Culture is the key to a great program

I flipped open my copy of Poets & Writers this month to discover that Pacific University’s MFA in Writing Program has ranked fourth among the top low-residency MFA programs in the U.S., edging up one place from last year. Congratulations to the faculty, students, and staff who made this possible. What is remarkable is that the Pacific program has only been around for a handful of years, as compared to the three programs ranked above it (Bennington since ’94, Warren Wilson since ’76, Vermont College since ’81) and the one program it surpassed in these particular rankings this year (Antioch, started in ’97).

My theory about the secret to this program’s twenty-first-century upstart success is, once again: faculty, faculty, faculty.

What happens when you assemble talent such as the Emeritus Flannery O’Conner Professor of Letters from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the director of the Ph.D. Program in Literature and Creative Writing at USC, and the founder and poetry program director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at SDSU (just to name a few) is that the program obviously benefits directly from the contribution of such outstanding writers and teachers. But more than this, having not only such a talented but well-connected core faculty naturally and automatically attracts other first-rate writing teachers into the program.

By rapidly attracting great faculty, the program made a name for itself with its debut in the Atlantic Monthly rankings as one of the top five low-residency programs. This led to an explosion in the quality and quantity of new student applicants, acquisition of more first-rate faculty, and overall program growth. The greatest challenge that comes with such rapid growth is maintaining the outstanding culture that precipitated the program’s early success. Culture is critical because maintaining a diverse, congenial environment where faculty can do what they do best with a minimum of politics and pretension creates an ecosystem wherein writing students are bound to thrive.

As in business, culture trickles down from the top. Kudos, three years on from the program’s Atlantic Monthly debut, to Dean Hayes, Program Director Shelley Washburn, and the core faculty–for sustaining a positive culture in the Pacific University MFA program, continuing its reputation as a great place to teach and therefore, by extension, a great program overall.

But tonight I want to write about Abby’s poetry, because reading Abby Murray makes me want to be a better poet. By “better” I mean more wild, fierce, and free. Life can drive you crazy, if you let it. Health problems in the family and pressures at work have been leading me up to the brink. How refreshing, then, to read poems that regularly swan-dive off the edge, with such panache.

A poem like “Barnacle’s Son” convinces me, completely, that even if a man can’t be born from a rough sea creature, it ought to be possible. And within the language of the poem, it is. Equally convincing is the poem “How I Love You,” whose lines taper down and down, constricting on the final phrase, in all its tough rightness: “I love you more than / an iron fence / loves her / house.” And when “They Took Her Away in a Birdcage,” my face wanted to smile and frown all at once.

But Abby’s poems are not all mixed emotion and magical realism. She can hold focus on difficult topics as unflinchingly as a poet like Sharon Olds. Abby does just this in “Bones,” written at the bedside of a wounded soldier, giving us “the explosion in slow motion:”

crescent moons and teardrops of shrapnel
spiraling up the leg from ankle to groin like
morning glories curling round a fencepost.

My favorite poems make me want to thank a poet for just being most fully themselves. So, thank you, Abby, for being Abby.

I’m off to howl at the moon.

Me & Coyote is available in New Poets | Short Books Volume IV from Lost Horse Press. Read more reviews from the Lost Horse Press New Poets series.

“How open to suggestion / they have always been, carrying nothing // with them of the past, content to leave almost / everything behind…”

-Christopher Buckley, “New Clouds”

I received a complimentary copy of the premiere issue of Cloudbank today. The journal is co-edited by Peter Sears, core faculty in the Pacific Unviersity MFA program, and the index reads like a roll-call of some of that program’s most talented writers: Arthur Ginsberg helps us see behind sight, Ron Bloodworth takes us into meditative country, Marianne Klekacz makes a Christmas-morning discovery of flight, Jennifer Whetham extols the sensuous mushroom, Beth Russell defends the curious appetites of the female praying mantis, and Abby Murray brings a glimmer of hard-earned compassion to a dog-eat-dog world. More than this, new poems by Christopher Buckley, Carolyn Miller, Margaret McGovern, and a host of other wonderful poets–some from the Pacific Northwest, others not–round out this impressive debut. A publication of Cloudbank Books in Corvalis, Oregon, Cloudbank the journal is accepting submissions for its second issue, including offering a $200 prize for one outstanding poem. Details for submitting poems, and ordering a copy of their excellent first issue, are available on the Cloudbank website.

Associate Provost Wilkes, Dean Hayes, Vice President Akers, Ms. Washburn, faculty, staff, graduates, alumni, family, and friends–good afternoon. Today we celebrate our completion of the requirements for Pacific University’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing degree, and a milestone for each of us in our ongoing education as writers. This also marks the fifth year of this MFA program’s existence. And if any program has earned the right to act its age, this one has. If memory serves me, this involves spontaneous tantrums followed by graham cracker cookies and a nap. At least, that’s what I liked best about being five. It was also the age when I dictated my first poem to my kind and patient mother. It ran seven pages. And, although I have learned a lot since then, today I would like to be brief in simply reminding us all of some truths about this program, and about writing, we all already know–but might want to hear repeated.

The behaviorist B.F. Skinner was fond of the saying that, “education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.” And so, in some sense, the real test of our education begins now, as we start to forget. Fortunately, through the unique grace of this program, we have been educated in the truest sense of that word, which shares a common root with the word “educe”–that is, we have had our writerly selves evoked from within. And so, more than any specific, received element of craft–immensely helpful though they all have been–we have learned, most importantly, to live in the world more like writers. This doesn’t mean we all moved in to our basements and stopped showering. Those would only be the outward signs of a being a writer.

Ours has been, if anything, an inner transformation–toward a greater awareness of what Paul Eluard meant when he said, “there is another world, and it is in this one,” and, hopefully, an experiential understanding of what our own Marvin Bell points out when he reminds us that, “in art, you’re free.” This experiential understanding of what it means to live through the eyes and ears of a writer can not be inculcated through lectures, workshops, or assignments alone. There is something about good writing one simply has to catch. And the privilege of spending time with mentors who are talented but unpretentious, wise with a sense of humor, and generous almost to a fault–is a rare and wonderful gift.

Teaching writing seems to involve a curious sort of dance, and the faculty here are all fleet of foot–instead of rattling off answers, they have stood next to us, in their humility, and marveled at the beauty of the questions. Instead of pounding us into conformity with their own style, they have opened doors into rooms full of gifted writers, each with something in common, something to teach us, and made introductions. Instead of telling us what to write, they pedal fast downhill, no hands, and shout, “catch me if you can.” And through this, the faculty have changed–not only our writing, but our writing lives–for the better.

Truly, I can not thank the faculty and staff enough for creating and sustaining this remarkable culture of generosity. In my two years, I watched faculty and students mix easily, talk honestly, and work hard not to take themselves too seriously. And so we have learned, by example, that brilliance doesn’t require pretension, that sincerely need not lack toughness, that there is no more wonderful pursuit than Czezlaw Milosz’s definition of poetry, and which I think applies to all forms of writing–”the passionate pursuit of the real.”

Stepping into this lineage does not begin or end with a ceremony. It happens every time we sit down to write. We have practiced the fine art of introducing the seat of our pants to the seat of the chair for two years now, forging habits, redefining comfort zones, wearing in new neural pathways like breaking in a stiff pair of boots. And because we have laid claim to the lineage through practical experience, it can not taken away from us by any external force. What challenges our awareness, and understanding, and commitment to explore what William Stafford called “the whole unexplored realm of human vision,” is not war, tyranny, imprisonment, floods, or any other natural or man-made difficulty–because writers have continued to write through every one of these circumstances–but forces instead far more insidious–like complacency, laziness, and pride. Our own honorary prose faculty member Anton Chekhov once quipped that, “any idiot can face a crisis–it’s day-to-day living that wears you out.” And it is true, because, in our day-to-day lives, we are not always so free.

And yet we have, each of us, in unique ways, committed to writing against the odds. It has been humbling to study alongside the single mother who would steal away a precious few minutes to write late at night, in the bath, when her kid was in bed–straining from exhaustion to keep the notebook out of the water. It has been remarkable to watch fellow students face down dark corners of their past with tenacity, honesty, dignity, and grace. We are teachers, and parents, and grandparents; computer programmers, and journalists, and students fresh out of college pulling espresso drinks for tips. We are just like anyone and everyone else. Except that we have committed, over the last two years, to develop and sustain a practice of writing–writing when tired, cranky, uninspired, and even when we just don’t feel like it–and, by persistently tapping away at the blocks, we eventually crack open rich inner worlds, by abandoning ourselves on the page time and time again, we eventually discover a little more about who we are.

It takes courage to come here, courage to stay here after that first workshop where you realize, in fact, just how far you have to go. And perhaps the greatest test begins now, as we step out into a world that needs great writing more than ever, and yet has been somehow dissuaded of that fact. Writing well is an act of defiance, not only against the conventional wisdom that favors a tangible product over a life-enriching process or experience, but defiance of the sound-byte, get-it-now consumer culture, and mind-numbing political-speak. Good writing defies neat categorization, defies polarization of “right” and “wrong,” and challenges us to understand our lives, ourselves, and our language–a medium we take for granted by its constant use–in new and unexpected ways.

I have been away from the program for several months now, having completed the course requirements in January. One week after my final residency, at my company’s all-staff retreat, the chairman announced that the global financial crisis had finally caught up with us, and that the company was in financial trouble. One month later, I was summoned to the board of directors’ meeting. I got up early that morning, just as I had for for over two years, and wrote a poem. In that meeting, the chairman announced that, in order for the company to survive, it would have to lay off forty percent of staff, including colleagues I had hired, and trained, and nurtured as a team. Breaking the news to them was one of the hardest things I have done. I kept the poem in my pocket that day, a token of defiance against the tidy conclusions I was tempted to make–about them, or me, or my superiors–and about the financial institutions that precipitated the storm that had now become ours to weather.

The truth is that none of us have been promised a simple life–security, and certainty, and plenty of uninterrupted time to write–and an MFA degree provides little, if any, added assurance about what lies ahead. Instead, we might do better to wake up each morning deeply impressed with the reality that there is truly no telling what today will bring. That might encourage us to close down the email, and sign out of Facebook, and write something–anything, for better or worse–right there, right away. What is that timeless adage? I believe it was Socrates who said, “Life is short, eat dessert first.” Instead we might print our own bumper stickers–”Life is uncertain. Write something.”

For two years, we have practiced the art of focus in a world of increasing distraction. It is not enough to say “keep writing” just once. Therefore let us go on from here as a community, and a family–to swap work, trade books, and above all encourage one another–a sacred, forgotten art revived here with a passion–encourage one another to keep writing, no matter what. It does not suffice to just say it once. And so, to get us started, I will say it three times, like Dorothy calling for her home out of the strange Technicolor world into which she was whisked by a tornado–let this be our mantra, our incantation, and every time we meet, let us say to one another: “Keep writing, keep writing, keep writing.”

Congratulations, and thank you.

I came to my first residency, here in Seaside, Oregon, one year after the death of our infant son. That event brought me back to poetry by momentarily stripping away all other ambitions. Poetry alone got me out of bed some mornings, and helped me chart the difficult inner landscape of grief, often in the bleary pre-dawn hours before work. I sought out mentors to assist me in improving my poems, and, on the sage advice of my friend and mentor Joseph Millar, I enrolled in the low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing program at Pacific University.

Getting to that first residency was hard: it was the first time my wife and I had been apart since the birth and death of our son, my first time in the Northwest, and my first real writing conference. I knew no one other than Joe. But from my arrival by bus in the freezing dark, throughout the past two years, at every turn and in even the most minute details of my experience–I received confirmation, time and again, that I was in the right place.

After two years, it seems to me that poetry is not, in fact, a skill one learns or teaches–like driving or typing–but actually a virus one catches from sustained and intimate contact with the infected. Having been cooped up with so many brilliant invalids–both faculty and students, poets and prose writers–over the last two years, I can definitely say I came down with something. More than anything, I learned how to give over to this healing sickness–by learning to let my poems have their own say.

In a letter to his brothers, John Keats wrote:

…at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously–I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

Above all, it is this ability Keats describes as “negative capability” that I cultivated, with great help, during my study here.

I cultivated this ability on two fronts: in the context of an individual poem, following the “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” more closely and more confidently, striking out boldly from line to line, assured that either my subconscious would catch me–or else the resulting fall and splatter would be spectacular. I also cultivated negative capability in the larger context of my writing as a whole, resisting “irritable reaching after fact & reason” and instead writing, and writing, and writing some more as an exercise in creative freedom, receptivity, and knowing myself.

For me, one of the great, unexpected aides in cultivating negative capability was poetic form. Whether the simple challenge to maintain stanzaic integrity, or the complex machinations of a sestina or villanelle, self-imposed limitations actually seemed to elicit greater wildness and surprise–to let my poems have more of their own say through me, instead of the other way around. It seems as though form distracts a certain logical part of my mind long enough to let the other, more creative parts come into play. And yet, when I came in to this program, I was unsure about the place of formal elements in contemporary writing in general, and my own writing in particular.

You see, I came in to this program as my own little house divided: between undergraduate studies filled with formal poems and critical theory, and a writing life fascinated by the wildness and apparently simplicity of most free-verse contemporary poems. In my third semester, the essay semester, I returned to an old favorite poet, Seamus Heaney, for help in understanding how to synthesize wildness and precision, scholarship and artistry, innovation and tradition–and in doing so, discovered a relationship between form and freedom. Studying Heaney’s poems and essays helped me understand how wild imagination and well-tuned music can fuse to create what he called “total adequacy,” that is, “a ring of truth within the medium itself.”

The title poem of my thesis, “The Silence Teacher“–which you will hear in a moment–is one example of how form and Negative Capability eventually came together, and taught me a lot in the process about how to let a poem have its own say. Based on the experience of visiting one of my wife’s oldest friends in England after the death of our son, early drafts were loaded, not only with personal feeling, but a disjointed amalgam of experiences and thoughts. We visited John Keats’ house in Hampstead during that trip, and I read poems by Robert Hass on rainy days. In this literarily-intoxicated state, the seemingly lighthearted story of the woman’s deaf daughter mistakenly calling her mother a “silence teacher” struck me as profound.

“Silence” became a lens through which I could view the present-tense experience of grieving amidst polite conversation, as well as the actual moment of loss, which remains present with me to this day. But, as much as this lens of silence provided its own kind of clarity and adequacy inside of me, coordinating and communicating these elements such that they might have a similar impact on a reader led me through draft after draft, and form after form.

Sandra Alcosser sent me countless examples of fine lyric poems, placing me in the middle of the choir to help me discover my own voice. Re-reading Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island,” as well as David St. John‘s “To Pasolini,” gave me a renewed understanding of the possibilities of the terza rima form. What I discovered in this process is the extent to which musicality and form heightened, elevated, and actually advanced my presentation of events and ideas: the better the music, the more these disjointed events seemed to come together and make “sense”–that is, to convey “a ring of truth.” The more this happened, the more I was encouraged to refine the imagery and word choice. Extensive feedback from my advisors and workshop groups helped validate these revisions, but it was the poem itself that ultimately spurred me on–teaching me, in its own way, how to clarify the narrative facts, remain wild and encompassing in my imagination of the experience, and, above all–stay true to the music.

Grief itself eventually became its own kind of reason, leading to its own conclusions. And so, particularly in my second year, the challenge became to remain open to a wider range of human experience. During one lecture, Marvin Bell admonished that we should write, instead of so many elegies to the dead, more love poems to the living. I took this advice to heart, and, with Marvin’s encouragement, began leaping off whatever ledge I encountered next–writing poems about love, several about our cat, and even one inspired by a sign on public bus.

In this way, I began to discover myself a writer in the way William Stafford understood, when he said, “A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.” And so, my creative process became largely a matter of starting–up early before work, up late when I should have been in bed, or on the weekends in our local coffee shop. I became–not a grief poet, or a lighthearted poet, a formal poet, or a free-verse poet–but a receptive poet, and a determined sitter before the laptop screen.

Assembling two years of work into a creative manuscript was equally a process of alchemy, gut, and nerve. In the end, I produced a collection of poems on a wide range of topics, grief being one of them. Yet, like Antonio Machado’s thorn in the heart, grief informed my writing process, no matter the subject, and, above all, kept reminding me, poignantly, of that heart.

More challenging for me than picking out poems, grouping them, or assembling them in a sequence was the weighty sense of finality that came with that little black buckram-bound book we call the thesis. For a moment, it symbolized “the end.” And then, once again, as an act of sheer defiance, I fired up the word processor, opened my running document full of rough drafts, false starts, cheesy ideas, and occasional gems, and just wrote something. Probably something bad–or worse, “just alright.” But in that moment, poetry was, once again, revitalized in my life.

More important, then, than the product of my two years here at Pacific–this thesis–has been the process of developing a practice of writing which includes actively cultivating “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts”–both within the poems, and within the larger process of writing–finding along the way that each poem had something to teach me, and something to say.

This has been the greatest gift of this program, discovering what Stafford discovered about the adventure of writing, when he said:

For the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision.

For this remarkable and transformative gift, I extend my deep gratitude to the faculty, staff, and students of the Pacific University MFA in Writing program. You were right, Joe. This is something truly special.

It is funny only because it is true that having this particular combination of letters after one’s name is not an automatic pass into the love, understanding, and recognition we all crave. Being raised by public school teachers taught me that our society undervalues education in a way that can be seen as either comic or tragic–depending on how tired you feel at the end of the day–and that teaching is an act worth pouring your whole self into anyway. It is the same with art.

After the graduate readings at this residency, a new student remarked that they were struck by the profound sense of gratitude present in the hearts of each of us outgoing students. This program is suffused with a spirit of generosity. Faculty and students mix easily, talk honestly, and work hard not to take themselves too seriously. A visiting professor put it succinctly: “usually people are either really good or really nice–but here they are both.”

If the faculty were priests, and this were a church, we might predict that they will reap rewards for their generosity in heaven. But they are not priests, and this is not a church, and instead of taking confession or quoting answers from religious texts, they have instead stood by us, in their humility, and marveled at the beauty of the questions. It is a privilege just to be here, partaking of something that transcends commerce, and politics, and marketing-speak: the deep words. The ones that matter.

And the rewards these artists and teachers reap in this life, for having faced down the human condition in their own projects, and hung in there with us students through our likely all-too-familiar neuroses, insecurities, doubts, and hopes as we face down our own projects–is the knowledge, all too rarely expressed, that they have changed–not only our writing, but our writing lives–for the better.

If there were a better phrase in English to expres profound gratitude and respect, I would want to use it. But all I can think to say is “thank you”–to the faculty in all genres, to Dean Hayes for believing in this program, and to Shelley, and Tenley, and Colleen, and, formerly, Amber, and all the interns, past and present, who slog heroically behind the scenes to sustain this place where brilliance doesn’t require pretension, where sincerely never lacks toughness–where people set out, with their raincoats and tackle, in search of the deep words. It has been a privilege to travel with you in this vessel for a little while.

• Yehuda Amichai, Love Poems
• John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Poems
• John Berryman, 77 Dream Songs: Poems
• Robert Bly, Silence In The Snowy Fields
• James Dickey, Drowning With Others
• Richard Hugo, The Lady In Kicking Horse Reservoir
• Rolf Jacobsen, The Silence Afterwards: Selected Poems
• Randall Jarrell, The Lost World
• Paul Mariani, The Great Wheel
• Thomas Merton, In the Dark Before Dawn: New Selected Poems
• W.S. Merwin, The Lice
• Frank O’Hara, Meditations In An Emergency
• Marianne Moore, Complete Poems
• Ezra Pound, Selected Poems
• Adrienne Rich, Diving Into The Wreck
• Jon Silkin, New and Selected Poems
• W.D. Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle
• Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
• Thomas Tranströmer, The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems
• Richard Wilbur, Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World
• William Carlos Williams, Spring And All
• William Carlos Williams, Imaginations

That’s more than the recommended twenty works (and notice I have deliberately not added any books about poetry)–so, I will have to trim and tinker.

Any suggestions, anyone?

I now recognize that in my work I have had a tendency to want to end a poem after delivering a few good lines, to “look ahead” to the conclusion and shape the direction toward that end. Reading Marvin Bell’s “Dead Man” poems, which always appear in two parts, helped me recognize just how much can still be said even after the conclusion of the first part of a poem. In some ways, every poem could be said to be just the first part of a poem on that topic.

Reading other longer works has also helped me understand how I might go about resisting conclusions in the effort at arriving in more interesting poetic territory. Being halfway through my third semester in the Pacific University MFA program, I have now read over fifty books of poetry and poetry criticism in the last fifteen months of study. I have learned a lot. Perhaps more importantly, I have absorbed a lot, imbibing poetry as much as analyzing it, and letting it shape my aesthetics from the inside out.

Most recently, I have been reading David St. John’s Study For The World’s Body. I am struck by the success of his longer poems. Comparing his work to another poet whose longer poems I also admire, Li-Young Lee, has helped me to understand some of the qualities of longer poems which I hope to deploy in my own efforts at breaking the single-page barrier.

Foremost among them seems to be a tone that reflects confidence. This sense of confidence about the speaker, and by inference the author, helps me as a reader to give the author permission to dwell on unfolding details, provided they remain grounded in concrete images, interesting language, music, or other elements of good craft. Careful examination of details in this way produces the actual poetry, and gives a sense of focus and precision to the work, despite its length.

The stand-up comedian Billy Connolly is a master at delivering humor through seemingly endless digressions. When he finally comes back to the main topic, long since forgotten in the audience’s mind, he earns not only laughs but trust that he knew what he was doing all along. Good long poems can also function in this way–taking time to deliver poetry through the details, but retaining a sense of focus and direction all along.

In some ways, it seems to me that longer poems do not necessarily have to end on lines as spectacular as those required for the success of shorter poems. A rider who has hung on to a bucking stallion with dignity and tenacity need not necessarily dismount with great flourish to win cheers. The sustained quality and duration of the work is a feat in itself. Such feats I look forward to attempting in practice soon.

Narration	Lyricism
Free verse	Meter & rhyme
Meaning	“Precious Nonsense“
Stichic	Stanzaic
Plain Speech	Elevated diction

In addition, I will continue to read widely from a variety of sources. Here is what I am thinking about adding to my reading list:

On Poetry

• Fredrick Smock, Poetry And Compassion (thank you, Mr. Carter)
• Dorianne Laux and Kim Adonizzo, The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry
• Stephen Berg (ed.), Singular Voices: American Poetry Today

Poetry

• Umberto Saba, Songbook: Selected Poems from the Canzoniere of Umberto Saba (trans. Stephen Sartarelli)
• Marvin Bell, The Book Of The Dead Man and Mars Being Red
• Paul Muldoon, Horse Latitudes
• Jane Mead, The Lord and the General Din of the World
• Ron Silliman (ed.), In The American Tree
• Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems
• Eavan Boland, Selected Poems
• Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996
• Seamus Heaney, District and Circle
• Medbh McGuckian, Selected Poems: 1978-1994
• David St. John, Study for the World’s Body: New and Selected Poems
• Tony Curtis (ed.), The Art of Seamus Heaney
• Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan: A Bilingual German/English Edition

Ideas For Poetry Book Structure

• Issa, The Year Of My Life (trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa)
• Basho, Back Roads To Far Towns (trans. Kamaike Susumu and Cid Corman)
• Robert Lowell, Life Studies
• Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (trans. Richard Howard)

This is only a cursory sketch for now. Any suggestions?

Dear MFA Students and Alumni,

I just discovered last night that the latest Atlantic Monthly magazine has listed Pacific University as one of the top five low-residency MFA programs in the nation! Jeannine Hall Gailey casually told me this in an email (a post script, no less) and I dashed out to buy two copies of the “Special Fiction Issue 2007.” In there is an article called “Where Great Writers Are Made” and there, in the last sidebar, is our program. We are included with the most venerable low-residency programs in the nation: Antioch, Bennington, Vermont and Warren Wilson.

Building a program is never easy. But it has truly been a group effort and the faculty and students are the ones who have helped make it happen. You are a talented, hardworking and passionate community and I hope you take as much pride and joy in this news as I do.

All best,

Shelley

Shelley Washburn, Director
MFA in Writing
Pacific University

Not bad for a program that has only graduated two full classes so far.

Obviously, I didn’t choose Pacific for its reputation, since it effectively didn’t have one when I applied. But clearly I’m not the only one who sees the means to work so closely with such great faculty as a rare opportunity and privilege. The beyond-the-call-of-duty helpfulness of the staff, beautiful residency settings and challenging-yet-manageable academic structure go further in making this a great experience so far. Hats off to all involved.