Another Rejection from JAMA.

 This time the turnaround was even faster!!!


"Dear Dr Nowaczyk,

We have now completed our review of your manuscript, which was under consideration for JAMA's A Piece of My Mind column. I am sorry to inform you that we will not be able to publish the manuscript.

Every year we receive hundreds of manuscripts that are submitted specifically for the A Piece of My Mind column. Criteria for determining acceptance include priority, originality, quality, and appeal for our general medical audience. Unfortunately, your manuscript was judged by the editors not to have met the criteria necessary for publication in JAMA."

So my work is not original, of quality, appeal and interest. Should I shoot myself now, or wait till later?

Mistakes.

Douglas H. Glover, in his excellent book "The Attack of Copula Spiders" listed four common mistakes that writing students make in their stories. Darin Strauss reminded the class of them earlier this month in Paris, at the NYU MFA residency. The mistakes are:

a. the partial story - a couple of thousand words, give or take, which introduce a situation  and a conflict but which end after the first major scene. the story doesn't develop through a series of actions;
b. the broken-back story - the student loses confidence in his/her ability to move the conflict forward and shifts to another conflict;
c. the bathtub story - a story which takes place almost completely as backfill in the mind of a single character (who often spends the whole narrative sitting in a bathtub - I  am only being slightly facetious);
d. the victim story - the student fails to generate true conflict because the protagonist refuses to speak up for himself, fight back, take a stand, get angry, etc.

With the exception of b., I have committed all of the above in the handful of stories that I have written. Sigh.

On a happier note, yesterday I sent "Dr. Bluebird" to Ars Medica for their Fall Issue. We'll see if they like it.

Banish Your Inner Critic

Sarah Selecky, whose e-course Story is State of Mind I am working through right now, suggested that we put together a picture of our inner critic. Here is mine - I called her Miss Panglin, after the Grade 12 English teacher who told our class that immigrants may become bilingual, but their English will never be idiomatic. She, of course, had a different name.

Choices.

I am considering three low-residency MFA programs: 1. the optional residency program at UBC; 2. the low residency NYU program which residencies in Parish (sic!); and 3. the Warren-Wilson low residency program.

They all have their pros and cons. UBC allows up to five years to finish the program part-time. It is Canadian, and its tuition is the lowest. You do not have to attend the residencies, but if you want to, they only take place once a year, in July, in Vancouver. It has a well-known and critically acclaimed faculty (Annabel Lyon, Wayne Grady, etc.). It would be the most convenient and the cheapest. Also most flexible.

The NYU program is alluring - what more can one want than study writing in  Paaaaahris?! The faculty is accomplished, recognized and has won numerous accolades. There are at least three Guggenheim fellows on faculty and numerous National Award winners. Chris Adrian, my literary alter-ego (OK so he is gay, male, and accomplished, none of which I am, but he is also a pediatrician and in his writing has expressed many of my feelings and traumas of pediatric residency training), is one of them and I would LOVE to study with him. Cons? Paris itself, Charles de Gaulle airport which I would have to travel through at least five times in two years, cost, and family who may not want me to be away so much. And you are supposed to finish in two years. But, boy, oh boy, would I LOVE to do this one!

I do not know much about the Warren-Wilson program other than it is the oldest low-residency program in the US, and that it has produced many published authors. Also two year, but more affordable than NYU and Paris, and it's bit more convenient to travel to North Carolina.

I will apply to all three, and see who takes me!

New Leaf or How I Got an MFA.

As of today this blog will document the work and the heartbreak of getting a Master's of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. I am still not completely sure that that's what I want to do, and definitely not sure how I am going to pull it off with a full-time job, and an even fuller-time family life. But here it goes.