 I've been writing for so many years, I started out primarily as a fiction writer, wrote a lot of short stories, wrote a few novels that didn't get published, the stories did, and then I discovered creative non-fiction sometime in the 1990s and it was still a sort of developing form at the time, at least the naming of it is creative non-fiction and figuring out all the different parts of the non-fiction world that were part of non-creative non-fiction, and I immediately jumped ship and said, this is where I belong. 20 years ago I started an online magazine, I never imagined it would last that long. It's non-fiction, essays and memoirs, 750 words or fewer, but it's a it's a challenge writers have taken up and that's why we're still here. We publish writers from Scotland, Ireland, a number of writers from India, the East. It's all English speaking writers or Americans living abroad, some of them very well known, some of them emerging in their career, some of them publishing for the first time, but it's grown from sort of a small little project I did at home to a magazine that gets 10,000 readers a year. Fairfield MFA is a strong program, it's a program that's very diverse in many different ways, including the life experience and age of the participants, but it's a program that represents America very well and likewise the issues in America very well. So the students here are writing about all these very pressing issues in our culture. Andrews Island is beautiful, it's a lovely space on the water, it's stunning the buildings that we're teaching in and staying in and eating in beautiful stone buildings. The residency itself is just so full of energy and vibrancy, the students clearly are happy to be here, excited to be here and I feel the momentum growing as the week goes on. Students in the creative writing program obviously are hoping to become better writers and the goal of writers everywhere is readers, eyeballs. I have something to say, I want people to hear it. There's strategies that work better, there's strategies that we know and strategies we're learning that every story's a little different. So to read the incoming submissions for a magazine like Brevity, you learn a lot about what works and what doesn't. You also learn about the world of editing and publishing. Students might want to go on to work in editing and publishing, but even if they don't, if they spend their life as a writer, sending their work out to magazines to book presses. It's useful to understand how that world works and what the editors are thinking when they open the envelope, although nowadays they're opening an email about an envelope.