How to Ask for a Letter of Recommendation for MFA Programs

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Dear Professor Day, remember me?
Dear Professor Day, remember me?

Dear former student o’ mine,

Thanks for your email/Facebook message asking for a LOR. I’m glad to hear that you want to pursue a graduate degree in creative writing.

This is one of those moments in life—like graduation, marriage, the birth of a child, getting a job—in which you proceed through a gauntlet of people’s attentions, and thus, you need to follow rules of etiquette—not just with me but with every single person you are about to encounter. Not to go all Emily Post on you, but mind your P’s and Q’s. If you aren’t sure what those are, pay attention. I’m going to talk explicitly about implicit subjects related to the MFA Program Biz. Continue reading

Kim Barnes: Learn the Craft, Trust the Process

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Recently, a former student emailed to say he’d been accepted into a few MFA programs, but ultimately, he’d decided on the University of Idaho. When I asked him what made the difference, he cited the beauty of the location, the full funding. “And,” he said, “Kim Barnes has created a multi-semester novel workshop, and I think it sounds fantastic.”

I knew this was one person I definitely needed to talk to. So I emailed her out of the blue and asked her if she would mind sharing this experience with the readers of my blog. She was kind enough to say yes. Continue reading

This is How You Do It: John Vanderslice (Part 3)

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This is the end of a three-part interview with John Vanderslice. During Fall 2010, we each taught a Big Thing creative writing course. We had never met, and at the time, we had no idea we were doing almost exactly the same thing in our classes. We figured this out by accident, really, when in the course of discussing something over email with his wife Stephanie Vanderslice, I mentioned that what I was doing, and the rest is history.

John, was there anything that inspired you to try these new approaches? Continue reading

This is How You Do It: John Vanderslice (Part 2)

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Part 2 of my talk with John Vanderslice, a fellow writer-teacher who is experimenting with new ways to incorporate Big Things into the creative writing classroom. (You can read Part 1 here.)

So, what did you do the third time you taught the course?

During Fall 2010, I ran the class in a radically new way. Instead of just beginning novels over the course of one semester, the students would begin and finish them. Period.

That’s definitely a challenge. I didn’t take it that far.

I set a specific word count goal for their projects–55,000–and gave them weekly word count goals as well. Every week one of the first things I did was to check their word counts–fortunately, they all had laptops or could plug a flash drive into a computer. Continue reading

This is How You Do It: John Vanderslice (Part 1)

This is How You Do It: John Vanderslice (Part 1)

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From time to time, I’m going to interview people who have figured out ways to teach “Big Thing” creative writing courses. John Vanderslice is one such writer-teacher. He teaches at the University of Central Arkansas, blogs at Creating Van Gogh, and was kind enough to answer a whole lotta questions for me.

What made you decide to try this? Had you ever taken a Big Thing class? How did you figure out what to do?

For the most part, I’ve taken, as a student, and run, as a teacher, creative writing workshops that are organized around composing the “small thing”: the essay, the poem, the short story. Smaller forms rule the workshops because they are better suited for the machinery of the workshop class–even if they are less suited for the temperament of the individual writer. I’ve been guilty of running the same machine. For several years, now, however, I have been open to, and even encouraging of, students workshopping parts of the larger works: chapters of novels, essays or stories that are part of a cycle. I appreciated that the students were “thinking ahead” to the larger forms, for heftier and more expansive ways to explore a story or a theme. Continue reading

This is How You Do It: No Typed Critiques

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Update since my last post: I wrote a letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education, and they published it, along with a response from Elise Blackwell. Since then, she and I have emailed privately. We shared some ideas and experiences. We even know people in common. The air is clear, and all is well. It’s funny how you meet people these days.

Okay, so now that THAT is out of the way, back to my series, “This is How You Do It,” which focuses on ways to re-think your classroom practices in order to accommodate long projects.

Fiction writer Matt Bell (How They Were Found, 2010) was kind enough to post an excerpt from my Millions article on his blog, but it was the reposting of that entry as a note on Facebook that generated the most discussion. It was in this forum that fiction writer Josh Weil (The New Valley, 2009) chimed in to share how Brooklyn College accommodates novels in their curriculum. Continue reading

Debate is Not Hate

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Let me be perfectly clear: I am not against MFA programs.

My essay in the Millions was originally titled The Big Thing: 10 Thoughts on Moving from “Story” to “Book.” Wisely, the editors re-titled my piece “The Story Problem: 10 Thoughts on Academia’s Novel Crisis.” Their provocative title prompted many people to read and share and discuss the essay-which is good. But perhaps it also raised the hackles of creative writing faculty-which is not good.

(BTW: Here’s a short history of the recent spate of MFA Program Critiques that have come out in the last year or so.)

Today I discovered this article by Elise Blackwell published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The real subject of this essay is the importance of geographic diversity in one’s literary upbringing. I support this idea wholeheartedly. As a native Midwesterner who earned her MFA in the South, I’m living proof that a writing apprenticeship doesn’t have to take place in an East Coast urban center as some might believe-and I tell my students this, year after year after year.

But for some reason, her wonderful argument was prefaced by pointing to “anti-MFA online hate,” and my essay was included as an example of said hate, a “dismissal” and a “strike to the heart” of writing programs.

This distresses and angers me. And I want to respond, because it’s important to my students-past, present, and future-that I not be unfairly categorized as some sort of zealot.

And this is why:

There’s a file on my computer called “Recommendations.” Right now, there are about 100 letters in that file written over the last 15 years. A lot of those letters were written in support of my students’ efforts to get jobs, scholarships, internships, to get into law school, into writers’ conferences and colonies, into all kinds of graduate programs.

But most importantly, I write a lot of letters on behalf of students trying for a dwindling number of open slots in two very competitive applicant pools: the academic teaching-position pool, and the MFA admissions pool. The letters I write for those students are read by creative writing faculty, and I need those folks in particular to hear me say this: I am not Anis Shivani.

My essay was not an attempt to tar and feather an entire discipline or those devoted to teaching within that discipline. I merely wanted to start a conversation among my fellow teachers of creative writing. I’m not someone on the outside of the ivory tower looking in, throwing stones. I’ve been inside this system for twenty years.

And in the last few years, I’d started noticing something:

  • A lot of young writers I knew (online and f2f) were graduating with MFA theses comprised of short stories and were having a tough time finding a publisher for those books. They were frustrated with their literary apprenticeship, with the realities of the publishing market, but also with themselves.
  • A lot of young writers I knew were trying to move from the writing of disparate stories and essays to the writing of books, but were struggling to do so. Some were motivated by the aforementioned frustrations, but in most cases, they were making this move because writing a novel or novel-in-stories was their lifelong dream.
  • A lot of young writers I knew said they felt discouraged from bringing novels and “big things” to workshop. Some of those young writers were my own students. Yes, my own undergraduate and graduate students said they regularly submitted short stories to fulfill my workshop requirements while writing longer works on their own, outside the workshop environment. Note: if I was blaming anyone in my Millions essay, I blamed myself. Front and center. Number 1 of my 10 thoughts.

Such a series of circumstances represented to me a puzzle worth solving. Why was this happening? Granted, not everyone agrees that these circumstances even exist, which is fine. But personally, I thought it was something worth investigating. And because I am a writer, I wrote about that investigation. I also started this blog as a way to share this investigation with others.

I’m not sure what (besides the headline of my essay, which was not written by me) would cause anyone to lump my inquiry into any category that includes “hate.”

Granted, Blackwell is careful to differentiate between me and Shivani. “The most extreme arguments” she says, “are akin to scenarios like Palin’s “death panels” in which groups of well-credentialed whitebread writers plot the exclusion of the interesting and talented.”

Yeah, wow, that’s not referring to me.

Instead, mine is the “softer imagination” that “blames a vaguer villain: workshop process among tables of people-pleasers.”

Well, my goodness, I’m certainly not the first person to assert that the workshop process has a downside. Mark McGurl in The Program Era calls it a form of retraction or “shame management.” Chad Harbach calls it the MFA vs. NYC divide. Even veteran creative writing teacher Madison Smartt Bell, in his introduction to Narrative Design, maintains that “there [are] enormous, crushing pressures to conform” in fiction workshops, but the pressure comes not “from any teacher but from the students themselves. It [is] a largely unconscious exercise in groupthink and in many aspects it really was quite frightening.”

None of these arguments represent “hatred” of MFA programs. They represent sound reflection and critical inquiry. The Creative Writing Program system keeps growing. Do we (and by “we,” I mean the thousands of people employed to teach creative writing in this country) do we really expect that such a boom will go unremarked upon? And does remarking on it constructively and rationally constitute a condemnation of said system?

I hope not.

For the last few days, I’ve been working on an AWP panel proposal on the topics I raised in my Millions essay, and I’m really excited about it. Three writer/teachers have committed to participate, most of them MFA program directors, and they are intrigued (not exasperated) by the perfectly healthy conversation that’s arisen out of my Millions essay. I hope that the panel is accepted so the conversation can continue.

Celebrating (and Celebritizing) Teaching Creative Writing

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Today, Fiction Writers Review is running “Where Are We Going Next? A Conversation about Creative Writing Pedagogy (Pt. 1),” a co-written article by myself, Anna Leahy, and Stephanie Vanderslice. This lively, wide-ranging conversation took place during the summer of 2010 via email exchanges.

I just want to thank FWR for publishing this article. You might be wondering why it appears there and not in, say the AWP Writers Chronicle or a pedagogy journal. Well, the truth is, we did submit it to the Chronicle, but they passed, as is their right, of course. When we got the very kind rejection, we discussed what to do next. Where else do you publish an article about teaching creative writing? (I’ve discussed this problem at some length here.) Since most creative writing teachers don’t (won’t?) read pedagogy journals, we decided to shoot for more mainstream publishing venues. Our first priority was making these ideas “findable” and “share-able.”

I’d like to take this opportunity to make two suggestions that weren’t included in this conversation:

A keynote address on Teaching Creative Writing at the annual AWP conference. I would pay good money to hear anything Charles Baxter or Peter Turchi or Janet Burroway had to say about teaching. Why can’t Good Teachers be “celebritized” at AWP alongside the Good Writers?

More “teaching-creative-writing blogs.” This blog has invigorated my teaching in many wonderful ways, and it’s brought me many new friends. Yes, it takes time, and I know we all struggle to find the time to write, to teach, and to live our lives. In the midst of a busy life, why make time to write about teaching when it doesn’t “count” for tenure and promotion?

Because when you force yourself to articulate what you do and how you do it, your teaching improves.

Because. Teaching. Matters.

Anxiety + Community = AWP

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"Are you somebody?"

[Note: This post has nothing to do with snow. ]

AWP is like my Facebook feed.

It’s where I go to feel connected to and learn from other writer-teachers. So many panel topics! So many great discussions! Sometimes I just show up to listen and learn, taking notes. Sometimes I propose a panel and start a conversation. It’s often energizing and enriching. I’m part of a community, a profession, a discipline. If this is what it feels like to have “a calling,” to be doing the thing(s) you’re supposed to be doing in life, then that is what I feel like when I’m there at AWP, on Facebook.

Continue reading

This is How You Do It #1: Writeshop

This is How You Do It #1: Writeshop

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You need to know this: I was not talking about MFA programs in my Millions essay. Or at least, not MFA programs exclusively. I was also talking about undergraduate creative writing programs. I think it’s possible (and necessary) to accommodate long-form prose at the undergraduate level, too.

How to do it: turn workshop into a writeshop.

For example:

I don’t know Joe O’Connell, but he responded to a post by Dinty Moore on the Brevity blog, and I thought what he had to say about his teaching was really interesting. Continue reading