LOW-RESIDENCY MFA IN CREATIVE WRITING

PRIORITIZING EXPERIMENTATION AND EXPLORATION WITHIN AND ACROSS FORMS AND GENRES AS WELL AS ARTISTIC DISCIPLINES AND MEDIUMS.

The LOW-RESIDENCY MFA IN CREATIVE WRITING is unique in that it considers language as one among many available materials. Situated in a school of art and design known for its strong support of interdisciplinary practices, our program encourages experimentation within and across writing forms, genres, and mediums along with a variety of publishing formats to include print, digital, sound, performance, and text-image works. This is writing as studio art.

The program offers tracks in prose, poetry, cross-genre, and literary translation. Portland-based residencies in winter and summer are supplemented with mentorbased independent work throughout the rest of the year.

Every three weeks, graduate students submit creative work to faculty members, brief essays on forms and methods, an ongoing reading list, and a letter addressing the writing process and responding to substantive feedback from faculty mentors. This epistolary method is the oldest, most intimate, and, perhaps, most intensive method of creative writing instruction. Writers, geographically distant from each other, exchange creative work and letters. Through this correspondence, writers come to see each other and feel seen while teasing out ideas about method and process along the way.

This balance between independent work and community immersion during the residencies helps graduate students develop the skills for sustaining reading and writing practices throughout their lives. It teaches graduate students to develop a rigorous, self-motivated discipline while periodically inviting them into supportive, non-competitive, generative spaces of community. This program is deeply embedded in one of the country's most literary cities.

JAY PONTERI

JAY PONTERI

Jay Ponteri directed the creative writing program at Marylhurst University from 2008–2018 and is now the program head of PNCA’s Low-Residency Creative Writing program. His book of creative nonfiction Someone Told Me has just been published by Widow+Orphan House, Fall 2021. He’s also the author of Dark mouth Inside Me(Future Tense Books, 2014) and Wedlocked (Hawthorne Books, 2013), which received an Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Two of Ponteri’s essays, “Listen to this” and “On Navel Gazing” have earned “Notable Mentions” in Best American Essay Anthologies. His work has also appeared in many literary journals: Gaze, Ghost Proposal, Eye-Rhyme, Seattle Review, Forklift, Ohio, Knee- Jerk, Cimarron Review, Tin House, and Clackamas Literary Review. While teaching at Marylhurst, Ponteri was twice awarded the Excellence in Teaching & Service Award. In 2007, Ponteri founded Show:Tell, The Workshop for Teen Artists and Writers, now part of summer programming at Portland's Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC.org) on whose Resource Council he serves. He regularly teaches memoir classes at Literary Arts and the Portland Book Festival.

WRITING IN PORTLAND

Our annual residencies are in the heart of Portland, Oregon, where we are deeply integrated into its community of artists and writers who have committed to making art that is revelatory, experimental, and that advocates for social justice.

The program draws upon our existing strong relationships with partners in our burgeoning Portland literary scene—including Write Around Portland (WRAP), IN TRANSLATION Reading Series, Literary Arts, Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC), Regional Arts & Cultural Council (RACC), Mother Foucault’s bookshop, Powell’s Books, Passages Bookshop, Poetry Press Week, Tender Table, and Street Books, along with a host of local, regional, and national small presses, e.g., Tavern Books, Gramma Poetry, New Directions, Wave Books, and Hawthorne Books, among others.

FACULTY MENTORS

Lead Faculty, Alison C Rollins published her debut collection, Library of Small Catastrophes, in Spring 2019 (Copper Canyon Press) and won the 2021 Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction. Most recently, faculty member Brandon Shimoda has been awarded the Whiting Foundation's Creative Nonfiction Grant Award for his forthcoming book of essays, Japanese American Historical Plaza,

published by City Lights. Some of the essays have been given over as talks during the program’s residencies. Other faculty include Alejandro de Acosta, Jess Arndt, Matt Hart, Sara Jaffe, Poupeh Missaghi, Vi Khi Nao, Dao Strom, Asiya Wadud, and Tyrone Williams. Previous guest artists include Jenny Boully, Renee Gladman, and Cedar Sigo.

CONFERENCES

Through faculty mentor modeling, informative panels at the residencies, and the student’s packet work with faculty mentors, our program prepares and encourages students to attend the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and Modern Language Association (MLA) Conferences. Our program will be present at the AWP Conference, both onsite recruitment and offsite reading and performance events (and parties!) with students and faculty mentors. Furthermore, literary translators and experimental writers might want to attend smaller conferences like American Literary Translation Association Conference (ALTA) and the NonFiction NOW Conference. Students in low-residency MFA programs often enjoy attending writing conferences because such events hold additional space for students spread around the country to join the community.