Betsy Boyd
assistant professor
Klein Family School of Communications Design
Additional Roles:
program director, M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts
Contact Information:
Phone: 410.837.6272
E-mail: bboyd@ubalt.edu
M.A., The Johns Hopkins University
M.F.A., University of Texas, Austin
B.A., Brown University
You know the popular catchphrase too much information? (I get that a lot.) Recently, I've come to associate this notion—that we typically shouldn't utter the utterly personal in casual conversation, especially at length—with the process of putting down on paper early-stage fictional and nonfictional material. Finding the elusive subject, naming it. Both as a teacher and as a novelist, I am interested in writing because writing, when we do it regularly, enables us to release the chaotic and complex information buzzing about our brains (and our bodies) and occasionally to decode and transform such difficult data into highly imaginative concrete work.
Flannery O'Connor famously said, "I write to discover what I know," an idea to which I wholly relate. As a writer and editor, I write (and read) mainly to understand better my own story, my way of seeing the world and my place in it. I sit at my desk and tell myself my version of too much information—the details stuck in my mental craw, the questions too heavy to hurl at my hairdresser or too ambiguous to aim at my husband. In turn, when things go well, I hear my newly born characters blab their hearts out at length to me. When I'm really lucky, this translation from emo automatic writing into fictional revelation equals something I could never have spat out simply whining over the phone to a friend who's groaning to herself, "OMG, TMI, Betsy Boyd, TMI."
Betsy Boyd's fiction has been published in The Kenyon Review, Story Quarterly, and Shenandoah, at American Short Fiction, Eclectica, Del Sol Review, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of two Maryland State Arts Council awards, an Elliot Coleman Writing Fellowship, a James A. Michener Fellowship and residencies through Fundación Valparaíso, the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Her short story "Scarecrow" received a Pushcart Prize.
Listen to her read flash story "A Random Strike" at American Short Fiction and short story "Adult Swim" via The Kenyon Review. Read her latest creative nonfiction at The Huffington Post, and her short stories, "Kim Kardashian Forever" published at Hunger Mountain Review, and "A Case of the Mondays," at Eclectica.