Tag Archives: Alumni Conference

A Single Dispatch from Wally Camp, AKA the Walking Stick* Hereafter, Mt. Holyoke College, 2026

It is Saturday morning. I’m at a tall table in a kind of lounge area inside the Kendade Science Hall on the campus of Mt. Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, and I am living the paradox of finding solitude in community, writing with some of my fellow alumni friends in relative silence in thisContinue reading “A Single Dispatch from Wally Camp, AKA the Walking Stick* Hereafter, Mt. Holyoke College, 2026”

#814: Walking to Breakfast with Mark

for Mark Solomon He had written a note to a friend,inviting her to tonight’s reading on the occasion of being back after a two-year absence from this annual conferenceof alumni from the Warren WilsonMFA Program for Writers. He wrote to her about how he felt to be reunited with his fellow“Wallies.” Mark graduatedfrom the programContinue reading “#814: Walking to Breakfast with Mark”

Dispatches from Writer’s Camp: All Good Things. . .

Our time together had come to a close and I was alone in the dorm where we stayed at Macalester College for the annual Warren Wilson MFA Alumni Conference. It was strange, that quiet, after all that activity, after all that brilliant conversation, after the nightly readings and daily classes, the meals together three timesContinue reading “Dispatches from Writer’s Camp: All Good Things. . .”

Dispatches from Writer’s Camp: Countdown T-Minus a Day and Some Change

I’ve got plane tickets, I’ve got plane snacks, I’ve got a new Moleskine notebook, I’ve got the new album by GLASYS, I’ve printed and practiced my reading, I’ve chosen some poems for morning meditation, I’ve packed my copies of Monster Talk, I got a tooth crowned, I got my hair cut, I got a copyContinue reading “Dispatches from Writer’s Camp: Countdown T-Minus a Day and Some Change”

Dispatches from Writer’s Camp: Generative Muscles

I began this blog post on the first full day of Writer’s Camp surrounded by writers in a quick half an hour session of generative writing practice–the large group version of what fellow camper Lauren Yaffe calls a writing buddy system: two or three or more people sit down in a room or at aContinue reading “Dispatches from Writer’s Camp: Generative Muscles”

Dispatches from Writer’s Camp: The Sermon on the Mount Holyoke

Blessed are the writers who have arrived at Mount Holyoke College to participate in the 2017 Warren Wilson MFA Program Alumni Conference, for they are lucky bastards, and I feel truly blessed and lucky to be here among them. Blessed is the writer who takes the red-eye flight out of Portland at midnight, sleeps throughContinue reading “Dispatches from Writer’s Camp: The Sermon on the Mount Holyoke”