Featuring instruction from past and present faculty members of the acclaimed M.F.A. in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, including Mark Doty, Douglas Glover, Robin Hemley, Richard Jackson, Sydney Lea, Bret Lott, Sue William Silverman, David Wojahn, and Xu Xi, Words Overflown By Stars gives you unprecedented access to a top literary education.
This comprehensive resource covers a wide variety of topics, including the creative process, titles, beginnings, voice and style, point of view, novel and short story structure, the role of dreams and fantasy in fiction, the often-blurry borderline between fiction and creative nonfiction, the subgenres of creative nonfiction, music and time in poetry, image patterning, “saying the unsayable,” multiculturalism, the art of revision, and much more.
About the M.F.A. in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts
Since the M.F.A. program’s inception in 1981, the graduates of Vermont College of Fine Arts have published more than 500 books as well as thousands of individual poems, stories, and essays in literary journals and anthologies. They have also received such major honors as the American Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction, the AWP Award for Poetry, the Walt Whitman Award, and the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Additionally, they have received Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Poet Laureateship, and had their books chosen for the National Poetry Series and Oprah’s Book Club.
Both provocative and practical, the essays in Words Overflown by Stars distill many of the lessons that have made the graduates of Vermont College of Fine Arts so successful.