• What Is a Workshop, Anyway?

• The Low-Residency Experience

• Creative Writing Ph.D.s

• Do Poets Need M.F.A.s?

• PW Talks to Author Matthew Thomas

• M.F.A. Program Spotlight

CREATIVE WRITING

BY DEGREES

Special Report 2014

M.F.A.s and Ph.D.s For Writers Are Everywhere

M . F . A . U P D A T E

P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY ■ A U G U S T 2 5 , 2 0 1 424

Photo: A workshop class at Fairleigh Dickinson’s low-residency M.F.A.

Despite the ubiquity of the work-shop model, critics of M.F.A. programs have long argued that being read and critiqued by other beginning writers may not be the best way for aspiring authors to hone their craft. Writers who have been through workshops, however, tend to

disagree—and their increasingly noteworthy publishing track records indicate that the workshop can, and often does, lead to published books and powerful, inventive writing.

The typical graduate-level writing workshop has three ele-ments. There’s the workshop instructor, a published author who directs the discussion and keeps the trains running on time; the writer whose work is being critiqued; and the rest of the class—all writers who, when they themselves are not being critiqued, function as a crack team of critics. Depending on course size, an M.F.A. student might workshop 15–25 pages of prose two or three times a semester; while poets in smaller group sometimes workshop as much as a poem (or even two) a week.

Workshop prep for both students and faculty consists largely of reading and critiquing. Proponents of the workshop argue that this teaches writers as much about craft as writing does.

What goes on in a creative writing workshop anyway?

The M.F.A. Workshop: From Red Ink to Published Book BY JULIE BUNTIN

The workshop is the core of the creative writing M.F.A. Most graduate programs in creative writing require that students enroll in at least one workshop per semester.

Support for

INDIE AUTHORSfrom Publishers Weekly

Get one.

booklife.com

Support for

INDIE AUTHORSfrom Publishers Weekly

G

Taps the experience, integrity and authorityof Publishers Weekly to help indie authors

achieve their publishing goals.• Professional tips, insights and strategies for creating and

marketing your book

• Connect and share with other indie authors

• A free and easy way to submit self-published books for reviewin Publishers Weekly

BOOKLIFE_FULL_Layout 1 5/14/14 4:16 PM Page 1

M . F . A . U P D A T E

Authors, Poets, Playwrights Hofstra’s MFA in Creative Writing program offers a challenging and exciting program of study integrating literary scholarship and focused instruction in writing. Students may concentrate in playwriting, fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction, exploring the art and craft of writing while grounding themselves in the rich literary traditions that offer exemplary models of these forms.

One new feature of the MFA is the availability of teaching fellowships, allowing students to work with a faculty mentor while teaching general creative writing or a genre-specific undergraduate workshop.

Erik BroggerPlaywriting

Julia MarkusFiction

Phillis LevinPoetry

Martha McPheeFiction

Core Faculty

Patricia HorvathCreative Nonfiction

v For more information, visit hofstra.edu/GradEnglish

Hofstra is launching the 11th season of the Great Writers, Great Readings Series. Fall 2014 visiting authors include Pulitzer Prize-winner Jeffrey K. Eugenides (November 10) and Belinda McKeon (December 3). Visit hofstra.edu/gwgr for more information.

Ad Hof CrtvWrt_PublishersWeekly_rev.indd 1 8/21/14 4:30 PM

David Grand (standing) and Jeff Allen, faculty at FDU, with a student

shops she attended at NYU with helping her to realize that the first draft of the novel needed to be completely reimag-ined. “Unfortunately and fortunately, my first M.F.A. workshop revealed to me that my novel made no sense. It had no structure, no plot, no order. In the sum-mer between my two M.F.A. years, I restarted the book from scratch. My workshop readers helped me preserve the book’s essence and redesign the book’s action.”

Brittany Cavallaro attended the Uni-versity of Wisconsin for her M.F.A. in poetry; it’s an intimate program that accepts only a handful of students in each genre and opens for applications in poetry only every other year (during off-years, it accepts applications in fiction). Cavallaro’s poetry cohort at UW-Madi-son consisted of six other writers. “We had all of our workshops together,” she says. “In short, they saw every single thing I wrote for two years. My cohort didn’t just see my poems as individual pieces (though that was a consideration); they were also always able to speak to how my project––and later, my manu-script––was evolving. If it seemed like I

“Contrary to popular belief, if you are really interested in being a writer, then you must be a stellar reader, and this is truly what the M.F.A. is for—to make you a better reader,” says Scott Cheshire, who graduated from Hunter College’s M.F.A. program in fiction and whose debut novel, High as the Horses’ Bridles, was published by Henry Holt in July. “Cynics will scoff at this and they are welcome to—‘M.F.A.s are banality machines, etc., blah blah....’ ”

While a writer’s work is under cri-tique, he or she is usually barred from speaking, a practice that mimics the real-world relationship between writer and reader—if, e.g., a reader is bored by the opening paragraph of a book on the new-release table at Barnes & Noble, there is, after all, no writer present to explain the thought process behind that long-winded description of the weather. Workshops attempt to address such problems when stories, poems, novels, and memoirs are in their infancy.

Rebecca Dinerstein, whose debut novel The Sunlit Night sold to Blooms-bury for a rumored six figures (it will be published in June 2015), credits work-

M.F.A. in CREATIVE WRITING• Low-residency program with online workshops

• Week-long residency spent abroad in Edinburgh, Scotland

• Manuscript-length thesis and publication plan

Apply Now! www.arcadia.edu/mfacw

Metropolitan Philadelphia1-877-ARCADIA (1-877-272-2342)

P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY ■ A U G U S T 2 5 , 2 0 1 428

also began in workshop, while she was enrolled in the fiction track at Kansas University’s M.F.A. program. “When my book was being workshopped, it wasn’t even conceptualized as a book yet, just a bunch of short ‘stories,’ as I was calling them at the time because I was too chicken to face the fact that they were memoir,” she says. Once Krug owned up to the fact that her stories were really nonfiction, she learned that the process of workshopping nonfiction comes with unique challenges. “It can be hard for your classmates to comment on the ‘nar-rator’ if they know the narrator is you,” says Krug. “It can also be tough to hear criticism of your actual life rather than just a fictional story.”

Krug’s next book, an essay collection, will be published by 99: The Press in 2015. She credits the workshop process, in part, for her publishing success. “My workshops gave me a lot of moral sup-port, helping me believe that my writing did affect readers, and that it was worth it to keep at it, keep querying editors, keep revising... all of it,” she says. “If I didn’t have that belief instilled from my workshop teachers and classmates, I don’t know that I would have pursued making a book.”

M.F.A. workshops help writers man-

age the delicate balancing act between the process of writing—which is incred-ibly isolated and individual—and the necessity of writing something people want to read. “I think of workshopping as a way to read your own work through the eyes of others—a scene that you write gets refracted by those around you, and suddenly you have several dif-ferent readings of it, each with a differ-ent momentum for how it might be retooled or reshaped,” says Kleeman. “Even misreadings are valuable because they help you find something in your material that you wouldn’t come up with intentionally––they help you think beyond yourself.”

Cheshire dismisses the view held by many critics that M.F.A. programs are “banality machines” that generate uni-form and predictable writing. But it’s hard to take these critics seriously when authors with M.F.A.s are responsible for works as disparate as, say, Paul Hard-ing’s Tinkers and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Harding is an Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate; Diaz attended Cornell; both titles won Pulitzers).

Julie Buntin is a freelance writer living in New York City.

Rene Steinke’s fiction workshop at the FDU residency

© R

EN

E S

TE

INK

E

was just rewriting an earlier poem, they’d tell me. If a poem felt like it could be in that collection, they’d tell me that, too.”

Cavallaro’s first full-length poetry col-lection, Girl-King, will be released by University of Akron press in February 2015. When she began the program, she was coming off a nine-month writing dry spell. Her first workshop kickstarted her writing, and she produced nearly 40 poems that initial semester. “Not all of those poems made their way into the manuscript, but they formed its spine,” she recalls. “Nearly every poem in the manuscript was workshopped, and the ones that weren’t were looked at by my friend Jacques J. Rancourt, who had been in all my workshops and who is my first and best reader.”

The opportunity to find a best reader in a grad-level writing workshop is one of the great benefits of M.F.A. pro-grams—writers often talk about rela-tionships made in workshop that have transcended the classroom and become part of their processes. “The best thing I took from workshop was getting to know other writers whose minds worked entirely differently from mine and whose minds I coveted,” says Alexandra Klee-man, who attended Columbia’s M.F.A. program from 2010 to 2012.

Kleeman started an extracurricular writing group with people she met in workshop, including Sara Novic, whose debut novel is forthcoming from Ran-dom House. “I wrote the first half of my book in workshop, almost like a serial-ized novel—my classmates would often be reading new chapters as fast as I could write them. I didn’t revise substantially during my time at Columbia because I was still moving forward with the plot—instead, I treated the workshop as a place to get feedback on what was working and not working,” says Kleeman. The manu-script eventually became the draft of her first novel, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, which will be published by Harper in Summer 2015 and was sold as part of a two-book deal that includes a collec-tion of short stories.

Louise Krug’s memoir Louise: Amended

M . F . A . U P D A T E

Award-Winning Faculty

Distinguished Writers-in-Residence

Teaching Instructorships

Editorial Opportunities

Diverse Reading Series

Renowned Annual Literary Festivals

Vibrant Urban Campus

Thriving Literary Community

FICTIONGarnett Kilberg CohenDon De GraziaPatricia Ann McNair Joe Meno Nami Mun Audrey Niffenegger Samuel Park Alexis PrideShawn Shiflett

NONFICTIONJenny Boully Aviya Kushner David Lazar Jill Talbot Sam Weller

POETRYCM BurroughsLisa FishmanMatthew ShenodaTony Trigilio David Trinidad

RECENT VISITING WRITERSChris AbaniDorothy AllisonBonnie Jo CampbellJulie CarrJohn D’AgataJunot DiazEmma DonoghueJennifer EganDave EggersPeter GizziJane HamiltonAleksandar HemonJonathan LethemBernadette MayerRusty MorrisonMaggie NelsonJoyce Carol Oates D.A. PowellLia PurpuraClaudia RankineSalman Rushdie SapphireJohn SaylesBrenda ShaughnessyDavid ShieldsChristine SneedIrvine Welsh

Fiction / Nonfiction / Poetry

Creative Writing colum.edu/CreativeWriting

P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY ■ A U G U S T 2 5 , 2 0 1 430

M . F . A . U P D A T E

The teaching market is becoming increasingly competitive, and many M.F.A. graduates are still stuck in the kinds of jobs they’d gone to grad

school to escape.

creative dissertation with an academic component. You also have to take four semesters of coursework.”

The University of Kansas awarded Krug a teaching assistance-ship while she worked on her Ph.D., which required her to teach two classes in exchange for free tuition and a small stipend. Most creative writing Ph.D. programs offer funding packages that include teaching fellowships that help students bankroll their years of study. Krug hopes that her Ph.D. will help her land a university-level teaching job; she’s been on the job market since last spring, working as an adjunct at Kansas in the meantime.

A recent search of the Association of Writers & Writing Pro-grams’s online database of creative writing programs yielded only 28 Ph.D. programs in creative writing across the U.S.; if the lens is widened to include programs in the U.K. and Canada, another seven more can be tacked on. While that may seem like small potatoes next to the 100+ low-residency M.F.A. programs currently attracting students, and even smaller potatoes next to the hundreds (literally, hundreds) of full-time programs churn-ing out writers at a university near you, there’s no denying that the Ph.D. program is slowly and steadily insinuating itself into the academic creative writing marketplace. As recently as 20 years ago, creative writing Ph.D. programs were rare, only offered at a handful of forward-thinking schools like the univer-sities of Houston and Ohio. Now there are enough to warrant their own Poets & Writers ranking—among the top 15 are the Ph.D. programs at Utah, USC, and Florida State.

Williams sees the creative writing Ph.D. as here to stay. “Probably, in about 15 or 20 years, all of these M.F.A. programs will be Ph.D. programs. It’s degree inflation, maybe, but it’s not going anywhere.”

Doctor of Creativity By Julie Buntin

The M.F.A. in creative writing is considered a terminal degree, and therefore qualifies gradu-ates to teach at the college level. But Ph.D. programs in creative writing have become an increasingly attractive follow-up to the M.F.A. for writers looking to improve their chances of landing competitive tenure-track teaching positions—or for those who want to buy more time to work on their projects without the pressures of a day job.

As his M.F.A. at University of Ari-zona came to a close, poet Jerry Williams was looking for more time. “I wanted a couple more years to focus on my writing and not have to go back into the reg-ular work force.” Like the major-ity of students who go through an M.F.A. program, Williams wasn’t

graduating with a published manuscript. He knew that the teaching market was becoming increasingly competitive and many M.F.A. graduates were still stuck in the kinds of jobs he’d gone to grad school to escape. “I didn’t want to tend bar,” he says. “Or worse.” He was awarded a Ph.D. from Oklahoma State in 2006.

While Williams was enrolled in Oklahoma State’s program, he published his first book, Casino in the Sun (Carnegie Mellon Univ.), which, along with the Ph.D., helped him land a visiting professorship at Roger Williams University. Now Williams is a tenured professor at Marymount Manhattan College. He says that when he makes hiring decisions, he tries not to weigh a Ph.D. over other kinds of experience, but does admit that the lit-heavy course load is good preparation for teaching. “It’s more academic,” says Williams. “The Ph.D. program is more like a lit degree with a creative dissertation. You’re reading 4,000 pages a week.”

Louise Krug just finished her Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of Kansas, a process she found more academically rigorous than her M.F.A. “To get my Ph.D. I had to take—and pass—comprehensive exams in three literary fields and write a

M . F . A . U P D A T E

Award-Winning Core Faculty• SuzanneCleary• DeniseDuhamel• AlbertGoldbarth• RickMulkey (Director of the MFA Program)

• MarlinBarton• CaryHolladay

AppliCAtionDeADlineS: February15&october1

theplace for Your nextBook isHere

For ADDitionAl inForMAtion:

converse.edu/mfa

• Robertolmstead• lesliepietrzyk• JimMinick• Susantekulve• Richardtillinghast• DanWakefield

RecentVisitingWriters,editorsandAgents: C. Michael Curtis of The Atlantic, Jenny Bent of the Bent Agency, Jillian Weise, Melissa Sarver of Folio literary Management, Dorianne laux, Ed Falco, Chuck Adams of Algonquin Books, Keith Morris, and Jeff Shotts of Graywolf Press.

P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY ■ A U G U S T 2 5 , 2 0 1 432

Have you seen any changes in the kinds of students applying and enrolling over the last few years?In the past few years we have seen a marked uptick in the number of very talented and promising students of color, and students from diverse backgrounds, applying

and matriculating. We look forward to building on that.

What do you tell your students about embarking upon a “career”—as artists or as anything else—after receiving their degrees?The biggest single thing I tell all my students is, try to separate out what you’ve been told you should care about, as opposed to what you actually need in order to live a satisfying, fulfilling life as a writer. For instance, there are some writers who are very ambitious, and who want to publish a lot and be known and read all over the country. Those writers won’t be happy unless they try to have that. We try to help them get there. Other writers are quieter, both in their work and in their personalities. So maybe they want a differ-ent kind of publishing life, a life where their work is read, but it’s more private, or more focused. That’s a fine way to live, too. Some people want to teach; others have other interests or careers already. I think it’s my job as a professor in our M.F.A. program to help students sort all this out.

When people ask you, “Why should I get an M.F.A.?” what do you say?

If you are at the right time in your writing life—truly ready to listen and grow and change—and if you pick the right program, it can be intensely accelerating. As my colleague, the poet Brenda Hillman, says, an M.F.A. is incredibly efficient: you should be able to get all the main tools you need as a writer in a two-year period, at least if we are doing our jobs!

A longer version of this interview appears at publishersweekly.com/mfa-zapruder.

M.F.A. Spotlight: St Mary’sBy Craig Morgan TeiCher

Poet Matthew Zapruder—author, most recently, of Sun Bear (Copper Canyon, 2014)—is on the core faculty of St. Mary’s creative writing program, based in Mor-

aga, Calif. He talked with PW about what makes the program stand out.

What makes St. Mary’s different from other programs?St. Mary’s is small, with deliberate aesthetic diver-sity: we look for as wide a variety as possible in the backgrounds of our students, as well as in their writ-ing. Our cohorts in each of the three genres (poetry, fiction, nonfiction) number just eight students in every class. But the program also has some of the desirable qualities of a larger program. Each year, in each genre, a visiting writer teaches work-shop. Also each year, in each genre, we have well-known, published writers who are also experienced teachers as visiting craft instruc-tors, as well as editors who come in for a few days and meet with the students.

Does St. Mary’s have any kind of aesthetic focus or area of specialty?

The faculty, and our visitors, and of course our students, reflect our aspiration to aesthetic diversity. We have people with lots of vary-ing interests studying here: both self-defined “experimental” writ-ers and more traditional writers. In fiction we have people writing so-called “literary” stories and novels, as well as YA and fantasy, though in my opinion those things are just as literary too!

Also, St. Mary’s as an institution, and our M.F.A. faculty, have made a serious commitment to social justice, diversity, political change, and particularly ecological consciousness in writing, or ecopoetics. It matters that we are out here in the Bay Area, on the West Coast. It feels different to be a writer out here, so far from the traditional East Coast cultural centers, and so close to the Pacific Ocean, with its history of liberation from traditional values and roles and innovation and experiment of all kinds.

More recently, the political and cultural activities in Oakland, which is where so many young artists and writers and musicians are going, as well as the presence of McSweeney’s and Narrative and Zyzzyva and The Rumpus, and so many other exciting new publish-ing ventures, continue to make the Bay Area a center for literary activity.

M . F . A . U P D A T E

P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY ■ A U G U S T 2 5 , 2 0 1 434

M.F.A. Spotlight: University of

Colorado BoulderBy Craig Morgan TeiCher

Noah Eli Gordon, a poet and author, most recently of The Year of the Rooster (Ahsata, 2013), is on the faculty of the

University of Colorado Boulder creative writing program. He talks with PW about what makes his program special.

What makes the M.F.A. at University of Colorado Boulder’s different from other programs?As a three-year program, one where students have the opportunity to teach creative writing courses without the burden of first having to slog through time-consuming rhet./comp. classes, we’re something of an anomaly: folks here dive—or are lovingly pushed—right in, yet they’re also supported with enough time to learn to stay afloat. Our program is small and focused, driven by the energy of our active and accomplished faculty and the camara-derie among our students and the burgeoning local literary scene, a loose conglomeration of innovatively bent writers working across genres and in different communities here in Colorado.

There is just so much abuzz at CU-Boulder, especially in the field of small press publishing. I teach an annual publishing workshop course in which our M.F.A. students run Subito Press, learning the ins and outs of how a press works. At the same time, as a kind of career seminar, we meet with various folks who’ve landed jobs in the literary arts just outside of academia: a letter-press printer, an agent, a book designer, a publicist. As editors and publishers, our faculty is closely tied to numerous important interna-tional presses, including FC2, Counterpath Press, Subtio Press, Letter Machine Editions, and more.

M . F . A . U P D A T E

Western offers a 25-month low-residency MFA and 13-month low-residency MA with July intensives in the heart of the Rocky Mountains, including annual attendance at our conference, Writing the Rockies.

Concentrations include Genre Fiction, Screenwriting, and Poetry with an Emphasis on Versecraft. We also offer a Certificate in Publishing. We are the new home of THINK, a national journal of poetry and criticism. All programs focus on craft and include both manuscript review and rigorous study of genre.

Fiction Faculty: Russell Davis, Michaela Roessner, Diana Pharaoh Francis, Candace Nadon, Stacia Deutsch. Recent Visitors: John Helfers, Robert McBrearty, Diana Tixier Herald.

Screenwriting Faculty: JS Mayank, Bob Shayne. Recent Visitors: Sam Robards, Joel Thompson.

Poetry Faculty: David J. Roth-man, David Yezzi, Ernest Hilbert. Recent Visitors: Kim Bridgford, Dana Gioia, Simon Jarvis, Dave Mason, Marilyn Taylor, Fred Turner.

western.edu/mfa 800-876-5309, Ext. 7David J. Rothman, Director drothman@western.edu

W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M 35

Does CU-Boulder’s program have any kind of aes-thetic focus or area of specialty?

Our program does pride itself on a tradition of innovation and experimentation; however, for us, those terms include a historic underpinning: we recognize that much of what we now consider canonical became so precisely because of its [authors’] willingness to explore and explode the boundaries of what one might do with writing. Along with workshops, our faculty members teach seminar courses on an ever-changing and wide range of literary topics. I recently taught a course on the art of the poetry book review, while my colleague Marcia Douglas taught one that examined the politics of language and the ways in which voice and linguistic concerns inform narrative and community across the black vernacular tradi-tion in the U.S., as well as local dialects in the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and Ireland.

What do you tell your students about embarking upon a “career”—either as an artist or anything else—following their degree?

I’m a little more interested in helping to cultivate, facilitate, assist, and otherwise germinate the desire of those folks who have a calling

to become artists, rather than anyone setting out on a career path. Is there a difference? Yes, the calling is about sustaining a life in art—ongoing, endless, deeply fulfilling. But we do all need to sup-port ourselves, right? The guest speakers I bring into my publish-ing workshop course offer a few examples of various occupations and career paths for those wanting to keep a foot in the literary field.

Sure, I wish I could help land our graduates wonderful jobs teach-ing in M.F.A. programs themselves, but the reality of the market makes that an uphill trek; however, as long as I can make folks aware of that fact, I’m happy to offer guidance.

When people ask you, “Why should I get an M.F.A.?” what do you say?

I tell them that it could be a rare convergence of sympathetic energies, of developing camaraderie and friendships, a chance to test the waters so to speak for one version of the kind of life they might really want. There’s been a trend as of late for professors in various writing programs to disavow their academic affiliations, as though they’re somehow pure artists, free from the confines of capital. If it’s cool to pretend you don’t get paid to talk about your art, then I’m happy to be totally unhip, because I love my job at CU-Boulder!

M . F . A . U P D A T E

Bring Your Writing to the WorldMFA in Creative Writing at Lesley University Fiction Nonfiction Poetry Writing for Stage and Screen Writing for Young People

Ranked #4 in the Top 10 low-residency MFA programs by Poets & Writers

lesley.edu/writerSara Farizan’s journey as a published author began with the MFA in Creative Writing, which she credits for helping bring her young adult novel to life.

Sara Farizan ’10Author of If You Could Be Mine, winner of two Publishing Triangle awards and the young adult Lambda Literary Award.

The New York Times Book Review

Farizan’s prose is frank, funny and bittersweet.‘‘

107GSASPA15.indd 1 8/18/14 5:11 PM

Creative Writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University

Awards and Fellowships Available Residencies in the English Countryside

Writing for Young Adults and Literary Translation

Editorial Internships at TLR mfa.fdu.edu

Ellen Akins Jeffery Renard Allen Renée Ashley Susan Bernofsky

Coe Booth Rebecca Chace Walter Cummins David Daniel

Donna Freitas Kathleen Graber David Grand H.L. Hix

Thomas E. Kennedy Minna Proctor Eliot Schrefer René Steinke

P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY ■ A U G U S T 2 5 , 2 0 1 436

Why Writers Love Low-Residency Programs

An M.F.A. No Matter Where You Are

BY JULIE BUNTIN

For many people, traditional M.F.A. programs are impractical. Most graduate writing pro-grams take two to three years to complete, and many award students teaching fellowships

and/or positions on university-run publications that make keeping a full-time job difficult, if not downright impossible.

Uprooting everything to spend a minimum of two years dedicated to the craft of writ-ing might sound like a dream come true for the typical aspiring writer, but for a grow-ing number of M.F.A. students, practical concerns outweigh the attractions of resi-

dency writing programs. These students have found a solution in low-residency M.F.A. programs that are conducted largely via Skype, email, and postal mail, in addition to annual or biannual seven- to 14-day residencies where students meet face-to-face with mentors, peers, and visiting writers.

Eric Paul, a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s low-res M.F.A. program in the poetry track, was attracted to the low-res model because of its flexibility. “As a working musician, I’m required to tour regularly,” says Paul. “My travel schedule can be quite rigorous—the low-res allowed me to work remotely and have the ability to balance both schedules.” FDU’s program hinges on two 10-day residences—one in held in England and the other on FDU’s campus in New Jersey—and Paul is quick to point out that faculty was very responsive between residen-cies. Chris Timmins, another graduate of FDU’s low-res pro-gram, says, “During the 10-day summer and winter residencies, the faculty made themselves exceedingly available, whether or not you enrolled in their workshops. Every single professor offered me thoughtful advice, answered questions about craft and the industry, and offered to share their contacts. They were never shy about sharing a drink and talking off record.”

Pattie Flint, an editor at Medusa’s Laugh Press who attends Cedar Crest’s Pan-European low-res M.F.A. program in poetry, applied because she was seeking one-on-one feedback. “I already had a solid writing community and respectable job in the pub-lishing industry,” she says. “These were two of the biggest gains to be had by a residency-based M.F.A., and it seemed superflu-ous to give up the community and career that I already had. The low-res format is more conducive to realistically simulating the

M . F . A . U P D A T E

Authors Zadie Smith (top) and Lydia Davis read at Shakespeare & Co. for NYU’s low-residency M.F.A. students in Paris.

M . F . A . U P D A T E

modern writer’s lifestyle, while still providing me with an incredible education.” Cedar Crest’s program is one of the few that features residencies in alternating European locations; in addition to creative work, students complete coursework in cultural studies that enhances their experience at each location, an aspect of the program that Flint says has given her work “new flavor and vitality.”

Perhaps it because low-residency M.F.A.s aren’t bound to a traditional campus that universities have been thinking globally about where to host the hallmark residency portion of their programs. Recently, NYU launched a low-residency program that takes students to Paris twice a year, where they can meet and study with Nathan Englander, Colson Whitehead, Chris Adrian, Helen Schulman, and other notable writer-faculty members in person after engaging in a rigorous course of study conducted primarily through email. “Paris is an amazing city,” says Richard Larsen, a current student in NYU’s low-res pro-gram on the fiction track who is about to embark on his thesis semester with advisor Darin Strauss. “The opportunity to dis-connect from the real world for ten days in Paris, twice a year, and spend that time with your colleagues, faculty, and visiting authors talking about and living nothing but writing is almost surreal. Or, perhaps better stated—it is sublime.”

For students and graduates of low-res M.F.A. programs, dis-

Creative Writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University

Awards and Fellowships Available Residencies in the English Countryside

Writing for Young Adults and Literary Translation

Editorial Internships at TLR mfa.fdu.edu

FacultyEllen Akins Jeffery Renard Allen Renée Ashley Susan Bernofsky

Coe Booth Rebecca Chace Walter Cummins David Daniel

Donna Freitas Kathleen Graber David Grand H.L. Hix

Thomas E. Kennedy Minna Proctor Eliot Schrefer René Steinke

tance isn’t an obstacle to building strong creative relationships. In fact, in some cases, the lack of face time and on-campus struc-ture—which doesn’t come close to real-life conditions for writ-ers—can even help students establish strong and enduring writ-ing habits. “Fairleigh Dickinson’s low-res M.F.A. allowed me to balance my job with the program’s reading list, assignment deadlines, and my own writing, which amounted to empirical training for ‘the writer’s life.’ I wrote, and still write, weekday mornings before my 9 to 5 and one day on the weekend,” says Timmins. “Rather than sorting this schedule out after a full-residency program, I’ve graduated with a productive structure already in place.”

Writers who want to hone their craft and knuckle down on their book projects without leaving home can choose from over 100 low-res programs nationwide. Warren Wilson College, which holds its two 10-day annual residencies on its campus in Swannanoa, N.C., is the oldest such program, and is widely considered the model for most low-res M.F.A. programs. With its roster of bestselling alumni (including David Wroblewski and Robin Black), Warren Wilson holds the coveted number one spot on the Poets & Writers low-res M.F.A. rankings. Other standout programs include the well regarded and long-running Vermont College of Fine Arts low-res M.F.A., as well as pro-grams at Bennington and the University of Southern Maine.

P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY ■ A U G U S T 2 5 , 2 0 1 438

Author Matthew Thomas with his three year-old twins.

Tell us about the moment you learned you’d landed a million dollar deal for your first book? It was extraordinary. I was teaching, and I was in between classes when I got the call from my agent [Bill Clegg]. How much it sold for didn’t really sink in at first, because I had to go back to work. But as it sunk in, I was overwhelmed—and grateful—because it changed my life. More than anything, though, I was happy that I was going to get to publish this book. And I was still feeling espe-cially happy just to have finished it.

You spent 10 years writing the book. During that time did you think about how you would publish it?No, I really didn’t think about the publishing process, because I always felt I had so much work to do on the book. Reaching out to an agent always seemed so premature. Besides, I wasn’t writing short stories or anything else, so there wasn’t anything that might have made an agent interested me in the first place. I suppose could’ve given somebody the first half of the book and tried to generate inter-

Success Story

BY ANDREW RICHARD ALBANESE

In his blockbuster debut, We Are Not Ourselves, Thomas tells the epic story of Eileen Tumulty, a daughter of Irish immigrants in Queens, N.Y., as she chases

the American Dream. Early reviews have been strong; the book received a starred review in PW, which dubbed the effort a “definitive portrait of

American social dynamics in the 20th century.”

Thomas’s personal story is rather epic as well. The 39-year-old author honed his craft in two writing programs, and later worked as a school teacher while he finished his first novel—which he wrote by hand, toiling in obscurity for 10 years.

“I started writing this book by hand, and then I would type it out,” he says. “But I found that I was editing so much as I typed that I was taking one step forward and three steps back. So I went back to handwriting. I would fill up a 70-page note-book, and then I’d have the stress of carrying these things around! But my desire was to get to the end of a draft. And handwriting afforded me some locomotive energy, and tremen-dous fluidity.”

Thomas’s hard work was rewarded last fall with a seven-figure deal from Simon & Schuster—a sum virtually unheard of for literary fiction, much less literary fiction debuts. Days before his August 19 publication date, we caught up with Thomas and talked with him about his craft, his M.F.A. experience, and his journey from obscurity to the verge of literary fame.

M . F . A . U P D A T E

PW Talks with author Matthew � omas

explore. experience. expand.®

Considering an MFA program?

The UCLA Extension Writers’ Program can help you get there!Our creative writing students have been accepted into competitive MFA programs all over the country including:

15782-14

• Antioch University• Bennington College• Boston University• California State University, Long Beach• Fairfi eld University• Indiana University• Iowa State University• Iowa Writers’ Workshop• Kingston College, UK• Lesley University• Louisiana State University• Pacifi c University

• Rutgers-Newark• Sarah Lawrence College• Spalding University• University of California, Irvine• University of California, Riverside• University of Florida• University of Michigan• University of Mississippi• University of Oregon• University of Texas at Austin• Vermont College of Fine Arts• Warren Wilson College

The Writers’ Program is the largest open-enrollment creative writing and screenwriting program in the nation. Choose from almost 400 annual courses offered both online and onsite.

uclaextension.edu/pubweekly • (310) 825-9415 • writers@uclaextension.edu

15782.indd 1 8/11/14 9:01 AM

P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY ■ A U G U S T 2 5 , 2 0 1 440

est, but that idea entered my mind only to the degree that sometimes I felt like a man in the wilderness—nobody was reading this, not even my wife. It helped that I had a full-time job as a teacher. Had I been in a freelance situation, I might have been more desperate. But, as shackling and time-consuming as a full-time teaching job can be, the psychic safety-valve of a paycheck allowed me to work on the book without having to answer to anyone. And that was tremendously freeing, as counterintuitive as that sounds.

Tell us about your M.F.A. experience.I did an M.A. first at Johns Hopkins, back when it was a one-year program. Now, it is an M.F.A.. I studied under Alice McDermott, Stephen Dixon, Jean McGarry, Judith Grossman, Tristan Davies, and the great poet Greg Williamson, among others. It was just astounding. From there I was able to spring into an M.F.A. program at Irvine, and I began to write this novel for my final submission there. I had been writing short stories, and some of those yielded a little bit of fruit, pieces of which found their way into the book—re-ally small portions and heavily edited, at that. But at Irvine I was working through material that was sort of circling the drain of what would become this book, which I was working up the courage to write.

What were the most valuable parts of the M.F.A. experience for you? It was the time to write. The stipend. And it was the community of peers, which is often referred to as the biggest benefit of M.F.A. programs. I think that is probably true. You learn as much from your peers as your do from your instructors, because they are all working writers, although at different levels of craft. But everybody is involved, and in a serious way. And, you actually learn how to read in an M.F.A. program, which is as important as learning how to write. By that I mean learning how to articulate your response to what you read in the language of writing rather than the lan-guage of criticism. Most people come into the M.F.A. knowing the language of undergraduate English lit. criticism, which doesn’t allow for a nuanced understanding of what makes a sentence work, or how sentences work in concert with other sentences. In a creative writing program, you learn to think like a writer at work.

Do you think you would have written We Are Not Ourselves without your M.F.A. training?I don’t think I would have written it as well, or as fast. Now, it took me 10 years to finish, so I suppose you can say there was nothing was fast about this. But I learned more in the first half-hour of listening to Alice McDermott than I ever would have figured out on my own in terms of nuts and bolts, craft minutiae. And Geoffrey Wolff would just toss off these bon mots about writing that were gold, and I just soaked them up.

Did your programs address how to approach the publishing side of things?No, and there was something beautiful about that. The most we

got about that at Hopkins was when Stephen Dixon gave us a list of literary magazines. It was a mimeographed list with his hand-written notes in on it. Steve types everything, so imagine a type-writer list with pen edits made over time, then copied, and then given to us. And the conversation about the list was maybe half a class. At Irvine, too, they were very careful not to talk about the business, maybe because Hollywood is so nearby and there is a potentially pernicious influence on the making of the art. They were scrupulous about not talking about the business side of writ-ing at Irvine, and I appreciated that. I don’t think you need to have that conversation with your writing teacher.

Speaking of Hollywood, did you ever think of writing in any other form than a novel?No, no, never. First of all, I am in love with the form of the novel. And if I had given up the form of the novel, I would have lost the chief virtue the novel provides the artist, a virtue that no other form offers, which is access to interiority. There is nothing like the inte-riority with characters that you get in a novel. Yes, there is a lot of competition for a reader’s time, but I think writers compete best with other media by writing the best novels they can write, the best short stories, or the best poems. These forms will always have their defenders.

What was it like working with Mary Sue Rucci, your editor at S&S? Mary Sue is a tremendous editor—she is a tremendous reader first of all and is gifted at articulating her objections efficiently and, how should I say this, humanely. She sees what’s wrong, and is also en-thusiastic about sharing what she loves—and that is great to get from an editor. There was a whole section that I wrote at her advice. And she did some wonderful, careful pruning, and a great line edit. You do hear a little about how editors at the major houses don’t edit. But that was not my experience.

Now that the book is out in world how do you feel? Any pressure from getting such a big advance? In terms of pressure, I felt much more while I was writing. I was in my 30s, with no publishing history, a job that I loved but that I didn’t want to do for 30 years. The pressure I felt was ever-present, and enormous. There wasn’t really a day when I was free from it. So, whatever pressure I might feel about the advance, it is nothing compared to the terrifying feeling I felt while writing this—that I might slip through the cracks.

What are you most looking forward to now?Writing the next book, which I am working on now. And I am excited to hear from readers. In the beginning I did sort of mourn the loss of the world that I had created and could inhabit. But I wrote for so long in vacuum that the very idea of having readers is such a miracle to me. It will be fun to interact with readers and have a conversation about the book. I’m excited.

M . F . A . U P D A T E

A low-residency program designed to deepen your understanding of writing as an ongoing engagement with discovery and transformation.

Request more information at www.ut.edu/mfa or call (813) 258-7409.

The Only Low-Residency

MFA IN FLORIDAFiction | Nonfiction | Poetry

PAST AND PRESENT GUEST WRITERS AND EDITORS INCLUDE: Michael Connelly, Arthur Flowers, Nick Flynn, Hal Hartley, Amy Hill Hearth, Eli Horowitz, Denis Johnson, Miranda July, Ben Lerner,

Susan Minot, Rick Moody, Francine Prose, Karen Russell, George Saunders, Heather Sellers, Wesley Stace, Deborah Treisman

TEACHING FACULTY INCLUDE: Jessica Anthony, Sandra Beasley, John Capouya, Brock Clarke, Erica Dawson, Tony D’Souza, Mikhail Iossel,

Stefan Kiesbye, Steve Kistulentz (director), Richard Matthews, Kevin Moffett, Donald Morrill, Josip Novakovich, Jason Ockert, Alan Michael Parker, Jeff Parker, Corinna Vallianatos, Jennifer Vanderbes

P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY ■ A U G U S T 2 5 , 2 0 1 442

Why Poets Get M.F.A.s Let’s take it as a given that no one studies poetry for the money and fame, or at least not just for the (piti-ful) money and (marginal) fame. You can count the

number of poets in the United States who make a living off of their book sales on one hand. Bestselling business writer Daniel Pink and others have argued that the M.F.A. is the M.B.A. of the 21st cen-tury. It’s true there are more and more programs every year and, thus, more newly minted M.F.A. graduates. And anyone who’s read a profile of Steve Jobs knows how vital aesthetics and creativity have become in the new economy, how they drive innovation. Whatever people say about an M.F.A. in writing—and they say a lot—such programs are cer-tainly hotbeds of creativity.

Former Maine Poet Laureate Betsy Sholl notes, “It’s a degree for people with a passion for [this] art, who value writing over huge salaries.” Getting an M.F.A. in poetry seems to require that one shed most practical considerations about the future. Of her M.F.A. students at OSU Cascades, Arielle Greenberg (My Kafka Century) says, “Some of them want jobs, but I do my best to quickly disabuse them of that.” When asked why they do

By GiBson Fay-LeBLanc

M . F . A . U P D A T E

An Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity InstitutionPhoto by Martin Seck

THE NEW SCHOOL

Write Your Book.Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Join a community that includes 36 graduates who published books in 2013. Concentrations are offered in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and writing for children. Live the writer’s life in New York City. www.newschool.edu/writeyourbook3

An Impractical Degree?

Poet Keetje Kuipers chose her program based on funding opportunities.

W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M 43

it, graduates of poetry M.F.A. programs talk about a compulsion to make little machines made of words. They want the time, feedback, and inspiration that an M.F.A. offers and a more intense engage-ment with the craft.

Poets choose programs based on repu-tation, faculty, location, and the opportu-nities it affords (like teaching or intern-ing at a literary magazine or press). Fund-ing is also important: Keetje Kuipers (Keys to the Jail) notes that she choose the University of Oregon over a program that promised connections because it was fully funded. She didn’t want to pay the price if she found that she didn’t want to write.

Once they begin a program, poetry students often encounter some surprises. They find that the poet mentoring them is not who they supposed it would be. They find community in unexpected places, including (gasp!) with fiction and nonfiction students. They find their work changing in unanticipated ways—and not only due to the influence of their teachers. Columbia M.F.A. Lytton Smith (The All-Purpose Magical Tent) says, “Being shown new ways to construct a poem weekly by my fellow poets made the M.F.A. invaluable. I’m sure I wouldn’t have written my first book without [the program], as much as my saying that will annoy a certain segment of the poetry world.”

Every poetry program has its workshop horror stories whether real or apocry-phal—a poem in the voice of a stray kit-ten, a teacher who picks favorites, another who belittles students—but most M.F.A. poets give good reports about the care and high standards with which teachers and students read their work and the relation-ships that can form as a result.

And what happens once the thesis is handed in? Greenberg hopes her students will have found community more than connections. Sholl (Rough Cradle) says, “There are connections, and then there is the work of writing well.”

It is clear, though, that many gradu-ates benefit from doors that are opened, even just a bit, by colleagues or teachers during or after their M.F.A. experience.

Kuipers says, “My professors and pro-gram directors seemed to be waiting to see who would put in the hard work [after the M.F.A. was over]. I had to earn their help, but I got it eventually.”

Regardless of what happens after grad-uation, the community created in an M.F.A. program can confer something

more lasting. Vermont College grad Marita O’Neil, says, “The friendships that I have because of the M.F.A. get me through the difficult days.” ■

M . F . A . U P D A T E

Most people won't realize that writing is a craft.

I shall try to tell the truth, but the resultwill be fiction.

MFA in Creative WritingMA in Publishing

Double Degree: MFA in Creative Writing and MA in Publishing

www.rosemont.edu

Suburban Philadelphia

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is the author of Death of a Ventriloquist and a freelance writer and teacher living in Maine.