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”
Tag Archives: community
#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”
We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Program to Reflect on the Gift of Writing Away from Home.
You may well wonder: Michael Jarmer, Writer Guy, why haven’t you been working on new fiction? And the answer to that question, in short, is that, since October of 2025, I have been somewhat distracted by another project, the one in which I write a poem-like-thing almost daily in response to the self-imposed challenge ofContinue reading “We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Program to Reflect on the Gift of Writing Away from Home.”
Feeling the Love: A Post Wally Camp Dispatch
I got home from Wally Camp on Saturday with the worst lower back pain I’ve experienced in some time. I mean, up until this morning I could barely put on my own damn socks. Partly the result of sleeping in the dorm at Macalester College on a mattress that felt like it had rocks insideContinue reading “Feeling the Love: A Post Wally Camp Dispatch”
Writing in a Zoom Room with Friends
If there is anything I miss about teaching during the pandemic school shutdown, it’s sitting virtually with a group of human beings I care about, in absolute silence, and in the comfort of my home, while every student in the Zoom Room writes. A silent classroom, no doubt, is better, because not only could youContinue reading “Writing in a Zoom Room with Friends”
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. . .”
#346: I Drove Through the Desert and Back Over a Mountain to Get Home
I drove for three hours, through the desert and back over a mountain, to get home. Listening to XTC the whole way, I felt every twenty minutes or so tears of gratitude welling up, which I staved off, because I was driving at sixty-five miles per hour and singing along to every single song, neitherContinue reading “#346: I Drove Through the Desert and Back Over a Mountain to Get Home”
#344: I Drove Over the Mountain to Get Here
I drove over the mountain to get here. I drove over Mount Hood. I drove over the mountain into the desert. Eventually, I ended up close to three other mountains, the ones we call The Sisters. I drove over the mountain to get here. This is the place where I will try to help peopleContinue reading “#344: I Drove Over the Mountain to Get Here”
A Single Dispatch After the AWP Conference
Oh my god, after three days of the kind of intensity that only a conference of thousands of creative writers under one roof could generate, I am spent. And yet, at 4:30 on Saturday, as I walk away from the Oregon Convention Center at the end of my last session at the Association for WritersContinue reading “A Single Dispatch After the AWP Conference”
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”
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