Arthur Flowers

One of the great benefits of the University of Tampa MFA program is the visiting authors and publishers. In the first term of the nascent program, superstar crime fiction author Michael Connelly dropped by the program and talked about story construction and concepts of literary merit in the sometimes unfairly termed “genre fiction.” Then, in the evening, he gave a reading from his 2011 work, The Drop, as a part of MFA program’s Lectores public readings series.

Well, my description of this event no longer has to be the sole record of it online. The UT program wizards have uploaded video excerpts from the Lectores readings, includings Connelly’s reading from The Drop:

Connelly shattered a lot of our expectations that first residency period. He, more than most, gives popular fiction a good representation, both in the quality of his work and the depth of his insight.

View also, if you’ve the time, Arther Flowers’s singular presentation, an excerpt from Tibor Fischer’s hilarious The Thought Gang, or a typical, fantastic reading from George Saunders.

You can find the rest, of those so-far uploaded, on the MFA’s web page here.

A tup of the hat to D.A. Hosek for pointing out these videos had gone live.