#**mfac

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We went to a post-ceremony Ghostbusters showing, and in the scene where Erin finally embraces the name and exclaims, “We’re the Ghostbusters!” a tiny little girl in the theater shouted “WE’RE THE GHOSTBUSTERS!” and I was So Happy. Like Damn. Good Stuff. My heart is full of love.

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Getting to see Gene Yang read from New Superman #1 sounds like a great evening… and it was!

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this is probably not the greatest time to ask you this, considering the news, so please feel free to respond whenever, or even not at all! I completely understand either way! I'm going to a masters of fine arts in creative writing program in the fall, & was just curious what your experience was like? what did you expect / not expect / are there people of all ages / what the workload is like, whether or not it was what you thought it would be / if the other writers advice is helpful? thank yo

(Yikes, what news!? The SK breakup, or did something MORE TERRIBLE happen?)

I’m still in my MFA program – one more year, ack! Too soon! – and I’m writing on my critical thesis this semester for defense in January. (Also ack.)

For the most part, it’s been a wonderful and nurturing experience, easily the best life-decision I’ve made since becoming an adult. I wish that my undergrad writing experience had been even a quarter of my experience at Hamline MFAC.

What did I expect? I expected it to be much harsher than it has been, due to my undergrad experience. I expected to do a lot of work, which I do. I expected to be one of the worst writers, which I’m not.

I did not expect to grow as a person, but I think – tentatively – that I have, a lot? I did not expect for the workshops to be valuable feedback. I didn’t expect to focus more on craft than content, but I’m really, really glad that we do, and I really wish that my undergrad program had even EVER TOUCHED ON craft rather than just yelling at everyone for their content. I also didn’t expect to be pushed to write outside of my original plans, but again, I’m glad that I was, because I won a scholarship on a project that I otherwise would have anxiety-avoided for years, and that scholarship includes first rights to a publisher that I really respect and love, so. That was cool.

There are people of all ages! The youngest that we have is 22 and the oldest is in her upper ‘60s, although the last student in their upper ‘60s dropped out because the workload was too intense. I’m one of the younger-average students in my particular program, I think, but I am SO BAD at judging age. So bad. There was one student who I was positive was my age or younger… until their graduation program last semester listed their undergrad degree as 1982. Which is five years before I was even born. Whoops.

The workload is a lot, but it also depends on who your advisor is and what the program’s goals are and what your project is like. I do both fiction and nonfiction, so when I’m doing nonfiction, there’s a lot of really intense research and stuff that adds to the reading time and work time that my fiction doesn’t necessarily have. My program also has 120 required books outside of whatever your advisor each semester gives you for the monthly essay(s) and outside of the nonfiction research texts, so. There’s a lot of reading and a pretty fair amount of writing. However, I don’t have any finished manuscripts from within the last year.

Overall, it is much better than what I thought it would be, and I’m grateful. There have been some hiccups, but the vast majority of the faculty and administration have been wonderful. For the most part, also, I’ve found the other writers’ feedback helpful, but particularly the advisors. I picked Hamline MFAC specifically for the professors on staff, because they’re writers I really deeply respect and enjoy, so. There’s that.

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I hope this isn't asking you to explain too much, but what's the process for sending a book in to Harper Collins? I've been thinking about doing it myself, so is there anything I (or other people doing the same) should know?

Well, they don’t normally accept submissions that aren’t through an agent. I got a scholarship award from this imprint in January, and part of the award is first-rights to the submission of my manuscript. (That means they can pass on it, if they don’t like it or want it right now, and then I’d have to go about querying and getting an agent the traditional way to resubmit elsewhere! …Cross your fingers for me.)

If you’re querying agents: READ THEIR WEBSITE THOROUGHLY. Don’t send them things that they don’t want, and FOLLOW THEIR INDIVIDUAL INSTRUCTIONS. They get thousands of submissions, and you don’t want yours discounted because you sent in a few pages too many or too few or addressed your salutation to the wrong agent at the right agency. Just be conscientious! The same goes for editors, if you find a reputable editor who takes submissions directly. If they don’t want dystopian young adult, don’t send them one. If they only take picture books, don’t send them a novel.

However, the publishing world is changing and opening up a lot – I know other divisions of HC, Lerner/Carolrhoda, and (I think) Little Brown have done cold-submission contests a few times in the last year. Lauren Oliver also accepts open submissions at Paper Lantern Lit for packaged publishing, which means that you’d write a story to fit the outline that you’re given by the company.

Figment (formerly Inkpop) is also affiliated with… someone. I think it’s S&S, but I can’t find anything about it on their site anymore, so it may not be – but the site is a lot like Wattpad minus the fanfiction sections. Wattpad, too, obviously is eyed by publishers and agents these days, if you want to go that route. The cut-and-dried query>agent>submissions>advance>royalties thing isn’t the only path anymore.

If you’re looking for any of the really major US publishers, though, I would recommend querying an agent. That’s something I’ll probably end up doing anyway, especially because I’m not a businessperson and I’m not a lawyer or accountant, and those aspects of the writing business aren’t what interest me – the writing itself is. :)

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Have you ever participated in NaNoWriMo? Any thoughts on it?

I’ve done NaNo a few times!  I’m not this year because of school, but I’ll probably end up writing 50k+ in November anyway.  I don’t really have specific feelings one way or another either pro- or anti-NaNo.  It works well as a model for some people and not for others.

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hiiii, this is super weird and I hope I'm not a bother, but I'm currently a senior in college, and thinking about applying to grad school while also applying to jobs over winter break. I'm considering applying to MFA programs, so I was wondering how you like the experience, if you think it's an exuberant amount of work, and what it's like / what you really /do/? I feel like I don't know nearly enough about what goes on in grad school.

It’s not weird or a bother at all!

The MFA program that I’m in is different from most, but it is also the one that I would most highly recommend if your primary interest is writing for children (picture books through YA, fiction/nonfiction/poetry inclusive, or graphic novels).  The biggest difference is actually that focus – most MFA programs frown on youth literature, as far as I’ve ever heard – and the secondary difference is that it’s a low-residency program.  Every six months, I spend 10 days on-campus getting lectures for the semester… like 12 hours/day for ten straight days, which is exhausting and intense.  (But wonderful!)

The rest of the six months, in my program, each student works one-on-one with their semester adviser.  In the first and second semesters, the workload per semester is:

- At least one major creative work - 4 critical craft essays- 40+ critical craft book annotations- any other work assigned by the adviser, which seems to vary A LOT by the professor and the student.

Third semester is devoted to the Critical Master’s Thesis, and fourth semester is devoted to the Creative Master’s Thesis, which is another difference between my program and most MFAs, which only require a Creative thesis.  So it’s a lot of work!

With the low-residency model, homework should equal out to roughly 25 hours/week, but with reading, it usually ends up being more than that.  One of the two creative pieces that I’m doing this semester is a pretty serious nonfiction piece, too, so with research time, there have been weeks that I put in ~95 hours (but also weeks where I was mostly waiting for materials to come in and didn’t have to work as much). 

There ARE two people in my cohort (who are, kind of hilariously, the only men in my cohort) who are actually just “visiting students” from the regular MFA program on campus, and they’ve both said that they’re stunned by how much more work our program is than the on-campus adult MFA.  I can’t really confirm that, though, or speak to how much work other on-campus MFA programs are.

I really enjoy the experience so far, though.  I don’t know that I feel like I’m improving as a writer, which is frustrating, but it IS nice to have deadlines and someone responding to my work who is a) a published writer in the field I want to enter and b) neither my parent nor a friend/fellow fangirl.  It’s also sort of stressful to me that we can’t really pick or control who our advisers are and there are a finite number of semesters, but I can deal with it.  (She says now, future!V laughing in the distance.)

I’m constantly terrified that I’m going to flunk out, and I feel like everything I write sucks bozons, but the 10 days that I spent on campus with the rest of the program in July were pretty much my favorite days ever, so I think choosing this particular program was the best decision that I’ve made for my life in a long time… if not ever.