Crime Novel Becomes Reality for GW English Professor!

GW Professorial Lecturer in English Matt Fullerty, who is currently teaching ENGL 62 (Comedy) and ENGL 52W (English Literature), recently found himself in the middle of a national news story in the UK.

Last weekend, a human skull was dug up in the garden of broadcaster/naturalist Sir David Attenborough in London. It turns out to be the long-missing head of an 1879 murder victim named Martha Thomas, who was killed by her maid Kate Webster.

In a peculiar twist, Dr. Fullerty has been writing about the murder--in the form of a novel--for the past two years. After the murder, Kate impersonated Martha Thomas around London, wearing her clothes and jewelry, and selling her victim's belongings. After trying to flee to Ireland, Kate was arrested and put on trial at the Old Bailey, eventually confessing to her priest. She was hanged in Wandsworth Prison by the "royal hangman" William Marwood on 29 July, 1879.

When the story broke on Saturday in England, Matt became the go-to source for the British press. The result was a feature in Tuesday's Daily Mail about life of the killer (and the man who hanged her).

You can read more about Matt Fullerty's novel The Murderess and the Hangman here. Matt is currently looking for a publisher for his work, and we hope this strange turn-of-events will help him land a book deal in time for Halloween!

How a skull found in David Attenborough's garden has solved one of Victorian Britain's most gruesome murder mysteries

On a bright, spring morning, coal porter Henry Wheatley and his companion were driving their horse and cart along the Thames.

Shortly before seven o'clock, just before arriving at Barnes Bridge, South London, Wheatley noticed a wooden box lying half-submerged in the water.

He got down from his cart and, with some difficulty, hauled the box on to the bank. Noticing that it was tied with cord, Wheatley took out his knife and cut it open.

He then gave the box a kick and it collapsed. What he saw next turned his stomach. A mass of white flesh fell to the ground. At first, Wheatley's companion suggested they'd stumbled across a box of butcher's offcuts.

Workmen building an extension at the Richmond home of Sir David Attenborough unearthed a skull in the naturalist's garden. The police are almost certain it is that of Mrs Thomas, who was murdered 130 years ago

But Wheatley knew his find was far more grisly  -  in fact, he'd stumbled across the body parts of a dismembered woman. The date was March 5, 1879. Wheatley immediately reported his find to the police at Barnes.

A pathologist identified the body parts as belonging to a short, somewhat tubby woman.
The corpse had been cut up with an ordinary meat saw, and a contraction of flesh away from some of the bones suggested that the pieces had been boiled.

However, the body was missing not only a foot, but also something vital to help with identification  -  its head.
Five days later, another gruesome discovery was made  -  this time on a manure heap in an allotment in Twickenham, about five miles from Barnes. It was a box containing the missing foot, which had been boiled in the same way as the rest of the corpse.

For the next few days, the police could only guess as to the identity of the body  -  which some newspapers speculated could have been used by medical students for dissection.

However, by the end of the month and with help from a key witness, the police and the public learned the body belonged to a 50-year- old woman called Julia Martha Thomas, who lived in Richmond.

Kate Webster - who murdered her elderly employer with an axe after she returned home from church on a Sunday evening

She had been murdered by her servant, a 30-year-old Irish woman called Katherine Webster.
Because of the gruesome nature of the corpse, the public were fascinated by the case. Some people even removed pebbles and twigs as souvenirs from the small garden of Mrs Thomas's cottage in Park Road, Richmond.

What was never discovered was Mrs Thomas's head. Its location remaining a secret  -  until last week, a full 130 years later.


On Friday, workmen building an extension at the Richmond home of Sir David Attenborough unearthed a skull in the naturalist's garden, and the police are almost certain it is that of Mrs Thomas.
Should this indeed be the case, then the final chapter of one of the most foul murders in Victorian London can now be written.

As a crime novelist, I've long been fascinated by the tale of the Richmond Murder  -  and I've even written a book based on the killing.

The murderer, Katherine Webster, was born in a small village in County Wexford in 1849. She spent her teenage years in and out of prison. At around the age of 17, she fled to Liverpool, where she lived as a drifter and furthered her skills as a burglar.

However, she soon found herself locked up and was sentenced to four years of penal servitude in 1867.
Released after three years, she made her way south to London, where she apparently attempted to make an honest living.

In 1873, she lodged in Rose Gardens, Hammersmith, West London, next to a family called the Porters, who would play a major part in her fate six years later.

Some time the following year, she gave birth to a son out of wedlock.

Unable to make ends meet Webster once more turned to thieving and, in 1875, she was sentenced to 18 months in London's Wandsworth prison for a staggering 36 offences of larceny.

As soon as she got out, she re-offended, and was locked up for another year in February 1877. In January 1879, she finally appeared to turn her back on a life of crime by taking a job as a servant for Mrs Thomas, at her home in Richmond.

Aged around 50, and recently widowed, Mrs Thomas was a small woman who took her religion seriously and was a devoted worshipper at the local Presbyterian chapel.

Unsurprisingly, the two women did not get along well. Mrs Thomas often had to reprimand her new servant for her violent temper and less than capable serving skills.

 

Gruesome: Builders unearthed a skull, believed to solve a 131-year-old riddle, in globe-trotter Sir David Attenborough's garden

On the evening of Sunday, March 2, Mr s Thomas returned from an evening service at the chapel. She found Webster had been drinking and a row ensued. The drunken servant girl was unable to contain herself and during the course of the argument she pushed her employer down the stairs.

She ran down after her, and seeing that Mrs Thomas appeared to be badly hurt, she decided to strangle her.
What happened next is like something out of a horror film. For the next 24 hours, Webster cut up the body of Mrs Thomas and boiled the pieces in a big copper pan.

Why she decided to boil the pieces is not clear, but it is likely she was hoping to disintegrate the flesh. She was unsuccessful and her attempts to burn the body parts also failed.

At this point , Katherine Webster decided that the only way to dispose of the body was to parcel it up and throw it in the Thames.

She placed the pieces in a box, and put the box into a large black bag. Then she assumed Mrs Thomas's identity.

On the late afternoon of Tuesday, March 4, she walked to her friends the Porters, whom she had not seen for months, and told them that she was now called Mrs Thomas and that her aunt had left her a house in Richmond.

Webster asked Mr Porter if he knew of an agent who could sell the house for her.

A little later, Webster, Mr Porter and his teenage son Robert went for a drink at a nearby pub. Robert carried the black bag, and it sat under the table while the three had ales.

Then Webster left  -  saying that she had to quickly see someone. When she returned, Porter saw that she no longer had the bag.

In fact, she had thrown it off Hammersmith Bridge.

Webster's greed knew no bounds. As well as trying to sell her victim's house, she also attempted to sell all its contents.

A man called John Church offered her £68 for some of the furniture, and she took £18 as a down-payment  -  insisting it be in cash or gold.

However, Webster was worried her crime would soon be discovered, and on or around March 18 she fled back to County Wexford.

Back in London, John Church began to grow suspicious and tracked down a friend of the real Mrs Thomas, who informed him that she was in fact in her 50s  -  and was most certainly not in her 30s with an Irish accent.
Church informed the police and, with evidence from Church and the Porters, they quickly put the puzzle together. On the 25th, Webster was arrested and detained at Clerkenwell prison.
At her trial that April, huge crowds thronged around the Central Criminal Court in London. Webster was found guilty, although she denied the murder.

She finally confessed the night before she was hanged at Wandsworth Prison on July 29.

What she never admitted was the location of Mrs Thomas's head, a secret which she took to her death at the end of the long rope.

Now, thanks to the unwitting help of Sir David Attenborough, the case can be finally closed.

Matt Fullerty's author site is www.mattfullerty.com

His novel based on the crime, THE MURDERESS AND THE HANGMAN, is currently with Watson, Little Ltd, and looking for a publisher. 

--

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1323762/How-skull-David-Attenboroughs-garden-solved-Victorian-Britains-gruesome-murder-mysteries.html#ixzz13SfD4KKy

Edith's War - author interview

Below is an interview I conducted with Andrew Smith about his novel EDITH'S WAR (recently released on March 26 2010).

"EDITH'S WAR is a story of hardship, love, passion, and motherhood during Liverpool's Blitz of World War II. In early summer of 1940 young Edith Maguire witnesses the internment of her Italian neighbours following Mussolini's declaration of war against Britain. Edith is swept up in the unthinkable event of her Italian friends' deportation to Canada on the Arandora Star and experiences first-hand the hardships and grief that ensue as a result of the ship's fateful voyage..."

Andrew Smith tells how he wrote the book, his inspiration and the connections between Britain, Canada and Italy below:

1

EDITH'S WAR tells a little-known story about Italian internment in Britain during WWII. How did you first encounter this information (new to me), and decide it would make a good novel?


I knew I wanted to write about how WWII changed British society, how the war was the mechanism that caused people to examine the way society worked and to call into question many of the conventions that had existed for centuries. I was researching this at the Imperial War Museum in London when I stumbled across the story of Italian internment in UK. The addition of Italians to the book, who are generally viewed as easy-going and uninhibited, especially compared to the British, fulfilled a welcome contrast to the depiction of an uptight British population. Also the accounts of their internment by harmless Italian men were classic examples of the stupidity of war and also of the way normal standards can change and deteriorate during wartime. This wartime shift in morality in relation to how the British Italians were treated, so different to how they might have been treated in peacetime, appalled and fascinated me.

2

I greatly enjoyed your evocation of place in the book - Liverpool, Venice (I am from Warrington, a town near Liverpool). Why/how did you choose these cities in particular to tell the story?

As you know, Liverpool was one of the hardest hit cities in Britain during bombing by the Germans. Liverpudlians suffered greatly during WWII. It was also the port from which many "aliens" were shipped to Canada or Australia, including hundreds of British Italian men. And the juxtaposition of the easy-going hedonistic and sensual city of Venice with the somewhat stiff and proper character that the younger brother had become, made him seem even more inhibited. And I made Venice the original home of the Italian couple who had lived in Liverpool during the war as a device to move the plot along. And finally you tend to write about what you know. I grew up on Merseyside, in Huyton, not far from Warrington, in the 40s and 50s. And I also know Venice well having spent a lot of time there during the last twenty years.

3

What was the greatest struggle you faced in writing the book?


There are good struggles and bad struggles. It's a huge struggle to write a novel like Edith's War because I had to do so much research and then the struggle that all author's face in developing characters, evolving a plot, etc. etc. But these are good struggles; I loved every minute of the research and writing stage. Then there is another huge struggle to get published. I tried long and hard to find an agent and a publisher and experienced many rejections along the way. This part of the process is excruciating and can be depressing if you start to take the rejections personally. One has to be strong, stick by the courage of your convictions, and realize that publishing is a business like any other.

4

Do you feel you are making a political point in writing this story? You decided to address the subject matter in the form of a novel. Why not non-fiction, or some other form?

If I'm making a political point it has to do with emphasizing the omnipresence and senselessness of war, and the fact that society seems unable to change in any significant way. I've written and published two non-fiction books, which I enjoyed writing, but I think it's difficult to impose passion and a distinct point of view into non-fiction. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I think it's easier to do it more effectively in fiction. I wanted to state very clearly how humankind seems unable to avoid war (witness the presence of wars constantly throughout history), yet how senseless and unfair war always is. Even WWII, which might be seen as justified from the Allies' perspective, has hundreds if not thousands of examples of inhumanity and unnecessary suffering imposed by all sides. The novel form allowed me to portray actual events and have the reader make no mistake that I viewed them as senseless and unnecessary. I also wanted to imply how difficult it is for any of us to change, on a personal level but also on a larger scale, as a society. A non-fiction book usually only tells the story, whereas a novel can show the effects of a story and be so much more emotive in the telling.

5

How are you enjoying the publishing process, having your first book released? If there's one thing you could change about publishing a novel, what would it be?


It's very rewarding to hold the finished product of so much work in one's hands. But, to go back to my point about publishing being a business, I don't think many authors are prepared for the dog-eat-dog commercial side of publishing. I'm fortunate because I was somewhat prepared by my work in publishing, I'm a book designer, but even I wasn't ready for the alarming truths of how difficult it is to get one's book noticed and into the bookstores. If there's one thing I could change it would be that books are sold on their merit alone, and not because a publisher paid for a prominent position in a bookstore, or because the author has a TV show, or has won a literary prize, or one of the hundred other reasons a book gets noticed other than for the quality of writing or cleverness of plot, etc. But I'm sounding cynical. I'm really not, and I do still believe that if a book is good it'll get the readership it deserves.

6

A good amount of the novel is set in and about Italy. Do you feel personally connected to Italy?

Not particularly, other than I've spent a lot of time there since I was in my twenties and have quite a few Italian friends whom I love, and I like Italy better than almost anywhere else.

7

Do you remember when you first wanted to be a writer?


Yes I do, because I started writing late in life. It was 1988 and I was forty-years-old, when I took my first creative writing course. Just previous to that I had taken a bus trip over the Himalayas from Kashmir to Ladakh in Northern India and written a magazine article about it, the first piece of writing I'd ever published. The article won an award for travel writing, which inspired me to write more. So I took some courses and started writing short fiction, which I love writing. I don't know why it took me so long. I don't think being a writer was presented as an option at the school I went to in Liverpool so I never thought of it. So I went to art school and became a graphic designer. I've been lucky to have found writing, and to have another profession that allows me time to write but also keeps the wolf from the door. Because, as we know, books rarely provide much of an income.

8

How important are family relations in telling a good story?


I think human relations of any kind are crucial to a good story. We all need something we can relate to and human relations provide a great deal that is familiar to us all. I suppose family relations are often the most intense and usually the most influential on our lives so they hold a certain gravitas that no other relations hold, they're what forms us. So, while not necessary to a good story, family relations are certainly wonderful additions to a story.

9

What is your work schedule like when you're writing?

Once I've done research and am into the writing stage I tend to get up fairly early in the morning and write solidly for four to six hours. Once I actually sit down and put fingers to keyboard the time usually flies by. But I'm as bad as most writers about starting, I'll make a cup of tea I don't really need or thumb through a magazine I've already read. I don't know why many writers find it hard to actually start writing; maybe because it's so intense, it's hard work to write, and it's rather tiring. Often when I eventually stop I'm fairly drained. But once I start I rarely look up, except to check research, until I just run out of steam some half-a-dozen hours later.


10

What are you working on right now? A departure, or something related to historical fiction across different times and places like EDITH'S WAR?


Some months ago, at a stage when Edith's War was out of my hands with an editor, I wrote the first two chapters of a book set in contemporary London. Unlike Edith's War it'll be a straight single time period narrative. The story is about a paparazzi photographer who is down on his luck having lost his business and his wife. He's a recovering alcoholic, estranged from his family, and broke. But he has a cache of photos of celebrities that might be worth a great deal. But because of his alcoholism and past indiscretions nobody wants to know. There's a whole plot in my head about how an opportunity to get exclusive photos of a drugged-out music star falls in his lap. Actually it's a ploy by the recording company to get publicity, etc. etc. The idea comes from a fascination I have with the symbiotic relationship that celebrities often have with the press. Princess Di being a prime example. I'm also interested in the whole phenomenon of celebrity, especially in our society with the proliferation of shows like American Idol and with people like Paris Hilton who have no talent or skill (they don't even model) but who have become celebrities earning millions. I'm keen to get back to writing it, but first we have to get out there and sell Edith's War.


Thank you for your time, Andrew. You can read more about EDITH'S WAR at http://www.edithswar.com/ and on Facebook here.


I'll also be posting this interview on http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/ and a link from my website http://www.mattfullerty.com/.

Biography
Andrew Smith was born in Liverpool, England. He moved to Toronto, Canada in 1974 since when he's worked in magazines and book publishing. Andrew Smith's writing has been included in the Journey Prize Anthology, has been shortlisted for the CBC Literary Awards, and has garnered a Western Magazine Award for Travel Writing. He has published two non-fiction books: Highlights, an illustrated history of cannabis (co-author) and Strangers in the Garden, the secret lives of our favorite flowers. He's enjoyed writing fiction since 1990, which, fortunately, is when he began.

The Case of Amy Bishop: Violence that Art Didn't See Coming

This is Kate Webster, female killer from my novel The Murderess and the Hangman. For more about the novel, please see my homepage here.

The following article from The New York Times deals with the role of female killers and art, particularly in light of the recent shootings by Amy Bishop, a professor at the University of Alabama.

--

When Ezra Pound declared in 1934 that “artists are the antennae of the race,” and Marshall McLuhan 30 years later called them people “of integral awareness,” both were using modern terms to update the ancient belief that works of the imagination might actually require a talent not only for invention but for attunement — for picking up signals already in the air. This is why the most forceful narratives and dramas seem less made up than distilled. They clarify events and experiences taken directly from the actual world.

Thus, the Jazz Age is better known through the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who captured its energies in real time, than through any number of retrospective studies. And the alienated teenager, that fixture of modern American life, didn’t fully exist until J. D. Salinger, with his faultless ear and attentive eye, coaxed him into being.

But every now and then, it seems, a gap is exposed. Events occur; art offers no guidance. The powers of imagination and attunement falter. Artists suffer a collective loss of awareness. “The culture” emits signals, but they are picked up only fitfully or are missed altogether.

Consider the case of Amy Bishop, the neuroscientist arrested for shooting six colleagues, killing three, at a department meeting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Rampages of this sort have become familiar. But with rare exceptions they have been the preserve of men: lonely, alienated psycho killers with arsenals of high-powered weapons and feverishly composed manifestos.

With remarkable suddenness Dr. Bishop has disrupted the pattern. When she reportedly discharged her 9-millimeter handgun, she also punctured longstanding assumptions, or illusions, about women and violence — particularly as a fuller picture of her past begins to emerge, much of it indicating a possible record of previous violent episodes, including the shooting death of her brother in 1986, and her suspected role in assembling a pipe bomb mailed to a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School in 1994, when Dr. Bishop was studying there.

Amy Bishop (Bob Gathany/Huntsville Times, via Associated Press)

It is not news that so-called senseless acts often unfold along the coordinates of an inner logic. This is what makes criminal violence so attractive a topic for artists and thinkers. The Western literary tradition, from Shakespeare to Dostoevsky, teems with pathologically violent men. Norman Mailer and Truman Capote wrote nonfiction masterpieces about them. They dominate the novels of Don DeLillo and Robert Stone, not to mention films by Sam Peckinpah, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.

But the landscape of unprovoked but premeditated female violence remains strangely unexplored. Women who kill are “relegated to an ‘exceptional case’ status that rests upon some exceptional, or untoward killing circumstance: the battered wife who kills her abusive husband; the postpartum psychotic mother who kills her newborn infant,” Candice Skrapec, a professor of criminology, noted in “The Female Serial Killer,” an essay included in the anthology “Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation” (1994).

Ms. Skrapec was writing at a time when Hollywood seemed preoccupied with women who commit crimes — in productions like “The Burning Bed,” the 1984 television film in which a battered wife finally sets her sleeping husband aflame, and “Thelma & Louise” (1991), in which a pair of women go on a outlaw spree after one of them is threatened with rape.

Both are essentially exculpatory parables of empowerment, anchored in feminist ideology. Their heroines originate as victims, pushed to criminal excesses by injustices done to them. The true aggressors are the men who mistreat and objectify them. So too with “Monster” (2003), in which Charlize Theron, in a virtuosic instance of empathy (and cosmetic makeover) re-enacted the story of Aileen Wuornos, a real-life prostitute who, after years of sexual abuse, began murdering her clients.

A decade or two ago this all made sense. The underworld of domestic abuse and sexual violence was coming freshly to light. And social arrangements were undergoing abrupt revision. The woman who achieved hard-won success in the workplace might well find herself, like the lonely stalker played by Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction” (1987), tormented by the perfect-seeming family of the married man with whom she enjoys a weekend fling.

Much has changed since then, but the topic of women and violence — especially as represented by women — remains more or less in a time warp, bound by the themes of sexual and domestic trauma, just as male depictions of female violence are locked in the noir demimonde of fantasy, the slinky femmes fatales once played by Barbara Stanwyck and Lana Turner more or less duplicated by Kathleen Turner and Sharon Stone.

Put it another way. It is not hard to imagine Mr. DeLillo or Mr. Scorsese mapping the interior circuitry of Timothy McVeigh; Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer; or Bruce E. Ivins, the Army biodefense expert who, the F.B.I. concluded last week, committed anthrax terror in the aftermath of 9/11 — the paranoia, the lethal mix of fantasy and ruthless plotting. But what artist might do justice to Dr. Bishop and her complex story, as its details have so far been reported: the privileged upbringing; her stable marriage to a uxorious husband, who was also her collaborator on scientific inventions; their four children, some of whose homework Dr. Bishop is monitoring from her jail cell? And what of the accounts given by associates and neighbors of her personal qualities — assertive, bristling with sharp opinions, vocal on the subject of her brilliance, harboring fierce resentments?

The uncomfortable fact is that for all her singularity, Dr. Bishop also provides an index to the evolved status of women in 21st-century America. The number of female neurobiologists may still be small, but girls often outdo boys in the classroom, including in the sciences. (Mattel recently announced a new addition, Computer Engineer Barbie, to its line of popular dolls.) A Harvard Ph.D. remains a rare credential for women (as well as for men), but women now make up the majority of undergraduates at many prestigious colleges. And the tenure struggle said to have lighted Dr. Bishop’s short fuse reflects the anxieties of many other women who now outnumber men in the work force and have become, in thousands of cases, their family’s principal or only breadwinner.

These conditions have been developing for some years now. But the most advanced narratives of female violence seem uninterested in them. There is, for example, Marina Abramovic, a pioneer of performance art who will be honored in a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in March, with 35 artists re-enacting five of her works. Ms. Abramovic, born in what was then Belgrade, Yugoslavia, first became a force in 1973 at the Edinburgh Festival, where she furiously stabbed a knife between her splayed fingers, bloodying 10 blades and tape recording the noises she made as she wounded herself. In 2002 Ms. Abramovic was still at it, exhibiting herself for 12 days in a downtown Manhattan installation, wordlessly moving among three raised platforms connected to the floor by ladders whose rungs were fashioned from large knives, their gleaming blades turned up.

There is also Karen Finley, whose avant-garde explorations of sexual violence put her in the middle of the federal arts-financing wars two decades ago. She is back onstage in “The Jackie Look.” Outfitted in bouffant and pearls, in imitation of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Ms. Finley stands at a lectern and delivers a monologue on the female body — at one point shedding copious tears — and on the indignities ritually inflicted on public women (Michelle Obama no less than Mrs. Onassis).

All this is stimulating in its way, but it feels curiously outmoded. Although Ms. Abramovic and Ms. Finley are both charismatic presences, their antennae seem to have rusted. They persist in registering the dimmed signals of a bygone time.

For this reason, perhaps, the most useful glosses on Dr. Bishop may come from the world of popular, even pulpish, art — for instance, crowd-pleasing movies like “Black Widow,” “Blue Steel,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” or even “Lost,” the ABC series. In all of them the hypothetical notion of empowerment gives way to the exercise of literal power. So too in crime novels written by women who specialize in the disordered or deranged mind. Genre art has its own limitations. But its strength is that it seeks to reanimate archetypes and is indifferent to ideological fashion.

“Everything is about power,” Patricia Cornwell, whose best-selling Scarpetta series is thick with forensic detail, maintained in an e-mail message, when asked what she made of the Bishop case. “The more women appropriate power, the more their behavior will mimic that of other powerful people.” Also: “Firearms are the great equalizer. You don’t have to be 6 foot 2 and weigh 200 pounds to kill a room full of people.”

Chelsea Cain, the author of a crime series that reverses the formula of “The Silence of the Lambs,” pitting a male detective against a female serial killer, suggested that Dr. Bishop is the latest version of an ancient figure, “the mother lioness that kills to protect herself and her family against perceived threats.”

In fact two middle-aged classics of genre literature eerily prefigure aspects of the Bishop case. In William March’s 1954 novel “The Bad Seed,” later adapted for both stage and film, an 8-year-old girl viciously murders a classmate but is protected by her mother, only to kill again. This parallels the allegations in Dr. Bishop’s case, at least according to the resurfaced police report on the death of her brother nearly a quarter-century ago.

No genre writer had sharper antennae than Shirley Jackson, whose gothic classic, “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” first published in 1962, was reissued last fall. Its narrator is an 18-year-old multiple murderess who lives with her devoted sister and fantasizes about killing again. She is “socially maladroit, highly self-conscious, and disdainful of others,” Joyce Carol Oates wrote in a penetrating essay recently in The New York Review of Books. “She is ‘special.’ ” Words that ring ominously in the context of Dr. Bishop.

Ms. Oates, of course, has examined violence as thoroughly as any living American writer. When I asked her what she made of the case, she drew an implicit comparison between Dr. Bishop and Shirley Jackson’s narrator: “She is a sociopath and has been enabled through her life by individuals around her who shielded her from punishment.”

Ms. Oates’s feminist credentials are in good order. But her assessment comes from beyond the realm of predigested doctrine. It echoes the blunt assertion made by Ms. Cornwell: “People kill because they can. Women can be just as violent as men.”

--

Sam Tanenhaus, The New York Times, February 24, 2010

Literary Journals Associated With MFA Programs

As an MFA student, helping to put out a literary magazine—whether you’re an editor, a reader, or a publicity volunteer—offers a valuable glimpse into the realm of professional publishing and another means of learning about your community of writers. If, as part of your graduate experience, you’re interested in contributing your time or writing to a school-sponsored journal, check out this listing of institutions whose MFA programs produce literary magazines.

University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
Black Warrior Review

University of Alaska, Fairbanks
Permafrost 


American University, Washington, D.C.
Folio

University of Arizona, Tucson
Sonora Review 


Arizona State University, Tempe
Hayden’s Ferry Review 


Ashland University, Ohio
River Teeth

University of Baltimore
Passager Journal

Boise State University, Idaho
cold-drill
The Idaho Review

Bowling Green State University, Ohio
Mid-American Review

Brooklyn College, CUNY
The Brooklyn Review

Butler University, Indianapolis
Booth

University of California, Irvine
Faultline

University of California, Riverside,
Palm Desert Graduate Center
The Coachella Review

California College of the Arts, San Francisco
Eleven Eleven

California Institute of the Arts, Valencia
Black Clock
Sprawl

California State University, Fresno
The Normal School

California State University, Long Beach
RipRap

California State University, San Bernardino
Pacific Review

University of Central Florida, Orlando
The Cypress Dome
The Florida Review

Chapman University, Orange, California
Elephant Tree

Chatham University, Pittsburgh
The Fourth River

City College of New York, CUNY
Fiction
Global City Review
Promethean

Colorado State University, Fort Collins
Colorado Review
The Freestone

Columbia College, Chicago
F Magazine
Hair Trigger

Columbia University, New York City
Columbia

Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
EPOCH

Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond
Aurora
Jelly Bucket

Eastern Washington University, Spokane
Willow Springs

Emerson College, Boston
Ploughshares
Redivider

Fairfield University, Connecticut
Dogwood

Fairleigh Dickinson University,
Madison, New Jersey
The Literary Review

University of Florida, Gainesville
Subtropics

Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
Coastlines

Florida International University, Miami
Gulf Stream Magazine

Florida State University, Tallahassee
The Kudzu Review
The Southeast Review

George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia
Phoebe

So to Speak

Georgia College & State University,
Milledgeville
Arts & Letters
Flannery O’Connor Review

Georgia State University, Atlanta
Five Points
New South

Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont,
and Port Townsend, Washington
Pitkin Review

Hamline University
Water-Stone Review

Hollins University, Roanoke, Virginia
The Hollins Critic

University of Houston, Texas
Gulf Coast

Hunter College, CUNY
The Olivetree Review

University of Idaho, Moscow
Fugue

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ninth Letter

Indiana University, Bloomington
Indiana Review

University of Iowa, Iowa City
The Iowa Review

Iowa State University, Ames
Flyway

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
and Washington, D.C.
The Hopkins Review

University of Kansas, Lawrence
Cottonwood

Lindenwood University, St. Charles, Missouri
Untamed Ink

Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
Exquisite Corpse

New Delta Review
The Southern Review

Manhattanville College, Purchase, New York
Inkwell

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
CRATE

jubilat
The Massachusetts Review

University of Massachusetts, Boston
Breakwater Review

University of Memphis
The Pinch

Mills College, Oakland
580 Split

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Dislocate

Minnesota State University, Mankato
Blue Earth Review

Minnesota State University, Moorhead
Red Weather

University of Mississippi, Oxford
The Yalobusha Review

University of Missouri, Columbia
Center
The Missouri Review

University of Missouri, Kansas City
New Letters

University of Missouri, Saint Louis
Natural Bridge

University of Montana, Missoula
CutBank

Murray State University, Kentucky
New Madrid

Naropa University, Jack Kerouac School
of Disembodied Poetics, Boulder, Colorado
Bombay Gin
not enough night

University of Nebraska, Lincoln (PhD)
Prairie Schooner

University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Interim

University of New Hampshire, Durham
Barnstorm

University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Blue Mesa Review

New Mexico State University, Las Cruces
Puerto del Sol

University of New Orleans
Bayou

The New School University, New York City
LIT

New York University, New York City
Washington Square Review

University of North Carolina, Greensboro
The Greensboro Review
storySouth

University of North Carolina, Wilmington
Ecotone

North Carolina State University, Raleigh
Free Verse

Northeast Ohio Universities Consortium (NEOMFA)
Luna Negra
Penguin Review
Rubbertop Review
Whiskey Island Magazine

Northern Michigan University, Marquette
Passages North

University of North Texas, Denton
American Literary Review
North Texas Review

University of Notre Dame, Indiana
The Bend
Notre Dame Review
Re:Visions

Ohio State University, Columbus
The Journal

University of Oregon, Eugene
Northwest Review

Oregon State University, Corvallis
Prism

Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles
OR

Pacific Lutheran University’s
Rainier Writing Workshop, Tacoma
A River & Sound Review

Pacific University, Forest Grove, Oregon
Silk Road

University of Pittsburgh
Collision

Hot Metal Bridge
No 


Portland State University, Oregon
Oregon Literary Review
Pathos Lit Mag
The Portland Review

Purdue University, West Lafayette, Louisiana
Sycamore Review

Queens College, CUNY
Ozone Park

Roosevelt University, Chicago
Oyez Review

Rosemont College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
Parlor 


Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey
StoryQuarterly

Saint Mary’s College of California, Moraga
Mary

San Diego State University
Fiction International
Poetry International

University of San Francisco
Switchback

San Francisco State University
Fourteen Hills
Transfer

San Jose State University, California
Reed Magazine

Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York
Lumina

Seattle Pacific University

Image

University of South Carolina
Yemassee

Southern Connecticut State University,
New Haven
Connecticut Review
Noctua Review

Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Crab Orchard Review

University of Southern Maine, Portland
Words and Images

Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester
Amoskeag

University of South Florida, Tampa
Saw Palm

Spalding University, Louisville
The Louisville Review

Stony Brook Southampton, SUNY
The Southampton Review

Syracuse University, New York
Salt Hill

University of Texas, El Paso
Rio Grande Review

University of Texas, James A. Michener
Center for Writers, Austin
Bat City Review

University of Texas-Pan American, Edinburg
gallery

Texas State University, San Marcos
Front Porch

University of Utah, Salt Lake City
Quarterly West
Western Humanities Review

Vanderbilt University, Nashville
The Vanderbilt Review

Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier
Hunger Mountain

University of Virginia, Charlottesville
Meridian

Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond
Blackbird

Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University, Blacksburg
The New River

Western Connecticut State University, Danbury
Black & White
Connecticut Review
Sentence

Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo
Third Coast

University of Washington, Seattle
The Seattle Review

West Virginia University, Morgantown
The Loop

Whidbey Writers Workshop, Freeland, Washington
Soundings Review

Wichita State University, Kansas
Mikrokosmos

University of Wisconsin, Madison
The Madison Review

2010 Creative Writing MFA Rankings: The Top Fifty

If this link ever stops working, below is a list of the top 50 MFA programs for Creative Writing in the US (Seth Abramson's list as published in Poets & Writers magazine).

Rank	School	Votes (of 508)	Poetry Rank	Fiction Rank	Nonfiction Rank	Total Funding Rank	Annual Funding Rank
1	University of Iowa in Iowa City	253	1	1	1	21	22
2	University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	169	3	2	*	16	4
3	University of Virginia, Charlottesville	144	2	4	*	21	21
4	University of Massachusetts, Amherst	132	4	5	*	40	41
4	University of Texas, Austin	132	5	6	*	1	1
6	University of Wisconsin, Madison	129	6	11	*	21	22
7	Brown University in Providence	127	8	3	*	19	20
8	New York University in New York City	125	7	7	*	+	+
9	Cornell University in Ithaca, New York	110	9	7	*	10	2
10	University of Oregon, Eugene	104	15	12	*	27	29
11	Syracuse University in New York	97	20	10	*	5	7
12	Indiana University, Bloomington	93	13	14	*	6	8
13	University of California, Irvine	91	26	9	*	26	28
14	University of Minnesota, Minneapolis	85	17	14	8	29	27
15	Brooklyn College, CUNY	81	39	13	*	*	*
16	University of Montana, Missoula	78	17	17	17	47	46
17	Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore	77	11	16	*	30	30
18	Vanderbilt University in Nashville	76	13	18	23	25	26
19	University of North Carolina, Greensboro	75	10	19	*	33	31
20	Washington University, St. Louis	70	15	24	*	12	3
21	University of Florida, Gainesville	67	22	21	*	13	16
22	Columbia University in New York City	66	38	19	10	*	*
23	University of Notre Dame in Indiana	62	34	22	12	+	+
24	Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia	56	32	26	4	+	+
24	University of North Carolina, Wilmington	56	22	25	5	41	42
26	Arizona State University, Tempe	55	19	28	35	15	18
26	Hunter College, CUNY	55	45	22	6	*	*
26	University of Houston in Texas	55	11	34	18	34	34
29	Colorado State University, Fort Collins	53	20	34	*	42	43
29	The New School in New York City	53	47	27	3	*	*
31	Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York	52	27	33	8	*	*
31	University of Washington, Seattle	52	27	28	*	*	*
33	University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa	51	25	31	29	2	18
34	University of Arizona, Tucson	49	32	28	2	+	+
35	Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana	45	22	40	*	9	10
36	University of Arkansas, Fayetteville	41	31	45	*	17	24
37	George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia	40	39	34	12	+	+
38	Boston University in Massachusetts	39	39	38	*	+	+
39	University of Nevada, Las Vegas	38	48	31	*	35	35
40	Ohio State University, Columbus	35	27	+	35	7	9
41	University of Maryland, College Park	34	37	44	*	*	*
42	Florida State University, Tallahassee	33	39	+	*	38	38
42	Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge	33	*	46	*	3	5
42	Rutgers University, Newark in New Jersey	33	*	37	12	*	*
42	University of New Hampshire, Durham	33	39	40	7	*	*
46	Pennsylvania State University, University Park	32	45	46	11	28	14
47	Southern Illinois University, Carbondale	31	27	48	*	14	17
47	Texas State University, San Marcos	31	*	40	*	+	+
49	University of Mississippi, Oxford	31	+	40	*	18	25
50	University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign	30	34	+	*	4	6
50	Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond	30	+	38	*	31	32
50	Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg	30	34	+	*	8	10

Note: An honorable mention goes to Bowling Green State University, a two-year program in Ohio that ranks among the top fifty programs in selectivity (#47), total funding (#46), annual funding (#45), and poetry (#48), and received pluses in overall votes and fiction. For a ranking of the additional eighty-eight full-residency MFA programs, click here.