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Director's Message
We are beginning to feel hints of autumn here in Marin and the brisk air has certainly been conducive to creativity! Our poets are producing beautiful manuscripts and our fiction writers have novels that are well under way. It’s hard to believe that our first cohort of MFA students will be graduating in June!
For this Newsletter I’d like to spotlight Brennen’s pinterest board, “Word porn,” a collection of weird and wonderful words. Here are some unfamiliar words that describe familiar emotions and conditions:
- Sonder: the realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own
- Opia: the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable
- Vellichor: the strange wistfulness of used bookshops
- Altschmerz: weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had—the same boring flaws and anxieties that you’ve been gnawing on for years
Inspired by this collection, I offer you a word-based writing exercise adapted from Rita Dove's "Ten-Minute Spill" (from The Practice of Poetry). Use at least five of these words as you can in a piece of writing within 10 minutes:
blackberry, cliff, voice,
mother, cloud, lick
whir, boat, needle
Send us what you've done and we'll feature an entry in the next MFA newsletter.
Happy writing!
Joan
Joan Baranow, Director
Low-Residency MFA Creative Writing
Dominican University of California
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