Lauren will read all of Carson McCullers, and everything she can find about Carson McCullers. Every letter, every blog, every journal article. Every biography. Brochures from the house tour. If it’s Carson, Lauren (who has wisely named her dog Carson) reads it. Meanwhile, over in Ohio, dear Ann’s on her 18^th-century-unmarried-American women kick—good, good—and Emily’s making her way to California, torn between short story cycles, Hemingway, and the graphic novel.  Good!  Good. That’s all you have to do.  Don’t even try to keep up with the new Eggers, Franzen, Chabon, Munro.  Don’t worry: Moby didn’t happen then and it’s not going to happen now. Forget about the vow to do Russians in winter. Keep up with your courses.  And fall in love: with your subject. One author. Part of a period. Japanese pillow books. Mine your tiny patch of land to its deepest depths. And you’ll be fine!

When you get to graduate school, it’s so easy to get overwhelmed. You constantly feel dumb. You didn’t read enough in undergrad, and the books you read were the wrong books! Don’t worry. Go narrow. Stay put.

Reading narrow offers creative writing students rich rewards. Going deep into reading one or two writers, or into a period, or a funky sub-genre, gives a writer insights into the process and craft of writing, which ends up helping us create our own writing life, and develop our own themes. Creative writers aren’t always literary scholars, and I advise my students to be selfish. Take on another writing life, rather than a survey, a history, or a genre. Get intimate with a living or dead writer’s process and technique, habit and development. Read that author in order to pretend to be that author. And watch: you’ll grow as a writer.

And, then when at the bar on Tuesday night after workshop (is it true that fiction writers drink more but poets have more fun?), everyone is talking about all the important books they have read and you haven’t and you feel smaller, and more Midwestern (or southern, or western, or northern, or foreign) than ever, you can gently shift the conversation over to Carson McCullers. Every Single Time. Paper covers rock. Passion trumps breadth. Lord your love, kids, and you’ll be fine!

That’s what’s on my mind this week; I’d love to hear what you think. What were you secret tricks for thriving in your first semester as a graduate student?