Monthly Archives: November 2020

Stony Brook’s Creative Writing MFA program

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Greetings loyal readers,

Check out this opportunity that just popped up in my email today!

We’re excited to offer two Zoom Open Houses for Stony Brook’s Creative Writing MFA program.

On Monday, 11/30, at 4 p.m. EST, we’re convening a faculty panel: Secrets of a Great MFA Application. Faculty Admission Committee Members will talk about what makes an outstanding Statement of Purpose. They’ll also be giving advice regarding the all-important Writing Sample.

ID: 96348126097
Password: 334096

On Monday, 12/7, at 5 p.m. EST, we’re offering a Pop-Up Faculty-Student Reading and Q & A re: the Stony Brook MFA in Creative Writing & Literature.

ID: 92184320719
Password: 424973

Here at Stony Brook’s Creative Writing MFA program, we’ve been impressed by the quality of our applicants and by the strength of our writing community. Stronger still in this year of virtual classes.

Here are 7 ways The Stony Brook MFA program makes a difference in a student’s creative life:

1.)  Small classes and plenty of attention: Writing workshops capped at 12.

2.)  Outstanding faculty—all of whom are working writers: Paul Harding, Susan Scarf Merrell, Ursula Hegi, Molly Gaudry, Robert Lopez, Susan Minot, Patricia Marx, Patricia McCormick, Matthew Klam, Melissa Bank, Roger Rosenblatt. Guest faculty members have included Regina Porter and Hugh Ryan.

3.)  Rigorous and supportive writing guidance.

4.)  During the thesis process every MFA student works one-on-one with an advisor for a year and a half to complete a book-length manuscript, whether a novel, collection of short stories, memoir, or poetry.

5.)  We offer a teaching practicum during which students craft 3 creative writing syllabi, then teach undergrads. A great résumé builder. Very few MFA programs offer grad students the chance to teach creative writing.

6.)  Our graduates find jobs in publishing and academia.

7.)  Our students get published! And win prizes. Genevieve Sly Crane’s thesis became her short story collection and this year she won the coveted Whiting Award. Here are a few of our other outstanding writers: Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand was an international bestseller. Tricia Rayburn has written several YA novels, including The Siren Series. This year Caitlin Mullen’s Please See Us was published to rave reviews. Alison Fairbrother is an editor at Riverhead Books and Random House is publishing her novel, The Catch, next year. Graduates Miranda Beeson and Nancy Keating both have poetry chapbooks appearing soon. Elena Gorokhova has published two award-winning memoirs, including A Mountain of Crumbs.

Other benefits? We offer Submitathons to help students prepare cover letters then send work out to literary journals. Our Writers Speak Wednesday reading series has featured luminaries such as T Kira Madden, Major Jackson, Jamil Jan Kochai, land Roz Chast. Each Spring we offer agent visits. Graduating students get one-on-one meetings with literary agents—and several have been signed on.

With our two creative writing campuses, one in Manhattan, the epi-center of the publishing world, and the other in Southampton, a stone’s throw to Atlantic Ocean beaches and the literary community of the East End of Long Island, we are able to offer students wonderful, sometimes unexpected, opportunities.

We have rolling admissions. Applications to be considered for funding are due 1/7/21. www.stonybrook.edu/southampton/mfa/cwl/

State tuition is a fraction of the cost of other MFA programs.

Thanks for letting your students know about our Open Houses. Please contact us if you have any questions.

With all best wishes,

Lou Ann Walker

Director

MFA in Creative Writing & Literature

Stony Brook Southampton + Manhattan

stonybrook.edu/southampton/mfa/cwl/

631-838-8742

Let’s talk about the humanities and liberal arts educations

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This week, we’re talking about the humanities and the liberal arts education! Buckle up! It’s a good one!

The following was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Survey on American Attitudes on the Humanities

By Elizabeth Redden

 November 9, 2020 

Just over half (56 percent) of Americans agree strongly with the statement that “the humanities should be an important part of every American’s education,” while 38 percent “somewhat agreed” with the statement, according to a new survey of 5,015 American adults from the Humanities Indicators Project of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

The survey found differences in attitudes across educational levels, political ideologies and gender. While 68 percent of college graduates strongly agree that the humanities should be an important part of every American’s education, just 47 percent of people without a college degree do. Liberals (70 percent) are more likely than conservatives (48 percent) to strongly agree the humanities are important. Women (60 percent) are also more likely than men (52 percent) to see the humanities as being an important part of every American’s education.

The survey also found that 78 percent of Americans wish they had taken more courses in at least one humanities-related subject in school. Nearly half (49 percent) wish they’d taken more classes in languages other than English.

Eighty-one percent of respondents said they regularly use at least one humanities-related skill in the workplace, and 29 percent of respondents said they think their career advancement has been “at least partially impaired” by a deficiency in at least one humanities-related skill.

The survey also asked Americans about their engagement with humanities-related content in their daily lives, through such activities as consumption of humanities-related video or audio programming, reading fiction and nonfiction books, researching humanities-related topics online, visiting museums, and attending poetry readings and other cultural events. While 97 percent of respondents engaged at least sometimes in at least one humanities-related activity over the last year, a majority of those surveyed did not engage in any single activity often or very often.

The following was published in the St. Cloud Times, our local newspaper:

Why we need to embrace liberal arts

Carolyn Hartz (professor of philosophy), St. Cloud
November 11, 2020
Many Americans woke up the day after the election in disbelief — how could so many of my fellow citizens really have voted for the other guy? If anything is clear from this experience, it is that there is a deep divide in our country.

This goes beyond a failure to communicate; it’s a failure of understanding.

Both sides say they value freedom, for example. But neither side is very good at articulating what their concept of freedom consists in. This is a philosophical question.

Another aspect (among many others) of this divide is between a conception of persons as independent individuals and one that sees them as fundamentally connected. This is a metaphysical issue about the nature of persons, and is also a philosophical issue. But most people have little awareness of how their conception of persons underlies their political views, or even how to think about these conceptions.

There are many more issues at the heart of our failure to understand each other, issues that lie deep in our fundamental conceptions of ourselves and our values. What makes it so hard to talk about these things? The situation was not always this way, but it has been building for a while now. How did it get this way?

It’s no accident that the increase in the rancorous political atmosphere has accompanied another change: education (particularly higher education) has increasingly tailored itself to market forces. Students don’t go to college to become educated, learn how to think, expand their horizons and deepen their appreciation of life experiences. They go to college to get a job.

There are many (good) reasons for this; the cost of college and the burden of student debt is a major factor. But I want to focus on the effects of this trend.

The liberal arts have always been the place where students learned how (not what) to think about value, about their own conceptions of themselves and others. Philosophy, literature, theater, the arts and history have all centered on these fundamental issues about human nature and how we relate to each other and the rest of the world.

As interest in these issues have eroded in favor of marketability and employability, we find ourselves increasingly at a loss about how to understand or even talk to each other about political, ethical and metaphysical issues that divide us. We have no common language in which to position different views on these issues.

Even many of the liberal arts have been forced to shoehorn themselves into a model of education that sees their value only as a path to employment. We’ve just seen the result.

The problem is not so much that we don’t agree on what freedom is (for example). The problem is that we have little awareness of what these different conceptions are or how to reason about them.

The erosion of the liberal arts has fed directly into the situation that the country finds itself in today.

Carolyn Hartz is a professor of philosophy at SCSU and a champion of the liberal arts.

Very interesting stuff!
Let us know what your thoughts are on liberal educations and the humanities!

What’s it like to be a GA?

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The SCSU English Department of Graduate Studies offers multiple assistantships to their students. Students who are a 191 GA or Graduate Assistant, are responsible for teaching one section of our first year composition course, English 191, as well as planning lessons, meeting with students, and grading. Teaching 191 is not the only GA position offered by the college/ For more information about becoming an SCSU GA, check out the English Department’s webpage.

This week, we are happy to feature writing from Ulysses Texx, a current GA.

Ulysses Texx, one of our second-year graduate assistants, shared some insight on teaching our first year composition course, ENGL 191 – Introduction to Rhetorical and Analytical Writing. Ulysses is one of our English graduate students. His students sure are lucky to have him as their instructor!

Check out what he has to say below!

Ulysses Texx Desk

What defined being part of the cohort of ENGL 191 GTAs last year was the community building of it all. Last year, eight of us shared an office, seeing each other almost every day of the week. Events hosted by last year’s second years often included former GTAs. The then-current cohort, most of which lived in the area and had been at St. Cloud for a while, was key to making me, the Twin Cities outsider, feel comfortable where I was, geographically, academically, socially.

From this community, our teaching emerged. We shared assignments and slides, sure, but also ideas about how to connect with our students. Games, discussion topics, conference days, reading activities, and other ways of making meaning passed from our lips and OneDrives easily and often. They connected us and the 200 students we taught collectively every semester.

Having the strength of a community influenced how I stood in the classroom, how I moved as I presented new topics and shared stories and food. I tried to use my energetic presence (and almost all my time) as fuel for their curiosity, knowing that students had acquaintances and friends in my section and across the other GTA, adjunct, and professor-led sections that they could interpret college life and its character (and often characters) with. I know they did, too—some introduced their friends to me whenever we bumped into each other on campus.

It’s difficult to give the fall semester such a charged impression. I’m back in the Cities, in my personal office, which I use infrequently, mostly as a background for Zoom and Microsoft Teams. On campus, I have an office to myself that I’ve seen once, when I reapplied the decor I took home from the cohort office in a panic in March to its dusty shelves and the side of the blond door facing the forlorn first floor hallway.

I have no other English teachers at home and have little patience for online meetups. I bounce ideas off my brother when he calls—he’s taken an equivalent of this class before—and my partner, who remembers taking an English class before. I’ve seen my current cohort maybe ten times this semester. I feel more a part of the pedagogies of nature and self-care I’m learning from the naturalists I read in the mornings and my cats as they frolic on the porch.

This cultural disconnect drives me to be as responsive to students as I can. Readings have been adjusted to their majors and are available free online, workload both laidback and rigorous. They write every week—often an essay—and I respond with an essay of my own on every submission received. I have strict deadlines but also an ear to lend to their lives. We’re taking our (structured) time making meaning out of everything. While we’re so isolated, it’s the only way we—my students, self, and cohort—can recreate the community so fundamental to 191 and our experiences at SCSU as students.

~Ulysses Texx