The creative writing program
“All writing is writing. Students should have experience with all genres. We wanted them to graduate with creative writing skills that they could deploy in a hundred ways.” — Former CW faculty Dana Levin
What does it take to become a writer? According to former faculty members of the College of Santa Fe creative writing program, it takes your thoughts, something to write with, and a community of likeminded strivers. Greg Glazner, the first director of CSF’s creative writing program in 1989, said, “The implication was that you found your way as a writer by working at it and having serious input from others who were also serious. We tried to impart that we were all in this together, and that only by devoted presence could we make things happen. We found that if we set this tone in the classroom, the students would rise to it.” Glazner now teaches at the University of California - Davis.
Creative writing classes met in Benildus Hall workshop rooms, where small groups critiqued one another’s work around a table. Among the early visiting writers and faculty were the playwright Michael McGuire and novelist Jack Butler. Poet Dana Levin arrived in 1998; poets Valerie Martínez and Matt Donovan came in 2003. The novelist Mark Behr, who died in 2015, also taught in the program. The curriculum was modeled after graduate-level master of fine arts programs, with an added emphasis on the craft of writing — not just on content and personal expression. “I think that focus on craft is still missing from a lot of graduate and undergraduate writing programs,” said Levin, who continued at SFUAD for a time and is now the distinguished writer-in-residence at Maryville University in St. Louis. “The other aspect, which we carried even more forcefully into SFUAD, is that all writing is writing. Students should not be specializing in fiction or poetry but have experiences with all genres. We wanted them to graduate with creative writing skills that they could deploy in a hundred ways.”
“Part of the goal was for us to deliver a really top-notch program that had its foundations in the study of literature,” said Martínez, now director of history and literary arts at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque. “It’s always been my philosophy that to be a writer, you have to be an engaged and astute reader of literature.” Martínez, who grew up in Santa Fe and graduated from Santa Fe High School in 1979, served as Santa Fe Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010.
The creative writing program hosted the First Print Reading Series, which brought writers to campus for public presentations as well as one-on-one consultations with students. Among the writers hosted over the years were Denis Johnson, Galway Kinnell, Louise Glück, Carl Phillips, and Leslie Marmon Silko. In the mid-1990s, Glazner ran a poetry magazine out of the college, Countermeasures, with Jon Davis, a longtime friend who still teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts. “Countermeasures was a quirky magazine in which Jon and I tried to thwart all conventions of magazine publishing. Students helped us put it together and mail it out,” he said. It was through her submission to Countermeasures that Glazner first met Levin.
Donovan worked at SFUAD until May 2017; he shared chair responsibilities with Levin until 2013 and then led the department until 2016. Now he is moving to Massachusetts with his family as the new director of the Poetry Center at Smith College. His wife, Ligia Bouton, who was an adjunct instructor of art at CSF, will join the faculty of Mt. Holyoke College.
“At SFUAD, the school proclaimed officially what it had been becoming for many years, and that was that it was an art school,” Donovan said. “In creative writing, we maintained a close relationship with the liberal arts curriculum. I really encouraged students to take classes outside of the creative writing and literature departments. You never know the kind of passion you might develop for a topic or a discipline, and what you learn in those other classes can find its way into your writing.” — Jennifer Levin