day. This segment of the course will be focused heavily on the idea of revision–sometimes arbitrary, always gut-wrenching. The process we’re following is one I’ve been developing with a colleague of mine based on the film The Five Obstructions. The very [...]

My fiction writing students and I often argue around the matter of what makes for a story. The debate usually begins when I encounter either one of two stances on the issue: 1) sometimes nothing happens in a story, there is no particular conflict, and the characters never change, or 2) everyday life is boring, [...]