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Friday Find: AWP’s 2009-2010 Survey Results, MFA in Creative Writing Programs in the United States

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

From the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP):

This past year, AWP asked Program Directors dozens of questions pertaining to their creative writing programs. Thanks to the Program Directors, AWP was able to assemble information on issues ranging from financial aid to class size, tuition, and budget and salary figures. With the downturn in the national economy, many programs and departments are competing for resources likely to become more constrained. Our hope is that the information gathered here will help faculty, students, and administrators make the best possible case for continued investment in their programs.

This information can help programs advocate for more administrative support, course reductions, and additional teaching assistantships or scholarships for students. In addition, the expenditure information in our survey can help programs advocate for adjunct and faculty salary adjustments as well as additional resources towards an affiliated reading series or literary magazine.

For many students and faculty, it is helpful to know how their school’s size and acceptance rates compare to the average program. Statistics on admission, class size, and program size will help you understand where your program stands among its peers. AWP thanks all the schools that participated in our most recent survey. Individual survey responses are confidential, but we hope that the aggregate totals listed here are helpful to your program and your creative writing community.

You can download the full report at the website. NB: Information was solicited this year from 145 full-residency MFA programs. The report may be even more interesting when we’re able to compare some of the data with corresponding results from low-residency programs.

Have a great weekend, all. See you back here on Monday!

Short Story Month 2010: The Collection Giveaway Project

by Erika Dreifus on
27

UPDATE, 5/31: Congratulations to commenters #24 (John Vanderslice) and #2 (Cara Holman), who, with some help from Random.org, have triumphed and emerged as winners of our short story collection giveaway project offerings. John and Cara, please e-mail me and let me know which book you prefer (first e-mailer gets first choice). Please include your mailing address–I will order the books and have them shipped to you asap. And thanks to everyone for participating!

Remember last month, when I stumbled on the National Poetry Month Poetry Book Giveaway? Well, all of the wonderful energy and ideas behind that project made me think that a similar enterprise should be undertaken for May, which has lately become something of an unofficial Short Story Month (as Poets & Writers recently noted, crediting organizations such as the Emerging Writers Network for the development).

Because I have such huge respect for the work of Anne Stameshkin and the entire team over at Fiction Writers Review (FWR), I contacted Anne to see if FWR might want to take on the considerable work involved with hosting a multi-blog “Short Story Collection Giveaway” this month. Fortunately, Anne agreed, and FWR is the hub for the project, and that’s where you’ll be able to check the full list of participating bloggers (improve your chances for winning by entering multiple giveaways, and get to know some bloggers who love short story collections in the process!).

Now, following the rules that FWR has come up with, I am happy to recommend to you two story collections. On May 31, I’ll announce the names of two winners selected at random from the comments section for this post. And then I’ll purchase two books and mail one to each lucky winner.

To participate in Practicing Writing’s portion of Short Story Month 2010: The Giveaway Project, I’m asking you to add a comment here, telling us about (or at least the name of) a collection you love or one you’re looking forward to reading. Comments that don’t mention a specific collection will not be eligible for the giveaway. Comments should be submitted no later than noon (U.S. Eastern) on Monday, May 31 (Memorial Day here in the U.S.), and I’ll have the winners’ names posted before midnight.

And now (drum roll, please)…I am delighted to announce the two story collections that this practicing writer will be purchasing and sending to two lucky winners:

First, we have Who I Was Supposed to Be (published in 1999 by Simon & Schuster), written by Susan Perabo. One of the bright lights that sustained me through my MFA program was my friendship with Susan Perabo, a gifted teacher (her “large group” workshops and craft seminars were among my very favorites) and equally gifted writer. I read Susan’s debut collection, Who I Was Supposed to Be, very soon after meeting the author at my first residency in May 2001. And then I reread it, bought it for friends’ birthdays, etc. I even mentioned it right here on the blog three years ago. And now I’ll buy a copy for one of you.

Meantime, in preparing this post, I discovered a terrific interview with Susan that I hope you’ll all take a few moments to listen to. If you’re very time-pressed, skip ahead and read through some of the praise that the book received from The Los Angeles Times and The Baltimore Sun. Who I Was Supposed to Be was named a “Book of the Year” by the Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, and The St. Louis Post Dispatch.

Moving on to the second book I’ll be delighted to purchase and send to a lucky winner, allow me to present The Pale of Settlement (published in 2007 by the University of Georgia Press), written by Margot Singer. This is another book I have mentioned here before. (I’ve also written about it for Kenyon Review Online.) Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction, and the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, The Pale of Settlement is also another book that I’ve been unable to stop recommending to others.

But don’t just take my word for it. Read excerpts from one of the stories on the National Endowment for the Arts website. Check out interviews with Margot Singer in The Southeast Review Online, Reform Judaism magazine, and the old Nextbook (now Tablet) site. And listen to Alan Cheuse discuss the collection for NPR.

Want to win one of these books? Remember, to be eligible, you need to submit a comment to this post, telling us about (or at least the name of) a short story collection you love or one you’re looking forward to reading. Comments that don’t mention a specific collection will not be eligible for the giveaway. If your comment doesn’t link to your personal site, please leave your e-mail address for me to use if I need to contact you about your prize. I look forward to reading all of your recommendations, and I thank you for participating in any way you are able: commenting, joining the giveaway project as a participating blogger, or even simply spreading the word.

Thursday’s Pre-Publication Post: Thank You, Deborah Eisenberg

by Erika Dreifus on
2

If you’ve been following my pre-publication posts, you already know that the material in my forthcoming story collection, Quiet Americans, has a great deal to do with my grandparents’ identities and experiences as Jews who escaped Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. And while only three of the seven stories in the book were written during the time I was an MFA student, suffice to say that more than just a few of the pieces in my thesis were similarly inspired.

This didn’t seem to worry two of my three thesis readers. But the third did express a reservation: “Too much grandparents and too much Holocaust.”

My faith in Henry James notwithstanding (recall the Jamesian dictum to allow the writer his/her donnée and criticize only what is made of it), that reader’s comment lingered (obviously!), and its impact wasn’t fully assuaged even when other, equally wise authority figures told me otherwise. During the past several days, however, the old warning has finally lost some of its sting. And for that, I am grateful to author Deborah Eisenberg.

Eisenberg, who has earned a mention here on the blog before, has a volume of collected stories out now. The release has prompted a profile on Tablet magazine, which begins as follows:

“I believe that people are what happened to their grandparents,” Deborah Eisenberg says…. “I’m not sure I can articulate this,” she continues, “but I’m in the generation that was brought up close enough to the war, the Holocaust, the camps, and yet was protected, to a degree that is amazing to think about now, in a world of synthetic safety. And I would say there was a current of anxiety that any child would have picked up on, probably continuing for several generations, underneath the very, very, very tense kind of perfect world in which I grew up.”

Thank you, Deborah Eisenberg, for somehow–in a way I’m not sure I can articulate–validating my book, and the path that brought me to it.

New Criterion for Considering MFA Programs: Smoke- or Tobacco-Free Status

by Erika Dreifus on
5

When I think back to my MFA experiences, many of my memories are shrouded in a haze of cigarette smoke.

There are many reasons why, at times, I felt isolated from my MFA community. Some may be my own “fault.” But the entirely external factor of smoking–that is, the popularity of smoking among faculty, staff, and other students–was definitely another. Because instead of immersing myself in the clouds of smoke that others created, my ex-asthmatic-lungs-and-dry-and-contact-lensed-eyes-and-I often chose to stay away from the clusters of smokers. (Try as I might, however, I couldn’t prevent one classmate from very deliberately approaching me one evening for the seemingly express purpose of blowing smoke in my face. Then he returned to his group of fellow smokers. I am not making this up. I have a witness.)

I don’t know if MFA populations truly do reflect higher percentages of smokers than other academic communities, but it has certainly seemed that way to me. Which is why, if I were doing the MFA all over again, one criterion I’d consider, admittedly among many, is whether a given program’s campus promulgates a smoke-free policy. (A related consideration would be whether the city/state in which the program is located disallows smoking in bars and restaurants. In my experience, MFA faculty and students sure do spend a lot of time in bars and restaurants.)

I think of this issue from time to time (whenever someone lights up right in front of me on the sidewalk, for example, and I feel compelled to hurry past so that I don’t have to inhale all of their trailing exhalations), but it returned to the foreground recently at work when I attended a Webinar for higher education professionals on “Making Your Campus Tobacco-Free.” The chief presenter, Ty Patterson, offered an excellent presentation on his home institution and the Center of Excellence for Tobacco-Free Campus Policy located there.

Among the points that especially impressed me:

*”There is growing interest in having the campus culture reflect genuine respect for others and the environment, central themes of tobacco-free policy.” Similarly, “a campus culture which reflects genuine respect for others improves teaching and learning.”

*There are many reasons why a campus should become tobacco-free. A few that I found especially compelling/resonant given my MFA experience: “exposure to Second Hand Smoke (SHS) is a health hazard,” “access for people with disabilities is threatened,” “[students should be] prepare[d]…for increasingly tobacco-free work places,” and, although it’s not the main reason to enact such policies (adults should be free to make their own life decisions), it is possible to “encourage tobacco users to quit via social norming.” The presenter noted: “While we do not recommend the purpose of tobacco-free campus policy be to get people to quit using tobacco, it is an ADDED benefit when even one person succeeds in ending their dependency on tobacco and thereby exending their life.”

As for resources for potential MFAers: The aforementioned center maintains a list of colleges and universities with 100 percent tobacco-free campus policies. And because fully tobacco-free may be too much of a stretch for some, this site, with its list of smoke-free campuses, may also be useful.

As is the case so often, it’s best to check directly with any campus whose program you may be considering for the most up-to-date information. (When I last checked, one of the lists did not note, for example, that the University of Michigan, home to one of the country’s most respected MFA programs, is going smoke-free as of July 1, 2011. Maybe the University of Michigan is trying to keep up with the University of Iowa. Just kidding–but it’s a fun thought.)

Something to think about.

Friday Find: New Low-Residency MFA Program at Western State College of Colorado

by Erika Dreifus on
1

Earlier this week I received an e-mail telling me about a new low-residency MFA in creative writing, to be offered by Western State College of Colorado. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of information available yet (the program will launch in July 2010), but you can take a look at some descriptive material online, including the following:

“The program will use a “low-residency” format — i.e., master’s candidates will spend only two weeks for three consecutive summers on campus, and during the four academic semesters (fall-spring-fall-spring) between these summer sessions, the candidates will work 1-2-1 with professional writer-mentors online. That means candidates in the program can live and work anywhere during the academic year while pursuing the degree. The program will have three concentrations:

* Commercial/Genre Writing
* Poetry with an Emphasis on Formal Verse
* Screenwriting

The program will also offer a one-year Certificate in Publishing, to help make writers more savvy about the publishing industry.”

I’ve added it to our ever-popular program list.

Have a great weekend, everyone. See you back here on Monday!