CCA MFA Program in Writing

Our first free all-program field trip takes us to City Arts & Lectures this Thursday to hear Leila Mottley talk about her new book Nightcrawling. We meet outside the Sidney Goldstein Theater at 7. See you there, MFAW.📚🤓

By popular demand, we're devoting next week's Tuesday Coffee Hour to a practical, in-depth conversation about getting published in literary magazines. On 10/4 from 3-4 pm Rebecca Foust, poet and assistant editor of fiction at Narrative Magazine, will join us in the garden to talk about specific submission strategies and answer your questions about the publishing process.

This is for writers of all genres, so come one, come all!

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What’s the connection between imagination and identity? MFA Writing Chair Jasmin Darznik will appear on a Georgetown University webinar this Friday at 11 am PST to discuss how immigration and her Iranian background have informed her writing. Free and open to the public—link to register in our bio.

The Litcrawl schedule is up and we’re on it! Swing by the Make-Out Room on 10/22 from 5-6 pm for our One Page Wonders.

This book! This author! Our heads are still buzzing with the ideas and stories Matt Bell shared at last night’s Tuesday Talks.

Just a few takeaways:

1. Hold fast to your “bad” ideas. This is where the magic lies, where your best writing emerges.

2. Wait to share your writing lest those “bad ideas” never have a chance to develop.

3. Prime your writing brain by reading interviews with authors—also a great way to kick off a writing session.

Huge thanks to Matt for a fabulous evening.

And!

Thanks as ever to our students who led the conversation with heart and grace.

This Tuesday Matt Bell, author of the mighty fantastic new craft book Refuse To Be Done and novel Appleseed, joins us live via Zoom from 6-7. Open to members of the CCA community, including alumni. Link to sign up in our bio.

In City Lights Bookstore, a quiet aura lingers inside the Poetry Room where, in a few moments, Joseph Lease will read from his new collection of poetry, The Body Ghost. His books are displayed on a small round table between a medium-sized podium and a rocking Poet’s Chair. In those silent moments, one could almost hear the voices escaping from the books lining the shelves all around the room. As people enter and take seats facing the podium, their enthusiastic conversations replace those lingering voices left behind by fellow poets. And when Joseph arrives, when he takes the podium and opens up the pages of his new collection, his voice rises and introduces the room to a new sound.

The Poetry Room is made for this moment. As Joseph reads his poems, his voice evokes rhythmic, urgent anthems conjuring a range of emotions that explore those caverns of the human condition, the ones experienced during life’s disorienting moments: death and mourning, profound love, and social constraints. The vulnerability between his words make room for a healing process. When Joseph reads his poem, "Rent is Theft," its title becomes a chant that emphasizes the space between social constraints and economic instability; his poem Night urges the necessity of speaking and being heard when caught up in a whirlwind of political and personal darkness; and The Body Ghost, broken up into three separate poems, underlines the common thread weaved throughout his collection, the search for a silver lining amongst hardships.

In the Poetry Room, Joseph leaves us with an evocative impression, not only in our minds but somewhere in our being; something there is stirring, healing.

-Fourteen Hills

THIS TUESDAY! Kicking off our first author conversation and reading of the year with poet sam sax on 9/13. The 6-7 pm reading is open to the CCA community, including alumni.
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sam sax is a q***r, jewish writer and educator. They're the author Madness, winner of The National Poetry Series and ‘Bury It’ winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. They're the two time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, Granta and elsewhere. sam's received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Poetry Foundation, Yaddo, Lambda Lit, MacDowell, and is currently serving as an ITALIC Lecturer at Stanford University.

Throwing it back to 2017 when then-U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith visited CCA. The poems she read to us that night in the Nave—haunting evocations wrought of research and imagination—would appear a year later in her book Wade In the Water.

What Nightcrawling Gets Right About Oakland (And So Much Else)—Oakland native and CCA MFA alum Emily Garcia reviews Nightcrawling, a searing debut novel by for

Link in our bio to read the review. 📖

The 2022 schedule just went live today and we’re thrilled to again be supporting this wild and magnificent SF tradition.

And! We’re making not one but three appearances this year.

First up, Professors Barbash and Darznik take on the art of the novel Oct. 9.

Oct. 15 draws Leslie Carol Roberts out of a well-earned sabbatical for a conversation on young women’s climate activism.

Then on Oct. 22 our second year cohort joins Litcrawl with their One Page Wonders.

Come on by—we’d absolutely love to see you and share the literary love.

Don’t forget to have a good time—and other fabulous advice from Adam Nemett ‘08, author of We Can Save Us All.

“You’re paying for time.” ✍🏻 Adam Nemett shares advice about making the most of your time as an MFA student.

His novel WE CAN SAVE US ALL was published in 2018.

Find him

“San Francisco itself is art, every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is a whole truth.”

William Saroyan

Lucky us, to write in this storied city.🌉

No place we’d rather be than our studio and garden.🌳✍🏻