Today I chat with a newly-minted PhD from the Center of Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. She has also served as an Associate Editor at the Mississippi Review and published extensively in print and on the web. Most recently, she was awarded runner-up in the Short Fiction Category of Rock Star Games Upload 4 Contest.

What have been some of your most valuable resources, as a teacher?
When I teach fiction writing, the short stories I assign are my best resources. In Composition class, it's the essays. I like students to see what a good finished product would look like, so I show them work by good writers and then I say, "Write like this." In class, we take the works apart to figure out how they're put together and what makes them work. I just taught Martin Luther King's "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" in my Developmental Writing class, and we are going over concepts like audience, credibility, logic, style, and tone, taking the letter apart bit by bit to see how it works. Then, the students will write persuasive papers of their own.

What advice do you have for creative writing teachers when students present fiction or nonfiction where the subject matter may be cause for concern on behalf of the instructor? (i.e. Abuse, sexual assault, etc.)
In a fiction workshop, you have to treat everything as if it were definitely fiction. Students need to learn that not everything happened in real life works on the page, so you can't hold back on criticism because of hurt feelings (though praise is always important, no matter what the subject matter). When I teach composition, I try to steer them away from such personal topics because it impedes them from thinking about issues like focus and development and organization. Catharsis simply isn't the goal of the class. I always have conferences with these students, and when the do turn in personal and sensitive work, I usually start the conference with a general comment like, "I'm glad you feel comfortable writing about this subject and I appreciate your candor. You've put a lot of emotion into the piece, but now it's time to think about..." and then I go into the writing issues. But, yes, when someone has written about being raped or molested or having to take a mother off of life
support, it's very difficult to talk to him or her about semicolon use.

What's been the most difficult aspect of applying for teaching positions?
I'm trying to get a tenure track position teaching creative writing at the university-level. The most difficult thing about it is that there are not many positions open and so many people want these jobs. Each school is looking for something different, and you never know what they want, so it seems best to simply keep at it until the job comes along that's made for you. But in the meantime, the process is time consuming and expensive (postage, traveling to the MLA conference for interviews, registration fees at the MLA conference, sending out a credential file), and that's difficult, too. But these are important jobs and no one said it would be easy.

What job listings did you utilize when looking for openings? What was your criteria in selecting institutions to apply?
The job listings I used were the MLA Job List and the AWP list. AWP posts exclusively creative writing positions, while the MLA list is broader (jobs teaching literature and composition and specialties in 18th century lit and what have you). My criteria in selecting institutions wasn't picky. I looked for schools with tenure track positions in creative writing where I met the qualifications. I
always look up information about the schools and the departments -- ideally I'd like to work somewhere where they have a literary magazine, though I'd also be glad to devote myself solely to teaching for a while.

You've been an editor with the Mississippi Review. Can you provide some brief do's and don'ts for hopeful contributors to literary journals (beyond spell-check, clean printouts, etc.)
It is always important to know what the magazine's guidelines are. I see people waste so much postage money submitting to us when we accept unsolicited submissions only for the annual Prize issue. Everyone who submits at other times of the year gets his or her SASE turned right back with a note about our guidelines. We throw the stories and poems away. I would also suggest knowing something about the work that the magazine publishes. Editors say this a lot, and I've found that I get frustrated with work that simply wouldn't ever make it into MR. Often people assume we want Southern fiction because we're based in Mississippi, but that's not really true.