Workshop: The Lowdown on Low-Residency Programs

Four years ago I was in the market for an MFA program. I’d heard a bit about the “low-residency” model: It originated in 1976 when poet Ellen Bryant Voigt established the first such program at Goddard College in Vermont. (The Goddard program is now directed by Paul Selig.) In 1981 Voigt and others planted a new set of low-residency roots in Asheville, North Carolina, by establishing a program at Warren Wilson College. Twenty years later, when I was looking into them, low-residency programs had multiplied at campuses across the country.

The popularity of these programs, which allow writers to earn a degree without having to spend much time living on a particular campus, was easy to understand. Writers like me who had, in many cases, slipped out of our early twenties and had established personal and professional commitments, could continue our education without disrupting (too much) the patterns of our lives.

After a lengthy search I found a low-residency program, and in May 2003, I earned my degree. But if I were starting this endeavor now, I’d have a host of options to explore. By the end of 2005, more than 20 low-residency MFA programs will be up and running in the United States and Canada. Among the colleges and universities launching new programs during this calendar year are Pittsburgh’s Carlow College, Murray State University in Kentucky, Seattle Pacific University, the University of British Columbia, the University of Nebraska, and Western Connecticut State University.

Most low-residency programs take two years to complete and require students to spend one to two weeks on campus twice each year during intensive residencies filled with daylong workshops, seminars, and readings. In the months between these residencies, students work individually with faculty mentors, typically well-published writers, with whom students construct reading lists and to whom they send their creative work for written feedback on a predetermined schedule. Less frequently, a program might fill those months with some kind of workshop structure maintained via e-mail or other Internet technology instead. Regardless of format, by the end of the program, it is generally expected that a writer will have completed a book-length creative work as her thesis and, almost as often, some substantive critical work as well.

If you ask program directors about the advantages of low-residency study, chances are that many will, at some point, cite the flexibility their programs afford. “Many writing students simply can’t take two years from their lives to move across the country (or to a new one) and take a full-time writing program,” says Andrew Gray, who directs the new program at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver. “In some cases, it’s also about affordability—staying at home allows people to continue to work while supporting their education.”

Gray believes another advantage of these programs is that the low-residency model is more like the way a working writer actually lives than the “artificial” atmosphere of a traditional writing program. “As a writer, in the end, you are working alone, though connected to a larger community,” says Gray. According to Peter Turchi, director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, that practical training can have long-lasting effects. Low-residency study, Turchi says, “is designed to require students to set aside twenty-five hours a week for their writing even as they maintain their professional and family lives. As a result, students are more likely to continue writing on a regular basis after graduation.”

Despite their similarities, it is becoming harder to sift through and understand all of the options that the low-residency model offers as the number of programs increases. Given the often hefty—and nonrefundable—application fees that these programs charge prospective students (fees frequently reach $50 or $60), it’s worth taking the time to research them in depth before applying.

For many writers, program selection begins with the broadest of considerations: genre. While some programs offer instruction in several genres, others specialize. If you want to focus on creative nonfiction, for example, Warren Wilson probably isn’t for you; instruction there is offered in poetry and fiction only. “Two years isn’t enough time to master either,” says Turchi, “but sustained, concentrated study and practice can move a student a good way along the path toward mastery.” Indeed, a few low-residency programs—those based at Goucher College in Baltimore and New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire, for example—offer instruction in a single genre exclusively (in those cases, in creative nonfiction and poetry, respectively).

Other programs require study in more than one genre. Steven Cramer, director of the program at Lesley University, finds genre diversity essential. “Lesley’s program is one of the few in which writing for young people is honored as a genre every bit as seriously as poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for adults,” he says. “During the residencies, students take seminars in all four of these genres, and in ways subtle but palpable, our writing for young people curriculum has both enlightened other writers to the rigors of the craft and lightened some of the tendency toward brooding and pretension among poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers.”

At the University of British Columbia’s new program, students must study at least three genres over the course of their degree preparation, which will generally last two years, although students may take up to five years to complete the program. Gray believes that writers benefit from experience with different creative forms; students “are best served by a sort of literary ‘cross-training’ in more than one or two genres of study.”

Regardless of which genres different programs teach, there are two distinct models of teaching them. “In a low-residency program, the ‘student-working-with-a-mentor’ dynamic trumps the group workshop,” says Lesley’s Cramer. Warren Wilson also uses the mentorship model; Turchi says that in nearly every educational situation, “individual instruction accelerates a student’s progress.”

UBC’s Gray admits that the mentorship model is “simple and relatively cheap to do,” and that it is an effective way to teach writing, “mimicking at its best the relationship between an editor and an author.” But it can also be limiting, Gray says. “The question we asked when we started thinking about the teaching of writing through distance education was, ‘If the workshop is so important to regular MFA programs, how can most low-residency programs do without them?’”

So UBC is trying the traditional workshop model, the centerpiece of any residential program. Here the Internet will prove essential, with workshops designed in conjunction with UBC’s distance education experts and the faculty. Students will be able to submit their work to the group electronically; the group will then provide critique and discussion. Gray notes that some other programs already employ similar technology (such as a Blackboard feature) for online workshops. “What is different for us,” Gray says, “is that we won’t be relying on the one-on-one mentorship model for the majority of the work students and faculty do together.”

Despite the advantages that have made the programs increasingly popular with students, some challenges are intrinsic to the low-residency experience. “Students in low-residency programs need to take on the responsibility of setting time aside for their writing without being physically apart from their work or home environment. This requires discipline and motivation,” says Turchi.

“By the end of 2005, more than 20 low-residency MFA programs will be up and running in the United States and Canada.”