An Inquiry of Place
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.
It seems a widely agreed upon fact that to be a good writer one must also read well. Fine.
When I started the MFA program at William Paterson University, I had never been in a workshop before.
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,