MFA Residency Countdown

As many of you may know, I'm working my way through an MFA in creative and professional writing (2 semesters left, yay!). The program is low residency which means it's independent study for the most part, except that twice a year I travel to campus for a week-long series of workshops, panels, meetings, readings, etc.

The next residency is coming up July 31 - Aug 7. I've signed up for workshops in fiction, flash fiction, "obsession as the engine of literary invention," and "teaching writing to non-writers."

Plus, I'm so excited (and by excited I mean completely and utterly freaked out) that I will be meeting with an agent during the residency (every summer there's an agent panel and afterwards the agents take meetings with some of the students). Gulp. I'm dealing with this by pretty much not dealing with it. Although I should probably figure out how the hell to best use my meeting time to my best advantage.

On Monday afternoon there will be a flash fiction slam...of course I'm participating with a micro-fiction piece of 153 words. That should be interesting.

For the fiction and flash fiction workshops all the participants are required to send pieces ahead of time so that we can read and critique each other's work and be ready to workshop it. For the flash fiction workshop, that's not such a big deal. All 15 or so people each sent in selections of 1 to 3 pages. So was able to read through those pretty quickly. But the fiction workshop? With 15-20 people each sending in between 10 and 20 pages (most of them close to 20 pages because they insist on sending the page maximum), that comes to somewhere around 225 pages to read and critique in a week. Not so easy. I'm slogging my way through it now.

Finally, I'm doing my teaching practicum this semester by teaching two sections of composition at the local university (one on campus and one at the air force base annex). I'm madly trying to get a syllabus and lesson plans written since classes start on Aug 23. At least I managed to get books ordered for the course. Now I just need to get organized and finish the syllabus!

So Saturday morning I'll be heading to CT, and as I have for past residencies, I'll be blogging about the different workshops and activities.

I'm really looking forward to the fun!