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  • Bluegrass Writers Studio
  • 521 Lancaster Ave
  • Beckham 100
  • Richmond, KY, 40475-3102
  • Phone: 859-622-6263
  • Fax: 859-622-3156
  • r-dean.johnson@eku.edu

Inside Look

Blank Slate

By Kristen Thompson, Associate Director, Bluegrass Writers Studio

     Bluegrass Writers Studio's Winter Residency 2014 begins today! As participants check in, they'll be given a name tag, a schedule, and a restaurant guide to top off the stacks of papers that started with their writing. Sandwiched in the middle will be the manuscripts of their workshop-mates.

For Absolute Beginners

By Rebecca DeSensi Sivori, Alumna, Bluegrass Writers Studio '12

Unlike many of my BGWS peers, I did not begin the MFA program with any previous workshop experience. My undergrad work was in broadcast journalism, my first masters degree was in counseling and student affairs. One day I picked up a yellow lined notebook and a pen and started writing. Several notebooks later I decided to apply to an MFA program, wondering if they’d take me. I was told to submit a short story prior to my first residency. A what? I was told to critique the work of my peers prior to the residency. Like, how? I did not feel I was in the position to ask questions or admit that I had no clue what I was doing. I did not want them to regret their decision to accept me.

Editing by Unfamiliarity

By Todd King, Alumnus, Bluegrass Writers Studio

     Before I was a student in the creative writing program I adhered to the maxim to write for yourself--that what I wrote only mattered if it pleased me. Even after finishing my MFA, I think the maxim is absolutely true. As I continue writing, however, I’m finding that its essence goes deeper: I write for myself, not just as a writer, but for myself as a reader.

     There is a sense of discovery when it seems you’ve matched abstract concepts of your imagination into words--you see the images and feel the emotions. There is a sense of accomplishment in seeing it all animated by text alone. You’ve pleased yourself as a writer. But then someone reads it and they don’t get it. It didn’t move the reader as it moved the writer.

Paint it Noir

By Dr. Derek Nikitas, Director, Bluegrass Writers Studio

I met Kelly Braffet a couple years ago when we were both guest “thriller” authors at the Southern Kentucky Book Festival. We were almost seated together, if not for the incongruous wedge of a perfectly pleasant “inspirational” writer. I don’t remember that author’s name, but she’d churned out about ten books in a couple years.

Ms. Inspiration asked me, “What do you write?”

“Noir,” I said, and she asked, “What’s that?”

“Sort of the opposite of yours,” I quipped.

By the Book

By Nancy Jensen, Associate Professor, Bluegrass Writers Studio

     If you’ve started your research into MFA programs—whether low-residency or full-residency—you know that they all share one common feature: a book-length creative work submitted in the final semester as the thesis.

     What you may not realize is that if your goal is to write a novel, a memoir, or even a cohesive collection of short stories or creative nonfiction, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a program of any variety that provides opportunities for your book-length work to be developed and considered as a whole. Hard-pressed, that is, unless you come to the Bluegrass Writers Studio. 

The Summer Highs of Our Low-Residency MFA

By Dr. Derek Nikitas, Director, Bluegrass Writers Studio

Nothing like winter chill to make you dream of summer. Over at the Bluegrass Writers Studio office, we’re bustling like Santa’s elves getting ready for this year’s Winter Residency. But June, and our Summer Residency in Lisbon, Portugal, is also calling out to us. The international experience has been a hallmark of our program since we started in 2008, especially since last year, when we started an exciting partnership with the Disquiet International program.

Genre-Friendly, Low-Residency MFA

By Dr. Derek Nikitas, Director, Bluegrass Writers Studio

When a writer considers low-residency MFA programs, the question of “fit” is major. We all want to join a nurturing creative writing community that will help us sharpen our tools, but we also hope our writing will be respected for its heart. Like with a healthy romance, we don’t want to be turned into something we’re not.

Most MFA programs embrace traditionalists, experimentalists, formalists, magical realists, realists, and writers who don’t fit any “-ists.” But what about writers of genre fiction? Or writers who like to play with genre conventions? That’s a trickier question.

Beth Ann Fennelly's Open House

By Joseph Nichols, Graduate Assistant, Bluegrass Writers Studio ​On January 3rd, 2014, poet Beth Ann Fennelly and her husband (and author) Tom Franklin will be at the downtown Lexington Hilton, reading from their novel, The Tilted World. The duo will be two of the superstar guests appearing at the Bluegrass Writers Studio MFA Winter Residency, which takes place from Jan. 2nd thru Jan. 12th at the hotel.​ ​As a graduate student focusing on poetry, I read Fennelly's book Open House – Poems. This blog post, then, is my attempt to write an unbiased critique of that collection, though my main predicament in doing so is veering away from the fan boy diction that screams for release. Midway through perhaps the third section of the first poem, I was making enough noise that my Olive Garden waitress had started giving me dirty looks.

Sexual Perversity in Tampa

By Dr. Derek Nikitas, Director, Bluegrass Writers Studio

Alissa Nutting’s Tampa is arguably the most controversial book of 2013.  Surely it takes the number one slot on Santa’s naughty list. It’s NC-17 enough to make Anaïs Nin put her fingers to her pursed lips, but the real threat of Tampa is the voice of its female-predator narrator, Celeste Price. It’s how Celeste bites down on American culture, chews it up, and spits it back in our faces.

How can you resist an experience like that?

Tampa is the story of a middle school teacher in her late twenties whose two obsessions in life are maintaining her youth/beauty and bedding teenage boys. Her story, in her own unflinching words, is equal parts enthralling and disturbing, funny and sick, honest and deceptive.

Grodstein Saves. Perhaps.

By Kristen Thompson, Associate Director, Bluegrass Writers Studio

    Lauren Grodstein is comin' to town. I don’t think she’ll be bringing a bag of toys, but hopefully she’ll give us a peek into her bag of tricks. Writing tricks, that is.

      Her novel A Friend of the Family is intricately crafted. The narrator, Pete Dizinoff, relates a series of events and choices that led to his ruin. I’m not giving anything away here; he’s honest about that from page one. He gives the impression that he is going to tell his side of things accurately, including his harsh judgment of himself. Along the way, he mentions intriguing little pieces of the story that don’t fit with anything told so far. These flashes, after a while, start to seem like misfires in Dizinoff’s overtaxed head. Fifty pages might go by before he catches up with himself and the reader gets more of the picture.

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