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Inspired by Santa Fe: SPU's First M.F.A Students
Guided by Great Writers and Artists
IN AUGUST 2005, UNDER New Mexico skies that
looked like they were painted by Georgia O’Keeffe, students
in Seattle Pacific University’s new Master of Fine Arts
in Creative Writing program gathered from across the nation
for the first of two annual weeklong residency periods. These
students, who will spend most of their M.F.A. experience reading
and crafting manuscripts in their own homes, benefited from
the personal expertise of renowned writers and visual artists.
Robert Clark, a Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the Edgar
Award for his novel Mr. White’s Confessions,
guided the fiction writers. Nonfiction writers worked with
Leslie Leyland Fields, author of Surviving the Island
of Grace, Out on the Deep Blue, and The
Entangling Net: Alaska’s Commercial Fishing Women Tell
Their Lives. Poetry students learned from Paul Mariani,
one of America’s leading literary biographers
and poets. Mariani’s biography of William Carlos Williams
was nominated for a National Book Award; his latest collection
of poems is titled Deaths and Transfigurations.
Student Matt Gallant, a fiction writer from Sammamish, Washington,
says he was attracted to the M.F.A. program’s “unique
approach to blending the art of creative writing
with faith.” In Santa Fe, he was particularly moved
by a session Mariani led: “Mariani spoke from the heart.
He shared some personal
background [about] how he got into the business of writing
poems. It was a magnificent,
uplifting, emotional encounter. I would not have had that
somewhere else.”
Later in the week, the M.F.A. students joined other artists
in attendance
at the Glen Workshop,
a national conference for artists and writers hosted by Image,
a journal of the arts and religion housed at SPU. There they
were further
inspired by the work of accomplished artists including
Over the Rhine, an internationally acclaimed musical duo from
Ohio, whose recent release Drunkard’s
Prayer is receiving rave reviews; and Barry Moser, whose
illustrations can be found in museums such as the National
Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the British Museum
in London.
A native of Pennsylvania, Rebecca Kasparek
applied for the Seattle Pacific M.F.A. program in its first
year because she wanted to be “part of something groundbreaking
… a pioneer.”
Mary van Denend of Corvallis, Oregon, actually left another
M.F.A. program in order to join SPU’s. “The real
crux of it was the spiritual
underpinnings,” she explains. “Those were not
there in the program I was in before.”
By the close of the Santa Fe event,
Greg Wolfe, publisher and editor of Image and director
of both the M.F.A. program and the Glen Workshop, was encouraged
by
the effect of the experience upon the “pioneering”
M.F.A. students. “On the last evening when they all
gathered around the piano
and were singing show tunes,” he says, “that was
the sign I needed that this was a
group that had bonded together and had a real esprit de corps.”
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