Meet the Grad: Gina DeCiani

On January 19, 2014, the final day of the upcoming residency, the MFAC program will have a Graduate Recognition ceremony, honoring the 11 men and women who have just completed their studies and will receive an MFA from Hamline University. Between now and that ceremony the Inkpot will be shining the spotlight on those grads. Today's interview is with Gina DeCiani, who lives in Chicago, Illinois.

What do you do when you’re not working on packets?
I am an attorney that’s been working as a government administrator for the last 10 years or so. I currently work for Cook County, Illinois, which is the second largest county in the country. I am legal counsel to the Bureau of Human Resources as of July of this year. Before that, I was the Deputy Chief Administrative Officer.

How did you hear about the Hamline MFAC Program?
A friend of mine, someone I met through writing workshops and SCBWI, told me she was attending an Open House at Chicago Story Studio, where Mary Rockcastle, Marsha Chall, and Marsha Qualey were going to be presenting mini classes and answering questions about the program. She was going to attend, and on a whim I decided to go as well. Mary, Marsha and Marsha presented such a great program – this was exactly the kind of instruction and support for my writing that I’d been looking for but hadn’t been able to find.

What was your writing experience prior to entering the program?
Like most of us, I was always a writer. I wrote lots of short stories, plays and picture books in grammar school and junior high school. Once I got to law school, my focus turned to technical writing, and I started teaching basic writing and public speaking classes to undergrads at U of I as a teaching assistant. After graduating, I began teaching writing, research and advocacy to paralegals and then law students. A co-worker then asked me to co-write a textbook on legal ethics for nonlawyers with her, which was published by West (which became International Thompson Publishing). That led to being asked to co-write some more texts on professional ethics that were re-published by Child Welfare League of America. After that, I realized that I had strayed pretty far from what my first writing interests were and I decided to start fiction writing again, eventually focusing on writing for children.

What do especially remember about your first residency?
I was terrified. Taking this educational program on was a huge commitment and I wasn’t sure I could handle it, so I only committed to one semester (I was mini-immersion!). And I was afraid I wouldn’t “fit in.” But I loved, loved, loved everyone I met.

Have you focused on any one form (PB, novel, nonfiction; graphic novel) or age group in your writing? Tried a form you never thought you’d try?
I wanted to absorb as much as possible while I was in the program. I focused primarily on writing a young adult book, but I also began drafting a proposal for a nonfiction book and I began a middle grade novel.  I still haven’t summoned the courage to work on picture books, which scare me because you have to do so much in so few pages. However, I’d love to take a stab at something, hoping it would turn out like Click, Clack, Moo– so I could link my legal background with my passion for children’s fiction. Or I’d like to write picture book biographies.

Tell us about your Creative Thesis.
My creative thesis is a young adult novel that I started working on it my first semester here. It’s a coming-of-age story set in the world of politics.

What changes have you seen in your writing during your studies?
Most of the big, “wow” changes occurred in the first two semesters – probably because I had so much to learn when I started. I learned all kinds of basics about writing that I had never been aware of before starting the program – like not naming a character’s emotions (thank you, Claire Rudolph Murphy!). The biggest change, though, has come in the dialogue I write. Ron Koertge was my advisor second semester and he had me write a critical essay called “dialogue that sizzles; dialogue that fizzles.” Before I wrote that essay, I had no idea how flat my dialogue was.

With packet deadlines removed as an incentive, do you anticipate it will be harder to keep writing? Any plans for your post-Hamline writing life?
I am exchanging a list of writing goals for the year with a friend of mine who finished her MFA at Vermont. The plan is that we will hold each other accountable.

Any thoughts for entering students or for people considering the program?
Listen to and work with your faculty advisors. They’re fabulous, they know what they’re doing, and they’re so generous about sharing their wisdom and experiences.

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The public is welcome to attend the graduate recognition ceremony on Sunday, January 19, 3:30pm, (Anne Simley Theatre, Drew Fine Arts Building). Jane Yolen is the speaker.

Meet the Grad: Shelley Jones

On January 19, 2014, on the final day of the upcoming residency, the MFAC program will have a Graduate Recognition ceremony, honoring the 11 men and women who have just completed their studies and will receive an MFA from Hamline University. Between now and residency, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, we'll be posting interviews with many of the grads. Today's grad is Shelley Jones; she lives in Johnston, Iowa.

What do you do when you're not working on packets?

When I’m not working on packets, I spend time with my family: my husband, Bob, and my three children, Allison, Levi, and Cole. We like to travel/explore, watch movies, play board games/video games, swim (though I flounder), ski, bowl, rake yard debris… We like just about any activity when we’re together. I also have this gig as an emergency room physician that sucks up a bit of my energy. When I have free time to myself, I like to read and—get this—write.

How did you hear about the Hamline MFAC Program?

Mary Rockcastle and Gary Schmidt attended an Iowa SCBWI conference. Mary gave a breakout session about the Hamline program. I had no interest in an MFA in creative writing, but the other breakout session sounded even more boring, so… As Mary talked about the program, I sat up straighter in my chair. I stopped yawning. My pulse quickened. By the end of the session, I thought “This is exactly what I want to do.” But I had doubts about whether I could devote the time and money. Then, on Saturday evening, Gary Schmidt gave the keynote address. He spoke about writing for children with such passion that the whole auditorium was crying by the time he finished. I’m not a crier, but Gary hit a nerve. My nose was so snotted up, I knew I had to try Hamline.

What was your writing experience prior to entering the program?

I’ve been writing since I was in grade school. I don’t like to brag, but at age 11, I was named “Creep of the Week” by a local television show for my story “The Green Slime.” In junior high I won a poetry contest and I got to meet a real live poet on the “Arts Afloat” boat which travelled down the Mississippi river. I’ve had a medical related short story, medical essays, and poetry published in magazines, but my desire for several years has been to write for children. I write in every spare minute. Writing is my drug—I couldn’t stop if I tried.

What do especially remember about your first residency?

I remember a miraculous January in Minnesota where the temperatures were in the fifties, and every day I walked to class from the Best Western Bandana Inn with a group of fellow students and faculty. We talked about writing. We talked about how life often gets in the way of our writing. I felt like I belonged.

Have you focused on any one form (PB, novel, nonfiction; graphic novel) or age group in your writing? Tried a form you never thought you’d try?

I’ve focused mostly on middle grade novel writing. I’ve written tons of picture books in the past which were unanimously panned by my critique group. At Hamline, I finally gained some understanding of the complexity of picture books, and I included a couple of them in my creative thesis. I also expanded into chapter books, some poetry, and I wrote a YA novel for my creative thesis. As I leave Hamline, I have a yearning to try non-fiction, verse novels, and graphic novels. 

Tell us about your Creative Thesis.

The bulk of my creative thesis is a YA novel—a twisted, snarky version of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, where sixteen-year-old Sparrow Bailey muses about various forms of suicide while missing the big picture. I also included two picture books: Mrs. Hyde Dances, about a teacher who dances after the students go home, and What Zosie Wants about a girl whose mother never gives her what she wants.

What changes have you seen in your writing during your studies?
The manuscripts I wrote pre-Hamline (which seemed like God’s gift to literature at the time) now look amateurish to me. Medicine is my first profession and it’s true that there is an art and a science involved in taking care of patients. In medical school, we first learned the science, and later the art. With writing, I feel like I’ve spent my whole life wallowing in the art, but I needed the science—the structure that comes from studying the elements of craft—that’s what Hamline provided for me.

Any thoughts for entering students or for people considering the program?

Hamline can help a writer take their manuscripts to the next level. If you’re like I was, you may be thinking that you can’t possibly devote the time and effort it takes to get an MFA in creative writing.  But if you love to write, you will make the time, you will find the money, and you will relish every minute of it. Well, not every minute. That would be a lie. Sometimes you will feel frustrated and untalented, prompting you to procrastinate by jumping online to whine to your fellow students. Sometimes they will tell you to stop whining. Sometimes they will whine back. Okay, so you will enjoy 59 seconds out of every minute.

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The public is welcome to attend the graduate recognition ceremony on Sunday, January 19, 3:30pm, (Anne Simley Theatre, Drew Fine Arts Building). Jane Yolen is the speaker.

Faculty Voices: Eleanora Tate

Because she did yeoman’s work on the Inkpot for a solid year, we gave Eleanor a break from writing a post this semester. But because we miss and love her voice, we’ve decided to share an excerpt from an interview she did with Dr. Ernest Bond for his book, Literature and the Young Adult Reader (Pearson/Allyn & Bacon 2011). The excerpt below is her answer to “On how she as an author of historical Fiction can write authentically about a time period she did not experience.”

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"I've asked myself the same thing with each of my books. I do a lot of primary research into materials produced during the period that I'm writing about. Sense of place is equally important to me. This gives me a flavor of the times. Since most of my books involve African and African American history, I read the WPA slave narratives from the states where my stories take place, particularly Missouri and North and South Carolina. These formerly enslaved persons' narratives told their memories to mostly white writers primarily during the 1930s. These folks lived and died, by now, well over a hundred years or more before my time. Their white interviewers may have reinterpreted some of what those old folks told them, of course. When I read, "Slavery was good to me and I were better off being a slave than I is now," I must remember that the conversations took place during the Depression. In addition, some of those old Black folks were very guarded and protective in their responses because they were talking to members of the same race that had had total control over their lives and, in many respects, still did.

The purpose of this kind of research is to give me a sense of flavor of the time. Plus, as an African American, I can look back into my own family's and neighbors' histories and feel a certain kinship with their shared experience, their triumphs and tragedies, their failures, and their pride in accomplishments. Human emotion has always been us, regardless of the situation, regardless of the century.

I have a racial memory, long memory. I know about racism and prejudice, successes and failures in every day living because I still have to deal with racism and prejudice, enjoying the roses despite the thorns, so to speak. I've never been physically whipped or had my children sold away from me, but that's where the primary research comes in. From it I can get printed descriptions about the physical treatment African Americans received. Internally I can certainly imagine the anger, the degradation, humiliation, helplessness, and sense of loss. I know what's happened to me.

I can get printed accounts of the enslaved or sharecropper family's activities during holidays and celebrations at the Big House. But unlike some writers outside (and a few within) my culture, I remember always that these folks were human beings whose happiness, joy, hope, etc. during these times were despite slavery. They had these positive feelings of "good times" despite slavery, and that's what makes my stories authentic.

I continue my research through conversations. Oral history. People talk to me wherever I go. I have this glazed "deer in the headlights" look through my bifocals when folks begin to talk to me, and they keep on talking because I guess I look like I'm mesmerized. When I first moved to South Carolina, for example, and loving community history, I was enthralled by the true stories people told me, by their use of the language (regional, vernacular), their intonation, their unique experiences. These folks, my neighbors, acquaintances, their ancestors lived the very history that I wanted to explore. I loved to listen and they loved having an audience. In addition to the printed version, the oral history from the folk is the real living history, and that's why The Secret of Gumbo Grove still rings with so much authenticity.

Physical primary source material includes old newspapers, old history books, courthouse papers, wills and deeds of the times, and I study photos, paintings, drawings, and read the novels of the times. I can glean bits of concrete information from those old books, which include descriptions of place and culture as the writer back then saw it around him or her. I read "secondary" source material—often scholarly material written more recently about the time—but I have to be careful with that because sometimes it's revisionist. The authors didn't experience firsthand what they were writing about, either, so this material is through those authors' life experiences and interpretations, and not objective."

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The Inkpot is going on end-of-year hiatus after this week. Check back in early 2014 for more from the MFAC community.

Meet the Grad: Daniel Holly

On January 19, 2014, on the final day of the upcoming residency, the MFAC program will have a Graduate Recognition ceremony, honoring the 11 men and women who have just completed their studies and will receive an MFA from Hamline University. Between now and residency, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, we'll be posting interviews with many of the grads. Daniel Holly is today's grad; he lives in Whitewater, Wisconsin.

What do you do when you’re not working on packets?
For the past four years I’ve been a stay at home dad to my wonderful daughters, working freelance doing everything from manuscript editing and formatting to graphic design and even jewelry making. Life is a banquet.  I’m also an illustrator in my free time and spend my non-writing creative time designing book covers and illustrations to my work, even 3D printing models of characters!

How did you hear about the Hamline MFAC Program?
My mentor at my undergrad writing program got her MFA through a low-residency program and advised me to pursue a master’s degree upon graduation through a similar method. Such wonders were unbeknownst to me, and after having our first daughter and wanting to keep one of us home with her and subsequent offspring, low-residency seemed the only way for me to follow my writing education further. I searched for schools that used this format and applied to two—Hamline and Vermont (no, not the children’s lit sister program; that didn’t even show up on searches).

What was your writing experience prior to entering the program?
For the sake of redundancy I’ll retell that I had my undergrad experience in writing, but I was among the only fiction writers and absolutely the only novelist in a whole program devoted to poetry and memoir. I was the lone warrior, valiant and fearless in my devotion to the fictional arts among the unforgiving hoards of poetry majors. I’m sure it was exactly like that. I wrote my first manuscript in the common rooms between classes and spent most of my less desirable class time jotting notes and outlines for books. It’s amazing I graduated, really.

What do especially remember about your first residency?
Lots and lots of humans. You’re talking about someone who spent(s) most of his time with toddlers, doing horsy rides and Kermit the Frog impressions. Don’t get me wrong, the Kermit impressions have served me well at Hamline (haven’t found a use for horsy rides yet), but I remember the sheer number of faces and words coming out of them—some aimed at me—to be overwhelming at first. Adult conversation? What is this strange wonder! But I also remember feeling a familial connection I never had at a school environment before. My wife joked upon my return home that I’d finally found my people.

Have you focused on any one form (PB, novel, nonfiction; graphic novel) or age group in your writing? Tried a form you never thought you’d try?
I write mostly YA science fiction, both before and during Hamline, but I tried my hand at some middle grade and picture books during my time, and I found I have a real passion for less conventional picture books, ones using more visual narrative than words or which utilize art styles or layout or even sometimes the proportions of the book to convey its meaning. I’m fascinated by methods of storytelling, especially in very sparse ways. Once I’d discovered books like these, my interest in the form escalated, and they’re often my first stop at a bookstore. But most of my work was YA. I’m doing several projects at once and found that using various ones helped me get the most out of my time with advisers at my disposal.

Tell us about your Creative Thesis.
I did an experiment piece in undergrad to see if it was possible to write a short epic. I failed. But all was not lost! I later found myself working on two other fledgling book ideas—with entirely different settings and characters—but I couldn’t shake the feeling that these three stories were deeply connected, so what finally came of it was a project of three very different books, all interwoven in events and occurring at the same time. During my final semester, my unnamed advisor was brave (or foolhardy) enough to accept all three manuscripts at once so I could work on them simultaneously. The last of them, Chains of Clay, became my creative thesis, and its heroine, Dune—a fifteen year-old Brazilian half-mask wearing, rifle slinging hunter—really took off into a story. This image of a girl with half her face covered in clay and a rifle in her hands stayed with me until I started thinking of reasons she’d want to cover part of herself, and she ended up as a girl who her own people believed was unholy. At seven years old, she and the deeply troubled boy who shared the same fate were drugged, tattooed as a warning to others, and dumped naked in a ditch with only rifles for survival. Both were exiled forever. The book takes place eight years later when she’s working for this trading caravan but periodically flashes back to her younger years as she watched the boy who was her only real connection become slowly possessive and sociopathic. In the present, her caravan is taken over by nomads on an expedition to find their mythic paradise, and the boy she left behind and fears more than anything is now employed by her captors and along for the journey. His presence is a slowly-tightening noose for Dune. I’ve never gotten to play with a character of such extremes, both fierce and formidable, yet deeply vulnerable at the same time. It’s a story about family, specifically what is and what isn’t, and like its two counterparts, Chains of Clay is about a search for paradise.

What changes have you seen in your writing during your studies?
Concision. If there’s one thing to narrow down on, I’ve learned concision, and in the broader scope of that same thought, voice. I really had no concept of voice work before, having grown up largely on classical and often long-winded literature. My work all sounded alike and all very distant and ‘lofty’ in its form, not very fitting for YA. My undergrad work was once described as a “mindf*** of detail.” I’ve learned to shut my mouth at Hamline. Members of my writing group noted the radical 180 my style had taken after my first or second residency, and while this came about obviously because of instruction and lectures, a large part of it was due to the literature I was exposed to.

Any thoughts for entering students or for people considering the program?
I think a truly successful book is less about relaying events and more about conveying what it was like to live them. Write what haunts you, what keeps you up at night in those moments you don’t want to dwell on. People recognize that kind of writing even if they can’t put into words why. Don’t be satisfied with a story with skin. Dig down and expose the nerves.

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 The public is welcome to attend the graduate recognition ceremony on Sunday, January 19, 3:30pm, (Anne Simley Theatre, Drew Fine Arts Building). Jane Yolen is the speaker.

Meet the Grad: Gary Metivier

On January 19, 2014, the final day of the upcoming residency, the MFAC program will have a Graduate Recognition ceremony, honoring the 11 men and women who have just completed their studies and will receive an MFA from Hamline University. Between now and residency we'll be posting interviews with each student. Gary Metivier is today's grad; he lives in Davenport, Iowa.

What do you do when you’re not working on packets?

Working full time as a news anchor/reporter. Attending school and sports events with my two sons and wife (Adam is 13/Josh is 17/ My wife is … :)

How did you hear about the Hamline MFAC Program?

I met Mary Rockcastle and Gary Schmidt at an SCBWI conference in Iowa. Mary’s advice that stuck in my head for months before I finally applied “do this for yourself”

What was your writing experience prior to entering the program?

I have always been a writer—but did not have the craft elements or any formal training.

What do especially remember about your first residency?

I wondered if I was a good fit—and whether or not I belonged and could finish. I felt like a kid back in school—but an old kid. I almost left the first day—but that was on me.

Have you focused on any one form (PB, novel, nonfiction; graphic novel) or age group in your writing? Tried a form you never thought you’d try?

I’ve tried every form at Hamline—and learned about myself immensely from that experience.

A hawk lands outside Gary's home office window.

Tell us about your Creative Thesis.

Hawk is very close to my heart—which made it even harder for me I think. Advisors such as Kelly Easton really inspired me to look at everything differently. I actually started the book seven years ago. Nothing remains unchanged—including the main character who once a male and is now female. To finish this novel is perhaps the most rewarding thing I have ever done. Even if it is never published, it was a great learning tool and is a symbol of achievement for me to treasure.

What changes have you seen in your writing during your studies?

I look back on the things I have written before and literally cringe. Not necessarily at the writing itself, but the lack of structure, style and craft elements. I am a totally different writer today—and always will be thanks to Hamline.

Any thoughts for entering students or for people considering the program?

Do it. Even if you don’t think you have what it takes, even if it is painful, even if it doesn’t fit into your life—it will become a part of your life forever. And forget about the cost, too. Compare it to the cost of a new car—but this investment will last a lifetime and stimulate talents in you that you never knew existed.

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 The public is welcome to attend the graduate recognition ceremony on Sunday, January 19, 3:30pm, (Anne Simley Theatre, Drew Fine Arts Building). Jane Yolen is the speaker.