Archive

It’s another dinner at VCCA, with four round tables filled with artist chatter, people getting up and down for seconds or dessert, and miraculously this evening–wine on every table. [...]

I gave a guest lecture at Sweet Briar College last week to two classrooms of freshman English students. Or maybe I should say freshwomen, since it is, after all, an all-girls school. In either [...]

And so they leave: Goodbye Mark. Goodbye Sharon. Goodbye Ronit, Martha, Belle. Goodbye dear poet Marjorie. But hello! Hello Conrad Hilberry, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Masha Hamilton, and (OMG!) Alice [...]

{Part 1 and Part 2 of this essay were published last week.}  For the first time since I began writing fiction (in 2008), I’m allowing sentences like this one: “It made him want another [...]

News Flash: THE CLAW and I were featured on “View from the Keyboard” this week!  I began by studying Lorraine Adams’ latest collection of interconnected short stories, The Room [...]

To be fair, it started in August. I received feedback from two literary agents that even though the writing in my war manuscript was strong and “you’re obviously a talented [...]

Ingrid Floss is a VCCA Fellow on exchange from Munich, Germany. She’s an abstract painter who uses acrylic and oil on canvas in bold, layered swatches of color. Walking into her studio [...]

Some mornings, it feels like Mount San Angelo (the knoll VCCA sits on top of) is all tucked in, artists still asleep in the Fellows Residence and the starlings not even rustling yet. As in Texas, [...]

Across the courtyard from me there’s a writer with a Pushcart Prize. Two walls over? A national bestselling memoirist with a contract for book two with Scribner. At dinner? Poets with more [...]

The starlings are migrating south by the thousands and each sunrise and sunset, hundreds of them alight on the trees and silos here at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Walking from the [...]