In my final semester in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts (Fiction 2000), I was chosen to speak at graduation with a fellow in creative nonfiction. I suggested instead of coming up with a speech, we ask grads to give us their best lines from their mentors over the four semesters. He and I took turns delivering the barbs anonymously, but I enjoyed watching the faces of faculty members who recognized their comments, some with laughter and some with embarrassment.

Here I am with some of my classmates, Michelle Brockway, Lynn Levin, Alexandra Enders

Here are the comments that might give a nudge to anyone who writes:

1. The education we seek in this program is not just about specifics of technique but about deeper writing and thinking processes.
2. The time for milk and cookies is over. 
3. Your original insights and clever, colorful presentation are strong enough to camouflage a failure to carry out a sustained, concrete analysis of the text in question.
4. I think we gutted that one too much.
5. The best way to learn about poetry is to write another poem.
6. I see this as a poem that wants to be sparse, terse, hard-won, not a poem that wants to load up with imagery like the plate of a Hoosier at an all-you-can-eat place.
7. Avoid gratuitous ruminations.
8. I find a central vacuousness for all its elegance.
9. Rub against type. Don’t go for obvious moments.
10. Meaning is not attached to the detail—it is revealed. 
11. I just ran the spellcheck and it picked up the word “Fulbright.” It didn’t recognize the word and asked to substitute “Filbert.” I think it might be easier to deal with being turned down for a filbert.
12. Perhaps it wasn’t that the poem failed but that it was insufficiently successful
13. No one—NO ONE—ever—EVER—does justice to their vision of what their work could and should be, so we should never use the failure to do so as an excuse to quit. We shouldn’t ask ourselves, “Am I doing justice to my vision of the work?” We should ask, “Am I coming at least a little bit close?”
14. Escaping the self is a noble, religious act.
15. Stalking the relationship is the job of the memoir.
16. Writers use words the way a painter uses paint. Like a junk sculptor, we build what we build out of the verbal junk of our culture.
17. All things come down to “a,” “the,” and “this.” All things come down to word choice. The word means everything.
18. The reason you’re having trouble outlining the plot of your novel is because plot denotes action and your novel has no action.
19. It’s boring.
20. When I was a kid growing up in Minnesota, I loved to be inside during a blizzard and put my cheek against the frigid window pane and feel it vibrate in the wind. There was something both comforting and exhilarating about being so close to something so powerful and deadly. A kind of safe danger. Art’s the same way. We have to put a pane of glass between the reader and reality, and we have to make it thin and clear enough to allow the reader to see and feel the reality through it. But we can’t let that pane of glass get so thin that it breaks.
21. The most important things I learn about constructing my own manuscripts come to me on a walk or in the shower.
22. Poems are bear traps—big, gaping holes in the earth, inside of which may be sharpened sticks.
23. Poems should be difficult when, and only when, they need to be. Why be mystifying about what is NOT mystical?
24. The near-fetched and the far-fetched need not be so distant.
25. When I’m traveling, I am reminded of just how marginal we ALL are as writers: a writer lives on the periphery.
26. Fred Astaire was a perfectionist. In those RKO movies he made with Ginger Rogers, he and a guy named Hermes Pan (no kidding) did the choreography. Rogers was making about a half dozen pictures a year and her time was tight and so she was brought in when everything was already mapped out. Astaire insisted every dance number be done in a single take, no cutaway shots. So every time they fucked up, they’d have to stop and repolish the bakelite floors. Rogers would sleep on a little cot behind the set. Their greatest number, “Never Gonna Dance,” is unusually long and complex with a two-tiered floor, and they had to do 47 takes to get it right. By this time, Roger’s feet were bloody stumps, bound up in bandages and rammed back into her dance shoes. The number, though, when you see it on film, looks like effortless perfection. What you don’t see are the 46 previous takes or the bloody stumps. I think this is what’s necessary to perfection and artistic control—bloody stumps.
27. Move it!
28. Pages thrown away or not used verbatim are not a waste of time.
29. You should always be willing to fail.
30. Grief is like a shard of dry ice that creates gaseous poison that will kill you. People need to find the way to turn the gas back into a solid. Those who don’t find it will become frozen. Once you find ways to take these swirls and geysers to make something external, the shard shrinks, the heat grows, and you can articulate a much bigger percentage of the muck in the losses.
31. The quality an unsatisfied desire is often more rewarding than the desire itself—than any satisfaction.
32. Love thyself, have sympathy for the things that do define you from moment.
33. Rejection is the norm when you send to any pub with an established reputation. Deal with it and don’t be discouraged. You will sooner or later prevail.

My new book, Sheltering Angel, A Novel Based on a True Story of the Titanic, is available for sale in print, ebook, and audio format.