Probably the most apt analogy to evoke Mason’s creative writing program is that of a community of talented apprentices working closely with masters of their craft. In its now forty-year history, the model has made the Mason program one of the most highly regarded in the country.
Today, college-based creative writing programs—of which there are hundreds—offer varying structures, from residential to totally on-line. Mason’s started as and remains a program where being part of a writerly community is the cornerstone experience.
Begun in 1980, the master of fine arts degree was the English Department’s first terminal program and was built on a studio-academic model that blended workshops with the close study of published writing as well as defining, studying and practicing the fine elements of craft. The focus is primarily on the work of the students. Students are not told how to write in a prescribed way but rather are encouraged in ways that will improve the work they want to write. This begins in the application process, when faculty read manuscripts submitted by applicants and can see the work that the writers want to develop. Faculty select applicants whose work they think they can help.
A key to the success of the program is the faculty. Such was the case when the program was started, when the architects were poet Peter Klappert and novelist Susan Richards Shreve, and it has remained true throughout its history as the number of faculty has expanded or as faculty retired or moved to other institutions. Today, these are a dozen working writers—publishing their own novels and stories, poems, and essays—and offering students not only feedback on the work they are writing but insights into the workaday world they will enter.
One measure of the quality of a program is the publications of its faculty, alums and students. There, the Mason program stands out with more than 500 individual volumes plus separate works in publications ranging from highly respected commercial publications like The New Yorker to more academic and selective specialized small-presses.
Mason’s program also offers students a rich array of added or parallel experiences. Many of the students in the program learn to teach by working as graduate assistants, tutoring in the campus Writing Center while studying pedagogy, and then moving into the classroom where they are the faculty of record in composition, literature and undergrad introductory creative writing classes. The program also offers the student-edited journals Phoebe and So To Speak, which provide students the chance to experience journal publishing from the editor’s perspective. In addition, the program has been a seedbed for experiences unique to Mason, including the opportunity to engage with the Fall for the Book literary festival to learn arts management, the Stillhouse Press to gain insights into book publishing operations, the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center to broaden perspectives on issues confronting writers today, and most recently the arrival at Mason of the Poetry Daily poem-a-day anthology which affords students a chance to experience on-line publishing as well as contact with a wide variety of today’s working poets.
Additionally, 2020 marks the launch of Watershed Lit: Center for Literary Engagement and Publishing Practice. The new center represents a commitment to the dynamic ways that literature connects people and to students’ professional development in a rapidly changing world, by gathering these initiatives into one center. Each entity maintains its own missions, governance, and budget, and will now benefit from strategic collaboration.
“Being at the helm of a 50-year-old journal feels momentous,” said Melissa Wade, a third-year MFA fiction student and editor-in-chief of phoebe, which was launched in 1971. “It’s amazing the careers we’ve been a small part of and the community we’ve built.”
"This year marks a significant juncture for the MFA program and for the country," said Gregg Wilhelm, who became the creative writing program's director in 2018. "During these unprecedented times, when storytellers and poets are needed more than ever in our lifetime, the program continues to be a place for writers to study literature, process events, and create art. Artists can't go through political turmoil, pandemics, and cries for social justice without reflecting on these moments and having something to say about them. We're here to help them say it, today and another forty years from now. MFA students will truly be able to write at the center of it all."
October 30, 2020
