Prominent Authors on
the Creative Writing Program

AUTHOR OF THE NOVELS
NERVES
MOURNING
THE DEATH OF MAGIC
and REVOLUTION OF LITTLE GIRLS

Being a Stegner Fellow was the formative event of my development as a writer. From Wallace Stegner I discovered that the difference between being talented and being good was the most difficult inch I would ever attempt to cross.

THE AUTHOR OF
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST
AND THREE OTHER NOVELS.
KESEY IS NOW AT WORK ON A VIDEO MUSICAL, TWISTER

I always compared Stegner to Vince Lombardi - he put together not only a good team but a good team of supporting coaches. Dick Scowcroft was so sweet and gentle that he complemented Malcolm Cowley, who was a gruff man. Cowley taught us something that we carried into our lives: It’s just as hard to write a bad novel as a good one. Also, you don’t want to hurt your teammates. Good writing glorifies all writers.

AUTHOR OF
THE LAY OF THE LAND

Nancy Packer and John L’Heureux taught the importance of being as good an observer, witness and lens as one could be; and even now, when I falter in my objectification or let my language slur into murkiness, I see Nancy’s and John’s faces, the first preaching clarity as a religion, the second as art.

AUTHOR OF FOUR BOOKS, INCLUDING
THE BURDEN OF PROOF
and PLEADING GUILTY

I fell into a community of younger people who had the same ambitions I did, who were gripped by talent and desire, who thought obsessively, as I did, about the contours of a good sentence and the enduring mystery of what could be said in fiction.

Those years - 1970-75 - were crazy times. There was a lot of erratic conduct: too much intoxication, too many marriages casually destroyed, too many people who laid waste to their talent and, even, their lives in the mistaken belief that they were being appropriately romantic and literary.

But I would do it all again. I am whatever I am as a writer because I was at Stanford then.

AUTHOR OF SEVERAL NOVELS INCLUDING
CONTINENTAL DRIFT,
AND WORKS OF NON-FICTION, INCLUDING
CALIFORNIANS: SEARCHING FOR THE GOLDEN STATE
and THE MEN IN MY LIFE

The example Wally Stegner set as a working writer, his disciplined approach, his steadfast dedication to the craft and art, perceiving it not only as daily work but as his life’s work, was the most significant thing I learned. It was my first exposure to that level of sustained professionalism.

In both fiction and non-fiction, Stegner left a legacy of his profound belief in history, being honest about the ways the past shapes and illuminates the present, whether it be a family’s past or a river’s or a region’s.

Hand in hand with that was his sense of place, the ongoing dialogue between individuals and the places we inhabit. His region was the American West, where he had a groundwire that ran deep; and in that grounding he found his strength as a storyteller.

AUTHOR OF STONES FOR IBARRA
CONSIDER THIS, SEÑORA
and THE TIGER IN THE GRASS: STORIES AND OTHER INVENTIONS

I will always be thankful to Stanford for taking me back in my old age. It was a wonderful present, being given that experience.

Everyone else was in their late 20s. It was much easier for me to write knowing that whatever you wrote was going to be looked at critically. And no matter what their comments were, you knew you would get something out of it.

If I hadn’t gone to the program, I probably wouldn’t have tried to write seriously. I doubt I would have gone on with it, because I would not have had enough faith in myself.

BOOKS INCLUDE
THE UNSEEN SHORE: MEMORIES OF A CHRISTIAN SCIENCE CHILDHOOD
and EROTIC RECKONINGS: MASTERY AND APPRENTICESHIP IN THE WORK OF
POETS AND LOVERS

We happily invaded each other’s houses (or tenements or one-room apartments above garages) with poems and food and wine, to read each other’s work attentively and critically, wanting it to be the best it could be; we wanted each other to thrive.

It is not merely my aging memory that reconstructs it as a luminous time. Much of this quality of light had to do with the young writers there.

But the light also came from Kenneth Fields, possibly the most underrated poet of our time and a fabulous workshop leader. He was, to me - to most of us, I think, that year - something of a guru, a Buddha-man with a Buddha-belly and room-filling laugh, a man who could joyously zing home a complex point so you’d never forget it. There was no one like him. He could analyze the strengths and weaknesses of a poem with a fierce patience and compassion. Then, at an unexpected moment, he could bring in something perfectly germane from Aristotle or Etienne Gilson or Emile Chartier or Emily Dickinson or Robert Lowell or any of a vast number of sources he kept in his mind like a Rolodex of true friends.

With Ken, poetry became for me what I’d always hoped it would be: an article of faith, a way of shoring up my own collapsing confidence in the worth of the world, a way, finally, of seeing.

SCREENPLAYS INCLUDE
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN
EAT A BOWL OF TEA
and HAVANA

I got serious, profoundly attentive, responsive criticism of my work from other writers - not critics, but writers who are also darn good readers and who had no other agenda but to read and respond and say “This is working” or “I think this isn’t.”

If you go back to the ’60s (my undergraduate years) there was still a sense that all the literary action was in New York. (Maybe also in Boston, or the Deep South.) There was a sense that we were out in the provinces, in the toolies. One of the things Stegner did was give the people in the program a sense of connection, that they were part of the whole literary landscape - that we weren’t out on the fringe, part of this comical California as envisioned by eastern writers. We were apprentices at this profession that was nationwide. Maybe he didn’t develop the regionalist school he had hoped for, but he did encourage a lot of writers.

BOOKS INCLUDE
THE INFERNO OF DANTE: A NEW VERSE TRANSLATION
and the just-published THE FIGURED WHEEL: NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS

Stegner’s vision was very characteristic of a period when it was assumed that literary art was important to the life of the university. In his heyday, the prestige and importance of writing in universities was unquestioned. Art had a value in that time. In previous decades and subsequent ones to that time, academics have tended to be insular, pedantic, cautious, and in their attitude toward art either uncomprehending and intimidated or uncomprehending and condescending.