It’s not just a rumor. After nearly 20 years of arduous planning, UCSD recently accepted its first batch of Master of Fine Arts in Writing students and will begin instruction this fall. The inaugural class was chosen from a pool of 73 applicants, and is composed of four fiction writers and four poets.
According to MFA in Writing Program Director Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, the program intends to carve out a name for itself in the MFA community with a highly interdisciplinary nature, a possible community practicum and competitive financial aid.
While the program will keep fiction and poetry as its two standard tacks, a cross-genre workshop offered in Winter Quarter will bring all eight
writers under one roof to experiment with content and form. This experimental proposal drew prospective graduate students like Lorraine Graham to the program.
‘For somebody who is interested in contemporary poetry, or fiction for that matter, and especially innovative or experimental poetry and fiction, UCSD has a really great history of that,’ said Graham, who already accepted her admission. ‘There aren’t that many programs in the entire country that would allow you to do avant-garde or experimental work ‘mdash; they basically wouldn’t permit it, and UCSD will.’
The program will include elements of existing MFA programs in other departments on campus. Bynum is devising a syllabus for a course tentatively offered next year that will entail cross-disciplinary collaboration with MFA in Visual Arts. Writers will also be encouraged to venture outside the literature department to take courses offered by other graduate programs on campus.
‘If [our graduate students] want to take a graduate seminar in Civil War history because that informs the project that they’re working on, they can do that,’ Bynum said. ‘They have a fair amount of flexibility in designing their curriculum to support the work that they’re doing.’
This same privilege already exists for other MFA students at UCSD. Before the writing option existed, graduate students of other disciplines were free to take a course called Writing States, offered by the literature department; Similarly, space permitting, they will be free to take the new writing courses.
Bynum and her colleagues are currently seeking approval for a practicum that would require MFA in writing students to provide community outreach, meanwhile receiving course credit toward their degrees. Students could run their own off-campus writing workshops, organize readings or volunteer at elementary schools.
‘We want students to know that they are expected to be taking the initiative to be designing their own outreach efforts so that this program has a presence in the larger community,’ Bynum said.
While the program cannot guarantee financial aid, one of organizers’ priorities is to offer as many frugal options as possible, including teaching assistanceships with partial fee remission and healthcare benefits. MFA in Writing students will be required to complete 12 units as a teaching assistant for either one of the three introductory writing courses for undergraduates or any of the six college’s writing programs.
However, in order to preserve personal writing time, none of the graduate students will be required to spend more than 50 percent of their time working.
The university was initially hesitant to launch an MFA in Writing at UCSD, concerned that it couldn’t compete with well-established programs at UC Irvine and San Diego State University.
Both the nearby writing programs take three years for completion, as opposed to UCSD’s two.’
‘Our [program] will be different,’ Armantrout said. ‘The MFA program at Irvine is very career centered, very mainstream-publication centered, and we hope that ours will be more adventurous and experimental and less tied into the New York publishing world. Ours will have a theoretical component and also a component that deals with literary movements, and so it won’t be all workshops.’
The program’s startup was also delayed’ over concerns that its faculty was still too small. But, in spring 2008, the literature department hired its fifth full-time writing professor ‘mdash; Cristina Rivera-Garza ‘mdash; and plans to hire one more faculty member by fall 2009.
According to MFA in Writing faculty, UCSD offers several key on-campus resources for the program. The university is home to Clarion, a five-week summer workshop of science-fiction and fantasy ‘mdash; the oldest of it’s kind in the country. Additionally, UCSD is home to the Archive for New Poetry, a collection of poetry and poet correspondence located in Geisel library that documents the evolution of experimental writing since 1945.
‘One thing that interested me about UCSD was the huge science community,’ said Courtney Killian, a prospective MFA student who has not yet accepted admission. ‘I do a lot in my prose with health and illness, and I’m concerned with human body stuff, so the infusion of that on campus was a big draw for me.’
With so many factors to consider in the MFA selection process, many students are turning to more comprehensive ways of narrowing their search. The Suburban Ecstasies, a program ranking site created by MFA student Seth Abramson, is one such endeavor. It directly polls enrolled students about their program funding, faculty, campus resources and financial aid. During the application season from October to mid-April, the site gets over 5,000 hits per day.
The site uses ‘Modified Revealed Preference Ranking,’ which means it measures student matriculation preferences.’ Abramson polls students applying to these programs and assumes that because they are invested enough to pay the substantial application fees and are willing to commit two to three years at any given school, they have done their research.
‘I was really intrigued by this new methodology for ranking MFA programs because certainly the U.S. News World Report version was very outdated,’ Bynum said.
Although UCSD’s MFA in Writing program has not yet commenced instruction, and although the bulk of its advertising has been through word of mouth, Suburban Ecstasies already ranked the UCSD program at 62 out of 100 nationwide, four slots below San Diego State University.
‘There’s always a lot of excitement when a new program pops up in California,’ Abramson said in an e-mail. ‘It doesn’t hurt that UCSD is one of the top-ranked public universities in the country. Generally speaking, universities with a strong overall academic reputation always do better with new MFA programs than do lesser-known colleges and universities. UCSD is one example of this, but there are many others, such as the’ University of Illinois, Rutgers University and’ University of Georgia.’
Bynum said she doesn’t feel as if the MFA in writing program is starting from scratch, thanks to the infrastructure of the existing undergraduate writing program, and to the large community of graduate students already working within the literature department at UCSD.
Readers can contact Joanna Cardenas at [email protected].