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At first, they were just names attached to e-mail messages.
It was the spring of 2001, and I was trying to get used to my responsibilities as co-director of a new program. For the last year and a half, at the urging of Cathy Anderson, who was then serving as Queens’ provost, I’d been working on developing a low-residency master of fine arts program in creative writing (MFA). MFA programs, in which student writers study their craft with published authors, had been around for over 60 years, but the low-residency model, in which students assemble on campus for brief periods twice a year and then send their work to their instructors at regular intervals, was still relatively new. Cathy had put me in touch with Fred Leebron, a novelist whose second book, “Six Figures,” had been set in Charlotte. With Fred’s help as co-director, recruiting other writers and designing an innovative curriculum, the program was to begin in May 2001, and many of those names appearing on my computer screen would constitute our first class.
I still remember how strange and gratifying it was to see those names actually become real people from all over the United States at our first residency. As I write this now, five years later, with over 90 graduates so far and many impressive publications by our students and alumni, I’m still amazed by the effects of the program. We often talk about the transforming power of education, yet I’ve never seen that power so clearly before. But don’t take my word for it. Listen to one of our graduates: “The MFA program has allowed me to fulfill a lifelong dream to simply create. When I look at my thesis, it's a collection of dreams that have finally found their way on paper.”
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