Writers use
Five recently published Southern writers (all Department of English alumni) share writing tips they’ve learned along the way.
W
E M I LY C OS TA, M . F. A . ’ 1 3 Costa is the author of the short story collection Girl on Girl (Rejection Letters, December 2024). She is working on a novel about her father’s video store.
What led you to Southern?
D AVID CA PPS , M.F.A . ’16 A poet and professor of philosophy, Capps is the author of six chapbooks, most recently, Fever in Bodrum (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and Wheatfield with Reaper (Akinoga Press, 2024).
Advice for someone who dreams of becoming a published writer Be humble; read the classics; read widely, both in terms of era and genre; only write if you enjoy it; travel; get used to rejection (I was rejected 15 times over the course of six years before finally being accepted by a particular journal).
What’s the most unusual or unexpected way you’ve gotten a writing idea? One of my books began with thinking about how counterarguments are constructed. Usually, one grasps an argument, identifies some weak points, and proceeds from there. But in writing, I tend to experiment. In reading Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life and taking note of how measured his prose was, it occurred to me to see what might happen if I composed a text by contradicting Seneca’s work, sentence-by-sentence. Over a few weeks, each night by candlelight and writing longhand, I worked on the resulting manuscript: On the Great Duration of Life (Schism Neuronics, 2023). 32 | Southern ALUMNI MAGAZINE
I’d graduated from UConn with an English and film degree but wasn’t sure what to do next. Then I randomly got a Southern M.F.A. postcard in the mail. Some kind of fate! I promptly quit the middle-school certification program I’d half-heartedly started, and I applied to Southern, which I can see now was a super-risky thing to do. Southern has the only full-residency M.F.A. program in the state of Connecticut. I wanted to stay here, and I knew that if I was going to make the leap and pursue this dream, I wanted to be fully immersed in the writing world. At a low-res program you’re working from afar most of the time, meeting up occasionally and doing retreats. At Southern’s full-residency M.F.A. program, you are right on campus with your peers and mentors. You are in the classroom, in community all the time. You’re in New Haven at coffee shops, restaurants, and bars talking about writing. Not only did that help me learn in such a wideranging, full way, but I’ve also made lifelong friends. It was a commitment and decision I will never regret.
Advice for someone who dreams of becoming a published writer Listen to what other writers, peers, and mentors say about your work, but never change