At ONLY POEMS, we like interviewing alumni and faculty from MFA programs across the US, as a resource to our writers and to get a lay of the MFA landscape. What would you say makes UNCW’s MFA program unique?

MELISSA

Three distinguishing features come immediately to mind; first, ours is a three-year program, which tends to mean more time to write and, thus, a manuscript that’s further along in its readiness for readers upon graduation. We tend to call this a book-producing program, and I think that third year is a big part of the frequency with which our graduates go on to publish novels and collections post-graduation. Second, our graduate students are not just encouraged but required to do some study outside their “home” genre, so fiction writers are taking poetry workshops, and CNF folks are learning to craft short stories. This kind of cross-genre work makes for exciting writing in genre, and it means everybody in the building has some intimacy with what everybody else is trying to do. Finally, there’s the Publishing Laboratory and the opportunity it presents for student writers to get hands-on experience in the editing, design, production, and marketing of magazines and books and to pursue a professional credential while they earn an MFA.

What do you specifically look for in poets seeking to attend UNCW’s MFA program? Is there something that stands out to you when you’re selecting potential candidates?

MELISSA

The writing sample is weighted above all other elements of the application because faculty reviewers are looking for promise, screening for work that makes them think not only, “I want to work with this writer,” but also, “I think this writer can grow here.” When I personally think about that kind of promise, I think about a student who seems to have urgent material and whose work already reveals not necessarily full mastery but a commitment to craft: attention to language and line integrity and form and image. That match between the story they want to tell and the sort of nascent chops to rise to the occasion of that story? That’s exciting to see in an applicant’s work.

What are some things that UNCW’s MFA program expects to foster in its writers?

MELISSA

What we most want is to prepare students to make satisfying and sustainable artistic and professional lives for themselves post-graduation. We try to do this by offering them concrete tools—craft, of course, but also information about how things work on the publishing side. Even for students who don’t want to work in publishing, seeing behind that curtain is demystifying and, so, empowering. Understanding the current publishing landscape also makes intervention possible. How would they like to change things? They get to think about that here. They get to do it. We want students to experience what it feels like to pursue not only their own but also other writers’ success, and the collaboration and interdependence of the workshop provides that opportunity, as do the Ecotone, Chautauqua, and Lookout Books practicums. Contemporary literature is an ecosystem; there are so many roles for each of us to play in ensuring its vitality and longevity and equity. We expect, then, to foster long-term commitment to one’s own artistic development and to the kind of literary community in which we can all flourish.

How does working as a professor in an MFA program support your work as a poet? Is there anything you’ve taught or researched that made you think, wow, I could use this in my own writing?

MELISSA

The two practices, for me, are wholly interconnected, and there’s a sort of chicken-egg thing going on when I think about whether my teaching is informed primarily by my own intellectual and artistic interests or vice versa. I’m glad about that! I sometimes design classes—like a recent course in Speculative Poetry—that arise from modes or moves I want to understand and wield better on the page, and I sometimes wind up teaching something I know our students want and need—like a recent course on Queer Poetics—and discover in the process that I’m going to be absolutely renovated by the subject matter, both as a person and as a poet. Either way, I feel really, really lucky.

At what point in a writer’s career would you encourage them to attend an MFA program? Are there any instances where you would try and direct someone away from attending?

MELISSA

It’s hard for me to imagine advising a student against pursuing the MFA unless they were themselves expressing a lot of doubt around life circumstances or a lot of ambivalence about focusing so intensely on their writing. In other words, if desire and opportunity align, I’m your cheerleader. And I think timing is idiosyncratic—some folks can ride the energy of their undergraduate studies directly into graduate school and be galvanized by the shift to a total focus on creative writing. Some folks need a break from academia before they feel prepared to take on the concentrated rigor of the MFA, and some don’t identify their passion until later in life. We’ve got a range of traditional- and non-traditional students here in the MFA program at UNCW, and I love the impact of that diversity of age and life experience on our program culture.

Workshops are a notoriously tricky part of MFA programs—how they are run, what benefits (or harm) they offer, and how the author is impacted by the experience. What are your thoughts on workshops? And, in your opinion, what is the most effective way to run a workshop?

MELISSA

Listen! That’s the big question, right? I think about it all the time, and I don’t have a succinct or even wholly confident answer. I feel like I do know a few things—I don’t believe in the silent writer and am troubled by the assumption that the person who made the thing being discussed is the least knowledgeable person in the room. I do believe dedicated, attentive readers (which all workshop participants should be) can help us arrive at a clearer understanding of what we’ve accomplished so far and help us measure the distance between what’s currently available to readers of a draft and what we’d like to offer them, but I think each writer has to be able to talk about their intentions in order for there to be a useful (and not harmful) match between those intentions and the feedback that gets offered. I believe kindness and critical response are wholly compatible where an atmosphere of trust has been established. And I think it’s a primary responsibility of the workshop leader to lay the groundwork for such an atmosphere and attend to it closely throughout the semester.

Design your ideal creative writing program. Imagine you have all the resources and support in the world. What will this look like?

MELISSA

I’d go very, very big—and by that I mean the ideal creative writing program exists in the ideal world. That means I’m not even talking about a fully funded program—I’m talking about free education, for everyone, in all disciplines, at every level, full stop. I’m talking about basic income, so nobody makes educational or professional decisions under duress. Let’s throw in universal healthcare and guaranteed housing while we’re at it. I want to know what kind of art people would make under those circumstances. It’s hard to even imagine how education in general would be different, let alone how we might design an MFA program, but I can tell you I want in on the planning once we get there! We could do a little speculating—more faculty who each teach fewer students and have a more equitable or flexible relationship to service and plenty of time to pursue their own ideas and projects. Studio space, apart from living quarters, for all student artists. Less worry about genre or even discipline and more focus on experimentation, invention, ideas, collaboration, play. Real, meaningful access, which entails understanding a writer as an embodied person and embodiment as truly diverse! Government supported magazines and presses, so we spend less time trying to figure out how to get the money to ensure that books find readers, and less energy competing for limited resources or addressing the kinds of injustice that arise when such competition is made to seem inevitable--its causes obscured, and its harms blamed on those who suffer them instead of those who benefit from them. (This should be a course–designing the ideal MFA program! I want to teach it–or take it?!)

As the author of two published poetry collections, I’m sure you’re familiar with the process of arranging your poetry, deciding what to keep and what to cut, and discovering an overall theme or narrative in your writing. What’s your advice to poets who may currently be drafting a collection themselves? Was there anything you discovered about yourself while writing your collection?

MELISSA

I taught a course on poetic sequencing last spring, so I have more to say about this than is polite to say right now; I’ll stick to a little bit of advice and describing one exercise we did in that course. I don’t think there’s any substitute, when it comes to putting together a collection, for the long, slow work of messing around–putting together several versions of a manuscript and reading them (preferably out loud) over and over again, locating and experimenting with multiple organizing principles, arranging and rearranging the poems until no juxtaposition feels wrong and until adjacent poems amplify and complicate one another in ways you like and until an arc emerges that you believe will instruct and engage and carry a reader through until the end. I also like to pay keen attention to the “seams,” what happens between the end of one poem and the beginning of the next, in terms of music, image, story. In order to convince my students that they already knew a lot about how to do such things, I asked them to make mix tapes and reflect on their decisions about song order. What effects had they created by putting “Pink Pony Club” after “Texas Hold ‘Em” instead of after “Creep”? What story did the mix tell or what did it ultimately say about love or death or coming of age? Had they attended to the break created by the two-sided nature of the cassette? Did they imagine their tape deck had continuous play, or would the listener need to turn the tape over and hit play on the second side? These were all craft decisions and beautifully applicable to the job of building a collection!

What’s the biggest piece of advice you can offer to MFA hopefuls?

MELISSA

I have a friend who wisely and frequently says, “If we’re lucky, we get many lives.” How one becomes a writer, how one manages to learn craft or establish a writing practice or join a community of working artists or be of service to books and their readers—there are as many ways as there are artists, and your means and methods will change, probably lots of times, over decades. If you want to be in an MFA program, apply until you get in, absolutely, and in the meantime, think about what you want your learning and making and sharing practices to look like. Think about how else to find your people, your co-conspirators and challengers and cheerleaders, how else to keep writing and growing. You will need to do this post-MFA, too, and for your whole life, and it will be hard, always, in new ways, and it will offer, always, new pleasures and joys. Though we can’t always dictate every detail, nobody can refuse any of us a writing life. We get to choose it, and we get to start now.

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