Unlocking the Creative Mind

By Vanessa Cutler

At 11:00 p.m., when most people are settling into bed, Margaret Cardillo is preparing to spend the next several hours writing. She does her best work after dark, when the silence, like a blank canvas, accommodates her need to create. “To me, writing is both a calling and a necessity,” said Cardillo, a first-year student pursuing her master of fine arts (M.F.A.) degree in creative-writing.

Diane Larson, a second-year M.F.A. student, feels the same way. As a child, she passed up ballet and basketball to make more time for writing. Now, with one published book of poetry, she is glad she devoted all those years to her true passion. “Writing keeps me out of therapy,” she said. “I would continue to do it even if I thought I’d never publish a word.”

Both of these women have a desire to express themselves through writing. But does that alone make a writer? According to A. Manette Ansay, director of the University of Miami’s creative-writing program, a writer must also be willing to put in the work.

Hard work is precisely what students face when they sign on as candidates for the two-year program, beginning with the competitive admission process. Along with satisfying other criteria, they must submit writing samples – 30 pages of fiction or 12 pages of poetry. The rigorous procedure helps ensure that the program will remain small, with an average of just 14 students at any given time.

Because the University of Miami’s creative-writing program is one of the nation’s smallest – providing students with direct access to faculty, many of whom are award-winning authors – it is also one of the most successful. “My professors have time to give me detailed feedback on my stories,” said Cardillo. “Having an expert evaluate each of my sentences and word choices is invaluable.”

Students also interact with visiting writers, which this year includes two novelists: Writer in Residence Debra Dean and novelist Edwidge Danticat, a College of Arts and Sciences Henry King Stanford Distinguished Professor in the Humanities (a visiting appointment) and a 2007 National Book Award finalist. Other visitors have included novelist James A. Michener, whose generosity helped start and continues to sustain the creative-writing program, novelists Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Chuck Palahniuk, and poet Edwin Torres.

Intensive Engagement

When students are admitted to the program, they select a concentration in either fiction or poetry. They attend classes and workshops in which they read and analyze the novels or poems of others. For example, in the “Forms in Fiction” and “Forms in Poetry” classes, students study the structure of novels, short-stories, and poems; they take them apart to see how they are made. “It was an eye-opening experience,” said Victor Garcia, a second-year M.F.A. student studying poetry, “to see how writers build their poems. It really made poetry come alive for me.”

Beyond reading and analyzing other writers’ work, creative-writing students are required to write extensively. The program recognizes that the process of writing is critical to the final product. According to Ansay, the author of a memoir, a short-story collection, and five novels (including Vinegar Hill, an Oprah’s Book Club selection), “There is a correlation between what we figure out on the page and how we grow and change.”

Ansay makes it a point to let students explore their own interests and find their unique voices. “The program allows me to express myself freely and I am constantly expected to try new things,” said Garcia.

But while she promotes creative freedom, Ansay also intends that students channel and refine their thoughts. So does M. Evelina Galang, a University of Miami professor of English, who places great emphasis on the revision process. “First drafts are expressions of the self,” she said, “but with revision comes the first glimmer of art.” In her workshop, Galang teaches students how to expand, overhaul, and fine-tune their initial ideas until they are clear and concise. “By establishing a community in the workshop, we build trust and create a common language by which we can effectively critique each other’s work,” she said.

For Garcia, this process has considerably improved his writing. “I used to write without knowing how to revise,” he said, “but now I realize how important it is.”

It Takes a Village

A requirement for graduation is that students will have produced a book-length work of literary value and publishable quality, which helps them transition into a variety of writing careers. Some become successful poets and novelists – two distinguished former students are Chantel Acevedo, whose novel Love and Ghost Letters won the 2006 Latino Literacy Now Award, and Michelle Richmond, whose novel The Year of Fog is currently being made into a movie by Newmarket Films. But many graduates pursue careers as magazine editors, researchers, and creative-writing teachers. Terrence Cheng, for example, helps train the next generation of writers as a professor of English and creative writing at Lehman College in New York City. Cheng recently received a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

“The purpose of the M.F.A. program is to give students the time and the place to discover what they have to say and to write about it,” said Galang. “And although we focus on the process of writing, there is a goal – to produce the best stories possible.”

Vanessa Cutler is pursuing her M.F.A. in creative writing with a concentration in fiction.