Why I Love Teaching in a Low-Res Writing Program

Every August I pack an almost-over-the-weight-limit suitcase and my computer and fly to Tacoma, WA, to teach for ten days at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program (to my mind, one of the best in the country). This is where I am at the moment—I have a little free time in the middle of pretty intense days—workshops, readings, craft talks, lectures, classes. It’s a great deal of fun. Every year I’m giddily happy to see my colleague-friends, about 30 of us, young and old writers from all over the country. At the end of the ten days, we mentors are paired with mentees, and we spend the winter shuffling packets of work back and forth.  They read and write; I comment and push.The photo is taken looking backward into the large room we use for our morning talks. Today was Judith Kitchen talking about the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. She is a brilliant writer and critic. I always take notes when my colleagues present.I’d say most people who attend a low-residency MFA program are between 30 and 60. They’ve had, or have, careers and children. Some are grandparents. It’s not cheap to attend such a program—it takes a commitment of time and money, and a willingness to take a risk. After all, who knows if someone else will think our work is any good?  Yet, the number of people who choose to make that commitment is pretty large. This doesn't surprise me:   1. In no other educational setting is literature studied as just writing, no ulterior motive. The questions we ask are simply: Does it succeed in making us care about reading it? How does it work to make us feel the way we do about it? How can we learn to do that, too? What other work can we study that also does this successfully?It’s such a relief to read as writers, to walk alongside the written word to see what it is and how it works, not to attempt to stand above it or impose paradigms upon it.2. No place else I know of are people gathered to help each other in the name of the truth art can point toward. If the poem is untrue, if a word is untrue, the workshop will eventually shine a light on that untruth. If a story is untrue—at base, untrue to nature/human nature—that will become evident.3. No place else I know cares almost nothing about credentials. If you can write, we are all in awe. If you can make us weep or laugh, we love you. If you need help doing those things, that’s what we’re there for.4. No other educational experience I know dwells equally in past and present. We study Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins alongside Dorianne Laux and Stuart Dybek. We know we’re inheritors of a tradition and everything we write owes homage to that tradition and must be seen against the backdrop of that tradition. We cross borders: we read Lorca and Rilke and Paz, and on and on.5. No place else exists more for the experience than for the degree. Most people who complete the MFA do it because they want to learn how to write better. The degree itself is hardly the issue. The degree is useful as a measure of what’s been learned, how the writing has improved, how much writing has been accomplished in three years.But if you asked a typical student, she’d say, “I’m here because I’ve always wanted some really fine writers, ones whose work I admire, to help me become a good writer, too. I’ve always wanted an intimate, ongoing correspondence with a writer who gets to know me and my work enough to see where I need help, where I’m succeeding.”The low-residency program gives a student access to a well-published writer over a whole year.  And then another writer the next year, and another the next. To me, that seems like heaven. If there had been such a thing when I was younger, if I had been free to enroll, if, if, if. I’ve been stumbling along, finding my own way, for the past thirty (plus) years. I imagine what it might have been like if someone had taken my hand and shown me something, anything, I needed to know.But who knows? I probably needed to do what I did. The Ph.D. has been good to me and for me. Furthermore, the MFA isn’t a guarantee of anything. We’ll never corral writers into one pen and brand them. The best thing about poetry, and fiction, and non-fiction, is that we can’t even say what “succeed” means. We write our hearts out. We get some publications. We may win a Pulitzer. But in the eye of God or Ginsberg or Glasgow, have we become “good writers”? If they could say so, would that make it so? We will never know.