The Masters of Fine Arts summer residency program hosted their first in-person residency since the beginning of COVID-19 this past summer, welcoming visiting writers and new faces to AU’s campus.
Students come from across the country to attend the MFA summer residency program for two weeks. Within these two weeks, students get to attend craft talks, genre-based classes and readings from visiting authors.
Each student has the opportunity to pick from three genres: fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry, or a combination if they so choose.
Rebecca Parillo, former administrative director, has been with the program for two years managing all of the logistics behind the scenes during the two years of non-in-person residency.
“I managed all the logistics – registering students for classes, keeping the budgets, faculty contracts, answering questions, completing needed AU reports. The 2020 and 2021 Summer Residencies were held over Zoom. We were able to have it in person this year,” Parillo said.
This year’s visiting writers consisted of Benjamin Percy (fiction), John Keene (poetry) and Ashley C. Ford (creative nonfiction). Each visiting author had the chance of hosting craft talks about their respective genre and readings of some of their works open to the public.
Director Christian Kiefer was unable to give a statement at the time, however, part of his role as director is taking student opinions and considering what authors they’d like to see during their two weeks of residency.
Alongside Kiefer and Parillo, the MFA program has welcomed back Sarah Wells. In the past, Wells has worked for the MFA program from 2007 to 2014 and will be returning this year as the program coordinator.
“My job now is to really help create a good student experience outside of academics, “ Wells said. “So helping onboard new students from the point of admittance through their time with the residency. Any problems they have online, and then afterward I want to really be involved with cultivating a strong alumni community.”
Since the beginning of COVID-19, this year’s graduating students began online and worked their way up these past two years to be able to graduate in-person and walk across the stage at the end of the residency.
Some students will continue their hard work in the classroom by joining the MFA Graduate Teaching Assistantships program, which according to the AU website, “Many writers make the bulk of their income via teaching and lectureships. Ashland’s MFA Graduate Teaching Assistantship (GTA) represents a pathway into that world through pedagogy coursework and associated supervised (paid) teaching experience.”
With two weeks of learning and finding their place within the world of writing, the students and visiting writers have taken it upon themselves to leave lasting impressions on the audiences that attended the open readings.
Sophomore Brynn Meisse shared her thoughts about the sessions she attended.
“My biggest takeaway as an audience member was that anyone can write. You don’t have to have a huge background in writing to start. All you need is a little bit of courage and an idea,” Meisse said. “I think it was super cool that AU was hosting an event like this on campus. It just shows that even though we are a small university we can still compete with state universities.”