Leaving Cincinnati, Leaving Home

The first time I visited Pittsburgh, it felt larger yet more compact than Cincinnati. I spent the night sobbing in my hotel room with a bottle of wine (which you can’t even buy at a grocery store!).

Pittsburgh (where I was moving in August to start an MFA program) was overwhelming for many reasons: it was too big, too foreign, too not-Cincinnati.

Speaking As A Student: How Valuable is my Voice?

When I started writing stories, at perhaps seven or eight, I never lacked any confidence in my choice of subject matter. Comic books about superhero penguins, page-long stories about gremlins in the garden, copyright-infringing narratives about Bugs Bunny. These ideas were not ground-breaking,

How to Defend Your MFA: The Hairdresser’s Line of Inquiry

I was having my hair cut recently in my home town in the English countryside, enjoying a break from the perpetual motion machine of New York. Not a terribly interesting thing in itself, but when you’re in the summer bridging your two-year MFA program, with your thesis relentlessly vying for your attention, any moments in which you can sit and relax are worth noting. So there I was, happily trapped at the mercy of the hairdresser, trying to look uninteresting enough to avoid conversation, when:

“So what do you do?” she asks innocently.