Vermont College's MFA in Children's Writing
Erik Talkin -- September 28, 2006
Inkbyte contributor Erik Talkin reports on the 'low-residency' Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young People at Vermont College.
Writers return to drafty collegiate halls for many reasons. Some to feel the snuggling intellectual comfort of academia in a thoughtless world, others to take their work 'to the next level' - and a few just to get out of Dodge. (And if you are on the run, you can do worse than Vermont in July).
This past July I showed up with sixteen other first semester students at our first residency in Vermont College's low-residency MFA in writing for children and young people. We were all there for a healthy mixture of the above mentioned reasons. A couple of near novices, a lady who has published twenty books, teachers, nurses, an editor and a literary agent and of course the requisite Viagra salesperson.
Some of us write for teenagers, middle grade readers or picture books for the very young. Whatever the age of our intended audience, everyone I met was interested in inspiring children to grab life, to question the world around them, and to fall in love with as many books as possible. As a goal, it beats world domination, and so we quickly found ourselves a working and mutually supportive group of people.
Of course I thought I knew a great deal about writing when I arrived. I did know quite a bit. However, I soon discovered that the amount I need to learn is limitless. By day two of the residency, I think you have to make the choice to crumple up with your inadequacies and die, or jump in. Brrrr!
The course is an intense experience. It lasts two years, which breaks down into four six month semesters and five ten day residencies. The residencies take place in January and July each year. Each residency is a whirlwind of lectures, seminars, workshops and readings - guaranteed to whip you up into an exhausted, exhilarated writing machine ready to bash every keyboard in sight for the next six month. The location of Vermont College certainly helps, a beautiful setting in what must be the country's quietest state capital, Montpelier. As can be seen from the accompanying photograph, the central building is straight out of the Adams Family via Lemony Snicket, and the dorms are full of olde worlde charm - which as we all know, is not what you look for in a good dorm.
Bursting with new knowledge, I returned home to jump straight into my first semester work. During each semester you are paired with a different advisor, a member of the faculty, whose job it is to work intensively with you through creative and critical work. Each advisor only has five or so students, so you are getting a fair chunk of teacher attention during each semester. Within the semester you undertake five packets of work which you submit to your advisor once a month. (This means you get two months a year off, but those are the months with a residency - damn!).
In each month's packet you are expected to produce 40 pages of new creative work and 40 pages of rewrites. On top of that you will typically do two short critical essays and need to add a good number of new volumes to the ongoing bibliography you are building up with your reading through the course of study. Sounds like a lot? It is. This is certainly not for the casual writer. You have to be committed to doing this degree of work to do the course, and also to be able to take a significant leap in the quality of your work.
Two things ease the pain - the incredibly high standard of the faculty and the support of your fellow students. The faculty are seasoned authors and skilled teachers. We get the benefit of instruction from a wide range of them during residency lectures. They really do feel a responsibility for you, and I have received excellent support and advice from my advisor, Kathi Appelt.
The students also work to support each other. There is an active college listserv, with both communal forums and those set aside for individual semester groups. This enables us to provide daily encouragement to each other and trade information. At a lot of writing seminars and groups, you typically have a wide spectrum of skill levels. With the Vermont MFA, the standards are very high. No loud mouth time wasters who would rather suck all the air out of the room than change a single word of their manuscript.
Coming from the world of screenwriting, I've got to say that everybody in children's literature is so nice! Things move much more slowly than in the former world, but it most definitely is not a 'bunny-eat-bunny' world.
There are many benefits to committing to an MFA - you can teach with it, you can attract a publishing house to your work, and you can begin to run where once you were crawling (and doing so in the dark).
I have just finished my second packet of work, and am feeling equal parts elation and exhaustion. I already feel like I have taken significant strides with my work. (Let's see what my advisor says about that one). Roll on packet three.
Update:
The National Book Award nominations were announced this week, and of the five nominees in children's literature, three of them are from the Vermont College MFA program. M.T. Anderson, former faculty chair, was nominated for The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party; Martine Leavitt, a 7/03 graduate for Keturah and Lord Death; and Patricia McCormick, a 1/99 graduate for Sold.
More Information
The following link is for an interview with the previous head of the MFAWC Department at Vermont College. She gives all sorts of details that I have only hinted at. See http://cynthialeitichsmith.blogspot.com/2005/12/department-chair-kathi-appelt-on.html This is the address for the program website if you would like further information: http://www.tui.edu/programs/masters_mfawc.asp