Returning to My MFA Program, A Playlist of the Week's Best New Albums, and more

A playlist of the week's best new albums, interviews with Sarah Rose Etter & Lauren Groff, an excerpt from Laura Picklesimer’s debut novel, new music from Mitski & Sarah Mary Chadwick, and more

Late last month, my MFA program at the New School resumed. A year away made me think about my writing goals and how they have changed since I started graduate classes.

When I entered the program in the fall of 2021, my goal was to work on a memoir and build up my own writing in both form and practice. After presenting the first two segments of the work-in-progress, I soon recognized that longform pieces are not always the best choices for an Iowa-style workshop. I concentrated on essays for the rest of the year, honing my craft on the shorter form while focusing on the memoir outside of class with my writing group.

I took last year off to work on the memoir, to spend my time writing one project. I also reflected on why I entered the MFA program. Originally I was focused on my own writing, which was selfish, I didn’t realize how much I would learn from others in workshop and the literary seminars. I now want to interface with writers beyond my writing group, to read the work of emerging writers and be infused with their opinions and criticism.

This fall I returned to class. The workshop has been enlightening. My cohort is diverse in age and experience, and has already brought a refreshing variety of prose to discuss. I turned in my first submission this week, and have already received feedback and constructive criticism that makes me think not only about my own writing, but everything I read. Reading others’ pieces (and the feedback they have received from the class) has the same effect.

The program is making me a stronger reader as well as writer.

Did you get an MFA in creative writing? An MFA in another specialty? Why did you enter the program? Were your expectations met?

A Playlist of the Week’s Best New Albums (96 songs, 5 hours and 58 minutes)

This week’s new music includes albums from Mitski, Vagabon, Sarah Mary Chadwick, Nation of Language, Woods, Worriers, Explosions in the Sky, plus much more.

Largehearted Likes:

1. The NYPL’s list of cookbooks that celebrate Latin & Hispanic culture through food

2. A writing happy hour

   If only I didn’t have writing workshop on Tuesday nights…

3. A leafblower

   I never thought I would ever use a leafblower for my Brooklyn backyard, but with a huge oak tree growing next door, our yard is covered in acorns and leaves most of the late summer and fall. My partner bought a leafblower this week to help keep the backyard neater, and thirty minutes of sweeping is now five minutes of leafblowing and twenty-five minutes of reading and beer-sipping. Everybody wins.

Largehearted Links

1. An excerpt from Laura Picklesimer’s brilliant debut novel, Kill for Love

2. Floating Points on working with Pharaoh Sanders on his album, Promises
   Four years after Shepherd and Sanders convened at a converted two-storey house in LA to begin work on Promises, Shepherd has decided to talk about it for the first time, as he prepares a single live performance of the album at the Hollywood Bowl. “Hearing Pharoah merely breathe through his saxophone feels like a portal into his soul,” Shepherd says, calling the instrument “this weird black hole that you can teleport through, into the lungs of the player”.

3. Electric Literature’s recommended literary podcasts for readers & writers

4. Essential hip-hop books

5. Sarah Rose Etter’s interview with The Creative Independent
   I always think it’s the first sentence. That’s something they talk a lot about in movies, that the central conflict is usually introduced in the first three to five minutes—and a book feels similar for me. The first sentence has to hold a whole world in it. If a sentence feels like something I can chew on or that might be loaded enough to open that door up, then I usually know that I’m cooking with something.

6. Pitchfork’s list of essential fall albums

7. Ilana Masad
   recommended books of craft at
   The Biblioracle Recommends
   .

8. Author & musician Geoff Rickly’s interview with The Creative Independent
   Even when I think about my own life now it sometimes takes on the surreal aspect of the novel I wrote. And it is a novel. It’s not a memoir.

9. Geoff Dyer on Virginia Woolf’s diaries

10. How is climate change affecting music festivals?

11. Lauren Groff interviewed about her new novel and writing historical fiction
    I don’t want to write about cellphones! I don’t want to write about Twitter. I would hate to write about Donald Trump in any form. Just thinking about him makes me sad.

    But I do want to talk about the urgencies of the now, and I think you can do that through historical fiction because history loops, and spirals. There are ways to, slantwise, talk about the great sources of heat and disaster happening now, through a historical lens. The past and the future are always in communication. It’s really just the job of a writer of contemporary historical fiction to find the resonance between the two eras.
    

Last Week’s LHB Feature Posts

Elyssa Maxx Goodman’s playlist for her book Glitter and Concrete

James Reich’s playlist for his novel The Moth for the Star

Josh Barkan’s playlist for his memoir Wonder Travels