How Not to Get an MFA

Posted on February 15th, 2013

I am only in my second year working as a freelance writer and editor. It’s been several years since I got out of graduate school with nothing to show but a collection of esoteric little stories bound in black and a piece of paper (that I never bothered to retrieve from the registrar’s office.) The MFA is supposed to be the beginning of a career in writing. But I didn’t even consider the possibility until many years later. After I turned thirty. After I spent years writing technical documents. After I got married and started popping out kids. After wasting a lot of good time and tirelessly avoiding my destiny. I have known what I wanted to do since I was a young girl, but actually getting to a place where I am doing it has been a long, winding road. I feel so far behind. And, honestly, I probably wouldn’t have made it this far were it not for the relentless encouragement and the reliable support of my husband.

Clearly I am not a good example of how to become a writer or pursue your dreams. But maybe I have some valuable advice to give anyway. After all, I have complete authority to discuss how NOT to go about it.

I forgive myself for wasting time in college. I was young and dumb. I worked too much. I was sidelined by a brief marriage and a protracted psych-out of a divorce. The best I could do was get through school and get decent grades. But by the time I graduated and made the decision to stay for an MFA, I knew better than to waste time. But I did it anyway. I was the shittiest graduate student in all the land. My three years at KU stretched to four years, and I didn’t spend nearly enough time focusing on becoming a better fiction writer. I have only one regret about the MFA, and that is not making the most of it. If I could go back and confront my younger self, I’d slap the glass of wine out of my hand and lay down the law.

1. QUIT YOUR MEANINGLESS JOB(S)
When you think about it, never again will you find yourself in a situation where your primary focus is supposed to be writing stories. Then real authors actually read them and give you feedback. This situation is very hard to come by after you graduate.

I had a string of low wage jobs during my first year as a graduate student: Working at a restaurant, hauling media equipment around campus, tutoring writers, and cleaning toilets on the weekends. With endless car problems and bills, it seemed like I was always struggling to make rent. I felt like a complete outcast at the few graduate student functions I managed to attend: broke, frumpy, and only vaguely familiar with the writings of Derrida.

Later on, I taught and interned as a technical writer. These were a big improvement, but the time constraints remained the same. I didn’t have much time left over after work was done. I should have adjusted my lifestyle so that I could live on less and write more. Or hell, READ more. It would have helped tremendously.

2. DON’T TAKE TEACHING SO SERIOUSLY
Like most people who get MFA’s, I got a teaching job that covered tuition and provided a small stipend to live on. The day I found out about being hired as a teacher, I quit a couple of the jobs. But teaching was really time consuming, and fear of making an ass out of myself in front of 50 young people spurred me to spend lots of time on class prep. And grading. And corresponding with students. I procrastinated by working, so it didn’t feel like procrastinating.

I’d thoughtfully comment on papers, posing questions in the margins, providing ideas for improvement, and urging students to elaborate on their arguments. I could do about two papers an hour this way, and I usually had at least 50 in the stack. And I observed that most students just flipped to the last page to see the letter grade. If the grade was high, they grinned and went on their way. If it was low, they started badgering me to change it immediately without regard for the comments.

Err on the side of giving higher marks in general. I stubbornly tried to uphold the standards of the university, but the litigious little buggers have nothing but time on their hands. A student who craps out a D paper in 15 minutes will spend 15 hundred of your precious hours trying to convince you – and the department head and the dean and the president and the police and the Pope – that he deserves a C instead. Just give it to him for gods sake and focus on your own studies. The studies that actually matter to your future.

Don’t blow it off, but don’t pour your heart and soul into it. Give your best to the students who care and let the ones who don’t care occupy a minimum of your attention.

3. DEFINE NETWORKING
In graduate school, there are networking opportunities and hopefully some chances for professional development. Neither of these were prevalent where I got my degree, but then again I wasn’t kissing ass and taking names and trying to build myself up either.

I hate networking. The idea of dogging people with the hope that they’ll do me a favor someday makes me deeply uncomfortable. It feels like lying and makes my palms sweat. Plus, I have this pesky down home Kansas streak that makes me thumb my nose at academic snobbery and excessively avant-garde writing. I just could not connect with many of the prime networking targets that showed up at university functions.

This is not to say I was a total recluse. I am shy, but I am also capable of meaningful human interaction. I loved some of my professors and spent lots of time hanging around in their offices shooting the breeze. One of my favorites was a fantastic guy and excellent poet who came to work in cowboy boots. He was completely unpretentious but wickedly intelligent. Another one – the one who became my major professor – was someone I initially mistrusted because he only tipped a quarter when I delivered his pizzas. But he was an inspiring teacher and an involved mentor, and he always gave generous, helpful critiques. He was the one who encouraged me to apply to the MFA program in the first place and pushed to get me in – a remarkably kind gesture that changed the trajectory of my life.

It was only after I left school that I realized that the time I spent hanging out with these guys was networking. Networking doesn’t have to be a miserable, false interaction. Find people you authentically admire and have a connection with, and it will come naturally.

4. DUMP THE BOYFRIEND(S)
Unless you are seriously going to get married to someone you meet while you are getting your MFA, don’t waste time on romantic relationships. (I accidentally wrote relationshits. Maybe I should have left it.) I spent way too much time with significant others who ended up being not so significant only a few years later. They were nice, decent guys. Okay, one of them was. But I knew from the start that we not compatible for the long term and should have just skipped right to the end where I moved into a friend of a friend’s basement and spent most of my time off work reading or writing. This didn’t happen until I had already graduated.

All of this is to say that I just didn’t do enough writing. I spent so little time working on what I allegedly wanted to do! Looking back, I don’t understand it. I think I was afraid of failure or something. I should have shacked up with roommates, rented a trailer, or slept under the bridge. I should have spent at least 90% of my waking hours working on fiction writing.

Once I got laid off, I finally got a chance – my first chance ever – to spend time writing. It was frightening, because WHAT IF I ACTUALLY SUCK? But really I only suck an average amount, and the suckiness is not nearly as bad as I feared. I have written more in the past year than I did in 4 years of graduate school. I have finished a novel, a graphic novel, and lots of smaller projects. Editing manuscripts and collaborating with other creative people inspires me daily. I knew this was what I wanted all along, and I am just thankful I finally had no choice left but to finally do it.

Categories: Life, Teaching, Writing

Good Reads 2012

Posted on January 14th, 2013

2012 wasn’t a good year for reading. I was too busy with work and travel. My daughter turned two and became extremely averse to letting me sit quietly with a book. We read a lot together, and I could probably write screeds about Where is Baby’s Bellybutton?, Goodnight Gorilla, The Giant Jam Sandwich, or the haunting conclusion of This is Not My Hat. No, it wasn’t my year for reading. That said, here are the few that stand out from 2012.

Great literature.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
I was born at the end of 1980 and experienced just a little of the eighties. I idolized Cyndi Lauper, cried over the ending of E.T., owned a pair of shiny aquamarine leggings, and enjoyed the lax rules about child safety by riding on my mother’s lap in our family’s giant orange Chevy truck. For the most part, I was too young to be culturally aware, too preoccupied with books to beg for video games, and barely cognizant of great eighties films beyond The NeverEnding Story and Beetlejuice. The nineties was my decade.

I still enjoyed Ready Player One, which is an expansive homage to eighties pop culture. Someone who grew up during that time, or for whatever reason worshiped the era, would certainly get more out of it than I did. But I still got a lot. It had enough – at times too much – background information to orient pop culture illiterates like me. Peeling back the layers of eighties nostalgia, it’s an exciting quest story with a sweet romantic ending and some gratifying anti-corporate themes. Very enjoyable overall.

Arcadia by Lauren Groff
I finished it last week, but I’ll go ahead and classify it as a 2012 book anyhow. I haven’t even started remembering to write 2013 on my checks yet.

This is classic MFA fare. (I can just hear my professors crowing about it.) Each sentence is a work of art. The book is written entirely in vignettes, most of them melancholy and poetic, leaving me with vivid visuals and a faint sensation of discomfort or sadness. Most of the action is implied; it takes place in between vignettes. I haven’t read prose this good in a long, long time.

The first half is incredible, and I devoured it over the course of a few nights. It describes a hippie commune in the 1970’s, a world that I find fascinating—just familiar enough that the lush descriptions were absolutely believable but also foreign enough to be novel. The author writes from a child’s perspective and nails it. The protagonist is observant and intelligent without being fully cognizant. He relates enough key details for adult readers to effortlessly draw conclusions. Life in a commune is filled with battling egos and ideological rifts. It is also close to wilderness and exposed to elements, something that is both beautiful and miserable.

When the commune disintegrates and the characters lurch ahead in time and place, the book begins to struggle. The vignettes become dull and pretentious, as if the author expects readers to experience way too much emotional gravity in each minor detail. The intense, carefully drawn children (who are now middle aged and settled) become blurry and boring as adults. The author, who can deftly illustrate complex people in just a few sentences, loses her touch and resorts to stock characters. Like the feisty Hispanic caregiver who bosses everybody around but always gets the dishes done, then quietly disappears when she is no longer needed.

The vignette format begins to feel contrived, the protagonist’s mother dies for sixty pages, and an attempt at action (a widespread epidemic) adds nothing but another gauzy layer of metaphor. Even the lovely descriptions begin to feel lazy. The author forgets that there are other adjectives besides thin. Thin thin thin thin thin. By the twentieth or fiftieth description of characters’ whippet like jutting protruding small slight delicate narrow long lean skinny thin thin bony bony bones, I started envisioning them as actual skeletons. I really doubt that is the imagery she wished to conjure.

Meet Helle, the love interest.

Complaining aside—and I have no right to complain because Lauren Groff can write laps around me—Arcadia is exceptional and worth reading. I wish the commune and life immediately after its dissolution was the focus of the entire book, but clearly she had a different tale to tell. I will definitely check out Monsters of Templeton with the expectation that it will be, at the very least, incredibly inspiring on the sentence level.

Otherland by Tad Williams
This series includes City of Golden Shadow, River of Blue Fire, Mountain of Black Glass, and Sea of Silver Light.

Having less time to read than usual, my completion of the Otherland series by Tad Williams took several months. I toted the brick-like books with me everywhere and read them in brief snippets. I chipped away at them in those weary blocks of time before falling asleep. I took them on the road, to waiting rooms, and to comic conventions. One of the paperbacks disintegrated, and I carried pieces of it in my purse to read and then discard. As such, giving a thoughtful, comprehensive review is impossible now.

The enormous volumes – each in excess of seven hundred pages – are all a single book. It was only hacked into four roughly equal hunks to sell and for ease of transport. I usually read less bloated works of fiction and have little patience for long-winded, meandering stories. I felt that I needed to challenge myself by reading something truly epic.

There are advantages to the sprawling narrative. Most importantly, I got to know the characters, which were interesting, varied, and mostly sympathetic. Tad Williams deserves enormous props for including a diverse array of characters and making each one of them human, complex, and uniquely engaging. Just to name a few, we have -

Renie, a South African city dweller who barely scrapes by as an instructor at a university. Her bravery and intellect are moderated by a realistic dose of insecurity and a rank temper.
Paul, a boring Englishman who gets sucked into cyberspace and wanders the myriad worlds of the Otherland network looking for his identity. When he finds it, he becomes believably heroic in spite of his bland beginning.
!Xabbu, one of the few remaining Bushmen of South Africa who struggles to hang onto his ancestry while navigating the most futuristic network in the world.
Calliope, a lesbian homicide detective in Australia whose passages come straight out of a pulpy mystery.
Orlando, a highly intelligent suburban kid who suffers from terminal illness in real life but kicks ass in cyberspace.
Olga, a puppeteer and former circus performer from Eastern Europe whose maternal drive saves the world.

The only two-dimensional character is the villain, Johnny Dread, who seethes unadulterated evil and murders women for fun and entertainment. This isn’t even close to a complete roster, but the idea is that Tad Williams used his imagination and came up with a varied cast of characters. If you’re tired of being expected to view the world through the same perspective again and again in every book, show, and film you consume, you will definitely appreciate this.

The other advantage to the huge series is its limitless setting. Otherland is a huge network that encompasses multitudes of different worlds, each with its own landscape, laws of physics, people, and creatures. There are worlds that mimic ancient Egypt in the time of the pharaohs and crazed Western worlds with carnivorous mine cars. There are worlds that embody stories like The Wizard of Oz and The Odyessey and worlds in the freezers of kitchens. There are worlds with insects the size of livestock and worlds made of infinite houses. The imagination and lushness of each place is truly stunning. I would recommend it for that reason alone.

Although some parts require dutiful skimming, Otherland is pretty engaging throughout. The ending was a little lukewarm. Endings are a bitch, and I know this, and the finale was perfectly serviceable. But when you’ve asked readers to stick with you for over 3000 pages, you better deliver something amazing. It did not quite live up to its promise. Ah well.

I want to read more this year, although with another child due in March and a hefty load of projects to complete, I will have to choose my reads carefully. Jeremy suggested that I make my way through some of the great comic series. We organized his long boxes mid-2012 and have quite a library in our basement. We shall see.

Categories: Reading

Highway 96

Posted on September 19th, 2012

My first webcomic is live! Several strips are available, and more are on the way. Read it (and subscribe) at www.ithacacomic.com.

Ithaca is not autobiographical. It’s a tapestry of people I have known, books and songs that have inspired me, and (most of all) the places I love. It is as an ode to the flyover states–the empty spaces, the derelict towns, and the unexpectedly beautiful things that thrive there.

Anybody who talks to me about traveling knows my personal meditation spot: Highway 96 from Great Bend, KS to Westcliffe, CO. My mother’s ashes are scattered on a mountaintop overlooking Westcliffe, and I try to visit every few years to pay my respects. I’ve driven 96 alone several times. Its stark beauty and utter solitude are good for thinking and storytelling. I’ve written many stories in my head while staring out my windshield at the vast, flat fields and the tall banks of clouds.

I wrote a lot of Ithaca there.

Emily Edna Hall, Ithaca Comic, Kansas, Colorado

Categories: Ithaca, Life, Writing

Making the Most of a Comic Convention

Posted on April 11th, 2012

A few weeks ago, Jeremy and I attended Planet Comicon in Kansas City. It was our maiden voyage as Outland Entertainment, and we have a pretty full convention schedule this year. Both of us were on the lookout for ways to improve our con experience and increase our chances of recouping some of the costs of attending.

Cons aren’t just about selling wares. They are also about networking – something that I have always sucked at because I am shy. They help you reach potential fans and give you opportunities to learn from professionals in the business. For me, it was also useful to meet other artists and writers living in our region. We sometimes feel pretty isolated living out here in Topeka.

But given the investment we made to get table space, order prints, buy business cards, and furnish our area with banners, it can’t hurt to try to make a little money as well. Here are some thoughts about how to do that.

Character Art
Apparently there has been a raging debate on this subject, but whether or not you agree that it’s okay for artists to sell images of copyrighted characters, there’s no doubt that those sell like hotcakes at conventions. Jeremy really doesn’t do this, except for commissions. He did a nice Red Sonja while we were there.

Display
We have two tall banners, which helped. Banners or any background display help draw people in because they set you apart from what’s going on behind you. Our lich king was very popular with children, and a few times the kids were strong enough to muscle their parents over to our table.

If you can, it’s better to actually hang up some pieces of your art or prints behind you. We had our prints in a box for people to flip through. This meant that only one person could look at a time. We’re going display some prints behind us at our next con.

Pinups
We sat by Kevin Keil, who is a talented artist, not to mention a very friendly person. He had lots of pinups of naked girls, and these were incredibly popular. This isn’t Jeremy’s typical subject matter, although he has done a few illustrations of topless women. Noting Keil’s success, I placed these prominently on the table, but for whatever reason, the elk-riding warrior woman with the sharp teeth wasn’t getting many buyers. Go figure. Jeremy’s thinking about doing a series of less bloodthirsty nudes to sell at our next convention.

Hubba Hubba

Books
The biggest selling item at our table was an ashcan-style book that contains the first few months of Ithaca, our upcoming webcomic. They are cheap to make and cheap to sell, and people want to read a story.

Mailing List
We offered a mailing list sign-up so that people who bought our book could get an alert when the comic goes online. Even if you don’t have a book, the mailing list is a good idea. People who didn’t want to buy something usually still wanted to sign up and read the comic for free or get updates about what Outland is working on.

Self-presentation
I have mixed feelings about this, but more than a few people advised wearing more revealing clothes and dressing up better. I will probably ditch the XL men’s shirt and remember to comb my hair next time.

On the topic of presentation, there were quite a few booth babes floating around. Honestly, I think you’d have to pretty much do the con in a pair of pasties and a top hat in order to compete with them. I saw more bare bums than a toilet seat due to our proximity to a booth that hired pantsless women to pass out comic book samples. I suppose if you can afford to hire a booth babe, you really don’t need any tips for how to make money at a comicon.

I am sure we will come up with more ways to improve our game at these cons. It’s also worth noting that they get drastically easier and more lucrative once you’ve made a name for yourself. Our issue right now is that although we are very busy with both personal and work-for-hire projects, we are toiling away in obscurity. Our webcomics are in production. I just submitted my finished novel to an editor. Jeremy’s work is appearing far and wide, but much of it is not in places where many people can access it. We just need more exposure, more publications, and more products!

For now, though, we’re small-time. And that is perfectly fine. We’ll just have to keep working hard to make money and meet people at these cons.

Here’s a link to the 2012 Outland Entertainment Convention Schedule.

Categories: Comics, News, Outland