Balancing Act: Professors Take on Teaching and Their Own Writing

"Seriousness of purpose is one of the fundamental things that I learned I needed in the program,'' says Guterson.

Who better to instill that lesson than Guterson's mentor Charles Johnson, whose novel Middle Passage won the 1990 National Book Award. Johnson is purpose personified, a whir of production. During his 21-year tenure here, he has completed several award-winning books, essays and novels. He is a screenwriter, book reviewer and editor of the Seattle Review. Nine months a year he dedicates himself to teaching because, as he says, "I owe it to those teachers who helped me become the writer I am."


Charles Johnson

"It's always a balance," Johnson says of the creative writing faculty's ability to teach and consistently produce written works. Watching a student rise to his or her own best writing, is part of each teacher's definition of personal success.

"To see someone like David Guterson is a great joy to me," Johnson says. "He's standing on his own two feet and he did not sell out to do it. Everything he's done has been in service to his stories."

That, in essence, is what the creative writing program is all about: graduating students who no longer need the program, with it's structured, tight environment and instant critic's circle, to write.

"No teacher can make more demands on you than you can make on yourself,'' says Wong. "My hope is that when students leave, they don't need people like me. The workshop voices are now in your head, you can be brutally honest with yourself as a writer. The best students are the ones who continue to investigate what we've taught them long after class is over, when they are not being forced to do it."

Despite its growing reputation, the creative writing program is far from being on equal footing with programs at other universities when it comes to recruiting. Better funding, especially from private sources, would enable the department to lure high quality students who need financial aid, bring in more visiting scholars, hire a full-time program director instead of passing the torch amongst faculty members, and help to recruit more minority writers, says Wong.

"We'd love to have a post-M.F.A. fellowship that is competitive nationally,'' he says. "A writer very early in his or her career doesn't qualify for a lot of grants or fellowships that published writers can get. This would allow us to get them money when they need it most."

"It is important for the University community to support creative writing because it's our best chance of articulating what the future might be,'' says McCue. "Support of this program should be parallel with the research sciences. These are the students who will be articulating another, crucial way of looking at the world. They are critical."

Cheryl Murfin Bond is a free-lance writer who lives and works in Seattle. She is an editor at Seattle-based Northwest Parent Publishing and graduated from the UW in 1989.

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