 Hello, everyone. My name is Kathy Dornbush, and I am an MFA from January 2012. My talk today is going to be directed to emerging writers who are just entering the publishing business in terms of literary journals, and finish my novel. I had three short stories that I was told by instructors here on the island, and I knew that I was going to have to try to pursue that, but I put it off. And it was a nagging thing. When am I going to start? When am I going to start? Well, I dove in at the AWP conference in Boston, and if you haven't been to an AWP conference and gone into the big exhibition hall, then you don't know necessarily what a large field this is, and you go from booth to booth and pick up journals, talk to editors, and so forth. Since that time, I have submitted 150 short story submissions. Now, in the interest of building narrative tension into my talk, I'm not going to tell you whether or not I was successful until later in the presentation. So I followed a very traditional route. I decided that with my first story, I wanted to have it in print form. So I was looking at print journals. It's called a beginner's need to have something tangible. Also, in terms of reputation, I decided that the Pushkart Prize was a good barometer. If a journal nominates for the Pushkart or has Pushkart winners, that would be a good place to submit. And for those of you who don't know about the Pushkart, it was one of those phrases that was out there. I didn't really understand it entirely. I started in the 70s by a group of writers who wanted to celebrate small presses and independent publishers. And each year, about 20 Pushkarts are awarded for fiction. There are also Pushkarts for other genre as well. And the anthology that they put together is called by the Pushkart people, the most honored literary series in America. And I believe on that little bibliography that I handed out, you'll see Clifford Garstang does an annual poll of Pushkart which you may be familiar with. And he actually shows you the journals and how many, over a rolling 10-year basis, how many have been able to have winners in Pushkart, in the Pushkart series. So for 2014, the top journals for the Pushkart are plowshares, conjunctions, Tin House, Southern Review, One Story, Paris Review, A Public Space, Three Penny Review, Kenyon Review. Now from my perspective and going through this process a little bit, I'd just like to make a few observations. One is that the literary magazine world is a closed economy. And with an economist husband, I'd say, you know, help me with this terminology a little bit. But a closed economy in that most of the readers of LitMag are writers. And then you also have this tiny, you know, a lot of the journals are based in academia and universities and colleges. And so you have a situation where literary journals exist to help people get published outside of mainstream publishing. It's a venue of sorts. But that close relationship between the product, the literary mag, the producers, the editors and the writers, and then the consumers, the readers, it's all sort of, one person could have all three roles, right? And so it leads to a very small, insular kind of community in a lot of ways. So the end result is that money's tight, payments are low, and subscriptions, contests, and institutional support become necessary to keep a lot of these journals alive. Most are run on shoestring budgets. The usual circulation is about 1,000 to 2,000 subscribers. And as those of us who have gone through the process know, usually you're paid in copies, or maybe if you're lucky they'll throw a subscription in. And that, so in other words, remember that a lot of these journals are, for those of us who are new to this, remember that a lot of these are college and university affiliated. They're using the infrastructure of the institutions to stay alive. There are exceptions to this. There are for-profit independent lit mags, and we, most of us are aware of Glimmer Train being one of them. They accept general submissions but also run annual ongoing contests. There's Tin House, Granta, and Zotro. Now there are also a number of non-profit independent presses, including One Story, McSweeney's just recently became a non-profit. The Sun Magazine, Boston Review, and Narrative Magazine, Narrative Magazine allowing, or having all free content. The for-profit and non-profit journals are the ones that have larger circulation. Usually some of them in the 10 to 60,000 range. Glimmer Train says that they have 16,000 paid subscribers. The Sun Magazine boasts 70,000 subscribers. And Narrative Magazine, which is again free and online content, is read by people all around the world. In terms of payment, there's more likely a payment from these independent presses. For example, Narrative Magazine has up to $1,000. It might even be more now for longer manuscripts. And Glimmer Train, through its various contests, distributes about $50,000 a year to writers. But through all this, I guess my point is the struggling nature of this business, and I just want to point out a few indicators of where things are in this. Connecticut Review, which was published by the Connecticut State University System beginning in the mid-60s. In terms of their situations, not good, because I went on their website. Maybe someone has more information about this. But as of the spring of 2013, they are on hiatus. And they have a beautiful website, and there's no way to submit there. In 2011, Shenandoah, which is Washington and Lee University's literary review, for its 61st anniversary issue, they went to all online content, and it's free. And that seems to be a harbinger of the faith that many of these print literary journals are facing right now. The paradox is that the internet has brought more literary magazines out, and has created more venues for writers. But there's that whole situation of how well accepted are online journals, like Mason's Road. There are some people on the internet who say that one of the reasons why Shenandoah has fewer push cart nominations now is because people might resent the fact that they've gone online. And lastly, a lot of journals are doing both, print and online. They might alternate issues, or they might be an online press that puts together an annual printed anthology. So even with the cost of publishing and the problem in reaching readers who are not themselves writers, there are more literary magazines than ever. And I've included in that bibliography that's floating around here. If you need one, there are others. What I started with was this Little Magazines, the International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses. It's in its 50th edition now, and it boasts 4,000 book and magazine publishers. And I just walked my way through it, and it's indexed according to subject and so forth. And I just spent days going through here, reading each of the entries and coming up with a list that I thought would be helpful, productive. The other thing, Poets and Writers has an online source as well, but there are 800 literary magazines in their collection. But the biggest by far is Duotrope, which many of you may know, an online database of about 5,000 markets in fiction, poetry and nonfiction. And I think it was a couple years ago, they went from free to $50 subscription. But it is by far the biggest, and it has other really valuable things to offer as well, which we'll touch on a little later. I also just included a few other guides to literary magazines. There's a lot on the internet if you start looking around and linking from piece to piece. And it's interesting that with so many markets, the journals themselves are trying to find a little niche. So there are certain specific things that they're trying to do to make themselves stand out. There is, for example, Everyday Fiction, if you might be familiar with that, an online journal that publishes a new short piece of fiction every 24 hours at midnight. There's One Story, which I have my, there's my One Story here. It's run out of Brooklyn and Portland, and every three weeks they produce One Story. I opted for the pamphlet version, but they also have a Kindle version and some other online sources for that. And then there's, for example, The First Line, a print and electronic journal that offers the First Line and writers are to build on that. So currently their first line that they're asking for submissions to is, we went as far as the car could take us, and everyone will write off of that. Now, in terms of the review process and the emerging writer, and I'd love to hear other people's view on this, as a newbie going out there, I'm wondering how the submission process really works when most places do not use blind submissions. Hats off to Mason's Road for using the blind submission process. It seems like few journals take that course. Most allow biographical information on their submission pages. Many require that the author's name appear on every page of the submission that you tack on to your, into the file. And so it just seems to me that if Joyce Carol Oates sends a story to a journal, it's going to give a lot different reaction in the editorial office than someone they've never heard of. And yet they still met most journals promise that they will consider emerging artists. Now, in terms of response times and simultaneous submissions, and there's a lot of disparity and opinion on this. If a journal says they don't take more, they don't want you to send the piece out to another journal until they're finished reviewing it. I know a lot of people who ignore that. I haven't, so it'll be interesting to hear from other people on this. But one of the things I've figured out is if a journal has a long response time, and that's one of those things that DuoTrope will provide you, that online service, if they have a long response time and they have a very low acceptance rate, also a figure that's available on DuoTrope, and they prohibit simultaneous submissions, then where does that leave you? I've had journals hold on to my stories for a year, and I don't think that's, it seems a little heartless, but that's the way it is. There are contests as vehicles to get getting published. In addition to Glimmer Train, a lot of these little journals are using contests as a way of fundraising, and oftentimes the winners will be published in a special issue. In terms of finding a good fit, that's kind of, in terms of your writing, that's sort of beyond the scope of what I'd like to talk about. Although I will say that looking at journals is important and getting a feel for them, and I have brought a number of copies here that you can leaf through after the presentation today. And if you're interested in taking any of them, please let me know, because I think that would be fine. Now in terms of making the submissions online, nearly all journals want their submissions to be done online now. There are some, like Gettysburg Review is one of the few that still wants the old fashioned paper, but most of them want you to submit online, and they require a small fee of two to three dollars, and I don't like using credit cards online in general. So what I found is that a gift card, master card visa, works just fine for paying that fee. Most of the journals are now paying Submitable, which is a company to manage their submissions. And the neat thing about Submitable is that you create a password sensitive account with all your contact information, and so let's say I'm submitting to one story, although they don't, I don't think they use, I think they might have their own submission managers, because I would call, but if a journal takes Submitable, then all I have to do is click into that, and it serves as a conduit, brings up all my information, and then I can put my cover letter and paste my story to the site and submit. Very easy. And then it offers you a list that you can go back and check. So you can see what's been sent through Submitable. It's another way of keeping track of your submissions. But what about submission trackers in general? If you've got dozens of stories out there, how do you keep them all straight? Well, DuoTrope is one of those services. One of their services is a submission tracker. You have to report your information to them, and they actually use, as soon as your piece is either rejected or accepted and you let them know, then they use that data to come up with their statistics. So they have quite a few. I don't know the exact number of subscribers that DuoTrope has, but it's pretty high. I decided not to do that. I began with DuoTrope, and then I decided to do it myself, because if you're only going to use DuoTrope for submission tracking, you don't really need them. You can do it on your own. You can use an Excel spreadsheet. Some people do that. I came up with my own, and I actually put this on your handout, the things that I was interested in. When is the reading period? What kind of journal is it? Is it a nonprofit? What kind of things do they like to publish? In this case, one story. The push cart number there refers to that index that I was telling you about. They've been very successful in getting push cart winners through one story. It gives you the word count, word limits, how you submit online, submissions manager, whether there's a fee, I like to keep that in mind. Multiple submissions very rarely will a journal take more than one piece at a time. The reporting time, simultaneous submissions, yes, the circulation. And then at the bottom, I will put down what I've submitted, the date, and then when I get word back from them, that will go at the bottom of each of these entries. And it's worked out really well because I can keep it as a big document. I keep it in one document, and then I can search it and change things and sort of maintain my focus that way. All right, what about acceptance rates? They're insanely small. Some journals, especially the economically viable commercial ones, receive tens of thousands of submissions a year. They say it's easier to get into Harvard than it is to get published in Glimmer Train. 40,000 submissions a year, and they publish 40 short stories. And again, duo trope is a good source for that kind of information. Now, what about rejection letters? Well, the good, the bad, and the indifferent. Here's an indifferent one. And I don't know why, but when you do a paper submission and ask for the self-addressed envelope and you get this back, these are among the worst. This is the Carolina Quarterly. Thank you for your interest in the Carolina Quarterly. We regret to inform you that we cannot place your work at this time. At least with the online submissions, usually the title of your piece will appear somewhere. It makes me feel a little bit better. But I just want to read this funny essay. This is How to Interpret Your Rejection Letters, and it's just a little excerpt from Seth. Is it Fried or Freed? It was published in Tin House in 2013, and he did a very comical piece on deciphering the editorial responses to a piece. And this one is How to Interpret a Response on a Lukewarm Response. The response being, thank you for your submission. We regret that we are unable to publish it, but we appreciate your interest in Name of Journal. He suggests you interpret the letters as follows. Try to imagine a giraffe on roller skates, slowly rolling toward the edge of a cliff. The giraffe has been drinking, and maybe as it's rolling toward the edge, it's even wearing one of those beer helmets with two cans of Budweiser in it and straws leading down to the giraffe's mouth. The giraffe hiccups once or twice and then plummets to a senseless, idiotic death. The reason you should try to keep this image of the giraffe in your head is because it is a perfect metaphor for what has just happened to your submission. Your writing is the giraffe. The cliff is the journal that you sent it to, and the giraffe's beer helmet is every nice thing your mother has ever said about you. So why bother submitting to literary journals when the odds are stacked against us? Well, personal satisfaction. A lot of times professionally it has to be done. You have to create that leg of the stool that Michael was talking about earlier. MFA, publications, and teaching, if you want to go into a teaching field. So how did I do on my submissions? Sadly, I didn't place anything yet. But along the way, I have received some encouraging words. And here's one of my favorite responses. This is from one story, and it's the submission that I put on that little blurb on your handout. It was for my Story Sugar Moon, which I wrote for Karen Osborn's class, in which she encouraged that I send out there into the world. It's a tough piece to place. It's historical fiction. A lot of places don't want to consider that. And it also has a strong Christian content because it is about a New England setting in the 1800s. And so it's been tough out there, but this is the response I got from the editors of One Story. Thank you for sending us Sugar Moon. Unfortunately, this particular piece was not a right fit for One Story, but we were very impressed by your writing. We hope that you will feel encouraged by this short note and send us something else. We look forward to reading more sincerely the editors. So I guess over the course of the year, a couple of years since I graduated, I am developing a skin as thick as a pineapple rind, and I will continue with this journey. I am going to renew my subscription to Duotrope and use their searchable engine to really go out there and find new places where I can submit my work. So thanks. I'm Jillian, and I graduated in July 13, and I will say I'm here because Kathy and her Duotrope idea saved my life. So I'm going to talk to you today about what happens after you graduate, and suddenly you are adrift in a mentorless sea. Now, when you first cross the causeway for your initial residency here, maybe you're a bit nervous, but it doesn't take you very long to realize that during this program while you're here, you're relatively safe. After a few days, you embrace this new family you've discovered, you float around the island from workshop to seminar to reading. The sea wall protects you. Subsequent residencies reinforce your feeling of security. Your third semester project may provoke a little anxiety, but the thesis semester is really a blur, and then it's your last residency. And you're excited and you're prepped for your presentation and you're ready for your, it was a 20 minute reading when we did it. You're eager to wear the cap and gown and the chapel ceremony and the fourth semester is so exciting. It's so exciting that you overlook the fact that you have not participated in the mentor selection process. You don't realize it yet, but as a graduate you are done. Your name did not appear on the blackboard in St. Michael's. You do not have a mentor. This really didn't hit me right away. For a week or so I was basking in the aura of accomplishment. I had earned my MFA. Then I realized I had no writing schedule to adhere to. I had no page production requirements. I had no packet deadlines. I had no reading list. I had no mentor. I felt as if I had been orphanized, and I don't know if that's even a word, but if it's not then it should be. Recently another alum Kate Gorton posted on Facebook about experiencing a writing drought. Well, I wasn't having a writing drought. I was having a writing tsunami, and it wasn't that there was nothing. It was that there was too much. My mind was overflowing and I couldn't find a sight line. I couldn't find a horizon line. I couldn't find any single thing to latch onto. And inside my head this is what I saw. All of you here on this happy little writer's island, and I was out there in the waves, waving, drifting, further and further away in a mentorless sea. Alone. No salad bar. No Crane Lake. Just me and my 281 unfinished pages that were trying to drown me. But every word that I wanted, every sentence that I needed to write, it was there, I just couldn't reach it. I was in what I called a washout. And my unfinished novel was haunting me. And taunting me, looming up in nightmares whispering, you can't do it alone. The torment took different forms. I became obsessed with craft issues. Eugenia's objective correlative was a constant companion. And if I was driving through a construction site, that was my unfinished novel, ripped open by a big yellow backhoe and flanked by orange caution cones. I began to resent it. I read sections of the novel I turned away in despair. What the heck was I supposed to do with this thing? I devoted two years of my life to it, and it wasn't finished. Well, there's a certain type of lunacy that affects many writers, and this often presents itself as absolute logic. And so in my despair, I embraced this logic, and I found my outline for the novel, and I read it twice, and then I did what any self-respecting writer would do. I made it longer. Now, this course of action in reality took me from unlikely to improbable to impossible, but in my mind, if it were longer, then of course it would be impossible to finish, and I would be completely justified in abandoning it. The relief lasted three days. And during those three days, I figured out a way to let the novel survive. That was probably during those three days was when I attended one of the local Fairfield diner dinners that Ben Fine organizes for local MFA's. Kathy was there and talking about duotrope, and I thought, well, what could I send them? I have 281 unfinished pages of the novel, but I can't seem to even find one single little short story in networks. So I switched genres and I wrote poetry. And not only did I write poetry, I submitted poetry. And this sounds really crazy, but the whole time I was in the program, I really didn't think about submitting anything. That was a big mistake, really, all of you, submit something. Keep submitting a lot of things. But anyway, I paid my 50 bucks and I joined duotrope. And I was fascinated by it. And over the course of a week, I sent out maybe nine or ten submission packets. Out of those, I got seven acceptances. In little journals, print and online. That felt pretty good. It was, it felt like validation, and basically it kept me going and it provided enough stimulus for me to actually revisit the novel and start working on it again. As I said, looking back, I should have begun submitting work while I was still here in the program. So maybe this will push a few of you to get that going right now. Other things that I did to keep myself from throwing the novel through the shredder was I created deadlines for myself. And I think Colin talked about this with workshops. You can attend conferences and workshops that will impose deadlines for you for a specific number of pages. I don't know if anybody else around here writes long, but if they tell me 18 pages, I'll write for them. So just signing up for a conference or a workshop, I'll end up with a good 30, 40 pages of stuff. Might not all be good, but it's there. A group of MFA alumni have put together a Writers Conference in Bridgefield. I submitted 20 pages for that. I ended up with a revised chapter of 18 pages. Then last summer, this MFA program instituted its summer Writers Conference. I think I was the first one to sign up. But it was another deadline, another workshop, another chapter, and then I did Richfield again in the fall. So that's part of my strategy. I just have to keep going to discipline things because I myself don't have very much discipline. It's good to maintain a writing group. I have two writing groups. One is a local group of alumni, and we've been working together for a long time. So we're familiar with each other's work. I also have an alum email partner. So when one thing falls apart, I've still got something going on the other side. And as Colin said, when you're working with other writers, whether you know them well or not, pay close attention to their work because you're going to learn a lot of things about your own work while you do that. As Kathy said, read a variety of literary journals, print and online, see what's being published, see where your work might fit in, figure out which journals you respect and where you'd like your work to appear. A decent publication lasts forever. A bad one never goes away. If you can go to AWP, definitely do it. They'll give you tote bags. You can browse the exhibition halls and they'll give you free samples and you'll come home with a couple of years worth of reading material. It's really a good thing to do. Kathy talked about submission fees, covering subscription costs. I consider that an investment. I think it's a good idea. Okay. Generosity. I don't know if it's true for all MFA programs because I've only gone to this one, but this one has a really generous spirit. I don't know how many of you are really active on our Facebook page, but for me it's a regular source of information and inspiration. Recently, Ayanna posted a link to an essay she wrote about taking walks with her baby daughter. Now naturally, when she was walking Joanie around, she was pushing a stroller. We often get a lot of advice about get outside and commune with nature and this and that. She had done this before and a lot of us do this and we're running. It makes a big difference when you're walking and you notice things. Ayanna pointed out the value of noticing the shape of a leaf, the color of the sky, the way a leaf can drift down from a branch and how it lands on a lawn or skitters across asphalt. If you take out your earbuds and listen to the sounds around you, you'll hear children babbling and wheels crunching and leaves falling and squirrels chattering and all kinds of things that you really don't know are going on, but these details you can keep in your writing, they can really help the scene to come alive. Then opportunities. I don't know if any of you know Alina Dillinge, I don't know her either. She graduated before me or perhaps just after I began the program, but recently Alina had a post out on Facebook. This was in late November. I had read her collection of essays entitled I Thought We Agreed to P in the Ocean and it was fabulous and it made me laugh so I liked Alina even though I didn't know her. But she had a post up on Facebook and she was a little bit panicked because her agent had returned her novel and asked her to increase the tension and she really thought she was too close to the work to be able to do that, so she was asking for readers and I thought, oh, I need tension too, so maybe I'll do that. It was Thanksgiving. I wasn't cooking. I had a lot of time. She sent me the manuscript. It was in two days and sent her back comments and we went back and forth for a bit discussing sections where she could really easily crank things up. For me it was a trifecta win, win, win. I got to read a great book. I got to make a new writer friend and she promised that when I'm done with my novel she'll read it. Really what could be better and these opportunities exist right within this program even with people that you don't know and be afraid of the people you don't know? Within this group really you can't lose. Then I'll talk just a little bit about encouragement. George Rider isn't an MFA but his daughter Jenny is. At the age of 80 George has a book coming out. The Rogue's Road to Retirement and it's just incredibly encouraging to witness Jenny's dad's success at an advanced age and it also gives me hope because even if it takes me 20 more years to finish my novel I know it's possible. Let's see I have a couple more things. During the time that you're in this program it's only two years. If you take a semester off it's two and a half. Usually you're going to complete it within three but that doesn't mean that nothing else is going to happen in your life during that time. A lot of crappy stuff can happen to you and you can have lousy experiences and derailing moments and you're frustrated and disappointed and you're sad and you're betrayed and you have experienced tragedies and all these things really can derail you and they can make you just go sit in the closet and shut the door and never write another word. But if you use it, even if you don't use it on something you're writing today you can throw it to anybody even if you just write things down and don't look at them and keep them somewhere in your desk where nobody's ever going to find them. Someday that stuff will be really valuable to you. And last but not least if you have when you've done everything you can do and you still can't manage to put it together in a cohesive fashion I realize during last summer's Writers Conference that the old adage is true there is no place like home and as you all of you have no doubt seen from reading workshop submissions home can sometimes be a pretty dangerous place but enders and this MFA family isn't like that it's really supportive and encouraging and so my answer was right in front of me I was a professional ass kicker and I knew where to find one after graduation if you wait two years after graduation you have the option of working again with a mentor of your choice you can arrange this through Michael and amazingly the price for this is the only thing in the world that has fallen lately so it's kind of a really good deal and so next summer I will again have a mentor and I'm very excited about that and the last thing I want to say is just keep in touch hopefully by next summer a couple of us are working on an additional online option that maybe we can all get in on the name of the website is going to be www.afterenders.com and we envision it as a sort of 24 hour hotline for writers in panic mode so we're still working out the details but it'll happen and I hope that I'll see all of you there and that's it for me my name is Steve Otpinoski I'm a member of the first cohort which graduated in I guess January 2011 to talk about my life after the MFA I have to talk about my life a little bit during the MFA because it leads into it so I'll do that we all came to the MFA from different journeys different life experiences and mine was different from most people I was a published writer I'd written over 140 books mostly YA books school library books most of them were non-fiction history, biography, books about states and countries also wrote some fiction not a lot, not terribly good hardy boy type books and not very good hardy boy books but what happened during the time I was here was interesting because while I was learning all this wonderful craft about writing fiction for adults which is what I wanted to do the work I was doing as a writer was falling away the publishing industry was changing it was becoming more based on internet and software and less on hardcover books and one of my publishers I've written many books for stopped publishing entirely, went out of business another one basically didn't publish books anymore did most stuff with software so I was losing a lot of work that was good in a way because it allowed me to do more my 20 pages a month so basically to write I could work on my third semester project spent a lot of time on that finished my novel in the program but the downside was that I wasn't making very much money so my income was falling off and what saved me when the program was over and what my experience has been in the last three and a half years or so is teaching and I suppose I should have been part of the other workshop earlier today to talk about that but two things happened in the program that really inspired me and made me want to teach being part of the workshop critiques here on the island reading the manuscripts of my fellow writers and learning how to make good comments and learning how to be a better writer through seeing the mistakes they make knowing I made the same mistakes and maybe helping them with my comments and I really took it seriously I think I got a lot out of it for myself as well as hopefully helping each other as we wrote these comments I learned a lot from the mentors I learned what it is to be a good workshop leader how to encourage people and how to work with them I also learned from a couple people and I won't mention names maybe not the best way not to do it to let people dominate a conversation who obviously have the same thing to say over and over again I wanted to see more disciplined at times and I thought if I was running this workshop I would run a little bit differently I would be a little tougher on people I would try to encourage everyone to speak so I learned what to do maybe a little bit of what not to do so when the program ended the other thing that helped me a lot besides the workshop seminars and critiques was working on my third semester project fortunately I had Bill Patrick as my mentor which was a good thing and also a very hard thing I decided the truth as I think a lot of us should step outside our comfort zone and do something we never did before I've written long papers before critical papers I didn't want to do that I didn't necessarily want to teach at that point at that moment in my life so I decided to write a screenplay something I'd never done before I'd written many plays, I'd written stories and a few novels but I never wrote a screenplay this would be a great challenge so I decided to take one of my novels my first novel which is a horror story about a witch and turn it into a screenplay that would have been great I said to Bill this is a great story it comes out of the weather vane starts doing terrible things and then of course she dies but he said you know Steve in a film it's not going to work because you're going to have this visual of this weather vane and no one's going to be frightened by it and it's not going to work I said but Bill that's my whole novel am I going to do this so he forced me to start thinking outside that little box and create a whole new story basically the same plot elements but changing it entirely to make it work as a film and I had a lot of fun doing that that's what I've never had in my life and even though it was frustrating at times I had a lot of fun and I realized how a screenplay different from even a play you use dialogue but you also have to have images and images have to tell the story the visuals and sound and things like that and it was so different from what I'd done before and I just took to it like a fish to water I really enjoyed it and even though the screenplay has not been published or has been sold to anybody I still plan to do something with it and it was a lot of fun to write it so and I also gave me a chance to do something I could teach which was screenwriting and one of my first teaching jobs outside of graduating program was going to Yale for a summer program called the Summer Institute for the Gifted, SIG and I recommend if you're looking for a summer teaching job it's a wonderful place they deal with students from all around the world come there pay a lot of money to stay at Yale live in a residency there in one of the residential colleges and you come in during the day and you teach these kind of sexy classes on things like myth and legend and writing and different things like that so I got the teach screenwriting on my very first time doing it I've done four summers there now six weeks and it's been a lot of fun so those are the two things that kind of led me to point me in the direction of teaching doing the final presentation here was a lot of fun and Karen Osborn was my mentor for that and encouraged me to do more with it so I couldn't get a job doing what I've done here you know what I'm doing at Fairfield now there was no adjunct jobs available I tried desperately to get a job as an adjunct and it just didn't happen I had a terminal degree like we all did and that's your foot in the door but then there are a lot of other people sticking their foot in that door and it's very hard to get past it so what I did was I decided to substitute teach in my own town which is Stratford Connecticut and that was a trip if you ever substitute taught in public schools it's just unbelievable I taught everything from pre-kendagard through high school every day was a different challenge and even though I enjoyed it I wouldn't want to do it again I'm glad I could move on from there but it gave me some sense of what it's like to be in the classroom on a daily basis and working with students obviously younger students high school and under just like the summer program at Yale was high school students gifted students so from there what did I do after that I basically started doing some continuing it I went to my home town so I was able to teach adults now you think teaching adults would not be as interesting as teaching, you know, well we're all adults but teaching people who are obviously invested in an MFA program or who were in college or something like that I found some of the writers I encountered in Continuing Ed were actually some of the best writers I've worked with they were excellent they came from all different backgrounds bankers, lawyers, whatever but some of them were very gifted writers we had a lot of fun, they were very committed to meeting once a week the pay is very low to be a Continuing Ed teacher but it's a great way to get started in teaching if you come out of this program and you're looking for a way to get your foot in the door and get something on your resume and I still do it to this day one day a week I teach in Stratford at a Continuing Ed and I've taught fiction, I've taught playwriting I've taught screenwriting doing that finally like Brian I got into the the core writing program here at Fearfield we were the first group that got in and I've been there now for three years and it's been a wonderful experience working with freshman composition E and 11, E and 12 which you heard about earlier I'm going to great detail but what I find interesting is again none of the students I have with maybe one or two exceptions have been English majors they've all been from different disciplines nursing, engineering, business administration business marketing but you entice them with this creative writing and composition and some of them turn out to be some of the best writers I've seen some of my nursing students turn out to be fabulous writers we had Bill there last year to come and speak to them and that was inspirational so the first semester we teach basically nonfiction essays second semester we get into literature which is a lot of fun we deal with short stories of poetry and plays and again those of us that are interested in drama we do more with that others that are interested in poetry do more with poetry so it's really quite flexible and again I encourage any of you who are interested in teaching and there are people that aren't who have no interest in it or have no aptitude for it but if you are it's a wonderful experience to get into that core writing and start teaching I've been blessed to be able to teach fiction workshop and also hopefully this semester play writing I get a few more students so that's been a great thing I've just been blessed with that my writing has fallen off a bit I haven't really finished a fourth novel I still haven't sold the third one yet and I've had some success with that I had a show done at the therapy of U.S. semester which was a great experience so I think for me coming out of this losing my freelance writing to a certain extent although I still do that too I was able to discover what a great experience having as a teacher and especially a teacher of creative writing and writing in general and that's been really a great thing for me to do and I encourage any of you to follow that path is certainly as a co-thing to do with writing I think it does stimulate your imagination stimulates your ability to write and you feed off other writers you have a good writer in your class and you just love to see an essay that's well written or a critical essay that really gets to the heart of it and you discover good writing and it's almost like being an editor and finding a writer that you're going to publish we do have an anthology we publish in core writing and we take some of the best essays and put it into that so students get a chance and other students get to look at it as models so it's really a great experience that's basically what I have to say and we look forward to hearing questions from you guys too so thank you there they are Brian has them right there I brought these yeah so hi guys I'm Brian Hoover I graduated in the winter of 2012 with Caffe right and then Steve and I as Steve said we're part of the first cohort of the post-graduate teacher training option that I believe Kristen and Colin and Chris Madden spoke about earlier today and I wish I could have been here on the island in time to hear some of that because you know what I was going to talk about today was essentially my experience balancing the writing and teaching life three years into my collegiate teaching career I guess I've been teaching at Fairfield University undergraduate core writing program with Steve for this is three and a half years now two and a half right but yeah it's um seems like longer and you know I come to the classroom with one pedagogical tenet that I absolutely swear by up and down and I come to this panel in the same spirit and the way I conduct the business in my classroom and this is you know I say a lot of things but this is the one that I really really believe is that everybody in the classroom is a learner and everybody in the classroom is a teacher and so I come today here to you know to this panel with my experiences but not with any what I would call expertise that people in this room you know that would put me above anybody in this room as far as what I can offer to this conversation and so one of the things that I wanted to do see I think that teaching works best when it's a conversation and I think that anything that I was going to say you know it's all intertwined with everything that Kathy and Jillian and Steve have already said and so what I wanted to do was to see you know we're nearing the end of the time and I thought that you know some of the things that I've got my points prepared I've got things that you know I can say and speak about but the conversations that I've had with Baron and the conversations that I've had with Kathy and Steve in the two hours I've been on the island they're already more interesting to me than anything that I was going to say anything that I prepared honestly I'm not even joking and so one of the things that I wanted to do was just sort of open it up and I guess this would sort of be the time to sort of back and forth about some of the things that have been said already and some of the things that we all must do especially those of us who are you know approaching this dual life these dual callings of teaching and writing these things that go so well together but can really strangle each other too at times and I think that that's sort of the place that I'm constantly grappling with and many people in the room might be as well and I don't mean to exclude people who are teachers who are not teachers you know we all have professional obligations we all have familial obligations we all have personal obligations and so I want to incorporate everybody's insights into the conversation that we have for the rest of the time that we're together here how many people in the room just by show of hands are teachers who have been involved in teaching okay interesting alright how many people have been interested in getting into teaching how many people in the room alright that's interesting to note too how many people come to the MFA having the goal of teaching in mind ultimately okay so there are people here who have done it who have thought about doing it who want to do it who aspire to do it and that's all very interesting and you know I'm here to speak of I guess about some of the things that I have found that have buoyed me in the classroom and some of the ways that you know classroom involvement and being devoted to something is you know as rigorous as teaching being devoted to something that carries as much responsibility as teaching how to balance those things so I made a list of pros and cons and I guess I'll just start talking about some of them and if anybody else has insights to offer you know to bounce off of these things and I invite the rest of the panel to speak to these things as well so the things that I think you know make me you know give me energy as a writer when I'm teaching writing one of the things that I think you know just from a nuts and bolts perspective I don't get a lot of time I don't have a lot of time to write as a teacher when I'm teaching I start September with a really good head of steam and I'm feeling really excited I'm anxious to meet my new students and I've got these ideas that are sort of turning in my head things that I've been working on in the summertime as Kathy could probably tell you September is also when a lot of the journals come back into their reading periods they might take the summer off but September is you know hey, Gettysburg Review is back and reading again I'm going to send something to Gettysburg Review so I have all these great high hopes I guess for what I can do as a writer as I'm starting to teach and you know then you start to assign things and you start to receive papers back for your students and then all of a sudden you've got this stack of papers and you're like oh okay so I will put my ass in the chair for an hour on Wednesday when I don't have office hours and I will do that and that will be my writing day I will do my writing things on Wednesday or I will submit or I will manage my submission logs and I will finish the final edits on that or something like that that will be my thing I do on Wednesday and nothing will ever disturb the thing that I do on Wednesday it's my time as a writer until about October 1st October comes around and you've had to respond to major drafts of a major personal narrative that some of us like to assign and that's where the real teaching you know happens I think that as a teacher of writing I really love to teach process I really love to get into process with my students and I think one of the things that we've all benefited from as students at this level, the MFA level you know you really just you get so much from what your mentor has to say to you on a draft, early draft and that sort of thing October 1st comes around and you're starting to pour yourself into responding, teaching the art of thinking and teaching the art of writing and everything like that and teaching better reading practices and all these things and so that's great but that really makes it kind of hard to maintain that time on Wednesday so like that block, that whole Wednesday morning that you're planning to do your writerly work maybe you have to just see what you can get done on Wednesday night because you really need Wednesday to you know to grade and plan and stuff like that so little by little you start to sacrifice you start to sacrifice the time that you've set aside for yourself and I'm saying you when I'm really talking about myself so I don't know that's sort of where this is my central struggle this is my central struggle and I have no answers necessarily Ben Fine, this is a man who we should talk to trade plays with Ben Fine but I think that it's striking the balance that is the key, the crux of doing this how to make sure that one of these endeavors of writing or teaching especially teaching writing to make sure that teaching doesn't swallow the writing that's the thing that I think I have to deal with personally the most show of hands in the room teachers, people who have taught, people who have you know attempted to do both of these things together what's the first thing that gets sacrificed in your practice when you're faced with the mounting responsibilities sleep fascinating true, I mean it's true my sleep is eaten into by the grading exercise exercise, yes the mind and body connection Yana's piece that Jillian was talking about about the importance of walking was a revelation for me when I read that because she's dead on it and she's right there with Thoreau and all those you know the Rambler tradition what else? friendships relationships, yeah, absolutely we can laugh about that but that's a damn series right there what else? a clean house you know what though kudos to the people who can sacrifice these things because I think that in the midst of trying to get yourself into the frame of mind where you can sit and engage the machinery, the mental machinery of writing I think a lot of those things start to take precedence over writing a lot of the time it can really be you know I need my friends I haven't seen anybody in two months I need to go have a beer with my old roommate or something like that or you know what the bathroom really needs to be cleaned needs to be cleaned a lot more than I need to do edit song things there's one thing Brian that this is from the people who are teaching I haven't been teaching in a long time at least and the fact is that I don't know if my own background agree with me Bill it gets easier I mean after a while you know what you're doing and you can still be the same for 20 years you don't necessarily get better but you know what you want to do and you can get by it without without without without that much preparation I have to say you still have the great papers unfortunately Rachel pick that one well I talked to Ben about this before the panel I was actually curious to know if it was different because no no no you're correct I think it's valuable I think that's a good point and I asked Ben about that it's time if you really want to do a good job it's a time thing what do you teach? mathematics let's walk in the park but he's writing like he's turning out like two textbooks a year he has the time for it he's not reading he's not reading literacy narratives you know it's and I'm up here and I'm sort of trying to be as honest as I can with everybody I'm not trying to say that there aren't amazing things about teaching that really do feed what I'm trying what I'm trying to do in my own writing practice I get to read amazing stuff all the time in terms of the things that I'm assigning as reading for my students as Steve said the first course that we tend to teach in the sequence of the core writing sequence of classes is a composition and rhetoric class and it's all essays and we can go back as far as you know we can go back as far as play to I guess that wouldn't be called an essay necessarily but we can go back as far as the philosophical teachings of the academy 2500 years ago and we can talk about the essay as it exists today I get to teach really exciting things that really help me as a thinker and help me as a learner and a reader and everything even more so in 12 when we get to the introduction to literature the sort of more traditional intro to lit class I'm constantly surrounded by amazing writing and that's incredible being a teacher I think forces me into a certain frame of mind where I'm thinking about thinking and thinking about reading and thinking about writing and doing all of these things at a much higher level than I would be if I weren't teaching if I were just not just I don't mean to say that any other this is subordinate to teaching I don't mean that at all but if I weren't teaching I don't think I'd be engaging my mind in those ways that are very helpful for a writer to be engaging because of her mind concrete thing that I love to do I've been told I've been told that I'm very intellectually honest in my classroom and I guess this goes along with my belief that everybody's a teacher and everybody's a learner whenever I assign a writing prompt in class I do it too and sometimes that's the only writing I get done in a three week stretch, four week stretch, five week stretch, six month stretch but it's important to me to let my students know that I'm not going to make them do anything as writers that I wouldn't do myself and I get something out of that I've gotten lots of lots of good things done and just good exercise that's the writer's version of going to the gym I guess and you need to do those things and sometimes teaching that's the best you can do and I think that I get a lot out of doing that and then there's the thrill of seeing really exciting student work too and that's something that can't be understated when you see that hint of promise in a student and I'm looking at predominantly first year writers I'm not looking at English majors as Steve said we get a lot everybody at the university takes the course that we take I guess you can place out of VN 11 if you have taken AP English in your senior year of high school but nobody escapes the core writing sequence at least part of it everybody has to do it so we get engineers, we get nursing majors we get people who are undeclared people who've never thought about their future people who've never thought about books we get all types but still there's this amazing thing that happens when you see a student who is engaging their mind on the page in a sophisticated way it's like oh here's a chance to talk craft with a student and here's a chance to do that whole dead poet society thing like staying on the desks and stuff like that that's the dream right you can have those moments you can have those those little flashes that really can propel you and energize you and get you to think about your own work in a certain way I just have to share this phrase that I wrote that I noticed that I wrote on my page I'm not really referring to my notes a whole lot but I did come up with this that I think is worth shaving so whether it was a student who wrote sophisticatedly enough that I could share some dork ass editorial advice on how to decide whether to use a semicolon or a dash or a student who seemed to comprehend and practice good revision strategies these are the types of things that you really live for you know as a teacher I'm not joking so the cons you know I don't think I need to talk too much about the cons the paper pile is a big you know a big point of contention you know you have to think really clearly about what you're saying what you're writing to these students in creating assignments what I think is attending the detail and being clear and what an 18 year old thinks is attending the detail and being clear are two vastly different things we've learned that so it's made me hyper aware of that sort of thing um yeah teacherly impulses to instruct and nurture having these things precluding all other work impulses this is the thing I think that it really all boils down to it's chatting with Barron at the beginning of the afternoon about some acting advice I come to writing from the theater and I come to teaching from the theater and teaching um and one of the things that a director of mine once told me as an actor is to do 100% of one thing that's like the most amazing advice really I think I've ever heard about you know what it means to attend to something to give something your attention and to focus and I think that the teacher the teacher writer question the crux of that whole issue is is it better to do 100% of one thing or to try to do fractions of several things um and to try to understand what's even possible um and so you know it's all it's all about um trying to answer that question for yourself um you know seeing how much you can be content with being a writer who teaches or a teacher who writes and you know what the balance of that is going to be um yeah isn't it so um anyway that's really you know as much as I can say as much as I'll monologue at you folks um I really think this works better as a conversation so I mean we've got time and this is like the Q and A I guess portion of the of the afternoon so um who out there has questions could I say something please since this is supposed to be about post mfa I graduated when 13 in 13 and I was lucky enough to have Bill into workshops and uh Bill always told to stay away from cliches but I'm going to give you some cliches and he said that uh the one thing is uh when when we started college all of us went to college some of our parents came along and our parents always said well what is he going to do with college you know what is he going to work at when he gets out and I get the same thing I'm a professor of mathematics people come to me what's uh little John going to do when he finishes why doesn't do accounting and I always tell them and I'll get to the point of this in a moment I said you have to study mathematics because you like you'll figure out what you're going to do with it later there's a lot of things to do you'll figure out how to do it later I come to the MFA and my parents were long since they didn't bring me here but I asked myself what the hell am I doing this for and it's a little different to be a 25 or whatever and doing it but I've come to the realization four years later that my dream of being Frank McCord has probably put on uh hold but you have to do this because you enjoy it and you keep doing it because you enjoy it I mean people who know me know that in American English I'm a bullshitter but that's American English I know what they call that in South African bullshitter bullshitter bullshitter you have to love to write poems you have to love to tell stories and you know maybe it's tough it's tough publishing we all know that we sit there and we cry but the point is you have to keep going because you enjoy it I know it's a cliche that's what keeps me going I'm still writing a lot of mathematics but the fact is you keep doing it I'm on Brian all the time right right right now teaching does keep you right because I'm gonna believe you can't be a scholar we can't be a teacher without being a scholar and you can't be a scholar without being a teacher I know that's another cliche that Bill will jump on me for but it's true it's true if you're a mathematician you have to be and teach mathematics too if you're a writer you have to somehow explain your writing to other people but you have to have your enthusiasm and you have to love it and that's sort of my cliche things for post-MFA you keep going whether it pans out or not because we're doing this because we love it so well done any other questions anybody do you have anything about your teaching job experience I did in fact I had a lot of very diverse bizarre teaching experience I taught acting classes I worked with actors one to one in audition type situations and I also taught acting classes in conjunction with a sort of musical theater workshop I taught 7 to 17 year old actors not for me I also taught long term substitutes at the high school level English and theater and I also worked I spent 9 years working with autistic spectrum kids in the behavioral therapy capacity so I had a lot of very a lot of diverse teaching experiences but nothing like teaching writing in the college classroom so I was really grateful for the opportunity to go and immerse myself in pedagogy and that sort of thing through the postgraduate teaching action here I wouldn't have felt confident in my abilities to teach at the college level without that certainly I recommend it to anybody who's interested Michael I want to thank all of you for doing that I just wanted to comment on some of the things that Kathy was talking about in terms of submission I've been an editor I was an editor for about 20 years and I saw all sorts of stuff coming in and the one thing I would say is when your stuff is ready send it out somebody here that says it's really strong it's polished, it's a good chapter even if it's a chapter of a memoir or a novel and self-contained if they tell you to send it out start sending it out don't send it out before it's ready the second thing I would say is to know the feel that's out there that's a good thing I think he mentioned some good books most of our faculty are suggesting those books international directory books and writers you should be aware of those kinds of things even if you're writing the longer things like memoirs and novels you can often chop off a section a chapter and send it out it's great to do that also and it is changing we have a different conversation here about journals and magazines 30 years ago 20, 30, 40, 50 magazines were published monthly or weekly and paid money there's very few of those now so it's taken up the slack our literary magazines online magazines so get your stuff out I get between 5 and 20 magazine calls for submissions he sends them out to you don't just cut those off save those if you have something that's ready send it out keep a record of where you sent it if it goes for 6 months send it a little note simultaneous submissions that is the way to go I've been on panels where they've argued against that I'm a strong supporter of simultaneous submissions as long as you're fair I'd be glad to talk to you individually about rules, etiquette ethics and so on simultaneous submissions I went from about 6 publications to about 38 publications over 3 years by simultaneous submitting changing from one submission at a time and I did that because I had stories that sat on a desk for 15 months I had stories that were accepted and then later from magazine bankrupt and never came out I'd be glad to talk more about that if there are more questions we still have a few minutes before 5 5 minutes well thank you guys