Outside Windows

by Steven Tagle, Jeff Parker (Contributor)

Smoking on the back porch the night of the first reading. Turning the crisp, first page of a friend's manuscript. Rolling in raffle tickets with a maybe lover. And writing in PJs and hoodie the morning after. During his first semester in the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers, Steven Tagle captures a community of talented writers coming of age.

These are ambitious, self-conscious characters, fraught with the anxiety of becoming. They've left jobs, taken out loans, and moved across the country to devote themselves to this calling, unsure whether they can rightfully claim the title writer. Besides navigating fantastical interior worlds, they must navigate life outside, with each other.

Outside Windows is an intriguing glimpse into creative lives: their transience and solitude, the extraordinary that illuminates their everyday. These photographs document the program on the eve of its fiftieth anniversary, through the eyes of one of its own.

58 pages, ebook

First published February 4, 2014

About the author

STEVEN TAGLE is a writer and filmmaker. He has been published in Spork and The Rumpus, and his documentaries have aired on Current TV. The recipient of a 2013 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, he studies fiction writing in the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers.