Ladies, He’s taken…but his press is looking for Ms. Right…

Steve Mueske’s Three Candles Press is looking to read manuscripts by female poets!

Thanks so much to all well-wishers and congratulators. It is all much appreciated, especially in my anxiety-ridden current post-MFA state.

More lunatic ravings of a recent MFA Graduate:
One goal of the MFA is to teach writers the ability to be self-critical. True or false?

The ability to be self-critical seems like an absolute necessity to a writer. I don’t know exactly how to teach it or how I learned it, but I suspect it has to do with my mother, fresh from her BA in Journalism, covering my second grade book reports with red ink, which made me cry, because as a kid, you just want your mom to say, “It’s terrific, sweetie,” not have her try to make you a really good writer when you’re like, eight years old. On the plus side, I swiftly became a straight-A English student under the influence of my mother’s red ink. I think it’s the same when you grow up and write things (poetry, fiction, blogs, whatever) and you want someone to tell you “it’s so terrific,” but really you are still learning and need to be trying to push yourself to be better all your life, because there’s no single second when you’re going to be the world’s most perfect-ever writer, and even if there were such a second, you wouldn’t know it and no one would tell you. I mean, I think T.S. Eliot peaked at thirty, and went downhill (a lot of other people argue otherwise) and do you think Eliot writing Prufrock etc was thinking, “This is the best thing I’m ever going to write?” I mean, that would make you really crazy, right?

So, in my experience, the MFA was a way to learn not to be more self-critical but more self-exploratory (not in a sexual way, you dirty readers! Shame on you!) To seek out what makes me “me” and put that into poems. To put more of my world into poems. To try to write more adventurous poems, new kinds of poems, about new things. To never be satisfied, but at the same time, to have more fun with my writing.

On another note, going out to dinner with G to celebrate the first day on a new position at his company, and then, tonight, a new episode of Heroes! With more T-Rex than any previous episode!