My first month in an MFA has blown my writing open

The September 2025 Digest, right in the knick of time

On Monday through Friday, I nanny a 15-month-old baby who calls me “Shoes.” I feed her, read her a book, then throw her in socks and velcro sneakers to dump her into a stroller. We walk for miles, go on swings, and say hi to my cats through the screened window facing the street.

As Shoes, my life has been nonstop. Before Baby’s lunch ends on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I slip on my sneakers and run, hefty laptop-laden purse on my shoulder, to catch the Broad Street SEPTA. I sit, shining with sweat, and ride to the Cecil B. Moore stop to step onto Temple’s sanitized, red-brick campus.

• On Tuesdays: a craft class with Emma Copley Eisenberg, author of Housemates and founder of Philly’s local writing community, Blue Stoop. When I tried to explain this class to my friends, they said, “Craft? Like, woodworking?” Close. Craft is a class reserved for writing technique. Emma’s class focuses on plots and defying the traditional three-act Aristotelian triangles we inherited as formulaic story guarantees. I’ll come back to this.

• On Thursdays: my fiction workshop with Alyssa Songsridej, a Temple MFA alumna who published Little Rabbit. (“Workshop? As in, wood workshop?” Yes!~~) If you’ve ever taken a creative writing class, you know the unique anxiety of a workshop. Over the course of the semester, every student will submit two (2) pieces of writing for the other 11 students + Alyssa to direct a conversation around what’s working and what can be improved. The writer, to avoid defensive interjections that redirect the conversation, sits silently while listening to people assess their never-before-seen writing. Even in the sweetest group of people, and my classmates are considerate and thoughtful, it’s never a good feeling knowing you will be told something is wrong with something you worked really hard on.

I finished my fifth week of school on Thursday, and I’ve already felt my brain expand as a writer. I read novels and short stories in different ways. I revise my work differently. I am unlearning the obedience of the hero’s journey structure.

Here are the top observations I’m carrying with me this early in the game:

Log what you read, but log how the writer does it.

In my workshop, Alyssa asks us to “describe the story in craft terms.”

What does that mean?