Converse College graduated its first masters in fine arts in creative writing on Saturday, and I was one.
It’s been a two-year effort – at once exhilarating and exhausting. There were moments I was not quite sure I was going to see the ceremony in Twichell Auditorium.
That’s because low-residency certainly doesn’t mean low work. It equals, at the very least, a part-time job.
It’s also not for people who think every word they write shines like expertly cut diamonds. Faculty and your friends in workshop stand by to erase that image.
And, after about three decades in the news business, I showed up to learn to write fiction. I’ve been saying to my journalism students at Furman University for a long time, “Good writing is good writing.” That is true. But writing from your imagination is a whole lot different from writing from your notebook. And, while journalism can be literary, it most often is not.
The first time I heard about the MFA program was when I interviewed Converse President Betsy Fleming about the school’s efforts to step into the world of creativity, to make its mark as a place where reaching for what seems impossible is commonplace.
I knew then I would apply once the program started. June 2009 brought the first residency, 10 days of lectures and workshops.
The 16 of us met in the lobby of a dorm on campus, and I am pleased to say, I was not the oldest one. Interestingly it was a mix of folks with established careers – some in areas very different from writing – and recent college graduates. One woman was from southern California, another Seattle. A woman whose husband is a certified rocket scientist came from Florida. Most were from the Upstate.
Phillip Belcher, the executive director of the Mary Black Foundation in Spartanburg, was a poetry student. He already had graduate degrees in law and theology. Jeffrey Schrecongost, a former Mauldin High School teacher and fiction student, had a master’s in liberal arts. Kasey Ray-Stokes, a creative non-fiction student from Savannah, had made award-winning films.
Sometime on the fourth day into the residency I realized this was nothing short of a marathon. The day started as early as eight if you had a meeting with your mentor, craft lectures, lunch, a three-hour workshop, another lecture, night readings, homework. Twelve-hour days. At least.
I don’t know of any other experience I’ve had that can compare to an MFA workshop. No editor combed through my work with such specificity. The word ransacked comes to mind. I left my first workshop feeling as if I had been flat run over by a truck. And the driver backed up. It was brutal.
But then something amazing happened. We were told to rewrite a few pages of the 20 we handed in. And when, later in the week, we reviewed that, it was called exquisite. A phrase I wrote was considered inspired. I was a student. I was learning. My teachers were published authors who could articulate the mysteries of every good novel I’d read.
I left there with a reading list of about a dozen books and five due dates for writing assignments and book critiques. That semester, the work was to be sent to my mentor by email, other semesters hard copies were required. I, for one, helped FedEx with my tendency toward working right up until the deadline.
And, yes, I’ll admit one particular semester I missed a couple.
I wrote short stories about a hairdresser with a drug problem, a mother unable to have an adult relationship with her daughter, a man who left his wife for another only to find heartbreak himself.
During the second year, I returned to the business that took me to Converse in the first place, a novel I had dallied with for years. I worked under the expert tutelage of two-time novelist Leslie Pietrzyk. Her lessons are as integrated in my writing life as my Mac. No character is all bad or all good, nor should he be a plot device. Clip off the first word of dialogue to make it more realistic. Start on a day something is different. Voice is not a standalone item.
Night after night, I finished editing the Greenville Journal and Spartanburg Journal and turned to my fictional world of Holly Hill, South Carolina, and the people who had become very real to me. The novel is half finished, bound by the Converse MFA office in a neat navy blue.
My thesis.
The impossible doesn’t quite yet seem commonplace, but certainly achievable. Half a novel awaits.
