BookLife

On the day after Shared Worlds, I will be teaching a class on music and writing at the Writing in Place Conference in Spartanburg, SC.  The topic is so huge that I had no idea where to begin in narrowing it down. 

Music plays almost constantly in my life—while I am writing, driving, reading, you name it.  I take music like medicine.  Classical sharpens my thinking.  Jazz clarifies.  The Grateful Dead opens the flow.  Bob Dylan awakens mischief.  While I prefer long, exploratory instrumentals from guitarists like Jerry Garcia and Carlos Santana, the lyrics of Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark open the parts of me that have to stay closed in order to prevent spontaneous weeping at inappropriate times.

While I do not play an instrument – I’ve tried just about everything at one time or another, it seems – I do like to improvise nonsense songs as I go through the day.  If I try to write those songs down, they skitter away and hide from my pen.

At times, I wonder about the complex relationship between my love of music and my inability to make real music.

The blurb for the Writing in Place Conference class reads as follows:

In what ways can music enhance your writing and creativity?  What can music — listening to it, seeing it live, playing it, writing it, etc. — teach you about writing?  Focusing on a variety of musical genres and drawing on commentary from a wide-range of writers, you will explore the many ways to intertwine your two loves: music and writing. 

Ambitious, no?  In a desperate attempt to get a handle on the topic, I’ve been asking other writers about their relationship with music. 

Here’s what Steven K. Brust, Thomas Cobb, Peter Conners, Stephen Leigh, and Sheri Reynolds have to say on the subject.

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Steven K. Brust is the author of 19 novels, including the Dragaeron series.  In Brokedown Palace, Brust blends lyrics of Grateful Dead songs with Hungarian folklore.  Brust is also a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter.

Thomas Cobb is the author of Acts of Contrition, Crazy Heart, and Shavetail.  Donald Barthelme called Crazy Heart “a bitter, witty psychological profile of genius that is also a wonderful celebration of country music.”   Before his success as a fiction writer, Cobb was a music journalist.

Peter Conners is the author of Of Whiskey and Winter (poetry),  Emily Ate the Wind (novella), and  Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead (memoir), as well as the forthcoming  White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg.  Conners is a Deadhead and a musician.

Stephen Leigh writes under his own name, Matthew Farrell and S. L. Farrell.  As S. L. Farrell he wrote the Cloudmages trilogy and the the Nessantico Cycle, which continues with the recent A Magic a Dawn.  Leigh is a professor, martial artist, and musician.

Sheri Reynolds is the author of Bitterroot Landing, The Rapture of Canaan, A Gracious Plenty, and The Firefly Cloak. She is also a playwright, professor, and a musician.

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In what ways do you or have you used music to enhance your writing and creativity?
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Steven K. Brust:  This question is tough, because the answers are either too prosaic to be interesting or too esoteric to be useful.  For example, I type a lot, and play guitar, and drum.  Three things that can lead to carpal tunnel, but because I switch off, among them so far I’ve avoided it.  I suppose I have used music and musicians in my stories, but that’s because music is like food:  a part of life that matters to almost everyone to one degree or another, and can be used to provide insight into character.  

I know many people listen to music when they write; I do not.  I cannot.  If there is music on, it demands attention.  Voices I can filter out, music I want to listen to.

Stephen Leigh:  I’m always listening to music when I’m writing unless I’m in a public space with my laptop and without headphones. Otherwise, iTunes is always on, usually set to random play. Sometimes, for specific scenes, I’ll put on a particular tune or genre of music. For instance, while writing the Cloudmages series (which was Celtic fantasy), I was playing a lot of traditional Irish music. For the Nessantico Cycle, I would occasionally play medieval/renaissance music to put me in the right mood. Otherwise, I just let iTunes surprise me. I have very eclectic tastes in music. My library has some 14,000 pieces in it, and comprises everything from classical to jazz to rock to indie to world to folk to country to the various hard-to-classify pieces.

Thomas Cobb:  I used to listen to music while I wrote.  I don’t anymore.  I don’t know why.  It wasn’t a conscious decision as I remember.  It’s important to me.  There is always some sort of soundtrack running through my head, no matter what I’m doing.  How that influences me, I’m not sure.  I suspect it has something to do with the rhythm and cadences of what I do. 

Sheri Reynolds:  Music is usually a break for me from writing. Whenever I get stuck, I crank up the music and sing while I clean the kitchen or cook. Sometimes when I’m struggling with my writing, I’ll make myself work for an hour with the promise that afterwards, I can play my guitar until my fingers get tired. I often move between my laptop and my guitar during the work day.

Peter Conners:  Well, I’m always listening to music and a lot of the time it’s the Grateful Dead. When I’m writing, I listen to things that either won’t distract my mind or contribute to the spirit of my work. For example, during my last writing session on White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg, I listened to Blind Faith. That worked both ways because I didn’t have to focus too hard on it, and it was also very 60s sounding. The Dead are perfect to me because they’re like breathing. I can pick whatever era fits my mood and just let it roll. And then when I’m done, I can crank it up and enjoy it on an entirely different level.
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And/or what has music — listening to it, seeing it live, playing it, writing it, whichever — taught you about writing fiction?
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Peter Conners:  Fluidity, experimentation, freedom, not worrying so much about what other people think, finding beauty even in ugly places (next to garbage cans in a coliseum hallway), valuing individual expression – my own and other people’s – and seeing what stifling that expression can do to people, how to find joy, the importance of release, the value of repetition (you become a better dancer by dancing… and so too with writing), and the importance of being simultaneously present and completely gone when creating.

Sheri Reynolds:  One important lesson I’ve learned from music is to pay attention to what’s happening in the background. Naturally my ear first hears the melody, the lyrics. Then I begin to notice all the nuances, the off-beats, the different instruments and how they play with and against one another. As a writer, I want a similar complexity and richness in my work. A first draft is rarely more than the melody.

Thomas Cobb:  Writing about music, which I did in the 70’s and 80’s, taught me how to write.  Music and writing are very different forms of art and don’t, I think, go naturally together.  When you write about music, you learn to write around it more than directly at it.  That was an important lesson.  It pertains to a lot of things in writing.

Steven K. Brust:  I don’t know what music has taught me about creativity in general, or writing in particular.  Something, probably, but I can’t say what.  The other way around is easier to describe: because I’ve had a certain amount of success at writing, it made me cocky enough to think I could learn to be a passable musician.  More specifically, when I was teaching myself to write songs, my knowledge of and interest in the processes of writing led to take a very methodical approach: I’m going to write a song that focuses on characterization revealed by a few significant details; now I’m going to write a song that tells the story in the negative space; now I’m going to write a song that explores a single character in some depth, and so on.

But I suppose it’s cheating to talk about songwriting–because the basis of songwriting is still the sentence, and that’s the basis of fiction too.  I’m flailing around here because the question fascinates me, but I have no insight into it.   Certainly the moments of inspiration in music and those in writing involve the same euphoria, but so do a million other things for other people.  That leads me to consider the similarities between music and writing, but that goes nowhere, because the similarities are so vague and general as to have essentially no content.  The difference between music and writing is much easier to express: when I’m writing, I never use drugs.

Stephen Leigh:  Playing music has taught me more than listening. From being a gigging musician, I learned that no matter how you’re actually feeling, you still have to give it your all when you step on the stage. It’s the same with writing: you can’t wait to feel inspired, and you can’t wait until you’re in the perfect mood to write: you have to sit down at the computer every day and you have to write, no matter what how you’re feeling otherwise.

Likewise, I’ve learned that the more you practice, the better you get. You don’t get better by thinking about playing, you become a better musician by actually playing music. You don’t become a better writer by thinking about writing; you become a better writer by actually writing.

And finally, you can’t ever be satisfied with where you are. It’s always possible for you to learn some new technique, some new way of approaching your instrument, if you’re open to that. I play bass most often, and I’m still learning the various techniques. I’ve also started playing guitar again in a duo setting, and I’m both re-learning stuff I’ve forgotten on that instrument and at the same time learning techniques that I never knew in the first place. Writing should be the same way: there are always new places to explore, new techniques to try, new ways to approach voice and structure — and I try to do that as well with each new work.

“Werewolves,” says Ekaterina Sedia in the introduction to Running with the Pack, “are not the expression of our own wildness, but the longing to be like those who hunt us, the desire to become the predator.”

Running with the Pack offers a variety of takes on the werewolf story.  Some agree with Sedia’s assertion above and others go more for the “beast within us” angle.  The table of contents features writers like Jeffrey Ford, C.E. Murphy, Laura Anne Gilman, Mike Resnick, N. K. Jemisin, and many more.  Below, I asked six of the contributors to Running with the Pack about the appeal of werewolves to them as readers and as writers.  The result is a round-table discussion of much more than just fangs, fur, and blood. 

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Marie Brennan is the author of the Onyx Court series, including the forthcoming A Star Shall Fall.  Her contribution to Running with the Pack is “Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes”.

Jesse Bullington is the author of The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart and the forthcoming The Enterpise of Death.  His contribution to Running with the Pack is “Blamed For Trying To Live”.

Karen Everson is a freelance writer working on a novel, Crown of Shadows, among many other projects.  Her contribution to Running with the Pack is “Deadfall”.

Geoffrey H. Goodwin stories have appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Rabid Transit.   He writes regularly for Bookslut, Weird Tales, and Tor.com.  and non-fiction.  His contribution to Running with the Pack is “Are You a Vampire or A Goblin?”

Molly Tanzer is an assistant editor at Fantasy Magazine, as well as a freelance writer.  Her contribution to Running with the Pack is “In Sheep’s Clothing”.

Carrie Vaughn is the author of the Kitty Norville novels and the forthcoming Voices of Dragons.  Her contribution to Running with the Pack is “Wild Ride”.

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What is the appeal of werewolves to you as a reader? As a writer?   What do werewolves allow you to do in fiction? And what unique spin do you put on the werewolf in your story in Running with the Pack?

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Molly Tanzer:  Though it’s simplistic, as a reader, I enjoy it when just about any monster shows up in a book or a story because I love monsters. I get excited about werewolves, specifically, because they tend to signify a number of things: the transformation of one thing into another, the beast within, clannishness and/or loneliness, and, I feel obliged to say, loss of innocence/discovering one’s sexuality (but I might be feeling that because I just last night re-watched The Company of Wolves).

Geoffrey H. Goodwin:  Werewolves are monsters that haven’t been defanged yet.  “Are You a Vampire or A Goblin?” is my first werewolf story but I doubt it will be my last.

Vampires used to be frightening because it was a sales pitch that you had to be buried in consecrated ground and all the rest or else you would rise from your grave and eat your relatives. That was scary and not one bit sparkly: convert or eat grandma. I loved Buffy as much as anyone, but I like my vampires and werewolves with their fangs bared.

Werewolves are interesting because there’s less preconceived cultural baggage. I wanted to explore an origin myth and avoid packs or silver bullets. Lycanthropy dates back to Ovid, but my generation had Teen Wolf and An American Werewolf in London. Both played for laughs, but the latter mattered to me and the former offended my sensibilities. I don’t look at a hungry wolf and want to date it. I look at a hungry wolf and I want to run as fast as I can, even if Duran Duran plays in my head while I flee.

Karen Everson:  What is it like to own the night?  How does the world change when perceived through different senses, when, instead of our human visual orientation, the mind seeks its first clues from scent or sound?  What is it like to read the textures of the earth against your flesh?  And how would our purely human senses change, once that other world had been opened to our minds?  Modern humans live at a remove from the natural world.  What if, by a twist of magic, we were turned, a-tuned, to more primal selves?  Would we find those changes savage and bestial, or liberating and somehow innocent?

Of all the non-primates, wolves are closest to our shadow selves.  The ancient Lapps saw them as another tribe, humankind’s rivals in the eyes of the gods and nature.  Wolves use many of the same food sources as humans.  They live in family groups, exhibit a fidelity in their pair-bonds that humans might envy.  They care carefully for their young, they play, they hunt co-operatively.  Closer study, such as I made for a yet-unpublished werewolf novel, implies very strongly that they have a complex language of sounds, facial expressions, and body language.  Though their societies have firm patterns, the personalities of individual pack members can change those patterns, and those personalities, in and of themselves, can vary from the nurturing care-giver to the truly vicious.  Wolves show behavior that, displayed in humans, would be called loyalty, love, and even grief.  But unlike humans, they have no distance from the more savage realities of their lives.  They hunt.  They kill.  That they take only what they need to live does not diminish the merciless persistence of the hunt, their deadly swiftness, nor the hard truths of tearing teeth and blood-stained ground.

Our shadow selves, indeed. 

Jesse Bullington:   I’ve always been a sucker for werewolves, both as a reader and a writer. The concept allows us to preserve the childhood fear of the wolf long after we’ve realized the mundane animal poses no threat to us, and expand upon it as we see fit. Do we represent the werewolf with the same compassion and understanding that we now view the endangered wolf with, or do we channel that primal terror of teeth and claws and fur into a monster worthy of the name? I’m fond of both approaches, personally.

Molly Tanzer:   Monsters are fun to write about because they can occupy space in stories in exciting ways, often very differently than human (well, with werewolves, fully human) characters. They are intrinsically flexible and thus they can be used to talk about social issues, or yield an awesome visual image, or just provide a chance to write a character with a consciousness alien to the author’s. I guess that’s why I’ve never minded “new” takes on classic monsters–I like to see people get creative. While old-school tropes can be rad when used well, I’ve found that they can (sometimes, not always) become crutches for lazy world-building. I think it’s fun to see writers (and I try, as a writer) to strike a nice balance between hearkening to the past and exploring what one’s own mind might create if, for example, one had just come up with the idea of “what if this person could transform into a wolf! What then?”

Marie Brennan:  I’d never written about werewolves before this story.  The inspiration came about from an article on Patricia Briggs’ website, written by her husband Michael, on the topic of silver bullets.  It turns out they’re surprisingly hard to make; no melting grandma’s cross over the campfire.  When I read that article, the idea really stuck in my mind: taking this bit of folklore and approaching it scientifically, to see what really works.  I think werewolves especially lend themselves to that approach, more than some of the other things you see in urban fantasy.  (I spend most of my time writing about faeries.)

Carrie Vaughn:  I have to confess that the number one reason I started writing about werewolves is that they’re not vampires.  I had a story I wanted to tell in a supernatural setting, and I realized I didn’t have anything new or interesting to say about vampires.  Werewolves, on the other hand, had been sadly neglected, stuck in bloody retellings of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for the last hundred years.  Struggling against the beast within, unleash destruction, die horribly, yadda yadda.  What happens if you get werewolves past that story?  If you have werewolf main characters and assume that they’ve learned to live with it, that they’re not a slave to the beast within and destined to die a horrible death?  What you get is a character living on the border between civilization and the wild, between human and animal.  This can be a powerful way of looking at the world.  And to me it’s a far more interesting metaphor than simply battling the beast within.

Karen Everson:  There are wolves of some variety in every environment.  Forest, tundra, jungle, mountain, even desert, the wolf has found some adaptation.  No wonder the werewolf is ubiquitous, and that there are so many myths concerning how they may come to be.  They are the servants of ancient gods and goddesses.  They are born, or made by a curse that may be singular or carried in a bite.  They are the other-selves of warriors, shamans, wizards, witches fair or foul.  They are the children of elder gods who shift at will, or humans twisted into monsters at the call of the moon.  How do such dual selves co-exist?  And if, in a world of magic, all of these variants exist, how would they interact if they met?

What could be richer ground?

Geoffrey H. Goodwin:  Werewolves have mileage right now because the rules are murkier. The predatory incarnation will come back for vamps, for sure—but it’s going to take a lot to get the blood flowing again. We like to be reminded that people can be monsters, but we also need to remember that monsters aren’t always people.

Jesse Bullington:   As a kid I was positively obsessed with werewolves, particularly becoming one, and for “Blamed For Trying To Live” I revisited that childhood desire, with the twist being on the former word instead of the latter in the description “urban werewolves”–in marketing “urban” is often synonymous with “African-American,” or worse, “ghetto,” and so I set my piece in a rough neighborhood in the city where I grew up, with a protagonist a bit different from the stereotypical “urban” character.

Molly Tanzer:  If I had to pick what I love most about my story in Running with the Pack, I’d be torn between the setting and the way my character becomes a werewolf (if indeed that’s what she is). I imagined my character’s town as being Gold Hill or Ward, one of those little mountain towns close but not too close to Boulder, and writing something set in that sort of environment was new for me. I’d just moved to/fallen in love with Boulder when I wrote “In Sheep’s Clothing” and so I wanted to write about where I lived, and what weirdness might ensue if something catastrophic happened here, given the location and the general mentality of the folks found within The Republic of Boulder and its outlying satellite colonies.

Then there’s the actual transformation, caused (maybe? I think) by the wolf-fur belt my character dons. Despite what your average furry might think, there’s little more horrifying than an animal getting up on its hind legs and coming for you. Also, if you’ve ever been up in the Rockies or the Flatirons when it’s snowing, the whole world goes grey. If you hike or drive up to some of the higher elevations, you can’t see beyond the prominence you’re standing on. If you know, for example, you should be seeing the entire Boulder valley as you stand atop a rock, but what you do see is just blank endless grey, it’s unnerving and terrible and beautiful (Kant’s theory of the sublime comes to mind at those times, as well as “man it’s cold up here”).

The idea of one’s neighbor becoming something neither human nor wolf and emerging out of the snow to come and eat you. . . well.  That’s, as they say, no good at all.

Carrie Vaughn:  “Wild Ride” is the backstory of one of the characters from my first werewolf novel, Kitty and The Midnight Hour.  One of the things I’m trying to do with the Kitty series is show that there are lots of ways that characters come to be werewolves, and lots of reactions to the situation afterward.  T.J. is a character who chose to become a werewolf, and this story explains why, and what happens after.

Geoffrey H. Goodwin:  To me, the most fertile ground with werewolves is in looking back. I put the Malleus Malificarum into “Are You a Vampire or A Goblin?” because I was sorting through the precedents. Up against Frankenstein or Dracula, werewolves need those elements to bring their myths forward. The legends are out there but they’re less monomythed. I’d even go so far as to say that goblins have more rules in myth, more requirements built up over the long haul. But that’s the magic in werewolves, they’re still unsettling.

Karen Everson:  Olwen Ap Howell, the main character of “Deadfall” in Running with the Pack, is a recurring character in my work.  (Another Olwen story, “Support Your Local Werewolf,” appears in Esther Friesner’s Strip Mauled anthology.)  Her family traces their lineage to characters in early Welsh mythology.  She Changes at will, and retains essential elements of her human consciousness in her wolf shape.  “Deadfall” is my exploration of a question that, to me, is one of the most fascinating posed by werewolf myth.  It is the wolf, the “Beast,” we are used to seeing presented as the savage, the killer.  It is, perhaps, our own acknowledgement of the monsters that lurk in our own psyches, the “Id,” the “lizard brain” that whispers our most selfish desires, our most savage wills.   But is it the wolf that is dangerous?  The needs and wants of the wolf are fairly simple, after all.  Or is the true danger of the werewolf that it is the perfect weapon — unknown, untraceable, even unbelievable — by which very human murder can be accomplished?   Most people, somewhere in the course of their lives, have had some event or person that would tempt them toward the perfect, undetectable, murder.  If werewolves, like wolves and people, live primarily in family groups, how do they govern such deadly possibilities?  How do they live and love and joy in what they are, and still stay hidden and unknown?

What happens if they get tired of hiding? 

There are interesting answers in Running with the Pack.

Geoffrey H. Goodwin:  Mad scientists, corrupt priests and vampires, the more Gothic tropes, all have their place. Ghosts have been taken in almost every direction and they beg for reinvention every time they rattle their chains…but werewolves remain harder to tame than those others. The precedent is more entrenched in film than literature, unlike the rest. The actual accounts are far less codified or consistent. Fewer unbreakable rules are floating in the collective unconscious. In looking at the other stories in Running with the Pack, I was impressed by both the range and the writing. I think putting dangerous vampires and sparkly vampires in the same anthology would disappoint most everyone…with werewolves, we got away with fewer restrictions and more maulings.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magazine.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. 

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Editor’s Note:  I was about to turn 11 years old in the summer of 1981 when American Werewolf in London came out.  And it scared the crap out of me, especially the transformation scenes and the fang shots.   Though I lived in an area of the world where alligators regularly ate our cats and water moccasins bit our dogs, American Werewolf re-populated the shadows of my psyche with fangs, fur and blood, with werewolves.

American Werewolf left me so unreasonably freaked out that I totally missed the humor while skewered to the seat in the theater.  And I can find humor anywhere.  Usually, at least.

For this reason, I avoided werewolf stories until I discovered last year that both James Lowder (Curse of the Full Moon) and Ekaterina Sedia (Running with the Pack) were editing werewolf anthologies.  Jim Lowder has edited some of my favorite anthologies, including The Best of All Flesh, Worlds of Their Own, and Astounding Hero Tales, and Kathy Sedia…  well, if Kathy Sedia digs werewolf stories enough to do an anthology, then I just had to see what they’re all about.

–JLCJ

I first met Pete Turchi across the ping-pong table in the mountains of North Carolina while I was attending the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.  Later, I got to know Turchi through his novel, The Girls Next Door, and his story collection, Magician. 

Turchi’s teaching and his non-fiction has had a powerful impact on me as a student of the craft, as a writer, and as a teacher.  Turchi co-edited two remarkable collections: The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work with Andrea Barrett and Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life with Charles Baxter.  Together these two books pull together the best of a writing program—the fiction, the shop talk, the look behind the magician’s curtain.

But it was Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer that so overtly changed the way I see the craft of writing and the way I teach it.

Turchi attended the MFA program at the University of Arizona. In various capacities, he has taught at Northwestern University, Appalachian State University, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the University of Houston. He directed the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College for fifteen years.  Currently, Turchi is the director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

Turchi has taught in traditional MFA programs and a low-residency MFA program, as well as in a variety of conferences and workshops across the country.  Below, Turchi and I talk about the importance of integrity, rigor, and generosity in the study of writing.

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All in all, what was the impact of attending an MFA program on your writing?
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Peter Turchi:   Attending an MFA Program tested my commitment to writing in a variety of ways. I had wanted to write fiction at least as early as second grade; and while I pursued other interests both in and out of school, I read and wrote fiction of some sort through junior high, high school, and college. I got praise and encouragement along the way, and I won a sizeable prize for “promise in the field of literary endeavor” when I graduated from Washington College, in Maryland, so I believed I was doing all right. But I was rejected by a number of the MFA programs I applied to, and far from the most talented student writer in the MFA Program I attended, at the University of Arizona. I found myself torn in a variety of ways, lost and lonely. Thousands of miles from the only places I had lived, a long and expensive plane flight from my girlfriend (now my wife), I had to confront the fact that there were a great many people my age trying to do what I wanted to do who were already much better at it.

Over time—and I see this only now, many years later—I developed a variety of coping strategies. I made friends with some of the best writers in the program; I experimented with other genres (I wrote movie reviews and long feature stories for the Tucson Weekly, notes for the international film series, a couple of full-length screenplays, an essay or two, and some curious, gimmicky short stories); and, through it all, I wrote and re-wrote and re-wrote the novel I had drafted as a junior in college, and which I published not too long after getting the MFA. Doing all of that other writing was good for my fiction directly, in that I had to create and revise drafts quickly and focus on clear and effective prose, and indirectly, because it gave me psychic hiding places. Even though some of that other writing was read by thousands of other people (once, sitting in a movie theater, I listened to someone in the row behind me read aloud and respond to one of my reviews), that writing wasn’t “workshopped,” and it was published.
Twenty-five years later, some of my best writer-friends are people I went to school with. They continue to influence me.
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What exactly is a low-residency MFA program anyway? What are the benefits? The drawbacks? Who should apply?
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Peter Turchi:  Low-residency programs can take many different forms, but the one I know best, at Warren Wilson (which I taught in and directed for 15 years, and still teach in now, when I can), along with many that have adapted its basic structure, brings students and faculty together for ten days or so every semester for classes, lectures, workshops, conferences, etc. The rest of the time everyone is at home, working. In the old days students sent faculty their work by mail; now it’s by email.

There are many benefits to the low-residency model. Writing, as we all know, is solitary work. Residential programs put people in classes week after week, so that the focus can seem to be those classes, and what happens in them and in workshop discussions. But of course that’s just a small fraction of what students should be attending to. Students should be focused primarily on their writing, and on all the reading related to it. A low residency program offers the benefits of a community of writers—you get to hear everyone, students and faculty, talking about the aspects of their work that fascinate them—as well as the necessary isolation. If the faculty is good, the experience is like a dream: every few weeks the student sends a more accomplished writer, one who is thoughtful and sympathetic, work in progress and a discussion of related concerns and ideas, and the faculty member responds by engaging in that discussion and offering suggestions.

All of that said, there’s nothing magical about the format: anything can be done poorly or well. If there’s an inherent drawback to low-residency programs, it may be that they require more independence and discipline on the part of the student. (Some people worry that the physical distance comes at the expense of a sense of community, but that is far from the case at Warren Wilson.)
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You’ve taught in both low-residency and traditional programs. What, beyond the residency requirements, are some of the major differences? If you had it to do all over again, which would you choose, low-residency or traditional residency? Does a young writer need an MFA to be successful?
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Peter Turchi:  If I had it all to do over again, I would start eating better and exercising much earlier. As far as my education as a writer is concerned, I think I would still opt for a residential program if I were to enter an MFA program immediately after earning the BA, which is what I did. If I were to wait a few years, I believe I’d opt for a low-residency program. But here’s the truth: I think any writer should go to the best program that will accept him or her, regardless of format or geographical location. The quality of the education trumps everything else. The great challenge, of course, is to recognize what makes a good MFA program, or a great one. The various rankings are not particularly helpful, and things like the celebrity of the faculty and student funding are irrelevant (to the quality of the instruction). Visiting programs is ideal, if that’s possible; second best is to ask students (and faculty) what they find most valuable about the program they’re part of, what reservations they have. And of course the best program for one person may not be the best for another.

This sounds terribly old-fashioned, but things to look for include integrity and rigor. Many students are, initially, inclined to avoid rigorous programs; but students thrive in programs that both challenge them to do more, at a higher level, than they think they can, and reward that effort. We’re living in a sad time when colleges and universities talk about students as customers, a kind of thinking that encourages teachers to make students “satisfied” by giving them good grades, and not to risk making them “unsatisfied” by asking them to do something difficult, and invoking consequences if they don’t. But a deeper satisfaction comes from doing something new and challenging. There’s an exhilaration that comes from exceeding what we believe to be our capabilities.
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Both low-residency and traditional programs include a workshop experience. What are the benefits and drawbacks of the workshop? When does it go well? When does it fail? What is this strange beast called an “MFA Short Story” I hear people grumbling about?
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Peter Turchi:  Writing workshops can be useful, but they can also be destructive, tedious, or both. The format—a group of people sit and discuss one person’s work in progress—tempts many people to offer pronouncements and opinions, and while that can be entertaining and, depending on the pronouncer, informative, before long that sort of workshop is too excruciating to bear. I’ve spent a good bit of time articulating my thoughts about workshops and how they can be most useful to everyone involved. The current version is here.
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You’ve attended and taught at a lot of conferences. What is their main value, who should attend, and are there any you recommend over others?
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Peter Turchi:  For writers serious about developing their work, conferences and workshops are something like MFA programs—opportunities to engage with writers at an equal or higher level, people who are serious about writing and invested in discussing it with others. Writers—like other artists, and maybe people in every profession—don’t have much to say about what they do to people who don’t engage with it or think about it in the same way. The challenge is to avoid dullards and people whose primary motives have little to do with any serious investment in learning. Instead, seek out good and generous people who will engage in conversation or correspondence about writing in ways that are stimulating, provocative, and useful.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magazine.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.