How to Write a Statement of Purpose for M.F.A in Creative Writing Programs

Among the most daunting -- and critical -- tasks involved in applying for graduate creative writing programs is writing the dreaded Statement of Purpose, which serves as a cover letter and therefore your first impression to the strangers reviewing your (and often hundreds of others') application.  Along with your writing sample, the Statement of Purpose is arguably the most important document.

Because the Statement of Purpose is often required to be one page or less, most applicants spend several weeks or even months crafting an effective SOP.  The problem, however, is that hardly anyone can say what, exactly, makes an SOP effective.  What should you include?  What should you not include?  How much personality ("flair") should there be, and what writerly ambitions or childhood trauma's are best left unmentioned?

Luckily, author and writing professor Cathy Day lays down some essential Do's and Don't's about writing the SOP.  Any writer serious about applying to graduate creative writing programs will benefit from these tips -- provided, after all, by someone who reviews M.F.A. applications regularly.

So take note!

Come Celebrate Graduating B.F.A. Students Stephanie Girard and Dayton Shafer!

Fall Authors Series Concludes with Two of JSC'S Own . . .

This Thursday, November 10th, JSC proudly welcomes a visit by two of its own, authors Neil Shepard and Tony Whedon.  

Even though both Shepard and Whedon recently retired from JSC's Department of Writing and Literature, both have been very busy.  During their visit, they will be celebrating the release of two new books:  Things to Pray for in Vermont by Tony Whedon and (T)ravel/Un(T)ravel by Neil Shepard (both released by Mid-List Press).  Please come celebrate with them!

WHEN:  Thursday, December 10 / 4:00 pm
WHERE:  Stearns Performance Space

Tony Whedon is also the author of the excellent book of essays A Language Dark Enough (Mid-List, 2004), which, according to the publisher, "travels on four continents in search of a language that describes 'home.' From Port-au-Prince to Shanghai, from Ecuador's Andes to the Green Mountains of Vermont, many of those he meets—his students, colleagues, and fellow travelers—are displaced people, exiles in a global community."  Whedon is also a pioneer of PoJazz, a lively performance-based fusion of poetry and jazz that has gained an enthusiastic following among his former students at JSC.

Read here Whedon's lovely essay "Kindred Spirits," featured in Hunger Mountain.

And here is Whedon's poem "Impermanence," published in Blackbird.

Neil Shepard is the author of three previous poetry collections with Mid-List, Scavenging the Country for a Heartbeat, I'm Here Because I Lost My Way, This Far from the Source--all of which, according to the publisher, "take readers on a journey across emotional as well as physical distances."


Shepard is the Founding Editor of JSC's acclaimed literary journal Green Mountains Review, which this spring will celebrate its first 25 years with an all-poetry anniversary issue.  

Read here an interview with Neil Shepard featured in Hunger Mountain.  

Here, courtesy of Mid-List Press, is an excerpt from Shepard's (T)ravel/Un(T)ravel:


AUBADE, WEST OF PARIS

(T)ravel/Un(T)ravel by Neil Shepard
(Mid-List Press, 2011)

(early spring)

throw open the doors --

almonds flowering
snow on trees, plums purpling
the black limbs of winter

flowering -- the ing is the thing
zing! -- dang if I ain't plain tame
this morning. I been dead
all winter, so tame is wild!
where I come from.

daffodils are yellow, not yellowed --
kids disappear in forsythia --
guardians on high alert, floating
over trees disguised as pink clouds --

throw open the doors! --

burble like a fool -- you've bungled enough
years -- burble, bungle, to hell
with the middle way, temper-
ance is our condition,
more than we admit -- not enough
heart epaulets -- not after thirty, no --

hereby decree all public men and women
shall sew hearts on sleeves or else --
shipped off to flower factories --

rough winds do shake
the darling buds -- how long
can these little courage-makers hang on?

Lydia Davis to Visit JSC on Halloween!

Lydia Davis

The JSC Fall Authors Series continues!

On Monday, October 31, fiction writer and translator Lydia Davis will visit JSC to read from her work.  Lydia Davis is the author the novel The End of the Story and the story collections Break It Down, Almost No Memory, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, and Varieties of Disturbance, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2007.  The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis was published in 2009 and, according to New Yorker book critic James Wood, "will in time be seen as one of the great, strange American literary contributions, distinct and crookedly personal, like the work of Flannery O'Connor, Donald Barthelme, or J. F. Powers."

Davis has received the MacArthur Foundation's "Genius Grant" for her fiction, and her accomplishments in translation are just as impressive.  Not only has she translated recent editions of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, but she has been named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government.  Whoa.

WHEN:  Monday, October 31 (5:30pm)
WHERE:  Johnson State College / Stearns Performance Space

Free and open to the public!

More on Lydia Davis:

Read an interview with Lydia Davis from The Believer.

Listen to three audio interviews with Lydia Davis at KCRW's Bookworm:
     in 1998 (discussing and reading from Almost No Memory);
     in 2002 (discussing and reading from Samuel Johnson Is Indignant);
     and in 2007 (discussing and reading from Varieties of Disturbance).

Read another interview with Lydia Davis by the National Book Foundation, conducted after she was selected as a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award.

And here is an interview with Davis at BOMB Magazine.

Read Davis's story "The Dreadful Mucamas" from the recent issue of Granta.

Read ten tiny stories by Davis, "Ten Stories from Flaubert," courtesy of The Paris Review.

Also from The Paris Review, here is Lydia Davis talking about translating the newest edition of Gustave Flaubert's novel of novels, Madame Bovary; and here is her follow-up.

And listen here to Davis's at-length discussion of translating Madame Bovary

PennSound presents here a trove of audio recordings of Lydia Davis's readings, interviews, and talks.

Read Davis's first-time translation of the Dutch (from The Mole and Other Very Short Animal Stories by A. L. Snijders) in Asymptote. 

Finally, below is a video inspired by a single sentence by Lydia Davis:

Writers Sign a Letter in Support of the Occupy Wall Street Movement

Check out Occupywriters.com for a list of (hundreds of?) writers who have signed a brief letter in support of the Occupy Wall Street Movement.  The list includes, to name but a few, John D'Agata, Robert Boswell, Jennifer Egan, Brian Evenson, Vivian Gornick, Mary Karr, Sam Lypsite, Bill McKibben, Rick Moody, Ann Patchett, Benjamin Percy, D. A. Powell, Francine Prose, George Sanders, Luc Sante, and many, many others.

Is your favorite writer on this list?  What does that mean? . . .

This Thursday at JSC: Poets David Lehman and Anna Maria Hong

The Johnson State College Authors Series is pleased host an evening of poetry with writers David Lehman and Anna Maria Hong this Thursday, Oct. 13, at 5:30 pm in the Stearns Performance Space.  This event is free and open to the public.

Read more about these authors below.

David Lehman

"David Lehman was born in New York City. He is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Yeshiva Boys( Scribner, 2009) and When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005). Among his nonfiction books are A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs  (Nextbook / Schocken, 2009), The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Anchor, 1999), The Perfect Murder ( Michigan, 2000), and Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991). He edited Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present and The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present, which appeared from Scribner in 2003 and 2008, respectively. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006), a one-volume comprehensive anthology of poems from Anne Bradstreet to the present. Lehman teaches writing and literature in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City. He initiated The Best American Poetry series in 1988 and continues as the annual anthology's general editor. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989 and an Academy Award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1990. He lives in New York City and in Ithaca, New York."  -- David Lehman's Web site

Poet John Hollander has said this about Lehman:  "This increasingly impressive poet keeps reminding us that putting aside childish things can be done only wisely and well by keeping in touch with them, and that American life is best understood and celebrated by those who are, with Whitman, both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it."   

Here is a video of Lehman reading his "Poem for Obama."
Here is Lehman discussing and reading from his recent book Yeshiva Boys.

Here is Lehman discussing his Best American Poetry series.
Here is an interview with David Lehman on NPR's Morning Edition, in which he discusses updating The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006).

Here is Lehman's amusing "The Questions of Postmodernsim." 

Anna Maria Hong

From Anna Maria Hong's Institute Fellows page at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study:

Anna Maria Hong writes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and texts for collaborative works. Since 2005, she has been writing a series of sonnets in traditional English and Italian forms as well as more experimental hybrids and departures. Hong is interested in how rigorous form shapes expression and how language pushes back against constraints to create strange, unexpected content. To date, she has written about 60 sonnets, comprising the first of two collections, The Red Box. 



At Radcliffe, Hong will be working on her second volume of sonnets. The Glass Age is informed by two primary images: the hourglass and the glass ceiling/coffin. The first entails notions of linear and cyclical time, while the second concerns the sensing and shattering of invisible, but oddly durable, barriers. A third strand in the collection responds to glass artworks by artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Niki de Saint Phalle.



Hong has published her work in the American Book Review, CUE, Exquisite Corpse, Fairy Tale Review, Gargoyle Magazine, the International Examiner,jubilat, New Orleans Review, Poets & Writers, POOL, Quarterly West, theStranger, and other publications. She is the editor of Growing Up Asian American: An Anthology (William Morrow, 1993) and the recipient of residencies from Djerassi Resident Artists Program and Yaddo. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas and a BA in philosophy from Yale University. She has taught creative writing at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and at the University of Washington Bothell.

Here is an interview with Anna Maria Hong by The Harvard Gazette.
Here is a poem by Anna Maria Hong called "Medea I / Device."

Read more about the Johnson State College Authors Series here.

The Death of Literature?

Over at Lapham's Quarterly, Curtis White explores how the divergence between literature as art and literature as commodity has contributed to the imminent death of both:

As far as I’m concerned, the book business deserves to die if for no other reason than that its business model is something out of the 1930s: send a bunch of loser Willy Loman’s out as “reps,” people who don’t read and don’t understand the books they sell, and have them place the books on consignment, just as if they were old chairs that you were trying to unload at the local consignment store. As far as the bookstores were concerned, they were mostly purchasing decoration for their stores, so that it at least looked like a place to buy books. The few books that actually made money—celebrity memoirs, confessions of failed politicians, moronic self-help tomes, and jokey piss-jobs about not running with scissors—were profitably located on a few tables at the front of the store. Everything else was just ambience.

Bad as this was and remains, the really fatal flaw in this system is that it allows stores to buy new titles not with money but with the return of all the books you sent them months ago that they never sold, and never really had much interest in selling. How could they sell them? No one working in the store read books, and they were no more capable of recommending a challenging literary title than they were of shaping your investment portfolio or diagnosing a kidney complaint. Every few years in the ‘80s and ‘90s, B&N would take some sort of national warehouse purgative and back would come books you thought you’d sold months and years earlier. (I once watched in appalled amazement as two-hundred copies of a backlist title that had only sold maybe five-hundred to begin with was returned by Barnes and Noble five years after it was first released. I had to wonder, did we ever sell any copies of this book?) The best that most of our books could hope for was a short shelf life of four to six months, a single lonely spine out in an acre of shelves and books.

Now even that stupid and insidious racket seems to be failing.

With the death of each new generation of booksellers, each failed “business model,” the independent literary writer/poet/publisher wants to say, “Good riddance, they had it coming,” only to be mortified by how much worse the thing is that takes its place.¹ In ten years, for people raised by computers (and by that I mean everyone), buying a book will mean buying an ebook from Amazon, Google, or maybe Barnes and Noble, if it survives. I asked John O’Brien, the legendary publisher of Dalkey Archive Press, what he thought, and he said this:

The greatest threat to book publishing in the United States right now is Amazon. Through various spin-offs, they have become a publisher, and this means that they are moving towards becoming both a distributor of books and a publisher, and no book publisher will be able to compete. In the future (and I am sure this is the plan) Amazon wants to control all distribution and all publishing. This is a very scary prospect: that a single company will have such power to determine what will be published and on what terms. Once the ‘Amazon plan’ is realized, they will be able to charge whatever they want to charge and will of course be able to decide what the best-sellers will be. They will have gotten themselves into the position of making such decisions because they will be the only game in town.

Even a year ago, O’Brien would have sounded paranoid to most people, but then came this article in the August 17, 2011 edition of the New York Timesbusiness section,“Amazon Set to Publish Pop Author.” 

Amazon moved aggressively Tuesday to fulfill its new ambition to publish books as well as sell them, announcing that it had signed Timothy Ferriss, the wildly popular self-help guru for young men.

Amazon has been publishing books for several years, but its efforts went up several notches in visibility when it brought in the longtime New York editor and agent Laurence Kirshbaum three months ago as head of Amazon Publishing.

To read the rest of White's article, click here . . .