Miklos Mattyasovszky

03/25/25

On my way to AWP with the rest of the first-year MFAs, aka the Epoch editorial staff. Also, my interview with Meghan O'Gieblyn, a major inspiration, went live on the Epoch blog recently.

More importantly than all of that, however, Mary and I learned a few months ago that we'll become parents this August! Of twin girls. There's really nothing I could write here that captures the giant, magical feeling, so I am not going to try, except to say that it is giant and magical and, in many ways, the only important thing. This is not really intended to be a personal blog, but I saw that my last post mentioned holiday travel plans and minor heel surgery, so it felt rather rude to my future daughters not to mention them. Because they already are the biggest deal. 

12/12/24

The semester has concluded for me. It was, overall, really wonderful. My workshop exceeded expectations, and the faculty and students in the Cornell MFA are all so supportive, talented, smart, different...nothing is flawless, but in terms of helping a fiction writer beginning to build a career, it's tough to ask for more. Highlights were: workshop, the MFA reading at Buffalo St. Books, the Literary Small Publishing class.

In line for the winter: turn my apartment into a bunker and bury myself in the novel until I have written some semblance of an ending for the roughest of drafts (or until Jan 25 hits and the next semester begins). Also going to Rhode Island around Christmas and also getting surgery on my heel--I have Haglund's Deformity, which is a serious-sounding but also kind of comic name for something that is pretty minor--on Jan 10.

09/18/2024

One month in to the MFA, and about seven weeks into living in Ithaca. Working as an editorial assistant at Epoch and getting a sense of how these magazines I have been submitting to work. Prompted a revision and then a few submissions of a story, "Oh, Mark," that I've been working on for a while. 

Mary and I (and Cassie, our dog) are settling into life in Ithaca smoothly. (Our cats are still struggling with the move). 

04/18/2024

After a full year of freelancing, working on a consulting startup, doing a small amount of carpentry, and writing a lot of fiction, I will be moving with my wife Mary (along with dog Cassie and cats Butternut & Gilly) to Ithaca this upcoming August, where and when I'll begin the MFA program in fiction at Cornell.

The funding, which is perhaps the best in the country and for which I am impossibly grateful, will allow me to really make a go at a career in creative writing--mostly fiction, with a few pinches of essay and a pinch of poetry thrown in. I'll get to teach, work as an editor at the literary magazine Epoch, and spend a lot of time writing exactly what I want to.

As such, I am reformatting the site a little. In addition to the About page, there will be a Publications page*, a Commercial Writing page--I am still working on some projects and would love to find more projects with exciting clients--and this page, a blog that I will update, if history is any indication, very sporadically. 

*which at the moment contains only the essay I published with PopMatters last fall.