By Elena Watts

In 1993, The Michener Center for Writers admitted its first class, affectionately referred to by the center’s senior program coordinator Marla Akin as its first-borns. James Michener, legendary author of more than 40 books who passed away in 1997, established the interdisciplinary program for poets, playwrights, screenwriters and fiction writers with a $20 million donation to the University. James Magnuson, the center’s director since 1994, said the program has become one of the most competitive in the country with, most recently, 1,100 applicants vying for only 12 spots. The ten inaugural Michener Fellows, who graduated in 1996, are sharing their craft with the world in classrooms, books, plays and films. Our Campus spoke with Akin, Magnuson and four of the ten first-borns about their experiences at the James A. Michener Center for Writers. The Michener Center for Writer's first class. Back row left to right: Jack Brannon, Joseph Skibell, George Langworthy, Middle row left to right: Amy Williams Adams, Sarah Wolbach, Amparo Garcia, Alex Smith and Kathleen Orillion. Front: Bruce Snider. Not pictured: Laura Maffei

Interview with Jim Magnuson

Hometown: A series of small towns in Wisconsin

Education: University of Wisconsin, English

Career: Director of The James A.

Michener Center for Writers,

Novelist, Playwright, Screenwriter

Our Campus: How is The Michener Center unique from other MFA programs?

Jim Magnuson: Students get fellowships of $25,000 a year plus all their tuition and fees for three years. So that’s unmatched anywhere. We have been able to host some of the best visiting writers in the world including most recently the poet Dean Young and the fiction writer Elizabeth McCracken, who are not only important literary figures but also superb teachers. We try to keep it familial — there are only 36 students at one time. Michener’s idea to break the program into four genres is different. The students have a primary and a secondary genre.  His mantra was to create a program for the professional writer, not for the teacher of writing. He said that being able to work in another genre is like having another arrow in one’s quiver. People learn from being with people who are working in other genres. And a lot of the time the biggest successes come from people who start in one and succeed in another — like Laeta Kalogridis who worked on the movies “Shutter Island” and “Avatar.” She started as a fiction writer in our program.

OC: What were your impressions of James Michener?

JM: He grew up in the Great Depression, so on one hand he was enormously generous — one of the world’s greatest philanthropists, but he was also the kid from the Depression. If he saw a two-for-one Arby’s coupon fluttering down the sidewalk he would stab it with the rubber tip of his cane and say, “This is where we’re going to lunch Jim.” He worked until the end of his life, publishing a book of 100 sonnets when he was 90 years old. He wanted to do grand things. He was very much a citizen of the world. I remember once he said, “You know I always wanted to support a young talented writer, but I’ve never been able to find one.” That was at the first picnic we ever had. He could say alarming things. Michener’s “Tales of the South Pacific” was a wonderful book. There’s an awkwardness in it, but there’s an honesty that certainly doesn’t romanticize the American GI in the war. He kept a whole generation of Americans reading. I think at one point he was responsible for all Random House profits. Think about that. He basically created Random House.

OC:  What does The Michener Center look for in its students?

JM: It’s based 90 percent on the writing sample. We don’t look at GPA and GRE that much. But when you’re talking about a one percent acceptance rate, the person is pretty amazing.  So usually, they’re dazzling in all parts of their life. The average age of students is 28 years old. Very few are admitted straight out of college. It’s better if they’ve been out doing something for a while so there’s something to write about besides dorm life. Some have been published before, often stories, or on rare occasions they have published one book. If they’re young enough, we figure this could still be of help to them.  A lot of our applicants are older and have published three or four books. It just looks like they’re looking to come in out of the cold and we’re not so sure we’d be that much help. I always joke that we get a certain number of people from the Ivy League and a certain number of people from Idaho. They balance each other out. The majority are English majors.

Interview with Marla Akin

Hometown: Conroe, Texas

Education: University of Texas, English

Career: Senior Program

Coordinator for The James A. Michener Center for Writers

Our Campus: Describe your role as program coordinator.

Marla Akin: When I first came over in 1992 there was no program, and I came more knowledgeable about the academic end because I had been the graduate coordinator in English. They needed someone to develop advising materials, establish ways to monitor student progress in the program and deal with the graduate school about degree requirements. We had to start running a visiting writers series and at that time Michener was alive and had ideas about who he wanted to bring in. He would often bring in an editor from New York or an agent of his own. I’m still very active in that part of it because I’m still very interested in the students, but I moved on to run our literary reading series, manage our budget, do the visiting faculty recruitment (the distinguished writers that we bring in for a semester), the program advertising and the Web site. I’m also involved with admissions.

OC: Who are your most successful fellows?

MA:  Hard to say because people who have published have met some goal and people who win residencies and prizes are meeting goals that they set for themselves in the writing life. I think that anyone who is still writing and believes in their writing is successful.

OC: What does the next Michener Center class look like?

MA: We admitted 12 for the fall from the 1,100 applications we received.  Of those, the greatest number, 700, were in fiction and we accepted just 5 of them. We also admitted 1 screenwriter from about 40 applications, 2 playwrights from just over 60 applicants, and 4 poets from a pool of about 260.

Interviews with Four of

The Michener Center’s

First Fellows

George Langworthy

Hometown: Kansas City,  Kansas

Education: Rice University, Cambridge University, English

Career: Screenwriter, Director, Producer

Genres: Primary-Screenwriting; Secondary-Fiction

Our Campus: What is the most valuable lesson you learned at The Michener Center for Writers?

George Langworthy: The most important thing I learned, which applies to all forms of art, is a really firm grasp of tone. Tone is really the most overarching definitive aspect of any work of art. And I learned it when I was studying with John Coetzee, the South African visiting author and Nobel Prize in Literature winner. We were doing fiction writing in that class and I had this epiphany understanding of tone when reading one of our fellow English department student’s short stories called “The Emperor of Ice Cream.” It was kind of like weaving a magic spell. She had you in an emotional engagement in her narrative just as something very serious and straight Hemingway-style would. It was surreal, but because of the special tone she created, which was poetic and comic, the force of her narrative still worked when it was implausible.

OC: Can you give us an example of tone you have created in your work?

GL: I made a short film called “Breezeway” just out of school and it premiered at Sundance a year after I graduated from the center. It is a comedy about a guy trying to quit smoking. And it is done in the tone of ‘50s educational films: having fun playing with that black and white old schoolroom footage about play nice on the playground, or drive safely, or duck and cover. So it was heavily influenced by that tone and we filmed it in black and white as well.

OC: What were your impressions of James Michener?

GL: On his 90th birthday, I was selected to speak representing the students because I gave him these cool cards as a thank-you gift and he liked them. I always like older people, and I always ask what they feel is important in life. Michener said, “Standing up for what you believe in,” which I think is lovely.  Later in the program, I had come a long way as a writer, and had experienced this interesting phenomenon. Basically, it’s that you have this cornucopia of ideas about things to write, and there’s no possible way you could even begin to execute them all because there’s not enough time. So I thought: Michener is going to tell me the secret. And we were sitting down at this picnic table outside in a professor’s backyard when I asked, “So Mr. Michener, when you have all these ideas about things you want to write, and there are too many to do them all, how do you go about picking just one?  He looked at me and said, “Very painfully.” And that was it. I said I was hoping for advice and he said that’s all the advice I have. He read something by every single person in the first class, and met with us individually. He read a script to a film that I made while I was at UT before “Breezeway.” It was kind of a Western noire that did well too. He had some great feedback. He had obviously read over it carefully and he was concerned. He wanted us to learn to be disciplined and to work hard.

OC: What were the classes like at the center?

GL: We all had two disciplines: a primary and a secondary from screenwriting, fiction, drama and poetry. There were group classes at the beginning, and later we worked on our thesis one-on-one with a professor. So the first year we’re doing a lot of writing workshops with ten students and a teacher. You come in with an idea and you come back with your first five pages that you share with the group. You get feedback and you continue however far you get with that piece. I think that you have to learn how to process feedback. I would say the act of writing itself and my own work were more important to me than getting feedback. I also think that people’s feedback can just be wrong. You have to be careful about that because you’re a fledgling writer and you’re working on an idea that’s just forming — it’s malleable and some people could give you feedback that would make you take it in a direction that is their thing, but not yours. The writer Michael Ondaatje, who wrote “The English Patient,” came and spoke to us and he said he never discusses any of his stuff with anyone until it’s done, because it’s too fragile.

OC: What have you done since graduating from the program?

GL: I sold one script, a wedding comedy called “Cake.” I’ve written for a British sketch comedy show, and I’ve written things that I’ve directed — that’s always been my main focus. I’m a writer/director guy, rather than a write-for-hire or director for other people’s stuff. “Vanishing of the Bees” will be released in August and September and will be on Cable and Netflix in the fall.  It will probably play in Austin at someplace like the Drafthouse. We’re sorting all that out now.  And short films have a great life online. There’s Funny or Die, a comedic site that gets tons of traffic where I’m  going to put my short film “Breezeway.” Maybe it will get five million views. Short filmmakers are in a better position to have their work seen since I’ve been out of school. “Breezeway” is 12 minutes which is a little longer than most that are online, but my “Death of a Minor Character” is a minute long, and is intended as a viral Web film.

OC: Who is your favorite filmmaker and what is your favorite film?

GL: I like Stanley Kubrick, the Cohen brothers, Werner Herzog, and Errol Morris, a documentary guy.  “2001: Space Odyssey” is my favorite movie of all time. It was so powerful, transcendent and sublime. The meaning is so profound and it’s also just so gorgeous.

OC: Who is your favorite author and what was your favorite book?

GL: I like T.S. Elliot, Wallace Stevens for a poet and I like “The Great Gatsby.” I like Russian literature: Anton Chekov, J. Stritesky and Leo Tolstoy. Tennessee Williams. I’m not a crazy reader – some people read so much – but I’ve always been a reader.

OC: What are your future plans?

GL: The main thing is releasing this documentary, “Vanishing of the Bees.” Ellen Page from “Juno” is narrating. So I’m just focused on that. And then it would be nice to do another comedy after doing all this serious environmental stuff. So I’m going to be writing, probably getting back into the fiction world.

Joseph Skibell

Hometown: Lubbock, Texas

Education: The University of Texas at Austin, Plan II

Summer school at Yale and a stint at the University of Chicago

Career: Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University, Novelist

Genres: Primary-Screenwriting; Secondary-Fiction

Our Campus: When did you know you wanted to write?

Joseph Skibell: I knew I wanted to write in high school. It all came about because I liked Bob Dylan and I read his biography that said he had read all of John Steinbeck as a kid. So I decided to read all of Steinbeck, and I remember thinking I could never be a writer like Steinbeck because I didn’t know how to clean a horse or build an engine. Then I read Voltaire’s “Candide” and thought I could actually write a book like that.

OC: How much of your work is autobiographical and how much is imaginary?

JS: My new novel actually has a lot of historical figures in it like Freud and Dr. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, so a lot of it is actually biographical. I’m not so comfortable with self-revelation so it’s easier to write about your own life if you’re giving those aspects of your life to a fictitious character. It’s a difficult task to figure out how much about your own life you want to reveal to potentially thousands of strangers.  The protagonist in my second novel seems to have more in common in his outer world with me than the other characters. In a way I feel much more similar in an inner way to the protagonist in my new novel. But you’re distorting things — to put it into fiction is to make it artificial. So anything you use from your own life isn’t reliable history because of the demands of the plot. These days, I’m actually trying to write a memoir about a trip my daughter, Arianna, and I took to visit three guitar makers. I’m 49 and she’s 18, so we’re on the same trip, but she’s looking forward to her future and I’m heading into middle age and starting to look back.

OC: How do you choose what to write?

JS: I have a lot of ideas, but really the hard thing is to find a general aggregate of concerns that are meaningful to you. If you didn’t really care about what you were writing in terms of it having meaning to your own life, then you could write every day and it wouldn’t matter. So that’s the problem, finding the ideas that you can spend years of your life working on.

OC: What have you done since graduating from the program?

JS: I’ve published three novels: “A Blessing on the Moon” (1997), “The English Disease” (2003) and “A Curable Romantic” (2010). I have a book contract for a nonfiction book about the tales in the Talmud. I’m working on a dual-memoir with my daughter, and I teach in the creative writing program at Emory University, where I direct the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature.

OC:  How do you teach and inspire your students?

JS:  In my experience, you give them five concepts about storytelling and their writing improves overnight between stories. The problem is that all of our stories are through screens and nobody sits down and tells people their stories. So part of my role is to get people interested in telling stories, listening to stories and thinking in terms of narrative. You break them quite easily of their unconscious bad habits and they immediately become much better writers. I think anybody can write creatively, it’s just to whom is that activity meaningful? Anyone can do it. To do it and have it be meaningful to you is another question.

OC: What do you miss most about The Michener Center?

JS: The great thing about it was having a community of fellow writers there to work with who were thoroughly committed, thoroughly immersed and not competitive. Everybody wanted everybody to do well. Having the support, the nurturing and the love of this community of people who were your peers, mentors and supporters was really a wonderful experience. The relationships still to this day are important to me. It was a life-transforming three years. I came in as screenwriter and left as novelist. Jim Magnuson was instrumental in helping me get a publisher and an agent.

Alex Smith

Hometown: Missoula, Montana

Education: University of California-Berkeley, English and Film Studies

Career: Filmmaker,  Screenwriter, Creative Director of the University of Texas Film Institute, Senior Lecturer/RTF Michener Center for Writers

Genres: Primary-Fiction; Secondary-Screenwriting

Our Campus: Who influenced you most in your time at The Michener Center?

Alex Smith: There is a way to deal with material that is more analytical than critical. The way the novelist John Coetzee ran his workshop was hugely instructive and influential for me — not only as a teacher, but as a way of looking at people’s work. With him you could never tell whether he liked or disliked something. He was always asking: what is this thing, what is it trying to be and how can we help it get there. So there was never judgment about its value. It was all about the object and what it needs to do to get where it wants to be. We had a guest poet, W.S. Merwin, and I snuck into his craft workshop because I wasn’t a poet. He had three rules or ideas about being a writer that I still utilize: Memorize the poems you love so they are a living thing in your head, watch animal behavior because it’s very pure and you can learn a lot about existence, and words are poems — meaning a word itself is a poem and unlocks a lot of meaning. So as a writer you need to be able to utilize your toolbox which are words — understanding the derivation, the usages and the meanings of words is key.

OC: What were your impressions of Michener?

AS: He read a story of mine and what amazed me about him was that he was so connected to maps of the world. I told him I was from Montana and he opened up an atlas of America to Montana and as I was talking, he ran his hands across the state of Montana. When I mentioned I had been in Scotland for a year in college, he opened up another map to Scotland. His books are all about place and it was fascinating to see that deep inside him — that he needed to connect with me via place. And I’ll never forget that.

OC: Do you think it is possible to teach someone how to write?

AS: You can’t teach talent but you can teach craft. And I learned a lot of tools through the various teachers I had, as well as some of the students.  There’s a lot of bonding that happened with my fellow Fellows, and we would not only have class together, but some of us formed a first novel group where we would meet and cook each other dinner and discuss writing and the writing life. And that was really great and I miss that. If you’re open as a student, you start to realize that people who’ve been writing for a long time have a pretty deep knowledge of the craft of writing. And genius doesn’t just flow from your fingertips. There’s a lot of work, a lot of dead ends and a lot of failures to get to the discoveries and solutions.

OC: What have you done since graduating from the program?

AS: Since leaving the center, I’ve worked steadily as a professional screenwriter. I’ve written nine or 10 screenplays for various film companies like Disney, Columbia, HBO and Fox Searchlight. I also wrote and directed a feature film called “The Slaughter Rule” that premiered at Sundance in 2002 starring Ryan Gosslin and David Morz. I recently produced the feature film “Dance with the One.” I’m trying to make another film this summer, an adaptation of “Winter in the Blood” by Native American author James Welch. I also wrote a TV pilot for FX called “Crazy Mountain,” a contemporary Western.

OC: How did your work change during the course of your time at the center?

AS: My screenwriting has become a lot more rounded and accessible. What has really happened is that the  screenwriting world has changed a lot since the mid ‘90s as far as making a living as an independent screenwriter. It’s much harder now. I’ve had to learn to write screenplays for a bigger audience — what I first wrote was pretty rarefied. So I’m figuring out ways to put the universal into the specific. The funding — private and professional — for independent filmmaking has gone away. The studios are only making films based on pre-existing intellectual properties like toys, game shows, or bestselling comic books and novels. So as a screenwriter it is much more difficult to find places to get your stuff made.

OC: Do you have a writing ritual?

AS: The main ritual is one big cup of coffee that I nurse while I’m writing. I shut down all my electronics, like the phone and the Internet, except for my computer. I read poetry before I write often to get me into a more lyrical dreamscape. When I’m on a deadline, I try to go from sleeping to writing without reading the paper or looking at e-mails or anything that could infect the writing. I found that when I do that, those things seep into the work. I try to go from a subconscious to a conscious state. I find for myself, the poetry helps with screenwriting because it is about condensing everything down to its essential value in a line of poetry and screenwriting is the same way because you need a lot of economy in a script.

OC: What are your future plans?

AS: My brother and I are developing a new TV series that we’d like to find a home for in the vein of “X-Files.” And I hope to continue with UTFI to help students learn how to make feature films by making them with professional guidance. I’m the creative director and teach screenwriting and directing courses. They also created a UTFI course cycle that takes the project from script to screen and I teach all those courses as well.

OC: What do you miss most about The Michener Center?

AS: I’m lucky that I live here and I sometimes teach in Dobie House, so I get to see the wonderful staff and faculty a lot. But I miss my classmates. I’m in touch with quite a few of them. We all bonded and grew a lot and it was a very formative period in my life as far as becoming a professional writer. That sense of wonder — I miss that.

Bruce Snider

Hometown: Columbia City, Indiana

Education: Indiana University, English

Career: Currently the 2010 James Merrill House Fellow, and will be the 2011 Amy Clampitt House Fellow next spring

Genres: Primary-Poetry; Secondary-Playwriting

Our Campus: What was the most important lesson you learned at the center?

Bruce Snider: One of the biggest things I got from the program was the sense of community. This is something that a lot of writing programs don’t talk about, that the writing life is very much a solitary life. You spend a lot of time by yourself and in your head — and it’s full of rejection and self-doubt. One of the most valuable things I left the program with was the relationships with faculty, mentors and the other writers who were engaged in the same thing I was.  A lot of those friendships have continued to sustain me since I left. I began to understand and see the importance of having and sustaining relationships with other writers who are engaged in the same thing. When you’re work is going well, you have a writer friend whose work is not going well and you can support them, and when your work is not going well, vice versa.

OC: Who inspired you most at the center?

BS: There were several – Naomi Shihab Nye has such a tremendous and generous spirit as a teacher and a writer. She brought into the classroom this sense that we were all engaged in this much larger conversation. She was the sort of teacher who would always bring things to class. She would bring in food, journals and poems she came across that she wanted to share. There was just this tremendous sense of giving, generosity, passion and excitement about what you were doing. I have tried to keep some of that spirit alive since I left. So being in the presence of such a generous spirit is something I thought – even then – I really need to learn from. I had many wonderful teachers: David Wevill is somebody I worked with whom I loved. Tom Whitbread, who I worked with in literature courses, was funny, smart and really did close readings of literature in ways a lot of teachers don’t anymore.  He was old-fashioned while a lot of literary critics today are very theoretical — they approach literature from the point of view of a particular theorist. His approachd to work was as a reader. We looked at Wallace Stevens’ poem “Sunday Morning” and really talked about it line by line. That was something from a writing point of view that was very valuable, that kind of close study and attention.

OC: What were your impressions of Michener?

BS: For some reason I didn’t meet with him at his home. They sent him a copy of a story that I had written in class, he read it and he asked to sit with me at a Christmas dinner. So I sat with him and he talked to me about my story. He was very generous and kind and I remember he compared it to Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” which was a story I wasn’t familiar with at the time. He said he thought I had what it took to be a writer, whatever that meant, but coming from him I took that to be very promising. The thing that he said that I really remember was that he knew he had been lucky — that not every writer has his book turned into a musical by Rogers and Hammerstein. And again this goes back to what I think is such a tremendous quality of the center — he felt that as a writer who had achieved such success, and such monetary success, it was his profound responsibility to give back to other writers.

OC: What have you been doing since leaving the center?

BS: I had a unique experience: I graduated and worked for the center for about six years. So I got to know a lot of writers in other classes and I got to be a part of helping to continue the degree plan and advising. I was the graduate coordinator, so I coordinated advising and admissions. I got to sit in on the selection process. So it was very useful for me to see how these things work, to get to know so many more writers, and to meet a lot of the great visitors. Then I got a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford for two years, which was about the time my first collection of poems called “The Year We Studied Women” published. I taught as a Jones Lecturer for two more years at Stanford, and then I came back to teach in UT’s English department for a semester. I went back to teach at Stanford and the University of San Francisco. This semester, I’m the writer in residence at the James Merrill House for six months in Stonington, Conn.  I’m finishing up my next book called, “Paradise, Indiana.”

OC: Do you have a writing ritual?

BS: I’m pretty disciplined about writing regularly, I don’t wait for inspiration to strike. It rarely does, unless I’m sitting there. So for me it’s about giving inspiration the opportunity to strike by being disciplined about showing up.  I don’t really have a huge writing ritual. I just make time to write. And sometimes it goes well and sometimes it doesn’t.

OC: How much of your work is autobiographical and how much is imaginary?

BS:  My work is pretty autobiographical. It’s based on my life, but there’s also some invention and it’s poetry so you change certain things for form.

OC: Do you ever get writer’s block?

BS: Writer’s block is a fear of writing something bad.  You feel like you don‘t have anything good to say, but the truth is that’s the process of writing. You have to let yourself write some of the bad, the pedestrian, the trite things that are in most of our heads to get to the things that are more surprising, revealing or interesting. So I don’t really suffer from writer’s block, but I let myself write bad things. You give yourself permission to write the bad stuff. And in doing that, some of my writing days feel like a bit of a grind, but that’s ok, that’s part of the process. And my experience has always been that if you stick with it, you will eventually stumble into something that is more interesting.

OC: Do you think it is possible to teach someone how to write?

BS: There’s a Buddhist saying that when the student is ready the teacher will appear. So it sounds a little like that in the sense that as writers we all learn to write often by reading other writers. So I would agree that we all have a certain inherent ability to write, and some of us have more natural ability than others. It’s like anything else you do in life, you have a set amount of talent, but then you really can learn to use what you have to its fullest extent, whatever that is. We can all become better writers, even if we can’t all become great writers. The path to becoming a writer has in a lot of ways become institutionalized in writing programs like the Michener Center’s. But in a lot of ways, they do the same things that writers have always done: Writers have always shared their work, and read and discussed other writers. So it formalizes it and makes it a more concentrated and quicker way to cover more ground because you have a teacher who has prepared a syllabus and set out goals for you to think about and learn from. And you have this great period in your life when you can focus on your growth as a writer.

OC: Who is your favorite poet? What is your favorite poem?

BS: I have so many favorite poets. I’m living in the James Merrill House, so I’ve been reading a lot of James Merrill’s work and being very moved and excited by it.  I’ve also been reading a lot of Elizabeth Bishop. There is a poem that is a touchstone for my work — it’s a poem by the poet Richard Hugo called “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg” and it’s a beautiful poem. I’m writing a lot about rural landscapes, I grew up in a small town and it’s a poem about a small town. He captures so beautifully this mix of melancholy, loss and beauty — the really complicated relationships that you can have to places and I think I relate to it so much because I come from a small town. You see yourself or you see your own experience of it in a way. I also love “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman.

OC:  What do you miss most about the center?

BS:  The Michener Center is a remarkable program. James Michener’s gift, his legacy, is profound and will continue to affect and influence the lives of writers for many years to come. The great thing about the program is that the ten to twelve people admitted every year are on full scholarship support. So you have no other responsibilities, other than to attend classes and focus on your work and on your growth as a writer. It’s remarkable in part because it helps avoid the kind of competitiveness that often exists in other writing programs. There’s a whole staggered level of support. I think it’s so nice in this program that everyone comes in recognized the same, so that people can really relax and not feel semester after semester that they’re competing with each other for funding. And it allows that community to form bonds that are crucial to most of our growth as we continue — and also for our sanity, because I’m a believer in that.  And also I think that the people who run the program are remarkable, in particular Jim Magnuson and Marla Akin. Marla is a phenomenal administrator and has really contributed to the growth and the vision of the program as much as anyone.