I got to spend another week in Newport, Rhode Island, with the low-residency Newport MFA program. Founded by my mentor Ann Hood, best-selling unstoppable writer of fiction, nonfiction and YA, the program is hosted by Salve Regina University and housed in the cliffside mansions of America’s industrial Gilded Age. The program is uniquely warm and nourishing (like Ann), where we get to hang with (and students study with) writers like Bill Roorbach, Alden Jones, Tim Weed, Michael Ruhlman, and more. This week one of the guests was bright-shining Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased (whom I first met in Ann’s workshop at Bread Loaf in 2015). My sweetheart Edgar Kunz teaches poetry in the program, and I love spending time twice a year in this strange, special place.
