Tomorrow I leave for a writers’ conference on Enders Island, off the coast of Mystic, Connecticut. It is an alumni workshop for folks like me who graduated from Fairfield University’s MFA/Creative Writing Program. This will mark the third year that I’ve attended this conference and I find that I get a lot out of it each time. For the past two years, the workshop was taught by Michael White, the director of the MFA program. This year, he stepped down as director and is not teaching the class either. Eugenia Kim, another professor in FU’s MFA program will be doing the honors and I am looking forward to seeing what she does differently from Michael.
The conference runs Friday afternoon to Tuesday night but we’ll be staying all day Wednesday, too, to give ourselves a little recovery time. I love these workshops but they are quite exhausting. For the class, each of us alumni students—there are eight of us, in total—had to submit 15 pages of a piece we are currently working on. I submitted a short story called “The Wisdom of Elephants.” I’m trying to learn how to write a good short story so that I may use them to apply for various grants, publications, and contests. We’ll see how Eugenia Kim and the rest of the alumni class feel about “Elephants.”