What I learned in Pocket MFA

Today I met in the final Zoom session of a 10-week writing workshop program called Pocket MFA. It’s a new organization, founded by poet Joshua Roark, and I was in only the second cohort. Their goal is to provide writers an accessible, supportive version of the rigorous core of an MFA in Creative Writing. And they did. I was in a class of four writers and one teacher or “mentor.” We were trained in a specific method of giving feedback to a peer’s work: 1) Readers share moments of meaning from the work, vivid bits, parts that hit us in…