I’m reading The Necessary Grace to Fall by Gina Ochsner. It won the Flannery O’Conner Award. Gina actually called me yesterday to congratulate me for getting into Seattle Pacific’s MFA writing program. She, along with Bret Lott, will be my fiction teachers. Or maybe they’re called professors. I’m not sure which. Gina actually lives in Keizer, which is where I’m from. She was very nice and described some of the things we’ll be doing at the first workshop this summer in Sante Fe. There are 7 other fiction writers in the program.
Right now the weather in Portland is wet. It’s a constant mist, not a hard rain, and it’s annoying. I don’t often long for the sun, but I am now.
Ross Gale is a writer and editor from the Pacific Northwest. 
Saturday. Sun comes back.
Ross! I’m late to the game. But: welcome to the MFA program at SPU. (More specifically, and more heartily, welcome to the Fiction side of the MFA program at SPU.)
We call them Mentors.
How did you like The Necessary Grace to Fall? Did you pick up People I Wanted to Be, or The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight yet? (And have you read any of Bret’s stuff? Very different from Gina’s.)
Anyway- hi and welcome.
Thank you, I’m really excited about it.