News: Creating writers

CAN GOOD WRITING be taught? "The answer is yes and no," says Michele Glazer, director of creative writing and a professor in the discipline's Master of Fine Arts, which began this fall at PSU.

"Good writing can certainly be encouraged, and you can learn the craft and make it your own," she says. "But like music or any other art form, writing requires considerable dedication, and you have to have talent."

An MFA in creative writing is long overdue, considering Portland's rich literary scene and its existing talented writers. Students in the new program select from fiction, nonfiction, or poetry tracks, taking a variety of core workshops and writing electives. Ultimately, they produce a book-length thesis under the guidance of a faculty adviser.

Those advisers include a cast of talented faculty who are writers themselves. Glazer has three books of poetry, including On Tact, & the Made Up World, which will be published by University of Iowa Press in 2010. Professor Diana Abu-Jaber is the author of the award-winning novels Crescent and Arabian Jazz. Her latest novel, Origin, was published in 2007.

Professor and journalist Michael McGregor has been the editor of three magazines, and his writing appears in The Oregonian, The Seattle Review, and Poets & Writers magazine. Professor A.B. Paulson's short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Extreme Fiction: Fabulists and Formalists.

Longtime Writer-in-Residence Craig Lesley is the author of four critically acclaimed novels and a memoir, including Winterkill and River Song.

The rest of the faculty featured here, include some familiar names in the national literary scene.

Tom Bissell

Bissell, new to Portland State this fall, started out as a fiction writer, but he had an urge to write about Uzbekistan, where he once was a Peace Corps volunteer. Harper's Magazine took a chance, and Bissell's thoughtful article eventually became his first book. He now successfully mixes fiction, travel, history, and memoir writing. His newest book is inspired by his father's experiences during the Vietnam War.

WORK: The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam, memoir; God Lives in St. Petersburg, short stories; Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia, travel book

REVIEWERS SAY: "A stunning and prodigious talent"; "Scabrously funny"; "Razor sharp, blackly comic"; "The literary assurance of a young Hemingway"

EXCERPT: "Bleszinski drove into Epic's parking lot in a red Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder, the top down despite an impending rainstorm. His current haircut is short and cowlicked, his bangs twirled up into a tiny moussed horn... He could have been either a boyish Dolce & Gabbana model or a small-town weed dealer." - from "The Grammar of Fun," The New Yorker

Paul Collins

Quirky and obscure figures from history are the fodder for Collins' books and articles. His passion is indulged by National Public Radio, which has made him its "literary detective." A PSU professor of nonfiction writing since 2004, Collins won a Guggenheim Fellowship that will fund his next book about crime reporting and the birth of yellow journalism in the 1890s.

WORK: The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World; The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine; Not Even Wrong: A Father's Journey Into the Lost History of Autism; Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books; Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World

REVIEWERS SAY: "Passionate"; "Knowledgeable"; "Sassy"; "Witty, detailed, highly entertaining"; "Exemplary scholar—adventurer writing"

EXCERPT: "Our stretch of Waller Street was crammed with Victorian flats, and we all oohed and aahed over each other's wainscoting, box ceilings and carved mantels. Yet, walking away from the whole thing, stuffed with architecture and potato salad, I felt a nagging doubt. "Did you notice," I asked my wife, "ours was the only house with books?" - from Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books

Charles D'Ambrosio

An award-winning short story writer and essayist, D'Ambrosio joins the Portland State faculty this winter. The Dead Fish Museum, his second book of short fiction, won the Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. The Seattle native is also an accomplished professor of creative writing, having taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

WORK: The Dead Fish Museum, short stories; Orphans, essays; The Point, short stories

REVIEWERS SAY: "Funny," "Moving," "Soulful," "Really astonishing"

EXCERPT: "The ancient Chinese man was a brown, knotted, shriveled man who looked like a chunk of gingerroot and ran one of those tiny stores that sells grapefruits, wine, and toilet paper, and no one can ever figure out how they survive. But he survived, he figured it out..." - from "The High Divide"

Debra Gwartney

People magazine, Good Morning America, and even The Tyra Banks Show all featured Gwartney's newest book, a memoir of her relationship with her daughters. A member of the nonfiction writing faculty since 2004, Gwartney's short stories, personal narratives, essays, and articles appear in magazines and newspapers around the country. Her book, Home Ground, edited with husband Barry Lopez, is a unique dictionary of land and water terms.

WORK: Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters; Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, with Barry Lopez

REVIEWERS SAY: "Profoundly moving," "Harrowing," "Raw," "Unflinchingly honest," "Builds to a magnificent, hard-won communion"

EXCERPT: "Amanda was getting more sullen the more she sliced her own skin and spilled her own blood, becoming a faint and frightening presence in our household—dark and sultry as a storm just over the mountain. I knew the cutting was more than a release." - from Live Through This

Primus St. John

Nationally esteemed poet St. John has been a member of the PSU English faculty since 1973. A master of both brief lyric and longer narrative poetry, St. John's work has earned the Western States Book Award for Poetry and the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. In 2000 he was a finalist for poetry for both the Oregon Book Award and the PEN West Award.

WORK: Communion: Poems, 1976-1998; Dreamer; Love Is Not a Consolation

REVIEWERS SAY: "Idiosyncratic and evocative"; "Trolls fragmented, consciousness-laden waters"; "St. John achieves a calligraphic, haunting efficacy"

EXCERPT:
The answer to everything
Is a just peace
(So we elected him President)
Or better umbrellas
That are not afraid"
- from "Our Lady of Congress," Communion: Poems, 1976-1998

Jeff Kuechle, a freelance writer, wrote "Oregon's Tour Guide" in the spring 2009 Portland State Magazine. Tom Bissell photograph by Hendrik Dey. All other photos by Kelly James.