New Mexico State University, Department of English

Reviewer's Name:

Becker

Review Date

May 12, 2009

Year of Graduation:

2005

Review Title:

NMSU: Distilled

Full Review of the Program:

Recently, a person who writes screen plays asked me to sum up (I think he called it "distill") the main lessons I learned in the NMSU MFA program. "Like 'write what you know,'" he said. This man had intense eyes, the kind that one is afraid to look into, the kind that aren't just one color, the kind that stay and wait for answers you don't have. As I sat there, trying not to look at him, I realized that I had no single lesson to offer.
(Uh, Boz, if I am mistaken here and there WAS one main lesson I was supposed to learn, could you email it to me?). Instead, I related what the late Sean Branson, my office-mate in our first year, told me. Sean was a man of few, but powerful words, and one day he said that what was great about this MFA program wasn't the classes or the workshops, but that for three years we got to be writers. Paid writers. We got to live it, and even if we would graduate and move on to be something else, we would always have that--those three years when we and others took our work seriously.

The screen writer waited, this answer far from proficient. I explained:
We got to play pool like writers, I said, we got to start camp fires like writers and talk like writers and dress like writers and play basketball like writers. We got to crowd together in apartments and lament like writers, we got to have relationships like writers, read like writers, go to Thailand like writers, and cook like writers and once I even got to sit in a darkened car and tell a writer from another state how I wanted to move to Southeast Asia and help tsunami victims when really what I wanted to do was go back to the party we had just left and have another beer and she asked me to tell her a secret about my mother's body. We got to be writers. It was a life. It was only three years long, but it was a life.

The screen writer and his intense eyes were now even more disappointed.

He squinted at me, he kept watching me, waiting, and I got nervous, finally agreeing that yes, the most important thing I learned was to write what I know (I am a weak man).

But really I couldn't answer him, we didn't just learn to write, we learned the life, and that lesson was one we could only teach ourselves. If you are interested in that life, this is the program for you.