It took listening to just one interview with Sheryl Sandberg, author of Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, before I was downloading this blueprint for professional success for women to my e-reader. I devoured it in about twenty-four hours. Sandberg is a contemporary of mine and the...

I didn't always look forward to the AWP (Association of Writer's and Writing Programs) Conference each spring. In fact, AWP used to scare me a little and it took me a long time to feel comfortable there. As a college writing teacher I cut my teeth on what...

This past weekend I had the honor of judging work for the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, a prestigious 90-year-old program for identifying young artists whose alumni include Truman Capote, Sylvia Plath and Joyce Carol Oates. I am pleased to report that the future of American fiction looks...

In his 1999 New Yorker article later reprinted in The Tipping Point, "Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg," Malcolm Gladwell offers this Chicago cultural diva as the epitome of a "connector," someone whose uncanny "ability to span many different worlds is a function of something intrinsic to their personality, some combination...

Almost from the moment I stepped into the classroom twenty years ago, as a teaching assistant in the George Mason University M.F.A. Program, I knew I wanted to teach. I loved being in a classroom with college students, even though at the time most of them were only a few...

True Story. Years ago as a young, untenured faculty member I was commiserating on the academic life with a senior colleague who told me that he was so busy during the week he had to come in on Saturdays to clean his office. I may have been a little wet...

If you're trying fit writing into your life, and if you're reading this you probably are, unless you are independently wealthy and have your own domestic staff, there will times when you won't be able to do it. Times when you'll need to be kind to yourself and let it...

The only thing I know for sure about Web. 2.0 and the current state of literary affairs is that it is in constant flux. Until the dust settles, if it ever does, all we can do as writers is hang on for the ride, keep writing and try to keep...

Now that you've decided that you do have what it takes, that you are worthy of taking the time to "live life twice," as Natalie Goldberg tells us writers do, I have a couple of well-worn tips in my arsenal to help make your writing time more productive...

It happens at least once a semester. A student writes me an impassioned note begging me to tell her whether or not she has what it takes to be a writer, imploring me to "stop her right now," if she doesn't. I've been teaching for 20 years and I've yet...

If I've learned anything in the past 40-odd years, it's that anyone, even a relative geek like me, who never once sat at the cool kids' table, whether the table was in the high school cafeteria or at Yaddo, can lead a writing life. You just have to...

It seems to be all about the crush these days -- man crushes, chick crushes, book crushes. When readers talk about their literary crushes, most are referring to characters in fiction. Plenty of articles, especially around Valentine's Day, breathlessly extol the virtues of say Wuthering Heights' Heathcliff or...

Motivated readers can always find time to read, snatching moments in line at the bank or the post office, carving out an hour here or there, after everyone else has gone to bed. Arguably, e-readers make this even easier. But, as my friend, poet Sandy Longhorn observes, writers...

Coauthored by Dianne Donnelly, Dinty Moore, Tim Mayers and Stephanie Vanderslice.

As a group, we represent a large swath of the field, graduate and undergraduate, public and private colleges and universities both large and small. Here, we let readers in on what really happens inside our creative writing programs and...

Recent Pulitzer debacle aside, this May's Poets and Writers magazine feature about writing contests got me thinking about the advice I give my own students about literary competitions. Poets and Writers offers a number of valid reasons why a writer might become a "professional...

As a writer and college professor, I've reached the stage in my career (read: middle age) where students and sometimes junior colleagues ask me for advice. They want answers to the big questions: like how to build a career that allows them to attend to their students without relinquishing their...

Coauthored by Dianne Donnelly, Tim Mayers, Dinty W. Moore, Stephanie Vanderslice

Last month, this group of six creative writers and teachers argued "Creative Writing Can Be Taught" and answered the question "What is Creative Writing Anyway?"
Too often, detractors of creative writing as an academic...

Today is #dayofhighered, a day on which teachers in higher education have been asked to explain what they do, in response to some pretty savage and wholly inaccurate criticism levied by David Levy in The Washington Post recently (Robert Farley offers a great...

John Updike would have been 79 this Sunday. Widely considered one of our greatest writers, when he died of lung cancer in January 2009 the web lit up with tributes, and as I read them I remembered my own John Updike story.

Updike was one of my heroes...

(Note: I teach creative writing to undergraduates and am often approached by students who want to know whether they should get an MFA and how they should go about it if they decide to take the plunge. This is my advice.)

Do I believe the Masters of Fine Arts degree...