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Thinking about getting your MFA? Relief Editors Alan Ackmann and Amanda Bauch answer a second question about their MFA programs.
Question Two: What do you feel was the strength of your program?
 Amanda Bauch: Although I tried to pinpoint a specific strength of my low-residency program, I couldn’t. So instead I’ll highlight a few key strengths.
Over time, I grew to appreciate the interdisciplinary component. The first three of four semesters, students created a project that would feed into their writing, working with a mentor in a specific field. For example, my last interdisciplinary project was a website called “Places of My Youth.” I traveled back to my hometown, took pictures of significant places, and interposed them with text on the site. One of my mentors had told me that, after reading my work, she still couldn’t visualize where the action took place. This project brought these locations alive in my work, allowing me to include the kinds of details that make writing vibrant. My program also had a profound effect on me as a person. One of the biggest struggles I had with my memoir was piecing together my identity, a complex, fluid part of my daily life and, therefore, my writing. Spending the intense, long days of residency with people from diverse backgrounds and locations exposed me to different perspectives on writing, art, and life. Also, most of the students in my program were returning to school after a prolonged absence; some hadn’t taken a class in as long as thirty years. The richness of their lives helped me value my own experiences, making me believe that my life—and writing about it—had value. Faculty and students alike created a nurturing environment, combined with some tough love, that forced me out of my complacency as a writer, and made me long to give my story the voice it deserved. Of course, we also must not forget that the low-residency program had a practical, financial perk. Instead of having to move to Boston, one of the most expensive cities in the country (and where I’d have to work full-time to pay my bills), I could stay in Upstate New York, where the cost of living was much cheaper. That way, I was able to only work part-time and still have plenty of money to pay bills. The greatest strength perhaps lies in the low-residency program’s ability to help students achieve that ever-elusive work/life balance. But I’m saving that for another post, so you’ll have to stay tuned.
 Alan Ackmann: The first part of my answer is more of a general pedagogy response than a full-res specific response, but the biggest strength of my program was the emphasis on effective writing as reflection of critical reading. Arkansas’ students were required to take numerous form and theory classes, where we studied various creative schools of writing, methodically analyzing the techniques, styles, and subject matter of classic and contemporary writers. A high premium was placed on recognizing your gifts as a writer, and on emulating the skills of writers who had come before you. The process was not entirely imitative, of course; we were encouraged to take only what was useful to us from any given writer, and to augment our studies by uncovering our own artistic identities. Even in our obligatory workshop classes, the emphasis was not simply on a recursive correction of specific errors within a story, but on isolating the mental misconceptions that generated such errors, and on correcting those miscalculations so as to avoid additional lapses in the future. The net result of all that critical reading, for me, was an awareness of critical writing. Over time, I stopped just slapping down “whatever felt right” onto the page, and started making conscious decisions fueled by an awareness of how my moment-by-moment choices were effecting the larger work and its intentions, which increased my confidence as a writer.
I’m sure it’s possible to come to those realizations without having a full-residency program, but I’m not sure I, personally, would have been able to do so. Learning how to write at this level was such a paradigm shift for me that it felt sluggish even when I was giving it everything I had, in terms of both time and effort. In all honesty, it took me almost a full year to understand why the stories I came into the program writing weren’t very good, and a whole other year to figure out how I might be able to make them better. And if I hadn’t had a half dozen or so good, good friends just a mile up the road who were going through the exact same thing I was, I’m not sure I would have had the stamina or courage to endure it. So those were the big strengths: the time to focus on the formative elements of fiction, and the community of people there to share in the experience.
Alan Ackmann, Relief's Fiction Editor, earned his MFA in fiction from the University of Arkansas, and his short fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Ontario Review, Louisiana Literature, and elsewhere. He was a Tennessee Williams scholar at the 2007 Sewanee Writers Conference. He teaches at DePaul University, and is currently completing his first novel. Find out more at www.alanackmann.com. Amanda Bauch, is an assistant editor for Relief, writer, and teacher. She fled the harsh Upstate New York winters and now resides outside of Jacksonville, Florida. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and is currently working on a young adult novel and a memoir. Her short fiction has appeared in Tattoo Highway, Bent Pin Quarterly, The Hiss Quarterly, and nonfiction pieces have been published in Writer Advice, Empowerment4Women, as well as two print anthologies, Tainted Mirror and MOTIF: Writing By Ear (forthcoming, December 2008).
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Editor-In-Chief Kimberly Culbertson wishes the Relief community a Happy New Year!
Coach takes a minute to recap the greatest moments from 2008.