Write By The Water

Teaching writing is wonderfully instructive for the teacher, and few venues are more pleasant than the August residency program of the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, part of their MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) writing program. I just spent three days there, eating more than I should.

Setting: The funky log-house charm of Captain Whidbey Inn on Whidbey Island, “Proudly out of step for the last 100 years.” Penn Cove on one side, a saltwater lagoon on the other, and trees and flowers between. The ambience inspires students and instructors alike.

Fellowship: A whole passel of people passionate about writers and writing. There’s a special pleasure in sitting at breakfast with 85-year-old poet and novelist David Waggoner and hearing him hold forth on drinking with Dylan Thomas in that poet’s final days.

Fringe benefits: Texas barbecue, watching graduates take a celebratory (?) plunge into the frigid saltwater, or checking out the exquisitely-crafted sailboat of author Larry Cheek who spent three years, he explained, learning not just the art of the Boatwright, but patience.

The Whidbey students, who ranged in age from 24 to 75, heard a real range of publishing experiences, from the Irish pleas for artistry from editor Brian Doyle to the commercial realities of the new e-book and burgeoning young adult worlds from agent Andrea Brown and her publisher husband, David Spiselman.

I spoke on research, commercial storytelling techniques, and switch-hitting between fiction and non. MFA students rightly spend a lot of time on craft, so those of us visiting properly got plenty of questions on the business side of being a writer: finding agents, editors, strategizing a career, and dancing through a tumultuous industry wracked by the revolution in electronic publishing.

The MFA program includes two 10-day residencies a year on beautiful Whidbey Island (my next-door neighbor) and intensive writing from home under the guidance and feedback of an excellent permanent faculty. Students choose from fiction, non-fiction and poetry tracks, but are also required to take some courses outside their focused area. From my perspective as a visitor, the whole thing seemed well organized and effective. Students read, and their stuff was good. Graduates are being published. The tone was cooperative instead of competitive, and smart without being pretentious.

You can’t learn writing from a lecture, anymore than you can learn basketball or boat building from a lecture. But you can accelerate a writer’s development with the tips authors have garnered from hundreds of years of experience. Why reinvent the wheel?

The accredited program continues to grow. For more information, check out www.nila.edu.