Delighted, finding myself that successor, I packed my books, my own hundreds of dear, if less handsome, books, and UPSed them to Stanford only to receive in return a puzzled phone call wondering what I wanted done with my books. Well, I said, I wanted them to go, if they could, on those bookshelves in the office. I was told that, well, they can’t go there, because those shelves are filled. Filled? “Those books stay in the director's office.” “They stay?” “Those were all written by graduates of the writing program.”

WRITING CLASS, MEETING AT
STEGNER’S HOUSE ABOUT 1958

Oh, so they have all been here, Gurganus and Kesey, Tillie Olsen and Tobias Wolff, McMurtry and Thom Gunn, Michelle Carter, Thomas McGuane, Al Young, Vikram Seth, Raymond Carver, Charlotte Painter, Harriet Doerr? Michael Cunningham, Alice Hoffman, Robert Hass? Not only been here, but made something of the experience, used the time to translate private enigmas into vivid, unexpectedly right language. This was the place where they made changes, got serious, began to trust themselves as writers have to. For 50 years, the program Wallace Stegner founded has taken in writers, kept them from the cold, instructed them in what’s honest, helped and encouraged.

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