MFA Writers

Siloh Radovsky sits down with Jared to talk about her path from anarchistic activism to experimental writing, the blurry line between fiction and nonfiction, and the joys and pains of teaching in an R1 institution. Siloh Radovsky is a prose writer invested in the overlap between narrative and criticism. A recent graduate of the cross-genre MFA program at UC San Diego, she is currently at work on a collection of linked essays. Her essays, articles, and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Entropy, [PANK], Sundae Theory, Teen Vogue, Inkwell, Alchemy, Identity Theory, and elsewhere. Siloh is also an educator, a collaborator in a narrative medicine intervention with Adolescent and Young Adult cancer patients, and was a founding editor of Kaleidoscoped magazine. She was an artist-in-residence at the Hinge Arts program in spring 2017, and was the recipient of an Evergreen Foundation Activity Grant and a Summer Graduate Teaching Fellowship at UC San Diego. Find her on Instagram @essence_of_toast and her website silohradovsky.net. MFA Writers is hosted by Jared McCormack and produced by Jared McCormack and Hanamori Skoblow. New episodes are released every two weeks. You can find more MFA Writers at MFAwriters.com. This episode was requested by Isabella Neblett and Amy Peltz. Thank you both for listening! BE PART OF THE SHOW — Leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or Podcast Addict. — Submit an episode request. If there’s a program you’d like to learn more about, contact us and we’ll do our very best to find a guest who can speak to their experience. — Apply to be a guest on the show by filling out our application. STAY CONNECTED Twitter: @MFAwriterspod Instagram: @MFAwriterspodcast Facebook: MFA Writers Email: mfawriterspodcast@gmail.com

Gauri Awasthi talks to Jared about how McNeese allowed her to earn an MA and MFA in three years, decolonizing the poetry cannon, and how she first found poems through Bhakti poetry, love poems to the divine. Gauri Awasthi is an Indian poet and environmentalist who recently graduated with an MFA in poetry from McNeese State University. She has won awards from Sundress Academy For The Arts, Louisiana Office of Cultural Development, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and Kundiman. Her writing has been published in Quarterly West, Notre Dame Review, The Punch Magazine, The Wire, Buzzfeed, and others. She teaches the Decolonizing Poetry Workshop at Catapult. MFA Writers is hosted by Jared McCormack and produced by Jared McCormack and Hanamori Skoblow. New episodes are released every two weeks. You can find more MFA Writers at MFAwriters.com. This episode was requested by Shalini Singh. Thank you for listening, Shalini! BE PART OF THE SHOW — Leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or Podcast Addict. — Submit an episode request. If there’s a program you’d like to learn more about, contact us and we’ll do our very best to find a guest who can speak to their experience. — Apply to be a guest on the show by filling out our application. STAY CONNECTED Twitter: @MFAwriterspod Instagram: @MFAwriterspodcast Facebook: MFA Writers Email: mfawriterspodcast@gmail.com

Jared's taking this week off to focus on finishing his thesis, so enjoy this rerelease with Vanessa Chan who recently signed a fabulous deal for two books, THE STORM WE MADE, and THE UGLIEST BABIES IN THE WORLD. Regular programming will resume in two weeks. Do we write because we understand or do we write to reach understanding? Jared and Vanessa Chan of The New School unpack this question. Along the way, they discuss writing about home while living in a foreign country, the long arm of colonialism, and the pros and cons of studying in the literary capital of the world. Vanessa Chan is a Malaysian writer who writes about race, colonization, and women who don't toe the line. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published or are forthcoming in Electric Literature, Conjunctions, The Rumpus, Pidgeonholes, Porter House Review, and more. Vanessa is a Fiction Editor at TriQuarterly Magazine, an Assistant Fiction Editor at Pithead Chapel, and an MFA candidate in fiction at The New School, class of 2021. This follows a 12-year career in public relations, including most recently as director of communications for Facebook in California. Her writing has received support from Tin House, Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, Aspen Words, and Disquiet International. She can be found at her website vanessajchan.com or on Twitter @vanjchan. MFA Writers is hosted by Jared McCormack and produced by Jared McCormack and Hanamori Skoblow. New episodes are released every two weeks. You can find more MFA Writers at MFAwriters.com. BE PART OF THE SHOW — Leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or Podcast Addict. — Submit an episode request. If there’s a program you’d like to learn more about, contact us and we’ll do our very best to find a guest who can speak to their experience. — Apply to be a guest on the show by filling out our application. STAY CONNECTED Twitter: @MFAwriterspod Instagram: @MFAwriterspodcast Facebook: MFA Writers Email: mfawriterspodcast@gmail.com

How does a creative writing PhD compare to an MFA? Erin Slaughter talks to Jared about the focus on professionalization in her doctoral program at Florida State University compared to the exploration and experimentation she found as part of the inaugural cohort of the Western Kentucky University MFA program. Along the way, she discusses her many experiences in the publishing industry and offers advice for emerging writers to demystify the submission process. Erin Slaughter is the author of A Manual for How to Love Us, short fiction forthcoming from Harper Perennial in 2023, and two books of poetry: The Sorrow Festival (CLASH Books, forthcoming 2022) and I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun (New Rivers Press, 2019). She is editor/co-founder of The Hunger, and her fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and hybrid writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, CRAFT, Slice, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Western Kentucky University and is a PhD candidate at Florida State University, where she teaches creative writing courses and co-hosts the Jerome Stern Reading Series. Find her at her website erin-slaughter.com and on Twitter @erinslaughter23. MFA Writers is hosted by Jared McCormack and produced by Jared McCormack and Hanamori Skoblow. New episodes are released every two weeks. You can find more MFA Writers at MFAwriters.com. This episode was requested by Rajiv Thind. Thank you for listening, Rajiv! BE PART OF THE SHOW — Leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or Podcast Addict. — Submit an episode request. If there’s a program you’d like to learn more about, contact us and we’ll do our very best to find a guest who can speak to their experience. — Apply to be a guest on the show by filling out our application. STAY CONNECTED Twitter: @MFAwriterspod Instagram: @MFAwriterspodcast Facebook: MFA Writers Email: mfawriterspodcast@gmail.com

Chibuihe Obi Achimba sits down with Jared to talk about the anguish and extreme joy of transferring a poem from imagination to language, using writing to explore the impacts and losses of modernization and civil war in his home country of Nigeria, and the necessary balance between encouraging independence and fostering community in an MFA program. Chibuihe Obi Achimba grew up in southeastern Nigeria. He's a poet and essayist completing his MFA in Poetry at Brown University. Chibuihe's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Harvard Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. He is the Founding-Editor of Dgëku Magazine. He was awarded the 2021 St. Botolph Foundation grant and the 2021 Frontier Poetry Prize for New Poets. Find him at his website www.chibuihe.com. MFA Writers is hosted by Jared McCormack and produced by Jared McCormack and Hanamori Skoblow. New episodes are released every two weeks. You can find more MFA Writers at MFAwriters.com. This episode was requested by Shlagha Borah, Erika Walsh, Amy Peltz, James Jackson, and Sebastian. Thank you all for listening! BE PART OF THE SHOW — Leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or Podcast Addict. — Submit an episode request. If there’s a program you’d like to learn more about, contact us and we’ll do our very best to find a guest who can speak to their experience. — Apply to be a guest on the show by filling out our application. STAY CONNECTED Twitter: @MFAwriterspod Instagram: @MFAwriterspodcast Facebook: MFA Writers Email: mfawriterspodcast@gmail.com

Over the last ten years, Katie M. Zeigler filled out an MFA application six times and never submitted. Now in her second year at St. Mary’s College of California, she talks to Jared about pursuing her MFA 25 years after finishing her Masters, her program’s emphasis on the business of writing, and crafting a novel about caregiving, dementia, and the sandwich generation. Katie M. Zeigler is a second-year Fiction student in the MFA program at St. Mary's College of California. Before the MFA, she got a BA and an MA in English Literature from Stanford University. Her short fiction and nonfiction have been published in Stonecoast Review, Fish Anthology, The Centifictionist, Griffel, Digging, and Stanford Magazine, and she was recently featured on the podcast, In Short. Visit her at katiemzeigler.com and on Twitter @katiemzeigler. MFA Writers is hosted by Jared McCormack and produced by Jared McCormack and Hanamori Skoblow. New episodes are released every two weeks. You can find more MFA Writers at MFAwriters.com. BE PART OF THE SHOW — Leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or Podcast Addict. — Submit an episode request. If there’s a program you’d like to learn more about, contact us and we’ll do our very best to find a guest who can speak to their experience. — Apply to be a guest on the show by filling out our application. STAY CONNECTED Twitter: @MFAwriterspod Instagram: @MFAwriterspodcast Facebook: MFA Writers Email: mfawriterspodcast@gmail.com

Poet Gabrielle Grace Hogan of the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin talks with Jared about using images to find theme in poetry, giving ourselves permission to write about happiness, and improving lesbian representation in the literary world. Along the way, they break down the similarities and differences between the New Writers Project and its sister program, the Michener Center for Writers. Gabrielle is a poet in her third and final year of the New Writers Project MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. She’s been published in the Academy of American Poets, Nashville Review, Salt Hill, CutBank, Foglifter, Peach Mag, and many other places. She has served as the Poetry Editor of Bat City Review, and Co-Editor of the online anthology You Flower / You Feast. Her debut chapbook Soft Obliteration is available from Ghost City Press. MFA Writers is hosted by Jared McCormack and produced by Jared McCormack and Hanamori Skoblow. New episodes are released every two weeks. You can find more MFA Writers at MFAwriters.com. BE PART OF THE SHOW — Leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or Podcast Addict. — Submit an episode request. If there’s a program you’d like to learn more about, contact us and we’ll do our very best to find a guest who can speak to their experience. — Apply to be a guest on the show by filling out our application. STAY CONNECTED Twitter: @MFAwriterspod Instagram: @MFAwriterspodcast Facebook: MFA Writers Email: mfawriterspodcast@gmail.com

Jared sits down with author and Syracuse Professor George Saunders to discuss his advice for new and prospective MFA students, the value of trusting your writing intuition, the best (and worst) kind of workshop feedback, and how Saunders is creating community through discussions of craft, life, and process in his new project, Story Club. George Saunders is the author of eleven books including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize,  and most recently, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. He studied in the creative writing program at Syracuse and later joined the faculty there where he currently teaches as part of their MFA program. His newest project is Story Club, a twice-weekly newsletter hosted on Substack. MFA Writers is hosted by Jared McCormack and produced by Jared McCormack and Hanamori Skoblow. New episodes are released every two weeks. You can find more MFA Writers at MFAwriters.com. BE PART OF THE SHOW — Leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or Podcast Addict. — Submit an episode request. If there’s a program you’d like to learn more about, contact us and we’ll do our very best to find a guest who can speak to their experience. STAY CONNECTED Twitter: @MFAwriterspod Instagram: @MFAwriterspodcast Facebook: MFA Writers Email: mfawriterspodcast@gmail.com

With a background in cinema, Jason Rodriguez of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago sits down with Jared to talk about how film influences his poetry. They unpack how Jason captures movement in visual poems, how the bombardment of media and pandemic isolation influence his work, and how he found an MFA program that allows him to investigate all areas of writing without confinement to a single track. Jason Rodriguez is a second-year MFA in Writing student focusing on design, interactivity, and poetry at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He’s been a producer on the school’s podcast, SAIC Beat, for the last three seasons. He was an Assistant Poetry Editor for the journal ANMLY and recently worked on a queer/sci-fi stop-motion short film titled Mother Bunker, which played at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Outfest, and Melbourne International Film Festival. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in BathHouse Journal, GlitterMOB, Mannequin Haus, Word For/Word, and Gasher, and was included as the introduction to Michael Aurelio’s poetry collection, The Smokers (2019). Find him on Instagram @freefloppydisk. MFA Writers is hosted by Jared McCormack and produced by Jared McCormack and Hanamori Skoblow. New episodes are released every two weeks. You can find more MFA Writers at MFAwriters.com. This episode was requested by De’Andre Holmes. Thank you for listening, De’Andre! BE PART OF THE SHOW — Leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or Podcast Addict. — Submit an episode request. If there’s a program you’d like to learn more about, contact us and we’ll do our very best to find a guest who can speak to their experience. STAY CONNECTED Twitter: @MFAwriterspod Instagram: @MFAwriterspodcast Facebook: MFA Writers Email: mfawriterspodcast@gmail.com

The podcast team is on vacation (re: staycation)! Enjoy one of our favorite episodes from the earliest days of the show. Regular programming will resume in two weeks. Can writing be a form of protest? And if so, is there room for hope? Jared sits down with Marcus Jamison of the University of South Carolina to talk about Confederate monuments and economic justice, as well as finding solace in writing and crafting poetry after our literary heroes. Marcus Jamison is a poet and scholar from Hamlet, North Carolina. He is in his final year as an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of South Carolina, where he served as a senior editor for Yemassee Journal. His poems have appeared in Barely South Review and Quarterly West, as the 2017 winner of an AWP Intro Journals Award. He has also been a finalist for the Scotti Merrill Award and for 92Y's Discovery Poetry Contest. A fellow of The Watering Hole, he is also an avid fiction and nonfiction writer. He can be found on Twitter @theRarePoet. BE PART OF THE SHOW — Leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or Podcast Addict. — Submit an episode request. If there’s a program you’d like to learn more about, contact us and we’ll do our very best to find a guest who can speak to their experience. STAY CONNECTED Twitter: @MFAwriterspod Instagram: @MFAwriterspodcast Facebook: MFA Writers Email: mfawriterspodcast@gmail.com