- Writers, up-and-coming and established, enjoyed Dara Wier’s dinner al fresco at her and Jim Tate’s Amherst home, as the annual Juniper Festival got underway last April.
“ Let me tell you about a dream,” says Marianne Boruch ’79. “We are all sitting in James Tate’s writing workshop and he’s throwing babies up in the air, and they’re circling over his head; they’re very joyful babies, all laughing. There was a great spirit of release and joy—when I woke up, I was quite happy. I think that dream characterizes how it was for me.”
The “it” Boruch is recalling is the master’s in fine arts program in creative writing at UMass Amherst. When Boruch, who has published six collections of poems, was a student here, there were just a handful of MFA programs in the country. Today, there are over 100, and some 700 creative writing programs nationally.
[ Marianne Boruch ’79G • Natasha Tretheway ‘95G • Matthew Zapruder ‘99 • Noah Eli Gordon ‘04 ]
Since the program began in 1964, UMass Amherst has graduated more than
600 MFAs. By many measures, the program seems to be doing something
right. To give just a sampling of alumni accomplishments, last year,
Natasha Trethewey ’95G won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; in 2003 Valerie
Martin ’74G took home England’s Orange Prize for her novel Property.
The faculty have their share of success stories, too. Director Dara
Wier was awarded The American Poetry Review’s Jerome Shestack Prize
in 2001 and a Pushcart Prize in 2002. Sabina Murray’s short story collection
The Caprices won the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; James Tate
was awarded the Pulitzer in 1991 and the National Book Award in 1994.
When it comes to rankings, UMass Amherst’s writing program placed among
the top 10 in the nation in 2002, the last time U.S.
News & World
Report rated MFA programs. Two years ago, MFA alum Tom
Kealey ’02 ranked
MFA programs by several criteria, including location, funding, and
teaching quality; UMass Amherst was 13 on that list. And when the Poets & Writers
website asked readers to pick the top 50 programs last fall, UMass
Amherst was number five.
Beyond the awards and ratings, though, are the intangibles, the substance
that makes the program a standout: what its students learn in their
three or four years on campus, what its graduates take away and apply.
When poet Joseph Langland started the program, he took as his model
the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the first creative writing
degree program in the country, but departed from that model in a couple
of ways. He made it a requirement, for instance, that students take
courses besides writing workshops. MFA students still take at least
three courses in poetry and fiction and six in other subjects, as well
as workshops. Boruch remembers, “The literature courses were useful,
although I’m sure we complained bitterly about having to take them.
Reading literature, you realize, ‘I’m not the first to think of that
idea!’ It’s very humbling, but thrilling too.” For that and other reasons,
when Purdue University asked Boruch to set up its creative writing
program, she took UMass Amherst’s as her model.
“I could take classes in so many disciplines,” Natasha Trethewey recalls.
“It helped me figure out what my real concerns were.” Trethewey explores,
in her words, “the intersection of public and personal history.” In
her Pulitzer Prize–winning book Native Guard, for example, poems about
her mother mingle with poems about the Louisiana Native Guards, one
of the first black regiments. An American Studies class with Professor
Judith Davidov, Trethewey says, made her appreciate how rich a source
history could be; now historical research is integral to her creative
process: “I bring so much to staring at the page when I’m doing research
and reading widely.”
Beyond the coursework, says MFA faculty member Noy Holland, the program
excels in offering “many kinds of experience,” such as the Juniper
Literary Festival, jubilat magazine, and Writers in the Schools, to
name three. “It’s the job of the program to give people exposure to
various ways of making a living, such as advocacy and small presses.”
Over the years, the program’s graduates have benefited from this exposure.
A case in point: Matthew Zapruder ’99, who is an editor for the small
press Wave Books. He started Wave’s predecessor, Verse Press, during
his time here. Being at UMass Amherst was also formative because it
gave him teaching experience (he teaches writing now, at the program’s
own Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and at other universities). First
and foremost, though, his MFA education was invaluable because, he
says, “the faculty taught me how to be a poet. I was given practices
and ideals to live up to.”
For Trethewey, it was a time when she came into her own. “The poems
I wanted to write were not necessarily fashionable. I had to dig my
heels in and say, ‘This is what I want to do’—that wasn’t a negative
thing. The experience helped to shape me.”
Boruch remembers how the poetry faculty—Donald Junkins, Langland, and
Tate—“honored different things. What one liked, the others might not.
It was troubling and freeing. Langland was all about the sound and
the music. Junkins would say sometimes, ‘I don’t believe it for a minute.’
His telling the truth was incredibly useful. And Tate was about invention,
play. However dark, there was delight.”
In Wier’s poetry workshop, all these elements are present: discussion
of practices and ideals, delight in sound and music, moments of creative
assertion, play, invention, and truth-telling. Wier, who has published
13 books of poems since 1977, starts things off by saying: “So let’s
hear poems.” Students read one after another, then Wier poses a question
about verb tenses, noting that a shift from past to present can radically
change a poem’s effect.
The conversation moves on to form—one of the poems is a rondeau—and
meter. There’s mention of Whitman, Ashbery, Browning, and Wallace Stevens’s
“The Plot Against the Giant”(“I shall whisper / Heavenly labials in
a world of gutturals”). Sooner or later, each student’s work comes
in for comment. Wier gently guides the discourse, sometimes just saying,
“That’s sort of great.” She tells a funny story about her children,
recommends books and writing exercises. It’s not obvious how the class
gets there, but toward the end emerges one of those charmed classroom
moments—someone is scribbling book titles in a notebook, others are
asking, “What’s the word? How do you spell that artist’s name?” There’s
a collective buoyancy, a feeling akin to Boruch’s “spirit of release.”
Holland has seen such moments again and again. “The atmosphere in a
class can be so charged. It’s a grown-up endeavor. The program has
serious, serious students. They’re clear they’re going to be writers,
there’s no question in their minds. They may wonder ‘How will I make
a living? Will I be able to publish a book?’ but the first question
is answered.”
Gustavo Llarull, an Argentinian with a PhD in philosophy, is one of
those serious students. Describing his first year, he says, “Last semester
I took Noy’s [fiction-writing] workshop. She’s got the very rare ability
to take a piece on its own terms, regardless of its aesthetic, and
give useful feedback, instead of trying to steer the piece in one direction
or the other. It is very inspiring—and very concrete: you can see what
works and what doesn’t. It’s incredible how you see your writing changing,
as if you were developing a muscle.”
Another first-year student, Jess Fjeld, graduated from Columbia University
in 2005, then worked at a literary agency. When she won a Poetry Society
of America Chapbook Fellowship in 2006 she decided to spend some of
her “flexible years” in grad school. “What cemented my decision to
come to UMass was being offered the managing editorship of jubilat.”
Appealing in its own right, the position also meant that she needn’t
go into debt to get her degree.
The program has more than met her expectations. There are the classes,
the faculty, and “Dara, the heart of the program.” Weir is not only
a gifted poet and teacher, says Fjeld, but “an amazing cook.” Fjeld
has also been learning about writing not just in classes—and at Wier’s
dinners for visiting writers—but from pupils at Heath Elementary School,
where she teaches once a week. “They’re natural poets,” she says. Citing
a first-grader’s description of a mountain as “15 pounds high,” Fjeld
says, “There’s a logic embedded in it, although what he said may not
be what was expected. Reading poetry, you’re looking for that embedded
logic, the poet’s system, a set of rules.”
While Llarull and Fjeld can say what’s great about the program now, James Tate, an MFA faculty member since 1971, has the long view. “I was fairly young when I came here; I didn’t know what to expect. The students were a bunch of wild asses! Maniacs!” he says laughing, quickly adding there were some very good students then. Still, he says, “Now things are infinitely different. There are so many serious writers. In the last 10 years, we must have had 20 writers publish books, good books … we’re really on a roll.”
Tate’s not sure why so many grads are publishing these days, but maybe
his own teaching approach—“I listen to them…I just help them to grow”—hints
at an answer. Writers do grow. They develop their writing muscles and
sets of rules for themselves, plumb their personal histories and tap
into the resources of the world around them. For many writers, all
this takes time. The successes of the past decade may in truth be the
coming to fruition of years of hard work by UMass Amherst MFAs. And
a sign of the coming of age of a program that knows how to grow fine
writers.
Snowfall in G Minor
like stamps. The fade of their color
Just this word thunk. Never used. snowfall—as in grace, fallen from,
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Marianne Boruch ’79G from Grace, Fallen From (copyright 2008 by Marianne Boruch and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved.) |
Natasha Tretheway ‘95G |
AFTER YOUR DEATH you bought for preserves. The next morning, I found it half eaten, the other side a swarm of insects hollowing it. I’m too late, |
APRIL SNOW |
Matthew Zapruder ‘99 |
URGE TO CALL |
When I entered the MFA Program for Poets and Writers in the fall of 2006, I had soaked up copious volumes of modern and contemporary poetry, but was not entirely aware of the emerging and engaging poets that were part of the campus’s writing community. One such poet that has stood out for me is Noah Eli Gordon ’04G. He possesses remarkable range in tone, form, and contextual difficulty, and his commitment to his art extends to the essay and review forms.
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