When I was applying to fully funded MFA programs for the second time, my strategy was simple: to ignore the rankings as much as possible.
Author: Stephanie Lane S.
Stephanie Lane Sutton, who blogged for The MFA Years from 2016 to 2018, writes poetry, essays, and fiction. Her chapbook of stories, Shiny Insect Sex, was published by Bull City Press in 2019. Her writing has appeared in The Adroit Journal, the Offing, and Black Warrior Review, among others, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and PEN America's Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She has a creative writing MFA in poetry from the University of Miami. Find Stephanie at her website, stephanielanesutton.com.
Letter to Myself a Year Ago
Photo by Gray Malin. Do you remember the ancient summers of your childhood? Our fingers would search the dirt between tree roots for acorns. We found so many with their shells cracked open, waiting to unfurl itself deep into the dirt. This is how it feels to be you. -- You might find this hard… Continue reading Letter to Myself a Year Ago
Spring Break
Photograph by Ron Magill. You can live your whole life in the springs of T. S. Eliot. There, snow fades to street charcoal, ice water soaks through in the seams of your shoes, and the sky remains an unmovable gray as the clock ticks forward an entire hour all at once. But somewhere, on the other… Continue reading Spring Break
In Defense of Actioned Poetics
While it is important to interrogate our motives and impacts when we write, to dismiss any act of writing, but especially poetry, as irrelevant involves both misguided utilitarianism and overgeneralization. Acts of political resistance begin with the imagination. In order to create a more just and equitable world, we must have an idea of how that world may look. Once we have an idea, we must be able to communicate it. Inarguably, revolutionary ideas have been communicated in language throughout history.
Winter Break
When people ask you where you are from, practice a different answer each time. Give the name of a region, an adjacent town, the street you last lived on. Take each place and hold yourself against its light to see where the edges meet. In January, move the writing desk to the other side of… Continue reading Winter Break