Focused Primarily on the Writing: Peter Turchi on Writing Programs

I first met Pete Turchi across the ping-pong table in the mountains of North Carolina while I was attending the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.  Later, I got to know Turchi through his novel, The Girls Next Door, and his story collection, Magician

Turchi’s teaching and his non-fiction has had a powerful impact on me as a student of the craft, as a writer, and as a teacher.  Turchi co-edited two remarkable collections: The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work with Andrea Barrett and Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life with Charles Baxter.  Together these two books pull together the best of a writing program—the fiction, the shop talk, the look behind the magician’s curtain.

But it was Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer that so overtly changed the way I see the craft of writing and the way I teach it.

Turchi attended the MFA program at the University of Arizona. In various capacities, he has taught at Northwestern University, Appalachian State University, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the University of Houston. He directed the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College for fifteen years.  Currently, Turchi is the director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

Turchi has taught in traditional MFA programs and a low-residency MFA program, as well as in a variety of conferences and workshops across the country.  Below, Turchi and I talk about the importance of integrity, rigor, and generosity in the study of writing.

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All in all, what was the impact of attending an MFA program on your writing?
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Peter Turchi:   Attending an MFA Program tested my commitment to writing in a variety of ways. I had wanted to write fiction at least as early as second grade; and while I pursued other interests both in and out of school, I read and wrote fiction of some sort through junior high, high school, and college. I got praise and encouragement along the way, and I won a sizeable prize for “promise in the field of literary endeavor” when I graduated from Washington College, in Maryland, so I believed I was doing all right. But I was rejected by a number of the MFA programs I applied to, and far from the most talented student writer in the MFA Program I attended, at the University of Arizona. I found myself torn in a variety of ways, lost and lonely. Thousands of miles from the only places I had lived, a long and expensive plane flight from my girlfriend (now my wife), I had to confront the fact that there were a great many people my age trying to do what I wanted to do who were already much better at it.

Over time—and I see this only now, many years later—I developed a variety of coping strategies. I made friends with some of the best writers in the program; I experimented with other genres (I wrote movie reviews and long feature stories for the Tucson Weekly, notes for the international film series, a couple of full-length screenplays, an essay or two, and some curious, gimmicky short stories); and, through it all, I wrote and re-wrote and re-wrote the novel I had drafted as a junior in college, and which I published not too long after getting the MFA. Doing all of that other writing was good for my fiction directly, in that I had to create and revise drafts quickly and focus on clear and effective prose, and indirectly, because it gave me psychic hiding places. Even though some of that other writing was read by thousands of other people (once, sitting in a movie theater, I listened to someone in the row behind me read aloud and respond to one of my reviews), that writing wasn’t “workshopped,” and it was published.
Twenty-five years later, some of my best writer-friends are people I went to school with. They continue to influence me.
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What exactly is a low-residency MFA program anyway? What are the benefits? The drawbacks? Who should apply?
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Peter Turchi:  Low-residency programs can take many different forms, but the one I know best, at Warren Wilson (which I taught in and directed for 15 years, and still teach in now, when I can), along with many that have adapted its basic structure, brings students and faculty together for ten days or so every semester for classes, lectures, workshops, conferences, etc. The rest of the time everyone is at home, working. In the old days students sent faculty their work by mail; now it’s by email.

There are many benefits to the low-residency model. Writing, as we all know, is solitary work. Residential programs put people in classes week after week, so that the focus can seem to be those classes, and what happens in them and in workshop discussions. But of course that’s just a small fraction of what students should be attending to. Students should be focused primarily on their writing, and on all the reading related to it. A low residency program offers the benefits of a community of writers—you get to hear everyone, students and faculty, talking about the aspects of their work that fascinate them—as well as the necessary isolation. If the faculty is good, the experience is like a dream: every few weeks the student sends a more accomplished writer, one who is thoughtful and sympathetic, work in progress and a discussion of related concerns and ideas, and the faculty member responds by engaging in that discussion and offering suggestions.

All of that said, there’s nothing magical about the format: anything can be done poorly or well. If there’s an inherent drawback to low-residency programs, it may be that they require more independence and discipline on the part of the student. (Some people worry that the physical distance comes at the expense of a sense of community, but that is far from the case at Warren Wilson.)
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You’ve taught in both low-residency and traditional programs. What, beyond the residency requirements, are some of the major differences? If you had it to do all over again, which would you choose, low-residency or traditional residency? Does a young writer need an MFA to be successful?
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Peter Turchi:  If I had it all to do over again, I would start eating better and exercising much earlier. As far as my education as a writer is concerned, I think I would still opt for a residential program if I were to enter an MFA program immediately after earning the BA, which is what I did. If I were to wait a few years, I believe I’d opt for a low-residency program. But here’s the truth: I think any writer should go to the best program that will accept him or her, regardless of format or geographical location. The quality of the education trumps everything else. The great challenge, of course, is to recognize what makes a good MFA program, or a great one. The various rankings are not particularly helpful, and things like the celebrity of the faculty and student funding are irrelevant (to the quality of the instruction). Visiting programs is ideal, if that’s possible; second best is to ask students (and faculty) what they find most valuable about the program they’re part of, what reservations they have. And of course the best program for one person may not be the best for another.

This sounds terribly old-fashioned, but things to look for include integrity and rigor. Many students are, initially, inclined to avoid rigorous programs; but students thrive in programs that both challenge them to do more, at a higher level, than they think they can, and reward that effort. We’re living in a sad time when colleges and universities talk about students as customers, a kind of thinking that encourages teachers to make students “satisfied” by giving them good grades, and not to risk making them “unsatisfied” by asking them to do something difficult, and invoking consequences if they don’t. But a deeper satisfaction comes from doing something new and challenging. There’s an exhilaration that comes from exceeding what we believe to be our capabilities.
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Both low-residency and traditional programs include a workshop experience. What are the benefits and drawbacks of the workshop? When does it go well? When does it fail? What is this strange beast called an “MFA Short Story” I hear people grumbling about?
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Peter Turchi:  Writing workshops can be useful, but they can also be destructive, tedious, or both. The format—a group of people sit and discuss one person’s work in progress—tempts many people to offer pronouncements and opinions, and while that can be entertaining and, depending on the pronouncer, informative, before long that sort of workshop is too excruciating to bear. I’ve spent a good bit of time articulating my thoughts about workshops and how they can be most useful to everyone involved. The current version is here.
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You’ve attended and taught at a lot of conferences. What is their main value, who should attend, and are there any you recommend over others?
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Peter Turchi:  For writers serious about developing their work, conferences and workshops are something like MFA programs—opportunities to engage with writers at an equal or higher level, people who are serious about writing and invested in discussing it with others. Writers—like other artists, and maybe people in every profession—don’t have much to say about what they do to people who don’t engage with it or think about it in the same way. The challenge is to avoid dullards and people whose primary motives have little to do with any serious investment in learning. Instead, seek out good and generous people who will engage in conversation or correspondence about writing in ways that are stimulating, provocative, and useful.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magazine.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.

One thought on “Focused Primarily on the Writing: Peter Turchi on Writing Programs

  1. Wish I had even an inkling of these things as I went for an anthropology degree in the mid 90's. I could have done much worse than seeking my fortune in the MFA programs. Thanks for the interview.

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