When I’m back staying with my parents—usually on school breaks or work breaks or what have you—I end up working at the restaurant that I’ve been at for years. During this most recent little break, at the end of May, I was chatting with some regulars that have seen me come and go for almost… Continue reading Reasons To Go Out On A Limb (Alternately: Pursuing an MFA)
This semester, I took Forms in Fiction with Garnett Kilberg-Cohen. You may be thinking to yourself, There goes poet Gillian, prose-ing around like she’s frolicking through a meadow! Way to experiment! My Forms in Fiction class this semester was all about studying the textures in the genre of fiction, and so we looked at hybrid… Continue reading A Poet in Prose Land
I teach Writing and Rhetoric II to seventeen art school kids. Pretty much all I do is use extensive metaphors to explain somewhat simple points. The metaphors make things far more complicated, albeit far more memorable. I use a lot of PowerPoints to keep me from embarking on stream-of-consciousness lectures, a la Virginia Woolf. The… Continue reading Eight Thoughts About Teaching College Kids
For the next two months we'll be asking some of our first year contributors to talk about the post application period and how they dealt with it last year. What did you do to get through the post application period? During the post-application period, I wrote in my journal a lot about my anxieties of not getting… Continue reading So You’re Waiting to Hear Back from MFA Programs: Post Application Advice With Gillian Douple
When I first set foot on my Project-Based Poetics class, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this craft seminar. There were six of us in the class, and the professor was young and bearded and enthusiastic. As my first class in a new school, I took a seat around the circular table in our classroom and… Continue reading A Love Letter to My Craft Seminar
