i’ll never leave the canyon ’cause i’m surrounded on all sides by people writing novels and living on amusement rides

1. Imagination 2012 Reading Series continues tonight, at Cleveland State, with Elizabeth Kadetsky and Josip Novakovich. The event begins at 7:00 p.m. in Cleveland State’s Main Classroom Building Auditorium (E 22nd St & Euclid Ave). This event is, yes, free and open to the public. Good deal.

2. Mary B. is featured in an interview over at Ploughshares. Today is Mary’s last day as the NEOMFA Director. We wish her well in her return to civilian life. You rocked the heck out of that job, Mary! Thanks so much for all you’ve done.

3. Likewise, Mike Geither at Cleveland State University will be picking up the mantle. We are very pleased to have Mike at the helm of this magnificent ship. Good luck, Professor Geither!

4. Today is my last day as your faithful NEOMFA blogger. I will be moving to Columbus in a few weeks. I hope that this blog has brought some new info and new ideas, and I hope it’s helped you keep abreast of all the wonderful things the NEOMFA and its students and faculty have accomplished this year. This coming year’s graduate assistant, Dan Riordan, has been tasked with taking up this role in the fall, and I know he’ll be awesome.

Thanks for reading,

Michael Goroff

you may say i’m a dreamer

1. If you haven’t had a chance to catch any of the Imagination 2012 Reading Series, there’s still time! Readings are scheduled for tonight, tomorrow, and Saturday. More info can be found here.

2. Twitter is hilarious. Bad writing tips for those who are working on a novel. (via The Millions)

3. 50 Shades of Terrible Sex Scenes (potentially NSFW, or for those made easily squeamish by bad writing).

4. Books are things to be conquered, like 5Ks and rock-climbing walls.

5. Ann Morgan’s taken up an Olympic-sized trial to read a book from all 196 UN-recognized countries, plus Kosovo and Taiwan, by the end of 2012. You can follow her progress at her blog.

6. “Although, to be perfectly honest, those with SF background and experience tend to make the same mistakes. I’ve found that the best SF writing is no guarantee of science accuracy. “

married to the game but i’d rather be the best man

1. Are you an owl or a lark?

2. Science fiction for the summer.

3. The Library of Congress offers its 88 books that helped shape America.

4. London is under attack . . . from poetry.

5. “If you try to ignore the roar of the nearby highway—not altogether an easy feat—it’s possible to imagine the house as it was when occupied by the young Mary Ann Evans, whose father, Robert Evans, was the estate manager for a the local landowner, to whom Griff belonged.”

6. No “Get Out of Jail Free” card? How about a novel?

a couple second chances surely would console me

1. Bateau Press recently awarded Nick Sturm (’12)’s chapbook, A Basic Guide, the 2012 Boom Chapbook Prize. Additionally, Meg Johnson was a finalist! Boom, indeed.

2. I recently retrieved from my parents’ mailbox Ninth Letter‘s special edition, Man-Made Lands, and was pleased to find within its pages a resurrection, courtesy of native Clevelander Scott Geiger, of the redesigns for Cleveland’s Public Square that were featured in The Plain Dealer. The rest of the issue is  awesome as well, but it was particularly nice to see Cleveland getting some love, especially as the project continues to lurch forward.

3. “This letter is sententious crap, shot full of self-pity. But it’s the kind of letter writers seem to write; and since I quit G-E, if I’m not a writer then I’m nothing.”

4. Um, quoi? Free awesome short story anthology from Harper Perennial’s Fifty-two Stories? Yes, please.

5. Kind to your summer reading needs, Elliot Holt lists 70 awesome short stories that you should read.

i didn’t rest, i didn’t stop, did we fight, did we talk?

It’s back!

The Big Big Torch has been passed to Mike Krutel (’12) and Alexis Pope, who are taking over as curators as Nick Sturm (’12) moves to the “great beyond,” a.k.a. Florida, for PhD school.

And did I mention that Dan Riordan is reading??

BOOM!

n’aie pas peur de sonner l’alarme

1. There were only 500 real bookstores in 1931. [via Melville House]

2. Randy Boyagoda exemplifies how not to communicate with editors(?).

3. Roxane Gay shows us where things stand for reviews in the New York Times of books by writers of color.

4. Who else wishes they were in Chicago this weekend?

5. Old books ain’t cheap.

6. Photographs with three-year exposures are three times as awesome.

7. Thomas Pynchon’s gone digital.

was this texas or france?

Just because classes are out for the summer doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to do. The summer offers writing conferences and retreats like Skidmore and Sewanee. The NEOMFA has close ties to two such writing conferences: the Imagination Conference and the Juniper Summer Writing Institute.

I’ve been to and have enjoyed both!

Imagination was very cool. If you are a NEOMFA student, you will see a bunch of familiar faces, and you might be in workshop with fellow NEOMFA students. However, there is a good mix of NEOMFA and non-NEOMFA participants, and Imagination is a great opportunity to meet new people.

The faculty is top-notch. I took workshop with Anthony Doerr last summer, and it was one of the best workshop experiences I’ve ever had. We looked at the stories that we’d brought to class, but we also spent time generating new material and learning how to defamiliarize ourselves in regards to our own work. We thought about how we generally approach our writing, and then we tried to think of different ways, spawning different ideas. It was fantastic, refreshing, and energizing. The faculty readings that closed out every evening wowed me, and the informational sessions throughout the week were . . . informative!

Most of the conference-goers are from the Cleveland area. It’s totally convenient that I, a person of Akron persuasion, can drive 30 minutes up I77 and attend an amazing conference. But Imagination is a conference that’s well worth flying to. There were several out-of-state students, including one in my workshop, and she had a great time.

I was also one of the very lucky students to be sent to the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. Every summer, the NEOMFA sends a handful of students to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst to work with and interact with and writers like Amy Hempel, James Tate, Mark Doty,  Charles D’Ambrosio, Dara Wier, Rikki Ducornet, Paul Lisicky, Noy Holland, Matthew Zapruder, Heather Christle, and more, during workshops, craft sessions, and readings. Amazing!

I was in workshop with Noy Holland. It was a generative, detailed experience. We looked very closely at the elements of a short story: the first line, syntax, and adjectives and adverbs. If thinking intensely about adjectives and adverbs for a few days in a small cabin with ten other intensely intelligent people sounds boring to you, you haven’t met Noy Holland. That week changed the way I looked at my writing, and continues to inform my fiction every time I sit down at the computer.

One of the best aspects of Juniper was meeting new writers from all over the country who cared deeply and enormously about writing. I was offered new perspectives and inspired and motivated by the people I met there. The town of Amherst, Massachusetts, is now also one of my favorite towns on Earth, and the home of my favorite pizza place.

I was lucky and grateful to be one of the students the NEOMFA nominated to Juniper for a scholarship, but even if you don’t receive such a nomination, I would highly recommend applying to Juniper next summer. It was a wonderful experience that changed my writing for the better.

-Michael Goroff