It is Saturday morning. I’m at a tall table in a kind of lounge area inside the Kendade Science Hall on the campus of Mt. Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, and I am living the paradox of finding solitude in community, writing with some of my fellow alumni friends in relative silence in this gigantic, intensely air-conditioned science building. We are participating in what we call a “generative writing” session, whereby people sit or stand together and write, mostly in an endeavor to generate new material toward poems, stories, a novel, memoir, etc. But people could be doing all manner of things as well toward revision of a work in progress, or research, or doodling. There are essentially no rules in a session like this and no expectations of each other outside of a respectful presence. The point is to make a space where whatever an individual writer needs to do can get done, and if they need a push from a prompt, our fearless facilitator will have one. It so happens that my writing week here at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers Alumni Conference, over six days of this kind of session, in addition to the time I have squirreled away for myself, has been so stunningly productive that I find myself this morning about to do something outside of my fiction writing project, you know, like writing a blog entry. I’ve come to a place where I feel so satisfactorily full, and yet, still wanting, in the presence of these fellow writers, to continue generating words and sentences and paragraphs.
But even before launching this blog entry, in this last generative workshop of the conference before we all eat our last meal, go to our last reading, dance our last dance, pack up and go home, I find myself writing a letter to a friend of mine. I am trying to describe to this friend, who is also a writer, what this community is like. It’s a difficult task, essentially, because it’s nearly impossible not to sound hyperbolic or superlative-drunk. There’s nothing else like it. I don’t know of a single MFA program in the country that has this kind of robust, vital, long-standing Hereafter for its graduates. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve attended, but I know that number is just a little bit shy of the entire progress of the 21st century thus far. 23 times? That might be it. And the miracle is that I have never experienced a bad one, have never felt disappointed, have never felt unwelcome. Instead, I have always felt at home, supported, inspired, encouraged, and loved—even when sometimes a large number of these folks are relative strangers. Our attendance is high this summer, about 52 participants, and whenever you get a group of people that large together for an entire week, it would be ridiculous to expect that you could possibly love every one of those individuals equally, that there wouldn’t be a person here or there or a behavior now and then that would annoy you, but taken collectively as a group, and thinking about how smoothly we navigate these relationships, how rarely there is conflict of any kind, how wonderfully welcoming and kind everyone is–it just feels to me like the best place in the world. When I am there each summer, I am 100% certain that there is no other place on Earth where I’d rather be.
One more lunch together, one more class taught by a fellow writer, a meeting to discuss the future of the alumni conference, some time to rest or socialize, one more dinner hour, the final reading, and then the dance. Not all of us, but a nice, enthusiastic quorum of dancers converge on this lovely space reserved for such shenanigans, replete with an almost request-exclusive playlist, some party atmosphere disco lights, refreshments and drinks, last conversations, and some uninhibited dancing by individuals (me included) who dance in public NOWHERE else on the planet, ever.
It’s Sunday. I’m up at 4:30 in the morning to carpool a ride to the airport in Hartford, Connecticut, where four of us will need to catch early morning flights. Having only slept for about 4 hours, I am bleary-eyed, and yet, beyond grateful that a fellow writer has volunteered to give us a ride, happy to be in a car with these three writer friends, even in my exhaustion, welcoming the last opportunity to have good conversations and a few laughs, happy to be able to say goodbye before heading to our respective gates, and a little sad, given our early departure, that I was not able to say goodbye to so many others. I don’t know about my colleagues, but my travel home is uncharacteristically smooth, uncharacteristically comfortable, and I know that a lot of that feeling originates with this post-conference sense of bliss and gratitude for the abundance offered over the last week by this gathering. Some six hours later with one layover in Minneapolis, my wife picks me up at the Portland airport. Today is our 40th wedding anniversary. The rest of the day and the evening are restorative, restful, grounding. Having celebrated a few weeks early with a trip to the coast, our celebration tonight consists of a salad, followed by Crab Louie, some time on the porch talking about our separate and simultaneous retreat weeks, and an early bedtime.
It’s Monday and I’m up early, writing before I even eat breakfast. Conference vibes not yet settled, I find myself emailing a long message in response to a check-in from a dear alumni writer friend who could not attend the conference, writing to another friend who would like me to mail her a copy of my new novella, and another who writes hoping to brainstorm ways to keep and attract new and younger alumni to the conference, not to mention some discussion about the Angine de Poitrine phenomenon. And before this gathering was even over, I was contacting colleges in my Northwest United States to scope out potential sites for the 2027 alumni conference. This morning I write a follow-up email to Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, where I hope to welcome Wallies from Warren Wilson to the 51st alumni conference for graduates of the MFA Program for Writers. I know. So many W’s. This is certain: I will be running on the fuel I received at Wally Camp this year, I bet, for quite some time. In the next few weeks, I imagine I’ll stay in high gear. Over some months, I may lose a little steam, but not enough to stop me. I’ll wager that the inspiration and energy for these creative endeavors will last me quite possibly all year long–until next July, 2027!
Cheers!
*No one will understand the Walking Stick thing in the title unless they’ve graduated with an MFA from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Graduates not only get a degree; they also get a lovely carved and polished walking stick to take home. What other MFA program can claim as much?
michael jarmer 