My career review presentation can be viewed on Prezi.

A copy of the interview transcript is found below:

 

 

What is the typical length of study as a graduate student?

It varies depending on the program, how quickly a student is able to finish their coursework, how long it takes them to finish their thesis, etc. I’m wrapping up my fourth year, with one left to go, but I have friends who entered the MFA program at the same time I did—or even later!—who are graduating this spring. So it’s possible to finish the MFA program in three years, but it takes a certain degree of monomaniacal focus that I don’t really have, I think. (For one thing, it means taking the comp exam and turning in your thesis the same semester, almost immediately after finishing your coursework, which…yeesh. Good for them if they can pull it off, though.)

This program can offer no more than four years of funding for MFA students, and five years for PhD students—but I didn’t start receiving funding until halfway through my second year, so I’m still covered through next spring.

How many hours per week do you dedicate to your graduate classes? (This may include actual credit hours and/or time spent doing work outside of class.)

It depends on the class, really. For most lit studies classes, we end up reading about a book a week (maybe two weeks for longer books), along with supplementary materials, our own written work, etc. It’s been a couple of years since I was last taking a full load of classes, but I remember it taking…most of my time, honestly, to the point where I was bringing my homework with me to Publix to work on whenever I was off the clock.

How many hours per week do you dedicate towards your undergraduate class? (The class you currently teach.)

This semester I’m just teaching one section of 3150 (Intro to Fiction Writing). I spend an average of…I guess fifteen or sixteen hours a week on class prep and grading, and then two and a half hours actually teaching. We discuss two stories each workshop, and I read each story twice—about an hour apiece each time—before writing my critiques, which can take anywhere from one to two hours apiece to write. So I try to give myself about four hours to focus on each individual story, which adds up to anywhere from fourteen to sixteen hours a week (and then there’s extra time allotted to reading/replying emails, etc.). I also hold about four office hours every week, but honestly, students only rarely show up during my office hours, so it doesn’t really take any more time: that’s just time for me to spend grading or reading Five Points submissions, most weeks.

When I’m teaching a couple of sections of 1101 or 1102, it varies from one week to the next. If I have a batch of papers to grade, that can swallow up most of a week. If I’m in the quiet “grace period” between papers, my workload ends up being pretty light. That only happens a few times a semester, so I try to savor it when I can.

How long have you been teaching undergraduate classes?

I taught my first class, a section of 1102, in the summer of 2014. In total, I’ve taught seven classes so far, including the 3150 class I’m teaching now. The standard T.A. contract involves four classes a year, but I was given a course release this semester (they assign those arbitrarily, I think, when they have enough sections of composition covered for the semester).

 

What do you think is the most rewarding part about teaching? The most challenging?

This is a pretty broad answer, but I really like the process of actually working with students, interacting with them in the classroom (when they’re engaged in the discussion, at least). It’s a great feeling when I’m able to help students reach certain understandings/conclusions about writing—whether it’s composition or fiction. It doesn’t work quite as well when I’m just lecturing about whatever subject matter, but I think I’m pretty good at leading discussions (if/when my students are willing to participate, which isn’t always the case). The most challenging parts are grading and trying to get students engaged on “off” days. Grading is very time-consuming, but that part’s fine: what I find most challenging about it is trying to give quantitative assessments for written work. It always comes down to my own subjective judgment, ultimately, which it took me a while to feel comfortable with. If writing instructors could just give feedback on students’ work rather than needing to assign a grade, that would be ideal—but I understand that that’s not exactly practical, for loads of reasons.

 

What was your process of applying to graduate school?

The first step basically involved trying and failing to find a job with my B.A. in Film and Video, and getting frustrated by working a retail job where I felt undervalued. Then, I started talking with professors and instructors with whom I had always had good relationships as an undergrad—Jim Roberts, Ted Friedman, and Drew Ayers (who has subsequently finished his PhD program, and now teaches in California, I think) in the Film department, and Candace Nadon (same deal, but in Colorado) in Creative Writing—about grad school. I had already taken the GRA as an undergrad, when I was thinking about trying to pursue a Masters in Film, so I had that base covered already. At that point, I honestly didn’t consider any programs other than GSU; I was too accustomed to living in Atlanta, and I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of needing to get used to a whole new city while also getting used to grad school. (At this point, it’s almost the opposite feeling: I’m only really considering PhD programs that are in different regions altogether. As much as I do love Atlanta, I’ve been here for about 25 years now, which is long enough, I think.)

I secured a few letters of recommendation, and worked on revising a few of the stories I had written as an undergrad. That’s basically the most important part of applying to a CW program: your GRA score and recommendations could be outstanding, but that only really matters if they like your creative work in the first place.

What was your process of gaining a fellowship at Georgia State? (I believe this is the right term- in other words: How did you become a professor? What was the process?)

For my first year of grad school, I didn’t have any funding. (They’re only rarely able to offer funding to incoming MFA students, assuming they don’t already have teaching experience.) My second semester, I started volunteering at the front desk in the Writing Studio. It didn’t pay anything, but it helped me get to know a lot of people—students and faculty—in the English Department, and it showed the Writing Studio administrators that I was reliable/committed/etc. The next semester (Fall of 2013), I was able to leverage that experience into a part-time tutoring position in the studio, which in the spring turned into a full-time position (including a tuition waiver and a small stipend). That, in turn, led to my teaching assistantship, which started in the summer of 2014. For each step of this process, I needed to submit an application, etc., but I also don’t think the application would have meant as much if they hadn’t already known me from working in the Studio. It’s a cliché to say this, but networking does matter.

What are some of your future goals and what you plan to do after you receive your degree?

I don’t really know, in the long term. I’m researching PhD programs, hoping to apply to enough of them by the end of the year that at least one of them will accept me. I need to retake the GRA sometime this year. I need to revise a number of my stories and finish the ones I’ve been working on recently—in part for my thesis, but in part so I can send them out and hopefully get a few of them published. (And have a few that I’m happy enough with to include in my applications to PhD programs). I have a few bigger creative projects I’d like to start working on this summer, hopefully—especially if I can figure out a way to make them line up with what I’ve already done for my thesis.

 

When did you decide to become a writer? Who or what inspired you?

I’ve been writing stories since I was a kid—not that I ever want to read any of the stuff I was writing back then! I’m not sure when I decided it was what I wanted to do, exactly. In high school I worked on the staff of the school’s literary journal, and as a (bad) music critic for our online magazine. I don’t know if I thought of it as anything more than a hobby I happened to be pretty good at, though: I was just as interested in film and music at the time. This might still be the case, honestly. I think of art through a pretty interdisciplinary lens, generally; it’s just that I’m better with the written word than I am with a camera or any musical instrument. It wasn’t until relatively late in my undergrad program, when I took a few creative writing classes—3150 with Sheri Joseph and 3160 with Candace Nadon—that I realized I might have more of a knack for fiction than filmmaking. There are fewer layers of technological mediation between the ideas in my head and what ends up on the page: no fumbling around with a camera, no hours spend in the editing room trying to get Final Cut to work for me, etc.

The first writer to ever make a real impact on me back then was Roald Dahl; then, in middle school, probably Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. In high school I got more into film (which I ended up majoring in as an undergrad): David Lynch, the Coen Brothers, Terry Gilliam, eventually Jean-Luc Godard and Jim Jarmusch in college. Comic books, too: Alan Moore, Daniel Clowes, Grant Morrison, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Jim Woodring.

 

Why do you write?

The short version: because I find it necessary in order to learn how to understand myself and the world around me. That sounds pretentious and dumb, probably—but ultimately art is about not only communicating my perspective and ideas to other people, but also trying to figure my perspective and ideas out myself.

What do you think is the most rewarding part about writing? The most challenging?

It’s always exciting to find a connection or a turn of phrase that hadn’t occurred to me before—surprising myself, like, “Wait, this came out of my head?” The most challenging part is that it can be extremely time-consuming; you never know how long it’ll take to get from one point in a story to the next, or how much work you’ll need to put in for the ideas to really make sense to other people. Other frustrations include: rejection letters and the lack of financial compensation for stories that often take dozens of hours of labor to put together. (This is what teaching jobs are for, really, and I guess money’s only important inasmuch as I need it to stay alive.)

Describe your writing process (if you follow a certain process).

It varies, really. Most stories start with spontaneous observations and ideas, then extrapolating outward—or, if I have a couple of ideas that feel like they might resonate with one another, trying to figure out why I think they resonate. Beyond that, it’s hard to say I have one definitive process. Usually I have a few scenes in mind for a story, and once I’m done writing the first one, I try to figure out the most efficient and interesting way to connect it to my other scene ideas.

Do you believe that digital technologies help or hinder writing and the writing process?

That depends on the writer, I guess. I get easily distracted by the internet—I had to deactivate my Twitter account for a while when I was studying for comps, for instance—so in that sense, it’s sort of a hindrance for me. With that said, social media allows for a lot of networking opportunities (ugggghhhh) and it makes it a lot easier to get your work published. This leads in turn to the problem of oversaturation, though: it’s easier to submit stories to journals, but there are also so many journals that there’s no real guarantee of many people seeing your work even after it’s been published. You’ll find the same problems in pretty much any artistic medium, though, I think.

On an artistic level, though, I think it’s any writer’s job to write about the human experience, and digital technology is unquestionably a part of that experience. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the internet has changed human consciousness, necessarily, but it has had a massive effect on the culture—so if we’re trying to write about living in the contemporary world, then we need to take it into account. Also, practically speaking, word processing technology is immensely easier to use than typewriters or notebooks, in part because we can edit our work as we’re working.