MFA in Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing

Workshops

Each residency, eight intensive workshops (each with a maximum of 9-12 students) engage students in fruitful, supportive discussions of their own work and issues of craft, aesthetics, and the role and function of literature. Please note: In addition to the standard intensive workshops in each genre described below, Stonecoast also offers optional “elective workshops” in special genres and topics in response to student interest. Some sample elective workshops are listed after each genre.

• Creative Nonfiction Workshop. An advanced course in writing memoir, personal essay, and literary journalism. Elective creative nonfiction workshops have included the newspaper column, travel writing, humor, and family memoir.

• Fiction Workshop. An advanced course focusing on such aspects of fiction writing as theme, plot, setting, and character. Elective fiction workshops have included historical fiction, lyric experimental fiction, flash fiction, comic writing, young adult, and an ongoing novel workshop.

• Poetry Workshop. An advanced workshop that focuses on issues of poetic craft, style, voice, form, and approaches to revision from an unusually broad range of poetic perspectives. Elective poetry workshops have included prose poems, basic and advanced meter, persona poems, narrative poetry, performance, the sonnet, and experimental/procedural poetry.

• Popular Fiction Workshop. An advanced course that accommodates various genres, including the mystery, thriller, historical fiction, horror, romance, and science fiction/speculative fiction. Elective popular fiction workshops have included suspense, crime, screenwriting, traditions of romance, and multimedia.

• Cross-Genre Elective Workshops. Many of Stonecoast’s elective workshops are cross-genre, with a thematic focus. These have included writing about race, writing nature, spiritually focused writing, and a publishing intensive.

Seminars, Readings, and Conferences

Each Stonecoast residency offers a remarkably rich array of seminars—21 in all— on literature- and writing-related topics. These seminars include presentations and lectures by eminent writers and critics such as Carolyn Chute, Martin Espada, Tess Gerritson, Maxine Kumin, Elizabeth Hand, Marilyn Nelson, Alicia Ostriker, and Christopher Ricks; intensive small classes on such topics from Prison Literature to Book Arts, Ovid's Metamorphoses to Marxist Literary Criticism, Iranian women writers to Persona poetry, Ghazals to Romance novels, John Milton to James Baldwin; and lively panels on topics from "Seven Habits of Highly Effective Writers" to "Translation and its Discontents" to "Dealing with Writers in the Family." Students are required to prepare required reading and participate in at least four of these seminars, although most choose to attend many more.

During the residency, students also attend evening readings by students, alumni, faculty, and visiting writers, including the performance-oriented “Stonecoast Off the Page.” You may watch clips of some Stonecoast readings on Youtube here. In addition, students participate in social and literary gatherings that bring writers together, such as luncheon discussions, receptions, dinners, a talent show, and the graduation party, and in one-on-one conferences with writer/mentors to establish a study plan and reading list for the coming semester.

Semester Projects

• Semester I: Each student exchanges five packets of creative writing and critical essays with a faculty mentor, approximately one packet a month. The mentor responds by mail or e-mail and sometimes phone within one to two weeks, offering line edits, constructive suggestions for revision, ideas for additional reading, and related thoughts on craft and theory.

• Semester II: Same as semester I, with a new mentor. Stonecoast students typically change mentors each semester to gain new perspectives on their work and develop different aspects of their writing.

• Semester III: Each student completes a unique semester project in one of Stonecoast’s six concentrations: the craft of writing, community service/social action, literary theory, interdisciplinary creative collaboration, teaching/pedagogy, or publishing.

• Semester IV: Each student completes a substantial creative thesis of publishable quality and prepares to offer a reading and teach a class during the fifth and final graduation residency.

M.F.A. Degree Requirements: 60 hours of graduate study plus attendance at and participation in the final graduation residency. Each successfully completed six-month semester will be the equivalent of 15 hours of graduate credit. Students are expected to devote a minimum of 25 hours per week to their graduate work.