WordPress Renewal Phishing

Today I got a couple of emails reminding me that my WordPress renewal is tomorrow. I thought that was odd, since I’m on auto-renew and don’t have to manually pay my bill. That’s when I noticed the email was from a user at “hosting.com” and the link address was to some long url that wasn’t associated with WordPress at all.

I’m pretty cautious about clicking any links in email, and I was already suspicious from the outset, but it did look like a WordPress reminder. And my renewal is coming up, though not tomorrow, by the way. I went into the app and checked, also checking to make sure my payment info was still correct. Everything is good, and I can delete that email. But first I thought I ought to post about it as a reminder and a warning to other WordPress users.

Of course, one lesson is to never click a link in an email unless you trust the person who sent it to you. Even then, double-check, since it could be someone masquerading as that person or company. I’ve seen this kind of phishing from PayPal and Amazon and countless other places, but this is the first one I’ve noticed that was spoofing WordPress.

So far, I haven’t fallen prey to any phishing attempts, but I’ve known plenty of people who have, even people who are smart enough to be careful. It happened to my mother once, but fortunately she talked to me and we were able to extricate her before any irreparable damage was done. It happened to a colleague whose husband happened to check in on her before she got too deep into a call. I say this because we can all become too stressed out, confused, or just rushed and then do something we regret. The last thing I want to do is to think that it couldn’t happen to me.

But the only way to keep it from happening is to stop and think before clicking, which is not always easy to remember. Look for anything suspicious. Hover your mouse over that link to see if it goes where you think it goes, or better yet, close that email, go to the app or the website and verify for yourself whether there’s anything you need to do. If there is, there will be a notice on your account. An email or text will not be the only way a company will notify you.

Though this attempt at phishing didn’t fool me, I can see how it could. Be careful out there! And stay safe.

Visit to Vicksburg

Kim and I had a great time visiting Vicksburg this past weekend. The main purpose of the trip was my reading, organized by Lorelei Books at the Old Courthouse Museum during the Bicentennial Fall Flea Market. More on that in a moment, but first, let me tell you that we had a fabulous time and found Vicksburg to be such a charming city. I’d been there once before to read at Lorelei Books and enjoyed the quick trip, but Kim and I had never been there together.

We stayed at Halpino, one of the properties associated with the Duff Green Mansion. It’s a small BnB-style lodging with four or five rooms and a common kitchen area. The furniture was all antique or at least in the style, and though there were a few of the kinds of quirks you expect in a place like that, we had a perfectly wonderful stay. There was no iron or hair dryer, though, so it’s a good thing I brought my clothes for the next day on hangers and Kim packed her blow dryer. There was coffee in the shared kitchen, though you had to get water from your room because there was no sink. That and the code to the front door were things we figured out along with another couple who were staying there, so we got to know them a little more than we would have in a hotel, which was fine. The room was clean and the bed slept well, so really, what more do you need? It was also the least expensive decent room I could find, so I’m not complaining.

In the morning, we went over to Duff Green for the included breakfast, which turned out to be a sit-down 3-course affair that we were served. The food was quite good, and we were seated with another couple and a young woman who was in town for a funeral. There were several other people at our table, but these were the ones we were sitting closest to and with whom we conversed over breakfast. After the meal, we took advantage of the included mansion tour, which really was just of the ground floor rooms, but we learned a bit about the history of the home: for instance, it was at one point a hospital that housed both Union and Confederate troops, which may have saved it from shelling during the siege.

After breakfast we stopped by the bookstore and then headed over to the flea market to have a look around. For an hour or so before the reading, I sat at Lorelei Books’ table and talked to people about Tree Fall with Birdsong. Lorelei’s owner, Kelle, called over a few friends and between them and a few people who wandered by, we rustled up a nice, small crowd for the reading. One draw was that it was indoors in the old courtroom, which was air conditioned. A few people wandered in and out, but several stayed for the full reading and discussion. We talked about the poems, and also about The W’s low-residency MFA program and the Welty Symposium, which I had mentioned in my bio.

Along the way, I met the husband of a former student. The husgand is an architect working on a project to shore up the stone wall around the base of the courthouse lot, and his wife, Tarasa, is now a teacher in the Jackson area. Unfortunattely, she wasn’t able to come along, but it was great to hear what she’s been up to and how successful she’s been in the twenty-five years since she left my classes.

After the reading, we headed downtown to grab a little lunch, though we settled for ice cream from the store where Coke was first bottled. We didn’t tour their Coke museum, but instead headed down the street to the HC Porter Gallery. We probably would have spent more time with Porter’s art, the woman working in the gallery turned out to be an MSMS alumna, so we got to talking about all the latest news from campus. She was a friend of Emma Richardson, so we promised to say hello, and she is also a writer, so we talked to her a bit about the symposium and the MFA program, too.

From there, we went to tour the Vicksburg National Military Park, since we had heard it was still open despite the government shutdown, thanks to a local group that was funding it. There also was no entrance fee, though we donated more than what our fee would have been to the Friends of Vicksburg National Military Park in gratitude.

If you haven’t been to the park, it is definitely worth a visit. We only wish we had left enough time to drive the full 15 miles of park road. We did make it through most of the Union side and to the military cemetery and remains of the USS Cairo, an ironclad wooden battle ship that was sunk in the Mississippi river and thus preserved. Other river battleships were torn apart and used for scrap or repurposed after the war.

We’ll have to return another time to see the rest of the park. We’re already thinking about planning a trip next September for a new art festival that the RC Porter Gallery started this year. It looks like a serious, juried art show with nationally known artists. If that keeps going, it will be a great boon to the arts world in Mississippi. We also met the woman who runs the Catfish Row Museum and would love to go back to visit that, and there was the Manhattan Short Film festival on Saturday night, which we were tempted to stick around to see.

But unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. When the park closed at 5, we headed on back to Columbus, stopping in Clinton for dinner and getting back by about 9pm. It was a quick trip, yet a rewarding one, and a good reminder that we just need to make the effort to do a few more day trips to places we haven’t yet explored in Mississippi, or to go back and explore of the places we have started to get to know.

Book Club Scam Targeting Authors

Let me first say that I love book clubs, and most book clubs are doing fabulous work to get books in front of readers. However, as seems to be the case everywhere these days, there seem to be a few bad operators that are taking advantage of this great work to get money from unsuspecting writers.

I encountered a situation like this recently when Robert from the London Wine and Dine Book Club contacted me about possibly using Tree Fall with Birdsong for their club. I have to say I was suspicious from the outset because unless it is a poetry book club, these clubs usually don’t go for poetry. I also didn’t see why a book club in London would be interested. Still, he gave a flattering, if somewhat general, reading of the book, and I decided to at least explore a little further. And I have had some good experiences with an international group who wrote me out of the blue.

My first step was to see if the book club really existed. A search led me to a couple of listings on an events page for upcoming meetings, and I didn’t see any mention of them as a scam or of bad experiences in my searching. Willing to check it out a little further, yet still with my hackles up, I replied to the email and said I might be interested. One thing I didn’t do was to give Robert any more information than he already had, judging by what he’d written to me. I did indicate that I was doing some remote events already and was comfortable with that format.

Robert wrote back very quickly, thanking me for my interest and saying that the next step would be to “creating a clear strategy for how best to introduce your collection to our readers.” This was one of the red flags I was looking for. He suggested talking abou this, so when I replied, in addition to suggesting a few times when I would be available by Zoom or other video conferencing platforms, I wrote about my research on the availability of my book in London (two stores list it, though both would have to special order). I also suggested that he was looking at purchasing copies for the club, I could put him in touch with my publisher, and I mentioned that as this is a small press publication, there was no marketing budget for the book.

I haven’t heard back from Robert since, so I suspect that either my reluctance to spend on marketing or the fact that my book isn’t readily available overseas probably cooled his interest. I suspect it was the latter, though I was a little surprised he didn’t try to sell me on whatever marketing scheme he had in mind. That’s what I’d been concerned about from the beginning, so I wasn’t too surprised that this didn’t turn out to be anything very promising. It certainly wasn’t anything I would invest in, though as I said, I would be happy to provide information for marketing.

Coincidentally, a few days later I read an Author’s Guild discussion about this very issue. Apparently, fake or at least unscrupulous book club organizers have started reaching out to authors to offer marketing services to their book clubs. I assume these come with hefty fees and the promise of sales to the club. Maybe some are legit, but many writers on the discussion suspected they were being taken for a ride. I don’t know that anyone had actually given money for this, but they were at least tired of receiving this kind of solicitation.

Fortunately, for those of us who also make offers to authors to participate in events, the advice for screening out the scam artists from the legitimate offers is fairly simple. The more specific the offer is, the better. Someone who tells you what date an event will take place, what you’ll be paid (if there’s an honorarium), and details about history of their event is much more believable. If you get an offer without these details, tread carefully.

Recently, I received another kind of solicitation. This was from someone who claimed to want to represent me, not as an agent but as someone who could help me navigate submissions and get speaking engagements and such. They seemed iffy to me, and it’s not something I want to do a lot more of than I already do, so I ignored it. If I had read about the book club scam before I got that email, I probably would have ignored it, too. As it was, I wrote a couple of emails and didn’t give out any information or commit to any marketing plan. The most I lost was a little time. I hadn’t even gotten my hopes up that it would pan out to be anything, so I wasn’t even disappointed when it didn’t. I just chalked it up as another learning experience.

I don’t know for a fact that Robert or the London Wine and Dine Book Club aren’t legit, of course, though I do believe, since he stopped writing as soon as I mentioned not having a marketing budget, I dodged a bullet.

Reading Roundup, September 2025

I want to start this post with a few words about reading at Bookends in Pontotoc, Mississipp last Saturday, my last reading of September. It was a busy month with the Mississippi Book Festival and another trip to Jackson to meet a class at Millsaps and read to the MUW Alumni Association. Read on to hear what it’s like to read in a small-town Mississippi Bookstore and learn more about my next reading in Vicksburg on Oct. 4.

It was a beautiful fall day, which meant I had a lovely drive through back roads of Mississippi to get from Columbus to Pontotoc. Alt 45 from West Point, up Hwy 245 to Ocolona, then 41 through Troy to the west side of Pontotoc, if you want to know my route. There were goldenrod blooming in the ditches and fields. The leaves haven’t started to turn (this is the South, after all), but the sun was golden and the sky was a clear blue.

I got to town a little early, not wanting to cut it too close since I haven’t been to Bookends before. That gave me a chance to drive by Pontotoc’s lovely farmer’s market that was just about to close up shop. I didn’t stop to look for anything, since I’d already shopped the Hitching Lot Farmer’s Market in Columbus and anything I got would have to sit in a hot car for a couple of hours. I parked by the store and even had enough time to walk down Main street a bit, where I saw a couple of antique stores, boutiques, restaurants, and the Pontotoc Community Theatre. It would be worth going back to explore when I have a little more time.

Bookends is a lovely little bookstore with two levels of books. I didn’t get a chance to explore all that much, since my signing was set to start at 11 when they opened, but I did see their display of local and Mississippi authors featuring my book, Gerry Wilson, and Robert Busby.

They had me set up at a table with a table cloth made out of pages cut from a book. A little boy ,who came to the store with his mother, asked if those were pages from my book, but I assured him they weren’t. His mother had seen me at Possumtown Book Fest and came by to say hi and to get her copy of Attached to the Living World signed. I’d already signed Tree Fall with Birdsong for her back in August. She and her son and daughter didn’t stay for the reading, though I imagine that would have been a challenge for the youngsters. Maybe next time, when we’re all a little older!

There was a small crowd for the reading: a local woman who’s working on a book of fiction or nonfiction, another local woman (I think) who said she saw my post on Instagram that morning, a young guy who was maybe in college or just out of collete, one of the owners and her husband and the young woman behind the cash register.

This was about what I expected, and in fact, I was pretty pleased to have that many people come out on a Saturday morning in a town of about 5,000 to listen to a poet they don’t know. We had a good conversation both before and after the reading.

The woman writing a book wanted to talk about her book and her writing process, which was fine. She’s doing many of the right things, like interviewing women from her church to get more background on the stories she wants to tell. I suggested she might want to give them copies of what she wrote down, so they would have those stories for their families if they want them. She’ll likely not use the actual stories, but draw on elements from several of them and combine them in new ways to create a fictional past that is reflective of the actual past. It seems like she has a lot to work with, both from her own history and the ones she’s researching.

We also talked a fair amount about working with lines in poetry and what I’m trying to do in the poems I read. And there was interest in The W’s low-residency MFA program, so I was glad I brought along a few brochures.

You never know where a small and intimate reading like this might lead, whether that is someone who gets interested in your writing program, or who thinks about buying one of your other books, or who tells someone else about the reading, maybe shares a poem or gets another copy for someone as a gift. The point, as I said on Saturday, is to get the poems out in the air where they can live and breathe, and where they can take on a life of their own.

I’ll also be happy if these folks become customers of Bookends and maybe send some of their friends that way. I do readings, not just to sell books, but to support local bookstores and develop community, which is one of the reasons the two sisters who opened Bookends decided to open up their store. Both were having a bit of a rough week, with some health issues for a family member, so they couldn’t both be there. I’m sorry about that and hope things will be getting better for them soon!

Next Saturday, October 4, I’ll be in Vicksburg for a reading at 1pm at the Old Courthouse Museum. I have a feeling that’s a pretty big space, so I hope we get a few more people to come out, though I’m always happy to read, whether there is 1 or 100 in the audience. I’m happier if there’s more than one, but I’ve done a reading when it was essentially the bookstore owner, one friend, and some of my own family who were in the room, so I’m not lying when I say I’ll read no matter the size of the crowd! Thanks to Lorelei Books of Vicksburg who helped to organize this. There’s a Bicentennial Flea Market going on that day, so hopefully that will draw plenty of people and a few will be curious enough to see what a poet has to say!

I’m only sorry that I won’t be reading at the bookstore, though reading at the museum is a much better choice for this day. Lorelei Books has a wonderful space for readings and they are such gracious hosts. I still fonly remember my reading there when Barrier Island Suite came out, so I’m very glad I get to go back. I will definitely stop by the store at some point next Saturday to see how it looks these days, though Lorelei will also have a booth at the Flea Market, so I’ll spend some time there, as well. Stop by and see me at the booth, and if you can stick around for the reading at 1, that would be wonderful!

And if I don’t see you in Vicksburg, maybe I’ll see you at the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium or at another bookstore near you!

Recent Developments on AI for Writers

No, I’m not talking about the newest ways writers can use AI (just don’t, if you ask me), but rather on the latest developments for writers whose work has been or could be used for AI training, including for me. That was too long for a title, though, so apologies if you came here looking for some other news.

I recently signed my first-ever AI opt-in addendum with Bloomsbury for the eventuality that they negotiate a deal or deals to use A Writer’s Craft in AI training. I was a little surprised to get this, and didn’t have a lot of time to consider it, but fortunately, I’ve been aware of what’s going on enough that I could make my decision. This doesn’t mean that my textbook will be used for AI training, but if does mean that my publisher can negotiate subsidiary rights to do that. Likely, this would be one on behalf of all their titles or at least a subset of their titles that the AI company is interested in. Bloomsbury also made it clear that opting in would likely make your title more accessible to AI search and other uses of AI that would make it more visibile in the future.

But why would I opt in if I’m opposed to AI? I will say that I’m not 100% opposed to its use for things like research where it could be very helpful. I am opposed to creative writers relying on it, though. And I’m opposed to the current AI engines because they have been trained on databases of pirated texts. I don’t trust AI, but I also don’t think they should be making billions when they have essentially stolen the content they used to get where they are.

Licensing agreements are one way that authors can get paid for the use of their work. They are also a way for publishers to enforce certain restrictions about how the work can be used, so that it can’t be used to create a competing work, for instance. Because licensing could lead to some income for writers and because it can also lead to some protections for writers and publishers, I support it. The opt-in addendum only means that my book will be considered for this, but it’s a starting point.

The Author’s Guild has advocated for these kinds of agreements, and I can see why, collectively, they see them as the best legal means to protect authors’ rights going forward. They have also been involved in lawsuits with AI companies, and have recently reported a settlement agreement with Anthropic where each author whose work appeared in the pirated databases they used would be paid $3000 compensation per title.

Oddly enough, this could affect me as well. This summer, I was surprised to learn that my third poetry collection Barrier Island Suite was included in one of the pirated databases they used. I suppose I shouldn’t have been, since a Google alert I have on myself had periodically turned up links to pirated copies of the book. I initially alerted my publisher, though I don’t know that they ever did anything about it.

Whether I’ll ever see my $3000 remains to be seen (probably minus legal fees, etc, so it might end up buying me a sixpack or two if I get it). That will depend on whether it is determined that my title was one of those actually used. A while back I reported it as one that appears on a list of titles in the database, but I don’t know more than that. It also depends on whether my publisher ever registered the copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office, which I believe they were supposed to do, but some publishers rely on only registering the ISBN and listing a copyright notice in the book. So if Texas Review Press didn’t dot all its i’s and cross all its t’s, I could be out that money. Or my contract may specify that only a portion of subsidiary rights goes to me, and I might not see much, if anything.

Still, it’s gratifying to know that some writers are getting compensation from at least one company. And it’s likely more settlements will follow. $3000 per title may seem like a pittance, but with the sheer number of titles included in these databases, which could number in the millions, the payout would be astronomical. Not all titles will meet the criteria for being included, though. Books must have an ISBN or ASIN have been registered with the copyright office in time, and it’s estimated that about 500,000 will qualify. The total payout is reported to be $1.5 billion.

There are, of course, many other AI companies, but hopefully this settlement will set a precedent that authors and publishers need to be paid for the use of their work. I don’t expect to get rich off of selling AI training rights to my work, but I also don’t like to see companies get rich by stealing access to the words and ideas of human writers, especially when they have been stealing that access in order to train a technology that could make our words less valuable.

I personally don’t believe that project will be completely successful, since I believe in the value of human expression over AI-generated expression. But writers will be in competition with AI for the attention of readers, some of whom might be satisfied with the predicatable and formulaic output of a machine as opposed to the often messy, unpredictable writing the emanates from the human experience.

Where in the World Is A Writer’s Craft?

This semester, I am on sabbatical, working on revisions to A Writer’s Craft: Multi-Genre Creative Writing that will become the second edition. My manuscript is due to Bloomsbury on January 15, so I need to stick to my schedule, but I’ve had a good week of writing (even though Labor Day cut it short), so this morning I got a little distracted.

This week a student wrote me out of the blue with a question about the book, which he’s using for a class at a school in Minnesota. Maybe that’s what led me to search on the book, or that led me to a post I wrote several years ago about a review on a site that no longer exists and that led me to search for more reviews. In any case, when I searched on the book title and my name, a lot of hits came up, mostly to my site or to Amazon.

But as I scrolled through the list, I began to notice an interesting phenomenon. Many of the links were to eBay, which wasn’t surprising, but looking closer, I noticed these were eBay listings from different countries, as identified by the address: ebay.ie or ebay.uk, etc. Ireland and the United Kingdom, even Australia, were hardly surprising, since my publisher is Bloomsbury, and before that was Macmillan International Higher Ed. (The imprint is Red Globe Press, which got sold to Bloomsbury a few years back.)

I’ve known that the book is sold internationally, and that the UK, Australia, and New Zealand were part of their distribution. What was more interesting was to see copies showing up on eBay in Denmark, Norway, The Netherlands, Belgium, and France, even Germany, Finland, and several Slavic and Eastern European countries. What this tells me is that there are copies in these countries that have been purchased and are now being sold used, which would suggest that the textbook has been adopted beyond the English-speaking world.

That’s interesting for me to know as I dig into revisions of the book for the next edition. I’ve been planning to add more examples and references to authors, and had already planned to include more international authors. The truly global market for the book reinforces that decision and justifies referencing more writers who wrote in languages other than English (in translation, of course). That makes me happy since besides teaching creative writing, I taught World Literature for many years. I know these writers, and I’m glad to present creative writing from a truly global perspective, and not privilege American and English writers over other traditions around the world.

I’m sure I’ll rely on English-language writers quite a bit when looking for examples, since that will be the easiest, yet bringing in other writers whose work is known and translated into English expands the horizons of what is creative writing that I can think about and talk about in the book. This goes along well with other changes I’ve been contemplating for the second edition, including inclusive writing pedagogy and an anti-racist approach to the workshop.

Advice for MFA Applicants

I’ve been writing about the MFA application process for over a decade, ever since we prepared to launch our Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing at Mississippi University for Women in 2015, so of course, I was interested when the latest issue of Poets & Writers (September/October 2025) advertised a feature section on choosing and applying for the MFA, along with other advice for writers. And I’m also not surprised that the articles were disappointing. It’s not that they were wrong, but more that they didn’t go into much depth. I usually like Poets & Writers and value their advice, but this time, they didn’t give each topic enough attention and barely scratched the surface.

Lyzette Wanzer, giving advice on how to choose an MFA program, focused more on things like geography or the weather than things like program culture or the kinds of faculty and students a program recruits. Geography can be an interesting factor to consider, but I would rank it pretty low on my list of criteria unless there are reasons you need to be in a program close to home. Your experience in a program will be affected much more by the people you work with than whether there are mountains or snow or city streets and cafes, though those factors may ultimately play a role in your decision.

Similarly, Wanzer mentioned that some programs are fully funded, while others are not, but she also made a distinction between “fully funded” programs and those with graduate assistantships and other forms of aid, which is a little misleading. While it is true that there are some programs that fully scholarship some students (I’m thinking of the Michener program at the University of Texas at Austin and a few others), these are exceedingly rare and extremely competitive. Most programs that are called “fully funded” do rely on assistantships to fund their students, which means that students teach classes, do research (rare in creative writing), or work in writing centers to work their way through grad school. These assistantships come with a stipend and (usually) a tuition waiver. The stipend often isn’t a lot, but will usually allow a person to live without a second job. It’s probably not going to be enough to support a family or live a lavish lifestyle, but you can get by, maybe by renting an apartment with room mates or limiting how often you go out to eat.

You also get valuable teaching experience while on an assistantship, which can be important if you want an academic career. And you should have health insurance and other benefits as an employee of the university. When weighing an offer from an MFA program, it is important to look into the financial implications: what is the cost of living where you will be, what kind of apartment could you afford, will you have other expenses like travel, and what kind of stipend and other benefits does the university provide? These issues get little mention in the Poets & Writers piece on choosing an MFA program, though to be honest, they could have probably added another article just about weighing the offers you get, assuming you’re lucky enough to be accepted into multiple programs.

The choice of where to apply and the choice of which school to choose in the end is very different, though the first influences the latter. The choice of where to apply is aspirational. You probably want to apply to different kinds of schools, some that are close and some that are far, some that are in uban areas and some that are rural, some that are prestigious and some that are hidden gems. Your choice of which one among the programs that have accepsted you to actually attend is much more pragmatic. May you all be so lucky to have two or more to choose between!

Wanzer did mention the differences between traditional MFA programs that involve taking classes on campus and low-residency programs that don’t. She didn’t go into why not being on campus often means that low-residency programs don’t offer much in the way of financial assistance. However, low-residency programs do allow students to keep their current jobs, which often are more lucrative than graduate assistantships. We allow students to live close to family or to stay where they are for all the reasons that you might want or need to do that. There are benefits to both models, as I point out in my post Low-Res or Fully Funded, an MFA Decision. It is also important to think about how you will afford your MFA, especially if choosing a low-res or fully online program.

I don’t mean to be too critical of Wanzer either. She gives some valuable information; there is just so much more to say. But I’ve written on these subjects a lot, and Poets & Writers only gave Wanzer a page in the magazine. Hers is the most detailed of any of the advice articles, which may be why I had more things that I wanted to react to.

Rene Steinke, who I admire greatly, gave advice on how to write your personal statement, though she focused primarily on how to think about and brainstorm to answer the question “why do you want to be a writer?” and by extension “what kind of writer you want to be?” Her piece is pithy, well written, and enigmatic, which befits the challenge of trying to answer those questions. Yet I have argued (more than once) that the statement about why you want to be a writer is often the least interesting or informative part of the personal statement. That might be why Steinke focuses on it, since that is where so many letters fall short. Yet, it’s also important to talk about how you’ve prepared for an MFA in writing or what you’ve written already, and to answer questions like where have you worked, have you published or at least attempted to publish, have you taken workshops, and what kind of writing do you like to read?

Similarly, Dan Beachy-Quick, a poet whose craft essays I’ve often taught, when writing about “How to Matke the Most of Your Time in an MFA,” focuses on immersing yourself in language and learning to value things about literature that your younger self may have scoffed at. Great advice, though I would like to add that probably the best thing you can do to make the most of your time is to develop community. Make lasting friendships and get to know your mentors as people, not just as writers you can learn from and network with. These relationships will stay with you for the rest of your life, which is why when choosing a program, more and more I think you should consider the people and the culture of a program more than anything else.

When I was reading with another poet recently, I was reminded of this when she told a story about a faculty member who criticized her poems for being too personal and who refused to serve on her thesis committee because he couldn’t handle “confessional” poetry, even though she would argue (now — maybe she didn’t have the experience to argue it then, she didn’t say) that her poems weren’t confessional. We’ve all been there, and I understand the stigma that anything with a slight scent of “confessionalism” faced a decade or more ago. I went through something similar with one of my grad school professors, though he didn’t use the term “confessional” with my poems. He was a lit professor, poet, and translator, and I learned only after I graduated that he had said some quite negative remarks about my poetry, not that he ever taught me in a creative writing class or had any reason to even think about my poems (I was in a PhD in Comparative Literature at the time). These are experiences no one needs. It may be true that they are unavoidable, though choosing a program that is a good fit for you can help, and having good and supportive mentors can help you make it through when the nay-sayers inevitably come your way. Having a community of writers can also help you develop the thick skin you will need to handle rejection and to keep writing until you begin to see the successes.

That may be one reason I value Molly McCully Brown’s piece on “How to Think about the Value of a Creative Writing Degree.” She understandably focuses on the writing you will do, the deadlines you’ll face, and the progress you’ll make as a writer, yet she also thinks of it in terms of the readers you will have, the questions you will ask of one another, the community you will build. She does not emphasize the final output, and maybe rightly so. Though an MFA typically leads you to a thesis, which is a book-length project, she ends her piece thinking about all the other “beginnings” you have created during your time in a program. Arguably, one of the main points to the MFA is that thesis, and learning to wrestle with a project that is as unruly and unpredictable as a book is probably going to be your crowning achievement, and may be the main thing that writers seek to get from their MFA. But the value isn’t only the thesis, the publishable manuscript itself, but is learning enough about yourself and about finishing a long project like this that you can do it again—and again and again.

The value of the MFA is not in learning how to knock out a novel or a collection of poems quickly and more efficiently. As McCully Brown suggests, it is to learn to complicate things, to ask more challenging questions, to dig deeper and to push yourself further, and to come through that wilderness to achieve a finished product: novel, collection of poems, stories, or essays, a play or collection of short plays, etc. which you can be proud of and that no one but you could have written. And then to be prepared to take on a new project with equal rigor. And to do it with the friends and other writers whose advice and words you value. Yes, I’m thinking of both the living, breathing community of writers you begin to accumulate in your MFA experience, and those writers you have read who may be long dead or may be the writers you admire from afar but haven’t met yet. You can discover your tradition, your canon, and your compatriots in your MFA journey, which will stay with you and sustain you throughout your writing life.

Can you do those things without an MFA? Of course. Many writers have and many writers will. Can you do them in the same way and with the same level of intensity outside of an MFA experience? Possibly, though it is very hard to replicate on your own. If you’re able to earn your MFA and you’re ready to do it, nothing should hold you back. But financial concerns, life challenges, and other roadblocks often do get in the way, and there should be no stigma against writers who don’t hold the degree. But for those who can make it happen, as my students say over and over, it is a transformative experience when you dedicate those years and that effort to the study of writing with others who are with you on the same (or a parallel) journey.

I’m grateful for Poets & Writers for including this feature section on advice on the writing life. There are other essays that go beyond the MFA experience that I won’t respond to here. All are well-written and provocative. I only wish they were longer. But the nice thing about a magazine format is there is always another issue, and with it the opportunity for more advice. And on my blog, I can keep returning to these same subjects, hopefully with new insights and updated information.

Orpheus in Serbia

Over on Substack, I wrote a post with this title, detailing the backstory of how I came to know the Greek cabaret (music) group StarWound. I won’t repeat that here (because you can read the post for free on Substack), but suffice it to say that they are performing my poem “Orpheus” along with others from their project “Interiors” at the Nisville Festival, one of the biggest alternative music festivals in Europe under the direction of the legendary Maja Mitic.

I’ll let you read in the Substack post about this performance and how they came to Columbus and performed at Mississippi University for Women. Instead, here I will add a little anecdote about how after their performance in Poindexter, as we were coming back to Puckett House after a slight detour to look for something to drink and to snack on, we encountered a deer ambling across College Street and onto the campus of Mississippi University for Women right by Whitfield Hall and the main gate. Now, we have quite a few wild animals on our campus, but I usually see feral cats, squirrels, and groundhogs, maybe the occasional armadillo, but never before (or since) have I seen a deer. It was a quiet night, so maybe he felt safe enough to explore (I’m pretty sure I remember right that it was a buck). That was just one of the magical moments that happened with StarWound during their visit. So far it hasn’t made it into a poem, though who knows.

There apparently will be a video of at least one of their upcoming European performances that I’ll be able to share. And I’m hopeful I’ll get to see video from tonight, though I’m not sure it will be sharable, at least not online. I’ll be doing a benefit reading later this month for a CD project with a selection of songs from StarWound’s US tours. More on all of this soon!

There’s lots going on, even when I’m not actively participating — but maybe one day I’ll be able to get over to Greece to see StarWound where they live or see them perform again in person. In the meantime, this fall, they’ll be touring several campus in the Northeast.

Writers Resist AI with Human Interaction

I’m on book tour, which means that wherever I go and whenever I can line something up, I’ll be giving a reading at bookstores, libraries, schools, and other venues, even virtual ones. As I do this, it has occurred to me that this may be one of a writer’s best defenses against the abuses of generative AI. Here you see me heading into Three Bells Books in Mason City, Iowa, with a box of physical books. We had a nice small crowd for an intimate reading that Saturday evening. I’ve had bigger and smaller turnouts in recent weeks, but the one thing that remains a constant is the human interactions I get to have.

That’s one thing, AI bots will never achieve. No matter how much the bots’ voices might improve or how convincing their interaction might become as they learn to mimic us better and better, they will never be more than a shallow copy of human experience. They will rely on reconfiguring and regurgitating the human experiences they take in through their large language models (including the unauthorized use of my last book, apparently), but they will have no direct experience of what it means to be human, to read or listen to a poem and feel the impact of those words resonnate with your own experience. They can only learn from us, but can’t become us (at least not until an AI is implanted in a living, breathing human body, which is a very scary thought (sorry)).

As a teacher, I’ve learned that one of the best ways to combat AI use by students is to develop a personal relationship with them, to work with them on their writing at every step in the process, to guide them, yes, to ensure that they are working on their own, yet also to let them know that what they write will utlimately be passed on to a real human being who values what they produce because I value their experience and their thought. Writing can no longer just be about the final product. It has to become about the journey that the person who wrote has gone on to reach that final product. That might be their intellectual journey, but is also and equally their very physical journey as an embodied person whose self gets poured into a paper, a story, or a poem.

As writers, we embody this principle when we give a reading. We are a living, breathing human being who obviously cares about the impact our words could have on the living, breathing human beings in front of us. The poems are no longer just about a final product, they are about the ability to communicate our experience (of life, of image, of language) to people whose lives or language or imaginations may be impacted by the experience. By reading (and talking about what we read), we not only prove that we wrote it, but we engage in conversation with those who gather to hear it. A reading is not just about the poems that were read; it is about where those poems take the room and how the people in that room react and give back to the writer through the conversation.

This can happen, too, in a virtual reading, but I predict there will be more and more emphasis on in-person literary events: readings, workshops, or salons of all kinds, as the public thirsts for more human interaction in response to the unfulfilling interactions with our increasingly technology-centered world (from the self-checkout at the grocery store to the customer service bots we all encounter online or on the phone).

What is most valuable about literature is its humanity — something we are in serious danger of losing right now — and what better way to show humanity than to show up in person, read from your work, and open yourself up to the vulnerability of taking questions. By doing so, we reaffirm the value of human interaction at a moment when so many forces seem to be moving away from the human in favor of the automated, the regurgitated lowest common denominator, and the predictable. By giving readings to a crowd of one or one hundred, writers can resist the tech-bro billionaires pushing a technology on us that most people didn’t ask for and don’t even want, simply by being human and putting our humanity out there through our words.

Thanks, Tennessee Williams: on the importance of blogging

Let me take a minute to explain the title of this post. Now and then, I search on myself to see what might be out there: to see where my latest book is being sold or whether there are any new reviews, for instance. Yes, I have a Google alert, but it doesn’t always catch everything, and searching can pull up some older references I’ve forgotten about.

That was the case today. When I search on my name, I often get a ton of results from this blog, most of which I ignore, but this morning one was a reminder of the time in 2020 when I participated (virtually) in the Tennessee Williams Tribute. I wrote about the poem of Williams’s that I read, “Orpheus Descending” and the poem of my own that I read with it, “Ishtar.” I also mentioned that this had led me to write “Orpheus” and “Eurydice,” two poems in Tree Fall with Birdsong. I’ve been reading these poems, and I remembered why I wrote them, but had forgotten the connection to Tennessee Williams. That cycle of poems about myths of the underworld became important to how Tree Fall with Birdsong reached its conclusion, and therefore important to how I found a publisher.

If I hadn’t blogged about it in the first place, and then if I hadn’t found that nearly five-year-old blog post, I would probably never remember the debt I owe Tennessee Williams.

This year, I’ll be participating in Friendly City Books’ Possumtown Book Fest, leading a poetry workshop. Now that I’ve retrieved this memory, maybe I’ll try to find a way to incorporate it in the workshop: either by reading another Tennessee Williams poem or by bringing in another poem for participants to respond to.

Of course, I could write a journal instead of writing this blog, but that might be a little harder to search. I would have to know to pick up an old journal and start reading in it for inspiration. If you don’t want to put all of your thoughts online, that is still a great option. Let this be a reminder to pick up those old journals and flip through them periodically. You never know what you might be reminded of or where that journey might take you.