Letter from the Director

The first class of the new MFA in Creative Writing at The University of Tampa convened in January. We went from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. for 10 days of seminars, craft talks, readings and workshops. We printed up broadsides in the Tampa Book Arts Studio and careened around Ybor City on the heels of Professor Gary Mormino, who told us about the history of the Lectores (the readers in the Cuban cigar-rolling factories). By the end we were exhausted and inspired in all the right ways. We’d all made a lot of new friends.

One of the more interesting aspects of the residency for me was seeing how the talks and seminars and workshops resonated in completely unplanned ways. Self-declared commercial crime novelist Michael Connelly and MacArthur Fellowship-winning George Saunders, two absolutely different writers, described their writing processes in almost identical ways. Neither of them plan. They embrace not-knowing. This led to several fascinating exchanges, including one of the more nonsensical inquiries uttered, I’m afraid, by me: “So then how much do you know, and how much do you not now, you know?”

The seeds of the program’s emphasis on a global literary perspective took root: Croatian-American Josip Novakovich read to us about the former Yugoslavia, and Francine Prose gave her talks on and close readings of Chekhov. You can see some photos from the January residency on the University of Tampa MFA Facebook page, which you can also like to stay up to date on various goings-on related to the program.

We’re currently accepting applications on a rolling basis for the new cohort starting in the summer residency, June 14-23, 2012. The roster is already taking shape: poet and memoirist Nick Flynn (in March see Robert De Niro and Julianne Moore in Being Flynn, the new film based on his memoir); translator, editor, novelist and journalist Keith Gessen (n+1 and All the Sad Young Literary Men); Jill Bialosky, longtime editor at W.W. Norton as well as poet, novelist and memoirist; and Arthur Flowers, literary bluesman and novelist. We’ve also got some new additions to our teaching faculty: Maile Chapman, Erica Dawson, Arielle Greenberg, Porochista Khakpour and more to come.

The next residency will be bigger and better than the first. Drop me a line if you’re interested in joining us.

Jeff Parker
Director, MFA in Creative Writing