In case you’re not familiar with the term low-residency as it pertains to graduate creative writing programs, I’ll define it here: students who enroll in a low-residency MFA program, such as the long-standing ones at Warren Wilson College and Vermont College, along with the newer and already well-regarded Pacific University graduate writing program (in which I’m a new fiction faculty member), spend ten days twice a year on campus taking part in workshops and craft classes, and the rest of the year corresponding with an assigned faculty member in their declared genre (fiction, non-fiction, or poetry, usually.) Most of the work is therefore done off campus, with new stories, essays and poems, along with reader commentaries and other critical work, mailed to faculty advisors every three to five weeks. Detailed critiques are then sent back to the student within a few days.
June 14 – 24 of this year was my first low-residency experience teaching for Pacific University, and it was several things: exciting, moving, exhausting, affirming, and ultimately, enlivening. Sitting in the craft talks, hour-long lectures given by faculty members (two talks are scheduled most days), concerning some aspect of the genre(s) in which they have published, made me feel again the thrill and expectant hope that I often experienced as a graduate writing student in poetry at Indiana University in the mid-90s, where I studied with Maura Stanton, David Wojahn, Tony Ardizzone, Cathy Bowman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Roger Mitchell, and Alyce Miller. Why do we write? each craft lecturer implicitly asked us. Also, how do we write? Two examples of craft talks given during the ten-day Pacific residency: the marvelous poet Ellen Bass’s sentiment v. sentimentality poetry talk and the funny, smart, and fearless Laura Pritchett’s how-to-write-sex-scenes talk – full of, er…inspiring examples and tips from sexy writers such as Steve Almond and Scott Spencer. The talks are delivered in many different ways: some writers read from print-outs (as I did when delivering my talk on story structure) and others were dazzling multimedia blitzes, but ones with much more substance than MTV’s airy video glitz – such as Michael Meyer’s “Start with Place” talk on travel and memoir writing and Aimee Nezukhamatatil’s haibun lecture (a haiku – prose poem hybrid.)
A question that was answered in many ways while I was out in Forest Grove, Oregon for ten temperate June days: Why is the Pacific University program already ranked in the top five of low-residency programs, despite having been founded fewer than ten years ago? Some of the answers: 1) its director, Shelley Washburn, has worked her derriere off, as have the assistant director Colleen Sump and the program’s administrative assistant, Tenley Taylor, to ensure that it’s run with passion, dedication, and expertise; 2) the faculty are all working writers as well as major-league teachers: the publications, awards, fellowships, and other citations included in the bios on Pacific U’s MFA faculty web page were heady and daunting the first time I read through them. Along with my admiration for their many accomplishments, I felt as if I wanted to be a student again and study under these writers, who are now, unbelievably, my colleagues; 3) the Pacific MFA students are also talented; each application is read and considered closely by a meticulous and dedicated admissions committee; 4) the faculty are mentors and friends as well as virtuosic teachers.
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Saturday, March 30, 2013 at 09:48PM