At Middlebury College, in view of the Green Mountains memorialized in Robert Frost's poetry, a staff of professional writers collaborate to provide a sense of community and shared purpose among the undergraduates in our Creative Writing Program. The Creative Writing Program at Middlebury functions within the English major. We teach over twenty different courses a year on various aspects of creative writing: fiction, poetry, playwrighting, screenwriting, and nonfiction. Our instructors are all published authors, prominent in their fields. They include Julia Alvarez (poet, novelist, writer of short stories), Jay Parini (poet, novelist, biographer, critic), Robert Cohen (novelist), Kathryn Kramer (novelist), David Bain (writer of nonfiction), Don Mitchell (novelist, writer of nonfiction, screenwriter).
Our teaching writers adhere to high standards within their own plentiful artistic productions and, likewise, expect ambitious efforts from their students. Advanced workshops and independent work are encouraged. The writing workshops classes are limited to a maximum of fifteen students, and student interaction is highly animated. Our philosophy of instruction is to provide a balance between offering constructive criticism and providing support for student effort. In addition to students critiquing each other's writing—poems, short stories, essays—exemplary works of modern literature are closely examined, such models being crucial to any writer's development. The close connection between the Creative Writing Program and the English Department encourages students to be good analytic readers as part of their training to become complex and substantive writers.
Students normally enter the program through ENAM170 , the Introductory Workshop, which allows them to explore poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in one semester. In subsequent courses students will be given the opportunity to specialize in one genre. After completing two Advanced-Level workshops in their chosen genre, seniors are eligible to undertake a Senior Honor's Colloquium workshop or to do an independent writing project (a cycle of poems, a series of short stories or a novella, or a collection of personal essays or other literary nonfiction) for one or two semesters under the supervision of a writing instructor.
In addition to its undergraduate program, Middlebury College also sponsors two summer programs—the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (held in late August) and the Bread Loaf School of English (held in July and August)—in which a number of English and American literature majors, and creative writers, take part. The college awards scholarships to these programs. Finally, at Middlebury College student writers have the opportunity to contribute to and publish a number of student (but of professional-quality) publications, including The Campus (a weekly newspaper), Frontiers and Section 8 (literary biannuals), Artemis (a women's journal), Otter Creek Journal (environmentalism), and the New England Intercollegiate Literary Journal. Some students intern at the New England Review, a national arts and humanities quarterly published at Middlebury College, or for the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.
Many of our students go on to pursue professional careers in journalism or publishing or continue to develop their talents in graduate school in the fields of writing and literature. Our growing list of alumni publications, awards, and accolades is one in which we take great pride.
Staff
Julia Alvarez is the author of five novels, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, ¡Yo!, In the Name of Salomé, and most recently, Saving the World. In addition she has published several poetry books, including Homecoming. The Other Side, and The Woman I Kept to Myself; and a number of books for children, among them, Before We Were Free and finding miracles, as well as several nonfiction titles. She has taught creative writing in grammar and high schools, colleges and universities, as well as in old age homes, prisons, and community workshops. She was educated at Connecticut College, Middlebury College, and Syracuse University. Recipient of an American Academy of Poetry prize, she has received fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the NEA, Yaddo, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and has been the Jenny McKean Moore Fellow at George Washington University.
David Haward Bain, nonfiction writer, is the author of Sitting in Darkness: Americans in the Philippines (recipient of a Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award); Whose Woods These Are: The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference 1926-1992; and Aftershocks. Two other books, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad, and Best Be Getting Home: Essays on Place, Writers, and Writing, are forthcoming. He was educated at Boston University and worked for some years in book publishing in New York. He has received grants from the New York State Council of the Arts/PEN Foundation, and the Rinehart, Lebensberger, and Wyndham Foundations. He has written for Prairie Schooner, Kenyon Review, The New York Times Book Review, Newsday, Washington Post Book World, Los Angeles Times, TV Guide, Smithsonian,and American Heritage, among many others.
Robert Cohenwas Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Creative Writing at Harvard; he has also taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Houston, Rice University, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He was educated at Columbia and the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Varieties of Romantic Experience: Stories, Inspired Sleep, The Here and Now and The Organ Builder (novels). His stories have appeared in Literary Imaginatin, Virginia Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Antaeus, GQ, Story, Harper's, Tikkun, and the Paris Review, and his essays and reviews have appeared in the Georgia Review, New York Times Book Review, Boston Globe, Village Voice, and the San Francisco Review of Books. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, he has received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers Award and fellowships from the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Jerusalem Foundation. He was a 1995 finalist for the Prix de Rome of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Kathryn Kramerhas taught at Bennington, Washington University, University of New Mexico, Vermont College, and the University of Cincinnati; she was educated at Marlboro College and the Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Rattlesnake Farming and A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space (novels), and has published fiction and nonfiction in Mississippi Review, Century Magazine, New Boston Review, and The New York Times. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Vermont Council on the Arts, and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. She worked for five years in Boston for the publishing firm Little, Brown, and was also interview editor at New Boston Review.
Jay Parini, novelist and poet, is the Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College. His five novels include The Last Station, Bay of Arrows, and Benjamin's Crossing. His four collections of poetry include Anthracite Country, Town Life, and House of Days (forthcoming). He has edited The Columbia History of American Poetry and The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry, and written a biography of John Steinbeck. With Robert Pack he has edited a distinguished series of anthologies, including The Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Essays,and Writers on Writing. His reviews and essays appear regularly in The New York Times Book Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. He is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Middlebury College.
Don Mitchell, novelist, essayist, and screenwriter, is the author of the novels Thumb Tripping, Four Stroke, The Souls of Lambs and The Nature Notebooks. For many years his monthly column about rural life, "R.F.D.," appeared in Boston Magazine, resulting in three essay collections: Moving UpCountry, Living UpCountry, and Growing UpCountry. His guidebook to Vermont, published in the Fodor’s Compass American Guide series, explains the state to visitors with an interest in natural and cultural history. Mitchell attended Swarthmore College. His work has appeared in numerous regional and national magazines; his current writing project is a novel in which two couples take a canoe trip near Lowell, Massachusetts and attempt to raise the ghosts of Henry Thoreau and Jack Kerouac.
Robert Pack, founder and director of the Creative Writing program at Middlebury College, and Director Emeritus of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, retired in May 1998 and now lives in Montana where he continues to write and publish.
Robert Cohen,
Director, Creative Writing Program
802-443-2426
cohen@middlebury.edu