Leaving VCFA 2

Perhaps more to follow...

It’s now been a week since I resigned from VCFA.

Here’s a story: Summer residency at Vermont College. Hot, steamy, I forget what year. Doesn’t matter because the residency experience, as some of you who read this will remember, was oddly timeless.

Mark Maxwell was a student in my workshop that residency. His workshop story was weird as hell. Richard Nixon, Raymond Carver, and Mark go on fishing trip together. They are friends. There is some indication that their relationship has been lengthy and mutually supportive.

It came time to interview mentors for the next semester. Mark asked to see me, and we rendezvoused at a cafeteria table in Dewey Hall. He was 27, a schoolteacher in Chicago, personable, and a bit confused as to direction even though he was entering his final semester. He needed to pull together a creative thesis, but in his opinion he hadn’t written very much and none of it hung together. He had some biographical vignettes based on Nixon’s early life. He had other different biographical vignettes about Carver and his alcolohism based on Carver’s poems. And he had three (very whimsical and surprising) short stories about the Nixon-Carver-Maxwell friendship. I said, “Well, show me what you have, I’ll read it tonight, and tell you what I think.”

When we met next day at Dewey, I had Mark’s sheaf of paper stacked in three neat piles. He looked nervous. “Well?” he asked. I said, “Mark, I think it’s a novel.” He gave me a look. Incredulous. “Yes, a novel,” I said, encouragingly. He broke into a grin and said, “Really?” “Sure,” I said. “It will be experimental, not plot-driven. You don’t even need to rewrite your vignettes to force them into a narrative. Just alternate Nixon and Carver bits, write some new ones, and then add more of these short stories about the friendship as a through-line of sorts.”

Mark finished his novel before graduation. It was idiosyncractic, to say the least, so it took some time after graduation before he found an agent and a publisher. The result was nixoncarver, a novel, published by St. Martin’s Press in 1998. David Nicholson, writing in The Washington Post, said: “Of all the strange books ever written (and published), this has got to be one of the strangest!” I took this as high praise.

This is a good memory for me. In my mind, my early years at VCFA are the stuff of legend, not the least because they were ethically uncomplicated. I had graduated years before from the Iowa Writers Workshop, the ancestral creative writing program, the place where the now vast academic creative writing industrial complex began. Iowa invented the workshop, students sitting around a table discussing each other’s work, the blind leading the blind. A workshop leader, a published author, more or less aloof or involved depending on the person, chaired the proceedings. Sometimes, though rarely in my experience, that workshop leader would meet a student privately to discuss a manuscript. It was very unsatisfactory, a bit of a scam. Often cruel. I remember more than one student leaving class in tears. (My first workshop at Iowa we took a vote on who was most likely to fail.)

When I started teaching in the Vermont College low-residency program, I felt nothing but relief. Workshops did happen during residencies, but after that, the practice of teaching became an intense colloquy between mentor and individual student. Unlike workshops, which were often just plain confusing, the practice of working one-on-one with a student for a semester offered the opportunity for a profound meeting of minds, focused teaching of craft, and the possibility of a life-changing experience for the student.

This low-residency teaching model (10 days of on-campus residency twice a year with five monthly “packets” of creative work exchanged over the semester) was not invented at Vermont College. There is some history here, going back to the 1930s. About that time, there was a debate as to how education might develop. Every side was “progressive,” but there were different ideas about what that meant. On the one hand, there were the classicists, who advocated that everyone should have a grounding in the humanities going back to the Greeks. Another branch, following the Vermont-born educational philosopher John Dewey, advocated a “student-centered” approach, small Oxford-style classes with individual tutors, student-defined studies, art as a way of teaching everyone the value of form, discipline, and individual creativity. Both sides saw education as the way to imbue students with sound democratic principles, to make them useful and responsible citizens. Several more or less experimental colleges sprang up in that decade. St. John’s College in Annapolis is a good example of the classicist approach. Black Mountain College in Asheville is a good example of the Dewey-esque approach.

Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, began in 1863 as a prep school, Green Mountain Central Institute, in nearby Barre. Later, it was renamed Goddard Seminary. In the 1930s, in order to survive, it refashioned itself as a junior college under a man named Royce “Tim” Pitkin, one of John Dewey’s progressive disciples. In 1938, Pitkin moved the campus to a farm just outside the village of Plainfield, changed the school’s name to Goddard College, and transformed it once again, this time into a student-centered, democratic, and informal institution. It wasn’t an art college after the Black Mountain model, but grew to specialize in adult education, making a space for working people to get an education. (Hence the low-residency teaching model, a way to advance the education of people who kept their jobs and maintained a responsible place in their home communities.)

In the 1960s, Goddard invented the Adult Degree Program, an MFA in writing program, the low-residency teaching format, and “packets.” It became famous as a place of educational ferment and experiment, much in line with the counterculture movement of the 1960s. The hills around Plainfield are still home to old lefties and ex-hippies who gravitated to Goddard in those days. The man who runs my local internet provider is one.

In 1981, for reasons obscure to me, Goddard sold its Adult Degree Program and its MFA in writing to Norwich University, a male-only military college in Northfield, Vermont. Norwich had earlier bought the old Normal School campus in Montpelier, which it turned over the the former Goddard College programs and renamed Vermont College. Something else happened in 1981. Again, it is obscure to me. Not only did the MFA in writing program break its ties with Goddard College, but it split in two, one branch going to Norwich University under Roger Weingarten and the other branch joining Warren Wilson College in North Carolina under Ellen Bryant Voigt. There remained a legacy of animosity between the programs, at least between Voigt and Weingarten, when I arrived in the early 90s, perhaps just gossip by then, though I heard it mentioned often. But both programs grew out of Goddard College and followed its teaching model. And Goddard later re-invented its own MFA in writing program, and nowadays it has low-residency imitators all over North America.

I quite liked working for the “generals,” as I called them. It tickled me no end. Hell, I wanted a uniform, though, alas, nothing ever came of this. In retrospect, the generals were decent, straightforward, and, I think, honest administrators in contrast to pretty much everyone else who has tried to run the place. But a cultural divide existed between the two campuses, which nobody seemed to want to bridge. We saw ourselves as bottom-up democrats and the generals were top-down autocrats. We were artists; they were disciplined military. We were the remnants of the 60s counterculture, and they were the military-industrial complex. As soon as I arrived, I began to hear the complaints about how Norwich was failing to keep pace with the deteriorating campus plant, about how the fabulous profits (sic) we were making went straight to Norwich instead of being used to build up our programs.

All the time I taught at the college, I heard these complaints, first against Norwich, then against Union University and Institute when they owned us, and finally against Vermont College of Fine Arts, when we finally owned ourselves (the fabulous profits (sic) from the MFA in Writing Program were being siphoned off, it was said, to fund money-losing new programs that always failed to generate the promised waves of new students). My thought here is that if the same complaints arise over a series of owners and situations, then perhaps no one is asking the right questions. Certainly, no one was taking care of the buildings, which are now mostly empty and soon to be put up for sale.

But I digress. Think of Goddard College as a hybrid of Black Mountain’s emphasis on the experimental arts and a rural Vermont practicality with something of the rumbustious, dope-fumed 60s thrown in. That’s what Vermont College felt like to me when I arrived in 1994. Looking back, I can see that idylls of the college’s first decade were already hitting their half life. The buildings were in decline. There was grumbling about the generals. But the rambunctious chaos of the student-faculty community was still in full swing. Jack Myers would give manuscript consults in his pajamas. Syd Lea would play the harmonica and sing the blues at the dances in Noble. Diane Lefer read a story about a masturbating baboon that left me with my mouth hanging open (did she really just read that?). Students and faculty would meet every night around the pool table at Charlie-O’s.

¹

I remember holding student conferences at the Thrush over beer. Mary Ruefle chain-smoked in her room then rose to the lectern like a sybil. There were morning swims at Curtis Pond and frigid, sleet-driven nights climbing the hill, not quite sober. A student gave a lecture on sex in fiction while two of her friends dressed as cocktail waitresses passed up and down the aisle giving out condoms. Students and faculty packed the readings in Noble Lounge. Someone’s baby invariably interrupted graduation. It was so intense, always so intense, that everyone would collapse around Day 7. That was part of the rite, the holy time of the residency.

At least that’s how I remember it.

1. Apparently, students and faculty hitting the bars together was part of John Dewey’s philosophy. When he visited Black Mountain College, as he often did, he often ended up going for drinks with students. The serious point here is that Dewey didn’t like artificial hierarchical barriers between students and teachers.