Manifest West

The anthology that I helped edit is now available on Amazon. If you enjoy western regional literature, check it out here. 

Manifest West: Different Roads

"Different roads sometimes lead to the same castle."—George R.R. Martin 

The works in this anthology reflect both the myth and the truth about the part of the United States we call the "West." Is there one "true" West? Or have the changes that are overwhelming most of the rest of the country so modified the West that there is little commonality? The editors of Different Roads believe, with Stephen R. Covey, that our "strength lies in differences, not in similarities" and are constantly amazed by what Stanley Baldwin calls "the many-sidedness of truth." Many sides of the truth of the West are represented in the anthology. Is everything here absolutely the truth? The reader must decide. 

Topics included in this collection of poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction range from the West's diversity of landscape, people, languages, attitudes and history to discussions of water issues, wildfires, antiquities and a broad range of environmental concerns. 

Different Roads is the third volume in Western Press Books' literary anthology series Manifest West. The press, affiliated with Western State Colorado University, annually produces one anthology focused on Western regional writing. The 2014 theme is Western diversity and the title Different Roads comes from George R.R. Martin's quote above.

Pictures From Kentucky

A few weeks ago, I posted that I took some pictures of my trip to Kentucky. Here they are. I spent most of my time on the Spalding University campus, so the pictures are of buildings on or around the campus.

I’m Back: Here’s What Happened

I’m home from my first residency at Spalding University in Kentucky. I was there because I’m getting my MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. I did take some random pictures of Louisville, but you won’t be seeing them because I haven’t had a chance to put them on the computer yet. I don’t think I’ve even taken the camera out of the suitcase yet.

I spent 11 days in Louisville. It was exhausting, awesome, and slightly terrifying. This was my first time going on a plane by myself. It was also my first time leaving Colorado by myself. But, I did it. I got to stay in a fancy hotel and meet a bunch of really interesting people. I did spend a lot of time lost and wandering around Louisville, but that was to be expected. I kind of get lost everywhere.

The residency was like a writing conference on steroids. It was nine straight days of lectures, readings, workshops, and meetings. Unlike my past residencies at other schools, we didn’t get the weekend off. I don’t travel much, so I had a hard time adjusting to the time zone change. I felt like a stumbling zombie for most of the residency. However, I did learn a lot. Even though it was scary and mentally exhausting, I’m glad that I went. It was totally worth it. The best part was that I went 11 days without hearing anyone say, “You’re getting a MFA in Writing for Children? What do you plan to do for money?” 

My Critical Essay

Last week I promised that I’d post the critical essay that I used to apply (and get accepted) to graduate school for Writing for Children and Young Adults. The entire essay is below. As you will see, it’s not a spectacular piece of essay writing.

~*~

Artwork as Foreshadowing in Bridge to Terabithia

Even though Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia was published in 1977, ten years before I was born, it was one of the books that I could relate to most easily when I was a child. Like the characters in the book, I lived in a small farming and ranching community on the outskirts of a large city that my father worked in every day, but I had never visited. Like the characters in the book, my friends and I spent a lot of time sitting in overcrowded classrooms and running around in cow fields. We also loved to play in the forest of giant cottonwoods down by the creek. Katherine Paterson got the details of rural life—right down to the underfunded schools, the overworked parents, and the community’s reluctance to embrace change—so correct that I was immediately drawn into the story. As a child, I had never read about characters who were so similar to me. Bridge to Terabithia remains one of my favorite books to this day.

Bridge to Terabithia is about two ten-year-old friends, Jesse Aarons and Leslie Burke, who create Terabithia, an imaginary kingdom in the woods that they rule as king and queen. The only way to enter Terabithia is to swing across the creek using an old rope hanging from the branch of a crabapple tree. At the end of the book, while Jesse is on his first-ever trip to Washington D.C., Leslie tries to swing into Terabithia alone. The rope breaks, she falls, hits her head on a rock, and drowns in the creek. As a child who had not read many novels, Leslie’s death completely blindsided me. As an adult with much more reading experience, I am impressed with the massive amount of subtle foreshadowing that the book contains. One of the most interesting ways that Leslie’s death is foreshadowed is by references to two pieces of artwork.

The first piece of artwork is described right before Jesse meets his new neighbor, Leslie. One of Jesse’s hobbies is drawing funny pictures of animals in strange predicaments. Minutes before he meets Leslie, he draws this:

“This one was a hippopotamus just leaving the edge of a cliff, turning over and over—you could tell by the curving lines—in the air toward the sea below where surprised fish were leaping goggle-eyed out of the water. There was a balloon over the hippopotamus—where his head should have been but his bottom actually was—‘Oh!’ it was saying. ‘I seem to have forgot my glasses’” (Paterson 10).  

The image of the drawing is still in the mind of the reader when Jesse meets Leslie. It stays in the back of the reader’s mind all through the book because Leslie is one of the few people who support Jesse’s love of drawing. Jesse’s hippopotamus drawing is evoked again at the end of the book when he is visiting the art museum in Washington D.C. without Leslie:

“There they came upon a display case holding a miniature scene of Indians disguised in buffalo skins scaring a herd of buffalo into stampeding over a cliff to their death with more Indians waiting below to butcher and skin them. It was a three-dimensional nightmare version of some of his own drawings. He felt a frightening sense of kinship with it . . . . To himself he said, I don’t think I like it, but he could hardly pull himself away” (Paterson 100).

This passage about the buffalo hunt artwork increases the tension in the story and darkens the mood. Jesse is having fun before this passage. When he sees the buffalo hunt, he becomes uneasy, which makes the reader uneasy. Leslie dies while Jesse is visiting the art museum, but neither Jesse nor the reader learn about her death until he gets home. Several times during his trip to the museum, he wishes that he had invited Leslie to come with him because she loves art as much as he does. He cannot wait to get home and tell her about everything he saw. The increased tension caused by this passage very subtly lets the reader know that something bad is about to happen, and it will probably involve falling and death.

Jesse’s reaction to the buffalo hunt artwork is similar to his reaction to Leslie the first time he meets her. He feels a sense of kinship with her because her individuality makes her an outsider in the community. Jesse’s love of drawing makes him an outsider in his no-nonsense family. This kinship keeps pulling Jesse to Leslie despite the fact that he originally does not like her because she is the fastest runner in the fifth grade—a title that Jesse trained all summer to earn. Like Leslie herself, Jesse’s drawing of the hippo is imaginative and light-hearted. Like Leslie’s death, the buffalo hunt was a real event. After seeing the buffalo hunt, the reader knows that Jesse and Leslie are not in their imaginary Terabithia anymore. They are in the real world, and scary things are not as easily dealt with in the real world as they are in Terabithia. Because Jesse is drawn to artwork that involves falling, it is as if he feels such a strong kinship to Leslie that he is able to subconsciously predict that this imaginative girl will fall to her death.

    

It is not a coincidence that Jesse draws a hippo—a water creature—falling into the sea. Leslie’s death is also foreshadowed with dozens of references to falling, water, death, bad luck, the breakup of relationships and kingdoms, religion and spirituality, fear and fearlessness, and Jesse’s sense that his entire life “was delicate as a dandelion” (Paterson 77). I was most impressed by Katherine Paterson using artwork to foreshadow Leslie’s death because it fits with the book’s message about the importance of imagination. Before Jesse met Leslie, he had been “a nothing—a stupid, weird little kid who drew funny pictures and chased around a cow field trying to act big” (Paterson 126). Leslie had “tried to push back the walls of his mind and make him see beyond to the shining world . . . . It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned to him in vision and strength” (Paterson 126). Jesse learns that his imagination and silly drawings are valuable, even if his family and classmates do not see the value in them. Leslie taught him that he can use his creativity to make the world a better place. Using artwork to foreshadow Leslie’s death is perfect because imagination is such an important part of the characters’ lives and the message of the story.

Works Cited

Paterson, Katherine. Bridge to Terabithia. First Harper Trophy Edition. New York, New York:

 HarperCollins Children's Books, 1977. Print.

Tips for Getting Accepted to Graduate School for Creative Writing

I’m not an expert at getting accepted to graduate school, but I thought I would share what I’ve learned during the very stressful process of applying and being accepted.

 

1.      Find a program that teaches what you want to learn.

 

“Creative writing” encompasses a lot of different types of writing: literary fiction, genre fiction, creative nonfiction, writing for children and young adults, poetry, screenwriting, playwriting, writing for television, etc. You have to find a program that teaches what you want to learn. Most of the programs that I’ve come across allow you to write literary fiction or poetry only, so if you want to write sci-fi or picture books, you’re out of luck in those programs. I knew that I wanted to write for young adults, so I Googled “Writing for young adults creative writing MFA.” That’s how I found my MFA program. If you want to write poetry or literary fiction, you can Google “Creative writing MFA rankings.” This will give you a list of the top programs in the country, but be aware that these schools get a lot of applicants. It would probably be a good idea to choose a few “safety” schools that aren’t among the top programs in the country.

 

2.      Low-residency?

 

Both my MFA program and my post-BA certificate program are low-residency. I love it. In a low-residency program, you only have to be on campus for a few weeks every year. The rest of the time, you do your work online. You don’t have to rearrange your entire life to go to graduate school. I’d highly recommend a low-residency program if you’re not the type of person who enjoys being in classrooms.

 

3.      Applying to graduate school takes forever.

 

Seriously, it takes an unbelievably long time. There are a lot of steps in the application process, a lot of paperwork that you need to get to the school, and a lot of writing samples that you need to provide. Be prepared to write. A lot. You might be able to use some of your samples for multiple schools, but every school has different requirements, so you can’t count on being able to use the same samples for everybody. If you want to apply to 8 programs, you might have to write 8 different 2-5 page critical essays. Do you have time to do that plus all the other application stuff for those schools?

 

4.      Asking for recommendation letters sucks.

 

Asking for recommendation letters made me hugely uncomfortable. I felt horrible for making people take time out of their lives to write letters for me. I didn’t like the fact that the letters had to be confidential. I didn’t like that I had to rely on other people to help me do something that I wanted to do. I didn’t like that my graduate-school future was in somebody else’s hands. I also spent a lot of time wondering what would happen if all of my potential letter writers said that they couldn’t write the letters. It turned out that only one of my potential letter writers said no. I got letters from everyone else I asked.   

 

5.      Don’t procrastinate asking for recommendation letters.

 

Procrastination is tempting because asking for letters sucks. Don’t procrastinate. I asked for my letters 8-12 weeks before the application deadline. I made sure that my letter writers knew the application deadline. Still, one of my letters didn’t come until after the deadline, so I wasn’t able to apply to that school. Ask for letters as early as possible. Also, use Interfolio. Interfolio is a document-management service that will keep your letters confidential and mail them to the graduate schools for you. All your letter writers have to do is upload the letters to your account. You do have to pay to use Interfolio, but it’s totally worth it. You have control over when your letters are mailed, and you can mail all of them in the same envelope. You can mail the same letters to as many schools as you want. You don’t have to rely on your letter writers to mail your letters or to get the correct number of letters to you so that you can mail them.

 

6.      Don’t freak out about the GRE.

 

A lot of schools will require you to do the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE). You have to take this test at a testing center. It’s a hard test, much harder than the ACT/SAT. There are two different GREs. The General Test has math, reading comprehension/vocabulary, and essay writing. The Subject Test has literature, literary history, literary criticism, and reading comprehension. Make sure you know which test(s) your MFA program requires. You can find practice booklets for both tests on the GRE website. Don’t freak out too much about the GRE. I studied every day for months, and I still bombed everything but the essay writing. The tests involve a ton of reading, and I’m a fairly slow reader, so I ran out of time. The essay questions on the General Test were stupid and easy. Even though I did horrible on the GRE, I still got accepted to graduate school. I know a lot of people who bombed the GRE and still got accepted to their first-choice school. Study hard, but don’t worry about it too much.

 

7.      Don’t freak out about your critical writing samples.

 

I freaked out about the critical essay that I had to include with my application. I’m not a very good critical writer. My critical essay wasn’t interesting or insightful. In fact, I’ll post it on this blog next week so that you can see how not-good it is. It didn’t matter. I still got accepted.

 

8.      Freak out about your creative writing samples.

 

All of the MFA programs that I read about said that they base their decision mostly on your creative writing sample. Work on your samples as much as possible. Give them to other people to read. Work on them some more. Think about them before you go to sleep at night. Then work on them some more. Bring them to a writing workshop. Then work on them some more. After you read this blog post, go work on your samples. If you’re going to freak out about something, freak out about your creative writing samples.

 

9.      Know how long it takes to mail transcripts.

 

MFA programs will want official transcripts from every college that you’ve ever attended. Two of my previous colleges mailed transcripts within a few days of receiving a transcript request. The third college took up to two weeks to mail a transcript. Make sure you know how long it will take your previous colleges to mail transcripts so that you don’t miss the application deadline.

 

That’s what I’ve learned from my application process. I hope that it is helpful to you.