Biography
Michelle Hoover is the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University and teaches at GrubStreet, where she leads the Novel Incubator program. She is a 2014 NEA Fellow and has been a Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, a MacDowell Fellow, and a winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Award. Her debut, The Quickening, was a 2010 Massachusetts Book Award “Must Read.” Her latest novel, Bottomland, is the 2017 All Iowa Reads selection.
She is a native of Iowa and lives in Boston.
Novel Incubator
Michelle Hoover is co-founder and current head of the GrubStreet Novel Incubator program, a competitive and affordable MFA-level course in novel writing. Spanning 11 months, the course accepts ten fiction writers every year who are interested in a deep revision of their novel drafts, a comprehensive craft-based study of the novel form, and a thoughtful introduction to the publishing world.
Academic programs, MFAs in particular, teach the craft of fiction using the short story as a template. These programs are useful for learning the craft of short fiction, and a full course of study at the MFA level is a rich and worthy endeavor, but there is no evidence that learning to write a successful short story teaches you how to write a successful novel. In fact, it may even be counterproductive, given that the processes, aesthetics, requirements and skills of novel-writing can seem as different from story-writing as poetry is from prose. More importantly, we believe it takes at least a year to effectively revise a novel, to explore its possibilities and maximize its potential, to truly know “what it wants to be.” Along the way, students need consistent fellow readers – emerging writers and also trained eyes – who understand the world they are trying to build, who can discuss big-picture issues of character development, plots and subplots and structure alongside sentence rhythm and figurative language.
In the Novel Incubator, unfettered by the academic/semester schedule, GrubStreet has developed a program from the point of view not of the institution but of the aspiring novelist. Unique in shape, the curriculum gives students a rich, authentic and artistically valuable experience directly applicable to the specific art of novel-writing. Ours is one of the only programs where a student’s entire novel will be thoughtfully critiqued at least twice by the instructor, an objective outside reader, and classmates, and where all craft discussions and readings will be novel-centered. We want to emphasize that we are not offering a formula or advocating a particular novel aesthetic; we aim simply to investigate the various forms successful novels and apply what we learn to our own books.