New degree program is a first in New Mexico

The New Mexico State University creative writing program has attracted accomplished teachers, graduated top-notch writers and brought the world’s best authors to Las Cruces to read from their work. But throughout its history, there has been one thing NMSU could not do. The school’s creative writing program has never awarded a Master of Fine Arts, the most sought-after terminal graduate degree for a creative writing student.

That’s about to change. A three-year MFA program for poets and fiction writers, the first degree of its kind offered in New Mexico, begins at NMSU this fall.

Professor of English Kevin McIlvoy and English department head Christopher Burnham led the effort by NMSU faculty, students and alumni to gain approval for the MFA from the New Mexico Commission on Higher Education and Board of Finance. Fourteen creative writing graduates wrote key letters of support to secure the new degree.

According to McIlvoy, who will serve as the program’s first director, prospective graduate students often called to ask about NMSU’s MFA only to find, to their surprise, there was no such thing.

“Their next question would be, ‘Where in the Southwest can I get an MFA?’” McIlvoy says. Now, New Mexico writers can stay in their home region, where, he suggests, they can draw on the “particular sensibility” shaped by the landscape and people of their state.

The MFA also should make NMSU even more attractive to emerging writers from across the nation. Currently, half the applicants for creative writing graduate study at NMSU are from New Mexico, while the rest hail from many other parts of the country.

Professor of English and poet Kathleene West sees the MFA as an important stage in the development of the creative writing program. “It will be all the MA was and more,” says West. “Now we will be able to provide our students with something they would have had to leave to get.” She says that she looks forward to working with students for the one extra year afforded by an MFA program. “I felt that there were people who were forced to assemble a bunch of poems instead of a more integrated manu-script,” says West. “With this extra year, students will be able to take their work to a higher level of completion.”

McIlvoy agrees. “The MFA is the preferred degree for people who choose to be educators,” he says, “but it will be useful for others. We think that people with this degree will first and foremost work toward publication of their writing, and that publication will open doors at a variety of levels, whether they go into publishing-related fields or teaching.”

Many see the MFA as the natural culmination of three decades of devotion to the teaching of writing at NMSU. From its debut as a bachelor’s degree program in the ‘70s, to the inauguration of an MA, and now with the new MFA, a creative writing degree at NMSU has always involved a commitment to the artistic growth of individuals as well as to the artistic integrity of the Las Cruces community, McIlvoy says. Teachers such as Mark Medoff, Keith Wilson, Joe Somoza, Tom Erhard and Jim Mealy established a tradition of personal instruction and community involvement now continued by current faculty members McIlvoy, West, Antonya Nelson and Robert Boswell. The department’s newest faculty member, nationally known poet Connie Voisine, will arrive in the fall.

“We are clearly already on the map as being a program that played a role in the lives of acclaimed artists like fiction writer Lee K. Abbott,” says McIlvoy. “We intend to stay a small and personal program that pays attention to individuals in a way that few other programs do.

“Some day,” continues McIlvoy, “people will look back on our MFA program and say that writers who wished to write in the particular artistic culture of New Mexico found a place to do that here.”

Jim Earley, ’96

A Fabulous Faculty The foundation of the English department’s new Master of Fine Arts program is a group of faculty members who are nationally renowned for their writing.
Mcllvoy	Kevin McIlvoy has published four novels, including Little Peg and Hyssop, and is the editor in chief of Puerto del Sol. He has received NMSU’s 1999 Westhafer Award for Teaching, the New Mexico Council of Teachers of English Excellence in English Education Award in 1996, the 1996 NMSU Dennis W. Darnall Faculty Achievement Award, the 1989 NMSU Donald C. Roush Award for Teaching Excellence and the 1987 Burlington Northern Foundation Faculty Achievement Award.
Boswell	Robert Boswell is the author of six novels, including American Owned Love and Mystery Ride, and two short story collections. He has written one play, Tongues, which won the John Gassner Playwriting Award. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, the 1995 PEN West Award for Fiction and the 1996 Evil Companions Award.
Voisine	Connie Voisine, a native of Fort Kent, Maine, will join NMSU this fall. Her debut book of poems, Cathedral of the North, won the Associated Writing Programs’ Award Series in Poetry. She has published poems in the Threepenny Review, Ploughshares and Seneca Review, and is working on a collection of nonfiction essays on ghosts.
West	Kathleene West is the author of Romance Tercermundista/Third-World Romance, published in 2000 in Cuba. She has published eight other books, including Death of a Regional Poet, Canto One and The Farmer’s Daughter. She is the poetry editor of Puerto del Sol. She lived two years in Iceland on a Fulbright Fellowship, studying Icelandic language and literature.
Nelson	Antonya Nelson is the author of three short story collections, The Expendables, In the Land of Men and Family Terrorists, and three novels, Living to Tell, Talking in Bed and Nobody’s Girl. She was awarded the Flannery O’Connor Award and the PEN/Nelson Algren Award. In 1999, The New Yorker named her one of the top 20 young fiction writers in America.

Photo by Michael Kiernan

Producing NMSU’s national literary magazine Puerto del Sol is a labor of love for the editorial staff, which includes graduate students Dorine Preston, assistant poetry editor, left, and Victoria Barrett, co-managing editor. The magazine, in its 36th year, has as its headquarters a small, jam-packed room in the English building fondly known as the “plush offices” of Puerto del Sol.

A Community of Writers

The notion of the writing life as tortured and solitary is pure fiction — at least as practiced at NMSU.

“The sense of the group is distinctive of our creative writing program,” says Antonya Nelson, associate professor of English.

“We don’t expect our students to sit alone in a garret and write,” she says.

Instead, they are immersed in a rigorous environment that teaches them not only to become better writers, but also to become leaders in the community of writers.

While the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing is new, the practice of involving students in the writing community is well established. English professor Robert Boswell, for example, instituted the Writers in the Schools program in which graduate students teach poetry and fiction writing in local grade schools. Each semester 40 to 50 of the young writers give a public reading of their work. Other student involvement includes bringing well-known writers to NMSU for public readings, publishing Puerto del Sol, the university’s national literary magazine, and organizing public readings that raise as much as $5,000 each year for a local food bank as part of the national Share Our
Strength program.

Master of Arts graduate Rob Wilder, ’96, who teaches at Santa Fe Prep School, participated in Writers in the Schools while at NMSU, a “terrific program,” he says that reinforced the idea of non-competitive success. “My students are grade-driven, so I try to set a tone that teaches them a respect for writing,” he says, “not just for grades.”

Wilder describes the creative writing faculty at NMSU as having a “generosity of spirit.” “Twenty years from now I feel I could call Kevin McIlvoy and he would agree to read my novel.”

Wilder also learned to rely on his fellow writers for support. “They give you permission to take risks, to send your stuff out, to take your time,” he says.

Victoria Barrett considers it a stroke of luck that the MFA is being offered while she is still a graduate student. Staying on for her MFA also means an additional year as co-managing editor of Puerto del Sol. “Puerto is an important experience for me as a developing writer,” she says.

Although Barrett is busy working and teaching, she has written more in the past two years than at any other time. “I’m far more productive than I expected. Here I don’t have to turn on my writer’s switch. I am completely surrounded by the thing I want to do,” she says.

Linda G. Harris, ’80

	Ocepek A majority of Puerto del Sol’s covers have been designed by Lou Ocepek, an NMSU art professor and the 2001 winner of the Westerhafer Award, the university’s highest faculty honor.

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