When we met Joshua Henkin at the GalleyCat BEA party, he not only reminded me about the galley of his second novel, Matrimony, which is coming out from Pantheon this fall, that’s sitting somewhere in the stacks of books overrunning my foyer, he also gave me a heads-up about his guest appearance on the book-marketing blog Buzz, Balls, & Hype this week, where he’s been doling out advice to MFA students, where he starts out by cautioning that “enrolling in an MFA program in order to get published strikes me as unwise.” Then he points out some of the common ways creative writing students fail to tell a story. “What I try to do is write about situations where conflict seems likely even if I don’t know what that conflict will be,” he adds in the next segment, citing “weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, Thanksgiving dinners, and family reunions” as examples.
So maybe we should be looking at this Henkin fellow for that MFA reality show idea I’m kicking around…