MFA Writers

Pod's out for summer! We wrapped up Season 2 on our last episode and are busy planning Season 3. In the meantime, enjoy one of our favorite episodes from this past season. We’ll be back in August with brand new episodes. 

Jared talks to O. Henry Prize winner Adachioma Ezeano of the University of Kentucky about finding her love of literature through Nigerian novels and folktales, learning craft from strong women, and workshopping without the gag order in favor of Crystal Wilkinson’s wild card critique musings.

Adachioma Ezeano is a 2021 O. Henry Prize recipient. She is a second-year fiction candidate in the MFA program at University of Kentucky. She is an alum of Purple Hibiscus Workshop. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in McSweeney's Quarterly, Flashback Fiction, Isele Magazine, Best Small Fictions 2020, and The Best Short Stories 2021. She is Igbo, from Nigeria, and worked with First Bank Nigeria before moving to Kentucky for her MFA. She tweets @adachiomaezeano.

MFA Writers is hosted by Jared McCormack and produced by Jared McCormack and Hanamori Skoblow. New episodes are released every two weeks. You can find more MFA Writers at MFAwriters.com.

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On the season 2 finale, Taylor Byas talks to Jared about how her fiction background helps her develop sharp images and accessible lines in her poetry while her poetic knowledge taught her to take more risks in her fiction. She also describes the value of a social media writing community (and how to build one), whether publishing success eliminates imposter syndrome (spoiler: it does not), and how her scholarly studies in her PhD program inform and enrich her creative work (and how to survive the comprehensive exam). MFA Writers will be back in your airwaves in August. Wishing you all a great summer, dear friends, and thank you for listening.

Taylor Byas is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is now a PhD candidate and Yates scholar at the University of Cincinnati, and an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus. She is the 1st place winner of the 2020 Poetry Super Highway, the 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets Contests, the 2021 Adrienne Rich Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the 2020 Frontier OPEN Prize. She is the author of the chapbook Bloodwarm from Variant Lit, a second chapbook, Shutter, from Madhouse Press, and her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in Spring of 2023. She is represented by Rena Rossner of the Deborah Harris Agency. Find her at her website www.taylorbyas.com and on Twitter @TaylorByas3.

MFA Writers is hosted by Jared McCormack and produced by Jared McCormack and Hanamori Skoblow. New episodes are released every two weeks. You can find more MFA Writers at MFAwriters.com.

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Luna Adler talks to Jared about moving between fiction and non-fiction, Brooklyn College’s unique novel-writing workshop aimed at accommodating the long form, the tension between a slow revision process and rapid MFA deadlines, and the benefit in recording one’s writing time while allowing grace for a broad definition of writing time that may or may not include thinking time.

Luna Adler is a Brooklyn-based writer and illustrator. She’s currently an MFA candidate in fiction at Brooklyn College, where she was a recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship. She is a fiction editor for The Brooklyn Review and a reader for Pigeon Pages. Her words, art, and comics have appeared or are forthcoming in Bon Appétit, Bust Magazine, Interview Magazine, Literary Hub, Gossamer, Autostraddle, Electric Literature, Backpacker Magazine, The Rumpus, The Belladonna Comedy, Hobart Pulp, and Lux Magazine, among others. Find her on Instagram @lunaadler or at lunaadler.com, where you can subscribe to her illustrated newsletter.

MFA Writers is hosted by Jared McCormack and produced by Jared McCormack and Hanamori Skoblow. New episodes are released every two weeks. You can find more MFA Writers at MFAwriters.com.

This episode was requested by Marcia Bronstein. Thank you for listening, Marcia!

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Taylor Sklenar of Iowa State University’s MFA in Creative Writing and the Environment talks with Jared about how growing up in a small town influenced his interests in chemistry and theatre, combining those interests in the MFA, and the myriad considerations that go into writing for the stage. Along the way, they talk about the many unique opportunities at ISU, including editing the Flyway Journal, running the Emerging Writers Reading Series, participating in political action through the EcoTheatre Lab, maintaining the Everett Casey Nature Reserve, and going on writer’s retreats to Lake Okoboji.

Taylor Sklenar is a playwright, poet, and theatre artist pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing and the Environment and MS in Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. He received an MA in Theatre from the University of Missouri, Columbia. His writing has been workshopped or produced at Tallgrass Theatre’s Iowa Playwrights’ Workshop, StageWest Des Moines’ Scriptease, Theatre Cedar Rapids, and many other places. His most recent collaboration, Alice in Quarantine: a Drive-Through Adventure, is published with Next State Press.

MFA Writers is hosted by Jared McCormack and produced by Jared McCormack and Hanamori Skoblow. New episodes are released every two weeks. You can find more MFA Writers at MFAwriters.com.

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On this episode, James Craig Hartz Jr., a Combat Medic turned MFA graduate, tells Jared about flipping the traditional military homecoming story into one filled with resilience, hope, and hard-won healing. He also discusses the role of mythology in modern fiction, the criticality of OSU’s graduate student union for pay and benefits, and his experience of concentrated solitude and intentional boredom at a graduate student writing retreat in the Oregon woods.

James Craig Hartz Jr. earned his MFA in fiction from Oregon State University after serving four years in the US Army as a Combat Medic. His writing has appeared in Witness Magazine, the tiny journal, F(r)iction, and Watershed Review. His fiction has been nominated for Best American Short Stories and he is the winner of Witness Magazine’s 2022 Literary Award in Nonfiction and the tiny journal's "(re)tell me a story contest.” Find him on Twitter @jchartz2 and at his website: www.jamescraighartzjr.com.

MFA Writers is hosted by Jared McCormack and produced by Jared McCormack and Hanamori Skoblow. New episodes are released every two weeks. You can find more MFA Writers at MFAwriters.com.

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Siloh Radovsky sits down with Jared to talk about her path from anarchistic activism to experimental writing, the blurry line between fiction and nonfiction, and the joys and pains of teaching in an R1 institution.

Siloh Radovsky is a prose writer invested in the overlap between narrative and criticism. A recent graduate of the cross-genre MFA program at UC San Diego, she is currently at work on a collection of linked essays. Her essays, articles, and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Entropy, [PANK], Sundae Theory, Teen Vogue, Inkwell, Alchemy, Identity Theory, and elsewhere. Siloh is also an educator, a collaborator in a narrative medicine intervention with Adolescent and Young Adult cancer patients, and was a founding editor of Kaleidoscoped magazine. She was an artist-in-residence at the Hinge Arts program in spring 2017, and was the recipient of an Evergreen Foundation Activity Grant and a Summer Graduate Teaching Fellowship at UC San Diego. Find her on Instagram @essence_of_toast and her website silohradovsky.net.

MFA Writers is hosted by Jared McCormack and produced by Jared McCormack and Hanamori Skoblow. New episodes are released every two weeks. You can find more MFA Writers at MFAwriters.com.

This episode was requested by Isabella Neblett and Amy Peltz. Thank you both for listening!

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Gauri Awasthi talks to Jared about how McNeese allowed her to earn an MA and MFA in three years, decolonizing the poetry cannon, and how she first found poems through Bhakti poetry, love poems to the divine.

Gauri Awasthi is an Indian poet and environmentalist who recently graduated with an MFA in poetry from McNeese State University. She has won awards from Sundress Academy For The Arts, Louisiana Office of Cultural Development, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and Kundiman. Her writing has been published in Quarterly West, Notre Dame Review, The Punch Magazine, The Wire, Buzzfeed, and others. She teaches the Decolonizing Poetry Workshop at Catapult.

MFA Writers is hosted by Jared McCormack and produced by Jared McCormack and Hanamori Skoblow. New episodes are released every two weeks. You can find more MFA Writers at MFAwriters.com.

This episode was requested by Shalini Singh. Thank you for listening, Shalini!

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Jared's taking this week off to focus on finishing his thesis, so enjoy this rerelease with Vanessa Chan who recently signed a fabulous deal for two books, THE STORM WE MADE, and THE UGLIEST BABIES IN THE WORLD. Regular programming will resume in two weeks.

Do we write because we understand or do we write to reach understanding? Jared and Vanessa Chan of The New School unpack this question. Along the way, they discuss writing about home while living in a foreign country, the long arm of colonialism, and the pros and cons of studying in the literary capital of the world.

Vanessa Chan is a Malaysian writer who writes about race, colonization, and women who don't toe the line. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published or are forthcoming in Electric Literature, Conjunctions, The Rumpus, Pidgeonholes, Porter House Review, and more. Vanessa is a Fiction Editor at TriQuarterly Magazine, an Assistant Fiction Editor at Pithead Chapel, and an MFA candidate in fiction at The New School, class of 2021. This follows a 12-year career in public relations, including most recently as director of communications for Facebook in California. Her writing has received support from Tin House, Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, Aspen Words, and Disquiet International. She can be found at her website vanessajchan.com or on Twitter @vanjchan.

MFA Writers is hosted by Jared McCormack and produced by Jared McCormack and Hanamori Skoblow. New episodes are released every two weeks. You can find more MFA Writers at MFAwriters.com.

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How does a creative writing PhD compare to an MFA? Erin Slaughter talks to Jared about the focus on professionalization in her doctoral program at Florida State University compared to the exploration and experimentation she found as part of the inaugural cohort of the Western Kentucky University MFA program. Along the way, she discusses her many experiences in the publishing industry and offers advice for emerging writers to demystify the submission process.

Erin Slaughter is the author of A Manual for How to Love Us, short fiction forthcoming from Harper Perennial in 2023, and two books of poetry: The Sorrow Festival (CLASH Books, forthcoming 2022) and I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun (New Rivers Press, 2019). She is editor/co-founder of The Hunger, and her fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and hybrid writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, CRAFT, Slice, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Western Kentucky University and is a PhD candidate at Florida State University, where she teaches creative writing courses and co-hosts the Jerome Stern Reading Series. Find her at her website erin-slaughter.com and on Twitter @erinslaughter23.

MFA Writers is hosted by Jared McCormack and produced by Jared McCormack and Hanamori Skoblow. New episodes are released every two weeks. You can find more MFA Writers at MFAwriters.com.

This episode was requested by Rajiv Thind. Thank you for listening, Rajiv!

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Chibuihe Obi Achimba sits down with Jared to talk about the anguish and extreme joy of transferring a poem from imagination to language, using writing to explore the impacts and losses of modernization and civil war in his home country of Nigeria, and the necessary balance between encouraging independence and fostering community in an MFA program.

Chibuihe Obi Achimba grew up in southeastern Nigeria. He's a poet and essayist completing his MFA in Poetry at Brown University. Chibuihe's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Harvard Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. He is the Founding-Editor of Dgëku Magazine. He was awarded the 2021 St. Botolph Foundation grant and the 2021 Frontier Poetry Prize for New Poets. Find him at his website www.chibuihe.com.

MFA Writers is hosted by Jared McCormack and produced by Jared McCormack and Hanamori Skoblow. New episodes are released every two weeks. You can find more MFA Writers at MFAwriters.com.

This episode was requested by Shlagha Borah, Erika Walsh, Amy Peltz, James Jackson, and Sebastian. Thank you all for listening!

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