FRONTMATTER

Two of our own Professors for our First Reading Of 2018

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 our Publishing and Fieldwork program, editor of Hunger Mountain, the leader of our cohorts, a fellowship director, a devoted mother, and a kindred spirit.…

What We Talk About When We Talk About Genre-Mashing Buddy-Cop Films

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 is (91% on Rotten Tomatoes!) can be divided into acts, tropes, and story elements. (Alexandra Sokoloff talks about this, clearly and concisely.) Analyzing Hot…

Welcome Back, College

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 a sense of how we experienced this lovely break, your humble chronicler asked fellow students of VCFA's Writing and Publishing program exactly what they did, what they read, and what they…

Porochista Khakpour and Alexander Chee Star at our Last Reading of the Year

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 Catapult. In the 4,000-word essay, she dissects what it means to be pigeonholed as an Iranian-American writer while operating in the American…

Our Last Reading Puts Us—Yes, Us!—Front And Center

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 MFA in Writing and Publishing program put on a reading of our own, where we shared the things we wrote during the semester. The funny thing is, separated by different classes and workshops, we didn't even…

Vermont Poet Peter Money, Live And In Concert

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 Square, for example, Money performs his poetry against an eclectic set of instruments. Tupelo Press describes the album as a “traveler’s spoken journal opera." Money worked…

VCFA Will Review Your Work For Free!

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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 like practice,” said Miciah Bay Gault, the Director of the MFA in Writing & Publishing program at VCFA. “It’s low-stakes. Writers who are…

Breaking Genre Borders with Julianna Baggot

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 up: in writing, "no one cares if you don't." Sit down, write, go to bed, wake up, do it again. For Baggot, it's worked—25 times over.  In this interview with MFA candidate Breanne…

Our Fourth Reading: Grounded In Place With Sean Prentiss, Jessica Hendry-Nelson

The best art is grounded somewhere. We are all tied to memories of where we grow up, where we settle down, where we spend time in between. At our fourth reading, faculty members Sean Prentiss and Jessica Hendry-Nelson both talked about the value of place and how they ground their work in very precise settings from rural Pennsylvania to northern Vermont. First up: Prentiss, Faculty in nonfiction, an environmental writer, and the author of Finding Abbey: A Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden…

VCFA Alumnus Tyler Friend Discusses Launching "Francis House," A Literary Journal

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Poet and photographer Tyler Friend is a self-described "apricot/human hybrid," a characteristically pronoun-averse writer, and someone who's eager to take on new poetic forms. Friend's 2014 chapbook, ampersonate was published by Choose The Sword Press (motto: "read a fuckin' book"), which they describe as a "quasi-autobiography...a collection of insecurities...a topography of my heart." After graduating from the MFA in Writing & Publishing program in spring of 2017, Friend moved back to…