JULY, A MONTH OF REUNIONS

Last month, I mentioned Vivian Gornick’s craft book, The Situation and the Story, and this month my focus on craft continued with my return to the Rainier Writing Workshop (RWW), the low-res MFA program I graduated from in 2021. During the ten-day residency, I attended three grad presentations, six classes, and eight morning talks on subjects ranging from Lavish Syntax by Rick Barot to The Vulnerability of Bliss by Scott Nadelson. RWW also celebrated the program’s twenty-year anniversary with a reading from the newly-released RWW anthology, The Next Draft: Inspiring Craft Talks from the Rainier Writing Workshop, edited by Brenda Miller. With this book, you too can experience the nirvana that is RWW’s morning talks! Available from the publisher, Bellingham’s independent bookstore Village Books, and Amazon.

This month I also returned to Indian Mary Campground on the Rogue River in Oregon where my extended maternal family has gathered for over forty years. About a hundred people camped, river rafted, and played a variety of card games and lots of corn hole, competed in a disc golf tournament, played bingo, and participated in a sing-along. I’m grateful to have a loving family I enjoy spending time with, especially outdoors!

Work: July was front-loaded with prep for the six classes I took at the RWW residency. For Pattern & Its Disruption—Repetition in Essays and Poems, taught by Barrie Jean Borich and Brian Teare, I read and studied, among other pieces, Annie Dillard’s “An Expedition to the Pole,” which is not what one tends to expect from a Dillard essay. The essay weaves two disparate threads—historical expeditions to the poles and Dillard’s own search for self and soul—into a fact-based and speculative essayistic journey.

In Renee Simms’ fiction class, we looked at how stories express the ineffable, create complex characters, and demonstrate verve. My favorite examples include, respectively, “The Hollow Children” by Louise Erdich, “The Stone Boy” by Gina Berriault, and “The Embassy of Cambodia” by Zadie Smith. I’ll return to my notes from this class in the future, when I’m ready to work on the novel I’ve been jotting ideas down for, after I’ve finished my Armenian family book.

Wendy Call’s Somatic Writing session had us on our feet and moving our bodies with breaks for writing. Brenda Miller’s I Spy had us pull material from our immediate surroundings and then exchange our work and write from the inspiration we found in our partner’s writing.

I took two classes taught by Aram Mrjoian, who edited the anthology We Are All Armenian which continues to shape my thinking of what it means to be Armenian. In Developing Tension and Intrigue in Static Settings, “Fat Swim” by Emma Copley Eisenberg and “Man v. Nature” by Diane Cook served as two of the stories we examined. In the Art of the Book discussion of Nadia Owusu’s Aftershocks, we explored how Owusu used, “earthquakes as a structural and thematic core.” And “the plate tectonics of Owusu’s chapter structure and organization, with a particular focus on the author’s ability to anchor, shuffle, and unsettle time.” (Quotes are from the class description.) As I’m still searching for my book’s structure, this class gave me much to think about.

Wonder how a low-residency MFA program works? For starters, you’re only on campus once or twice a year for an intensive ten-day residency. In between the residencies, you work one-on-one with a faculty mentor, communicating via phone, email, and/or Zoom. Packets of work—your new and/or revised writing and critical response papers to assigned readings—are due at regular intervals throughout the academic semester or year. Most low-res MFA programs last two years with a residency every six months. A select few, including the stellar Rainier Writing Workshop, are three-year programs with a yearly residency, four total as you start and end the program at a residency.

A low-residency MFA program is all about your writing, improving your skills as a writer and a reader, and helping you reach your writing goals. It’s rigorous and flexible, and requires about 15-20 hours of work each week.

You can learn more about the Rainier Writing Workshop here. Poets & Writers has an MFA database you can check out here.

Windows: Writing residencies and family reunions both offer me community, places to soak up interactions and inspiration which will sustain me as I return home to my writing space and shut the door. Because a shut door is how the work gets done. Writing is a solitary act. But the writing life, and daily life, are community events, and I’m grateful to all who are rafting through the white water, and the calm, with me.

Indian Mary Campground on the Rogue River in Oregon.

Rainier Writing Workshop’s annual ten-day residency takes place on the campus of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.