Friday, August 3, 2007

Introduction to the George Mason MFA Fiction Blog

Welcome to the fiction blog: "A few years' experience will convince us that those things which at the time they happened we regarded as our greatest misfortunes have proved our greatest blessings."

The primary vision for taking up even more precious space of your ADD-addled brain is to put an end to the historical practice of requiring every new class of MFA fiction students to have to figure out on their own how this writing/student life thing works. By establishing a repository for the experiences and resources of current students and alumni, we hope to create stronger writers, stronger students, and a stronger George Mason MFA fiction program/community (since no one ever leaves the program). We would like to see this blog used in conjuction with the official MFA website, providing more of the informal thoughts and experiences to flesh out the skeleton of the program.

Here are some of the things we could see added to this blog:
  • Stories on how to be a grad student
  • Advice from current and former Mason MFA fiction students
  • Stories/updates about your own writing process
  • George Mason MFA Fiction gossip
  • Contest announcements, including deadlines, how to submit, costs, prizes--extra points if you've submitted to this contest before and have feedback on the process and whether its worthwhile to submit or not
  • Journal information, including submission guidelines, links to journal websites, interesting stories or articles--extra points if you've submitted to this journal before and have feedback on the process
  • Fiction program event announcements
  • Literary reading announcements in the DC area (including roll calls of who is going)
  • MFA Fiction program requirements--what they are, how to meet them, how people have been meeting them
  • Information about what classes to take, favorite professors, what to know before you get to the class
  • Braggings
  • Interviews with alumni, faculty, famous authors, agents
  • Information about agents
  • Information about conferences--and roll calls of who is going to what
  • Your own pieces of fiction (be forewarned - we claim no responsibility to what might happen to your pieces of fiction. You may want to upload it as a PDF file.)
Make sense? Ready to begin? Let's turn the page...

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