Master of Fine Arts - Low-Residency Creative Writing

• Master

  Degree

• English

  Language of instructions

• 2.5 years

  Years of study

• Full-time

  Study mode

• United States, Portland

  Location

The Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing program is unique in that it considers language as one among many available materials. Situated in a school of art and design known for its strong support of interdisciplinary practices, our program encourages experimentation within and across writing forms, genres, and mediums along with a variety of publishing formats to include print, digital, sound, performance, and text-image works. This is writing as studio art. The program offers tracks in prose, poetry, cross-genre, and literary translation. Portland-based residencies in winter and summer are supplemented with mentor-based independent work throughout the rest of the year. Every three weeks, graduate students submit to faculty mentors creative work, brief essays on forms and methods, an ongoing reading list, and a letter addressing writing process and responding to substantive feedback from faculty mentors. This epistolary method is oldest, most intimate and, perhaps, most intensive method of creative writing instruction. Writers, geographically distant from each other, exchange creative work and letters. Through this correspondence, writers come to see each other and feel seen while teasing out ideas about method and process along the way. This balance between independent work and community immersion during the residencies helps graduate students develop the skills for sustaining reading and writing practices throughout their lives. It teaches graduate students to develop a rigorous, self-motivated discipline while periodically inviting them into supportive, non-competitive, generative spaces of community. This is a program deeply embedded in one of the country's most literary cities.