People

Faculty

Creative Writing Core Faculty and English Department Faculty who teach creative writing.

Charles Baxter (fiction)
My usual approach is to read a student's work as closely as I can in an effort to find what is distinctive in the student's writing. I don't praise or criticize very much until I have described—and encouraged workshop members to describe—what is on the page. In this way we can all discover the form of the work and how it may help, or work at cross purposes against, the content. I am interested in helping students improve their writing, but I am equally interested in helping them to discover in what ways their writing may be emerging.

Michael Dennis Browne (poetry)
I had a note from a student who was a painter in my British poetry class last winter which said, in part, "I feel like a new world has opened up to me." And that, for me, is one of the main things that teaching is about—getting inquiring minds into contact with exciting material and seeing new syntheses start to form. It's one of the deeper joys of life.

Maria Damon (poetry)
I am concerned with process as much as with product, believing that the written artifact is the unexpected gift that sometimes results from a much larger engagement with language as a generative source, with perceptive faculties, and with the cognitive-affective nexus. It is this exploration, primarily, that interests me.

M.J. Fitzgerald (fiction)
My approach to the Workshop is to expect the maximum from my students. I want them to be at once ambitious and humble; ready to risk all in their writing, to risk their pride by taking criticism, and to risk their popularity by offering honest and thoughtful criticism. My approach to Reading as Writers and Topics courses is to look at the works always as a writer might, never as a critic or an academic theorist: sometimes this means that the way a book is put together is more interesting to me than what the book might or might not be saying. Although I find that the better the book, the more likely it is that structure and content are closely and excitingly bound together.

Ray Gonzalez (poetry)
As a writer and teacher, I believe in sharing what I know and learning from the community of writers. This includes other faculty, but also writing students. In a university setting, we learn from one another. An active writing program should encourage the gift of creativity, but also offer opportunities beyond the traditional workshop setting. As writers, we are fortunate in being able to learn our craft from voices of experience. What we return to the world is a gift. The chance to make that gift is what a university creative writing program is all about.

Patricia Hampl (poetry, literary nonfiction)
I came to teaching after working as an editor and free-lance writer so I may have a tendency to see my students as colleagues. I think of us as working on their writing in order to get it ready for an imaginary magazine I'm editing. I like that moment when a student sees that sentences have sinew; that language is as physical in its way as paint is for an artist. Then we're cooking.

Julie Schumacher (fiction)
I think writers need to learn to be both artists and critics, and that's what I try to convey when I teach: that one begins by shutting the critical voice away, allowing risks and experiments and mistakes; and that one gradually summons the critic back, not to savage the artist but to shape and refine and enlighten. I think one can work this kind of dual magic on one's own writing and, in a workshop setting, on others' writing, too.

Madelon Sprengnether (literary nonfiction)
My classes involve a lot of reading and writing. I like to introduce students to a wide range of non-fiction prose styles and to give them an opportunity to write in ways they haven't tried before. When I assign writing exercises, I encourage experimentation with new forms and voices. Often students find that these exercises lead them into longer projects or help them to reconceptualize some of the work they are already engaged in. I think I am especially attuned to the deep material a student is trying to bring forward and try to assist that process with my comments. I have a strong interest in form and am usually able to guide students who have structural problems with their writing. In general, my aim is to help students discover the material that has the most meaning for them and bring it to its fullest realization.

David Treuer (fiction)
At first glance, my academic training in Anthropology and the teaching of literature have little in common. However, I see both—the study of cultures and the literatures they produce—as having, if not convergent meaning, then at least convergent formal qualities. As a novelist, I try to teach literature not as necessarily having anything to say, but as a pleasant battlefield where how things are said makes all the difference. I try to give students a working knowledge of a certain body of texts, and to arm them with the skills necessary to pull apart and put back together the literature they have yet to encounter.