It is the point in the semester when most of us start to crack. The air is finally warm. The wind is nothing but wild. I can tell when I begin to crack by simply waking up and not knowing what day or time it is. Even though (I realize later, after I sip my […]

These kids, they surprise me. I know that kids are surprising. Unexpected things come out of kids’ mouths, I know. I live with my four-year-old niece. Yesterday, she sang me a song about going potty less than one breath after telling me she liked that we didn’t waste food, which was during a discussion in […]

If my second year as a fiction writer in the MFA program has a theme it is this: I am often the only non-poet in the room. I’m dating a poet, I live with two poets, and I spend most of my extracurricular time hanging out at bars or readings with poets. There are a […]

I have a Billy Collins face. This is not at all to say that I resemble former U. S. poet laureate Billy Collins; what I mean is, there is an expression that I make whenever Billy Collins is brought up in conversation in my vicinity, whenever I feel compelled to respond to that situation honestly […]

Whether you are a new, weathered, or prospective graduate student in the Creative Writing Program, you musn’t forget about the abundance of internship opportunities available to you! The English Department created a formal internship program about 20 years ago, and today – thanks to the hard work of Deanna Ludwin, John Calderazzo, and others – […]

AWP 2013 is upon us, and we’ve all got big plans.  Check out what the CSU folks will be up to: FACULTY: Dan Beachy-Quick:  Friday, March 8: 2:00: Ahsahta Book Signing;  3:30: The Arcadia Project Panel w/ Jennifer Moxley, Josh Corey, Jonathan Skinner, and Brenda Ijima; The Arcadia Project: Writing the Postmodern Pastoral; Location: Room 109, […]

  Flannery O’Connor and Faulkner could do this story justice, so just pretend you’re in their hands. Our story begins in the early 60s, and I’m suddenly in college.  I’m seventeen, set loose from a small town in the Adirondacks, and a high school legendary for what it lacked and what it had in abundance. […]

A few fortunate things happened to me this semester: 1.I was given the opportunity to teach Introduction to Creative Writing (E210) here at Colorado State University. 2.I had a conversation over drinks with Audrey Wasielewski, who teaches Intermediate Sculpting in the Visual Arts Department.  At first glance, these two events are quite separate. Even if […]

I first moved to Colorado—the Front Range—in 1984. Boulder, specifically, my junior year of college at that other university, CU. A California kid who had gone East for college initially (Colgate), I was rather worn out by the place, its small size and Tri-State insularity, the lake effect weather. And so, like many Californians, I […]

Flannery O’Connor was once famously asked if writing workshops discouraged young writers, to which she is said to have replied, “Not enough of them.” The essayist Pico Iyer maintains that, “Writing can be learned, but not taught.” Beneath such skeptical pronouncements lies, it seems to me, a niggling doubt about the source of art: whether […]