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Finding the Flow

More than technique,
UM’s Creative Writing Program teaches writers how to live

By David Allan Cates

By the fall of 1989, ten years out of college and reading and writing like a madman for all of them, I had a novel manuscript that had been rejected by thirty-some publishers, just four published short stories, and a family farm I’d been slowly driving into the ground with neglect. It was time to swallow failure and make room for my brother and his family. Time for my wife, two daughters, and me to drive past our barn for the last time, wind through a foggy hollow and out of our beloved Wisconsin hills. Time to head west in an overpacked truck pulling an overpacked trailer. Like Okies or homesteaders—but not quite. We crossed the plains and the mountains to Missoula so I could attend graduate school in creative writing at The University of Montana.

A friend once told me that literature was like the Great Pyramid, a 3,000-year-old astoundingly beautiful human creation, and my only job as a writer was to haul my own pretty little stone up there onto the pile.

Well, I’d tried. I’d been patient. I’d worked obsessively hard—once I spent almost a year writing nothing but paragraphs—but the only thing I felt I’d learned writing on my own was that I couldn’t trust my judgment anymore. I seemed to have forgotten what was good. If I was going to haul my little stone up onto the Great Pyramid, I was going to need help, and the first help I needed was simple: I either wanted somebody to tell me I was talentless and deluded—and should give it all up—or I wanted somebody to tell me I had what it took.

One or the other, I thought, would be a very fine thing.

So even though I had no money, no job, and only a hole in my heart where the farm used to be, I did have one good question when I came to grad school. Eager for an answer, I signed up to have part of my novel workshopped on the first day of class. The adjunct instructor was Leonard Robinson. He was in his seventies and many years before had published lots of stories, poems, and a couple of novels. He wasn’t famous. His career had come and gone. But more than a writer, he’d been an editor in New York and it was people like him, the gatekeepers, who seemed to know something I did not.

I sat through a class discussion of my novel’s chapters. The variety of my classmates’ opinions astounded and confused me. I thought they were idiots. Or else I must be. I really hadn’t a clue. I don’t remember what was said. I only knew I’d come for a simple answer but all class had done was magnify my confusion.

Leonard was a short man. I seem to remember his feet not touching the floor as he sat in his chair at the front of that Liberal Arts Building classroom, but I think that’s probably not true. Despite what I considered an old-fashioned formality in running the workshop, he had a playful mind and endearing eyes. After class, he raised a finger and called me up to his desk.

“Come with me to my office,” he said.

I followed. We went in and he closed the door, and I sat down, and he looked at me carefully. I was a nervous wreck. I thought I might crack open and start leaking onto the floor. When I think about the weight I was going to put on whatever he told me—and when I think about my unrealistic expectations—I mean, the question I was trying to answer—I still can’t believe what happened. As if Leonard could see past me to the monster of self-doubt hanging over my shoulder ready to devour my pitiful flesh, he said, “Don’t listen to what anybody said in that workshop. You’re more talented than even you can imagine.”

Aaaaaahhhh.

True or false, who cared? What mattered was how Leonard dispatched the monster with one rock from his sling. I think I must have floated away. Up out of that building and past Main Hall, over the still-green Oval and streets lined with shocking gold maples, and higher still into a Missoula sky so blue it hurt my eyes.

Somehow I made it down Maurice Avenue to our family housing apartment, our crowded new home, where I began to surrender to a voice I’d been resisting for years. The voice had been telling me that the novel I’d been working on was not a happy story but a sad, three-act tragedy. I had to stretch to let that idea in—I didn’t want to write a tragedy. But the book had become something on its own, something I had not intended, and it was clear now that my job was to get on that horse and ride. Leonard had given me the courage to try.

Over the winter I rewrote the novel again—a fifth time, I think. My desk was wedged against the foot of our bed, and I’d start working early in the morning before my wife was awake. I’d asked William Kittredge, another teacher, to read the manuscript, and when I turned my head to watch my wife sleep, I’d think of what he told me: Ease back, tell the story.

In addition to rewriting my novel, I had a part-time job by then and a full load of credits, which included literature classes. I loved reading the books and listening to my professors. But I resented any time spent working on anything that wasn’t my novel. So if I had an academic paper due, I severely limited the time I spent on it. In fact, whatever I could write in two hours is what I turned in—then I went back to novel writing. I hadn’t come to grad school to get A’s on my report card.

By spring I’d finished the rewrite. The novel, Hunger In America, is the story of the last night in the life of a cab driver in Kodiak, Alaska, the story of a young man far from home. It is not an autobiographical story, but novels come from some place deep and mysterious in the writer, and I can see now it addressed the big fears and shames of my life—what happens if I don’t love as I should the ones I am supposed to love? What happens if it all ends before I have a chance to do something good?

I sent the manuscript to Kittredge. He sent it to his agent, who gave it to a colleague—and by mid-summer she’d sold it to Simon & Schuster.

A success story, sure—and just the kind the folks in the Master of Fine Arts program like to tell. But life is long, and publishing success is a mist. It burns off or blows away. Or sometimes never rises at all. Over the next fifteen years, I’d write five more full-length fiction manuscripts—three novels and two books of short stories—that would be rejected by well over a hundred publishers before I’d sell a second novel.

So the demon of self-doubt is never dispatched for good. He only hides for a little while. Yet there is something else I found here in Missoula that helped. Something that was even bigger than what the late, great Leonard Robinson gave me, something that has lasted.

Other schools might have star writers—and The University of Montana certainly has its share. But it wasn’t the stars who taught me what I’ve needed during the hard years. It wasn’t the classes, and it had nothing to do with the esteem of the program. It was the way the program opened doors that allowed me to meet other writers who lived in this small city. I met them at readings or parties. Saw them at the grocery store or grade school or church. Played softball at the Northside field. Met at Charlie B’s or at Snowbowl or a UM basketball game. Saw each other walking over the Higgins Avenue Bridge or standing on the sidelines at Fort Missoula while our kids played soccer.

Because what any of us needs to know—more than technique or how to publish—is how to live. How to keep working, how to grow, to move, to risk. How to keep our hearts open and stare down the monster of self-doubt day after lonely day. All this while trying to do the work of adulthood—buy groceries, raise children, stay sane—things that unfortunately don’t always go hand in hand with the work of being a writer.

So although I met plenty of classmates who weren’t idiots after all—students and teachers just as ragged and tottering as I, friends I still rely on as readers of early drafts—my grad school experience was made deep and rich and long-lasting by writers I met out of the program, writers in this place, writers in the world. Most were neither famous nor rich. In fact, the less famous, the more inspirational. They were neighbors, though, and all in their turn, they extended a hand to me.

We’re all crazy here, they said. We’re all struggling with our pretty stones toward the Great Pyramid. Join us. Welcome.

Where The Big Fish Lie

UM’s Creative Writing Program among the country’s elite

When Harold Guy “H.G.” Merriam established The University of Montana’s undergraduate Creative Writing Program in 1919, it was only the second such program in the country, after Harvard’s. Ninety years later, Merriam’s legacy is a rich cultural diaspora of writers and writing that starts in Missoula and flows across the state and beyond like ripples on the Clark Fork River.

In a recent book of critical essays about Montana literature, All Our Stories Are Here, past program director Lois Welch writes: “The University of Montana’s Creative Writing Program is now and has been since its inception a complex positive influence on both the University and the state, providing a welcoming community for writers and one of several cultural bridges between Montanans and their University, itself part of national intellectual culture.”

In 1965, UM’s Creative Writing Program joined the ranks of about a dozen in the country offering a Master of Fine Arts degree. Initially directed by John Hermann and Earl Ganz, the program grew to national prominence under poet Richard Hugo, who taught at UM from 1964 until his death in 1982, as well as faculty members such as James Crumley, James Lee Burke, and William Kittredge. Kittredge directed the program for a time, as did Welch, Kate Gadbow and, currently, Prageeta Sharma.

The UM Creative Writing Program earned a huge honor in 1997, when U.S. News and World Report ranked it in the top ten programs of its kind. (The magazine has since stopped ranking creative writing programs.) More recently, Poets & Writers magazine ranked UM sixteenth in its guide to “The Top Fifty M.F.A. Programs in the United States.” According to the article, there are now 140 full-residency creative writing programs in the country.

The highly competitive UM program receives more than 400 applications each year for twenty spaces. At any given time the program has forty to fifty first- and second-year students in poetry, prose, and nonfiction emphases. Its most recognizable alumni include James Welch (Fools Crow), Sandra Alcosser (first Montana state poet laureate), Kim Barnes (Into the Wilderness), Andrew Sean Greer (The Confessions of Max Tivoli), Aryn Kyle (The God of Animals), Colin Meloy (lead singer, The Decemberists), and Melissa Kwasny (Reading Novalis in Montana).

Current creative writing faculty are Sharma, Judy Blunt, Debra Magpie Earling, Deidre McNamer, Kevin Canty, Joanna Klink, Greg Pape, and Karen Volkman. Recent and upcoming visiting faculty/writers include Rick Bass, Brian Blanchfield, Elizabeth Willis, Peter Richards, Robert Boswell, Peter Filkins, Annie Finch, Peter Gizzi, Eileen Myles, Peter Orner, and Michael Perry.

The program has produced several literary journals over the years. The first was founded in 1920 by Merriam and called The Montanan, although the name was soon changed to Frontier. The current incarnation is the long-lived CutBank magazine, started in 1973 by Kittredge, then a faculty adviser. Now in its thirty-seventh year and seventy-first edition, the magazine publishes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction from established and unknown writers. Contributors have included Wendell Berry, Louise Erdrich, Chris Offutt, and Aimee Bender.

CutBank’s founding slogan is “Where the big fish lie,” referring to the shadows in both the river and the human psyche, where the best stories come from. It’s an apt slogan for UM’s Creative Writing Program, as well.

—Patia Stephens

About the Author David Allan Cates ’79, M.F.A. ’92, is the author of three novels, Hunger in America, X Out of Wonderland, and most recently, Freeman Walker. His short fiction has appeared in numerous small magazines and his travel writing in Outside magazine. He lives in Missoula and is the executive director of Missoula Medical Aid, www.missoulamedicalaid.net.

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