Our second reading featured author James Scott and faculty members Julia Shipley and Jericho Parms, a triumvirate hereby known forever as “The Three Js.” First: James Scott, whose debut novel The Kept is an unyieldingly bleak tale of revenge set in the cold of western New York in the late 1800s. Featuring a mother with […]
Over the past year, the second-year students in VCFA’s MFA in Writing & Publishing program have been diligently, quietly plugging away at their thesis projects. This is their last semester to complete them. For such a close community of writers, this looming graduation date brings equal parts panic, relief, and sadness. Right now, they’ll be […]
It was a crowded evening for the first reading of 2018. Local bookstore Bear Pond Books was onsite hawking our readers’ works, and we had two wonderful faculty members sharing from their books: Miciah Bay Gault and Robin MacArthur. We in VCFA’s Writing and Publishing program know Miciah Bay Gault as the Program Director, professor in […]
It’s a new semester, and we’re kicking things off with a bang, or at the very least, a screenwriting class. In Julianna Baggott’s Stage & Screen course, we analyzed Hot Fuzz, the 2007 British action-comedy film with Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and a lot of guns and explosions. Any movie, no matter how brilliantly genre-defying it […]
Aaaaand we’re back! After our first semester of intense writing, workshops, readings, and getting to know each other, we deserved a good break. And we got one: most of us went home (to points everywhere), while some of us stayed in town, soaking up the experience of a frigid and beautiful Vermont winter. To get […]
Porochista Khakpour and Alexander Chee, two very distinguished novelists, both with two books previously published, came to Café Anna for our fifth and last reading. Khakpour, Faculty in Fiction, Novel, Memoir, and teaching a module in longform prose, went first. She read her essay “How to Write Iranian-America, or The Last Essay,” originally published in […]
It was a strangely warm night in Vermont for our last reading—a surprise, really, after a day-long blizzard that dumped a foot and a half of snow across campus. Mercifully, there was no wind chill. At Cafe Anna, we were all in high spirits. Now, it was our turn to shine. The students of the […]
Local poet and publisher Peter Money came in to our Publishing and Fieldwork class to talk about his life in literature. Quite the life, too: The Beat-influenced poet was mentored by Allen Ginsberg, and during his time in New York and San Francisco he published various zines and collaborated across genres. In his album Blue […]
It’s true! Every fall, the faculty of VCFA’s MFA in Writing & Publishing program take the time to review prospective students’ work. Five pages tops, in any genre, free of charge. For those considering an MFA, it’s a helpful glimpse into graduate level critique: a taste of an intensive, workshop-focused MFA writing program. “It’s almost […]
Julianna Baggot is “intense.” The Faculty Director of VCFA’s MFA in Writing & Publishing, she proudly wears that badge, and brings that sort of energy to our Forms class. Sharp, funny, and never one to hold back, what she does best with the cadre of young writers assembled before her is to stress the importance of showing […]