An Anniversary

February 2007Ten years. It’s been ten years since Vermont College’s Master of Fine Arts program in Writing for Children and Young Adults met with its first class. Thirty students and six faculty. The faculty members were Jacqueline Woodson, Chris Lynch, Louise Hawes, Jack Gantos, Graham Salisbury, and I.We were all as green as grass, trying to figure out what we had to offer one another, why we were there, what this program was going to mean.The Vermont College MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults was the first program of its kind in the country...in the world, if you want to be more expansive about the whole thing. It is a low-residency program. Faculty and students come from all over the country...again, even from all over the world. We spend ten days together on the beautiful Montpelier campus in January and again in July. Then in the intervening five and a half months, students deliver a packet of creative and critical work to their faculty advisor once a month and receive a carefully edited response. And we all came back together again for another residency of lectures and workshops and readings, of discovery.When I was first asked to teach in the new program, I hesitated. A graduate program—any graduate program—is expensive. What, I wondered, would our students get for their four semesters, five residencies of time and money spent? What would their degrees mean? Editors aren’t interested in degrees, only in the manuscripts before them. And academia isn’t noted for its openness to children’s literature, either to studying it or writing it, so I didn’t see doors being swung wide for our graduates who might want to teach. I pushed through my hesitation and gave the program a try, though, and it didn’t take me long to understand.I have been working with developing writers for thirty years, but I soon realized that at Vermont College I was seeing something entirely new. Our students’ writing grew at an astounding rate! Part of the reason, of course, is a simple one. The students who come to us are, every one, deeply committed to their writing. Not to having written—lots of people think that is a nice idea—but to the actual act of writing. They come to us having agreed to spend a minimum of twenty-five hours a week on their writing and reading, and most spend much, much more. Some come already published, ready to move to a new genre or to a new level of seriousness with their work. Others have been writing for years and are teetering on the edge of their first acceptance.Some present their very first manuscript written for children in their applications, but they come with a soaring passion for writing for children and young adults.The other reason our students’ work grows so dramatically is harder to define, but I believe I have come to understand it. Before beginning to teach with the Vermont College program, I worked with many writers, some over a period of years. When I worked with students long term, I came to discover that eventually they and I would come to a place where I had given them all I had to offer. In fact, I could begin to see that, when the same students returned to me year after year, my strengths came to be their strengths and my blind spots, their blind spots. (There was little either they or I could do about my blind spots.)In the Vermont program, a student may work with me for one semester and then move on to work with Tim Wynne-Jones for another . . . or Kathi Appelt or Rita Williams-Garcia or Laura Kvasnoski. Each semester another faculty member will see that student’s work anew or will see the same struggles I did and respond to them in different ways. As a consequence, our writers are tugged in different directions, sometimes to their initial discomfort, almost always to their great advantage.In responding to those different demands, they grow as writers. In fact, they take great leaps. Every single residency I listen to our students’ graduating readings and glow with pride. What most of them accomplish in four semesters, five residencies is astounding!I have also come to understand more clearly why a program such as ours is needed. When I entered the juvenile market more than thirty years ago, it was open to promising beginners. That was possible, because editors were allowed time to groom writers, allowed the financial latitude to take on writers whose work wasn’t yet fully formed in the hope that stronger work was coming. Often today—and more than one editor has told me this—if a manuscript isn’t 90% there in the first draft submitted, editors cannot take the risk of committing either resources or time to that writer.So we are bringing our students, many of our students, through to that first 90% of a solid manuscript...or even beyond. We are also giving them the tools to go on producing those solid manuscripts after they leave our oversight. And I have discovered that while publishers may have little interest in degrees, they have come to have a great deal of interest in Vermont College. Several support us with scholarships. Many have an open- door policy for manuscripts from our students and graduates.We prepare our students for teaching positions as well. I hadn’t realized when we began how many positions would be open to them. Not professorships in major universities, at least not yet, but our students occupy adjunct positions in colleges all over this country.And perhaps most important of all, we give our students a community of other writers they can relate to and rely on for the rest of their lives. What a gift in a career that is otherwise so completely solitary!For ten years we have been growing, learning. Our faculty keeps shifting. Some, like me, stay because they love teaching, because they love the community we have come to be. Some move out as they commit to demanding contracts, then move back in when their time opens up again. Others simply move on and new faculty come in. But we share, every single one, a solid place as professionals in this field and a deep concern for the students we teach.Other programs are springing up around the country now, some in direct imitation of ours, others in patterns of their own. And I am proud to see them, proud to be part of the flagship program that paved the way for them.Mostly, though, I am proud of our students, of all ten years' worth of our students. Many have not only moved on to publish and to teach but to become movers and shakers in our field.Three out of the five on the short list for young people’s literature in the recent National Book Award were graduates or faculty from our program. (The winner was a faculty member, M.T. Anderson.) An editor was heard to say that the entire field of children’s literature in this country has improved because of our program. We have been called “the Harvard of children’s literature.”I have been doing the good work of writing and teaching for over thirty years, but in these last ten, for the first time, I have had a community within the larger community that is completely mine. How grateful I am for it.My dear friends—students and faculty together—keep me energized, keep me growing, keep me warm.I thank every one of you.Ten years. Let’s celebrate!