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Creative writing at Carolina shines with awards, movies, star appointees

By L.J. TOLER
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL – Outside, the yellow-brick Greenlaw Hall looks quiet and normal.

But inside, there are earthquakes going on.

Greenlaw houses the English department, which includes the creative writing program, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Lately, the program’s teaching writers have jumped clean off the Richter scale.

One of the most extensive such programs nationwide for undergraduates, creative writing at Carolina has hit a sort of critical mass in faculty milestones, appointment of three talented new teachers and even two new movies based on faculty writings:

• Sarah Dessen, a 1993 honors graduate of and lecturer in the program, will see her name on the silver screen nationwide starting Friday (July 18), when New Line Cinema releases "How to Deal." The film is based on her first two books, "That Summer" and "Someone Like You." Earlier this year, Dessen was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in young adult fiction for her fifth novel, "This Lullaby."

• Michael McFee tied for second in one of the nation’s top competitions, the Poets’ Prize. Each year a committee representing American poets reads every entered poetry book for the year– no fewer than 200 for 2002 – and names the best. They recognized McFee’s sixth collection, "Earthly" (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001). "Earthly" also won the 2001 Roanoke Chowan Award from the N.C. Literary and Historical Society, for the best book of poetry in the state, plus a prize from the Poetry Council of North Carolina. McFee was honored last fall when the 21st annual literary festival at Emory & Henry College in Virginia focused on his poetry.

• Alan Shapiro was just elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, with the likes of United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. The academy calls itself "an international learned society of the world's leading scientists, scholars, artists, business people and public leaders." Shapiro won the Roanoke Chowan last year for his book "Song & Dance." He also has won a Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry, a poetry prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., a National Book Circle Critics Award and other honors.

• Randall Kenan, a 1985 graduate of the program, will join its faculty this fall as an associate professor. His awards include the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Prix de Rome; his short story collection "Let the Dead Bury Their Dead" was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993. Kenan has taught at Columbia and Duke universities, the universities of Mississippi and Memphis and Sarah Lawrence College.

• Virginia Holman will be the program’s 2003-2004 Kenan Visiting Writer. This year Simon & Schuster published her memoir "Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories from a Decade Gone Mad." The book was honored by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill for insights into experiences of children whose parents have mental illnesses. Last week the Carter Center in Atlanta named Holman one of eight recipients of its seventh annual Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism. Holman, a former editor at the literary and arts magazine DoubleTake, also has written for Self, USA Today, The Washington Post and others.

• Daniel Wallace, author of three novels, will teach in the program during the coming fall semester. And in December, Dreamworks and Sony Pictures will release a movie on his first book, "Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions" (Algonquin Books, 1998), starring Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Jessica Lange and UNC-Chapel Hill alumnus Billy Crudup. Wallace has a cameo role.

"We know that we are blessed by the talents of the faculty," said program director and associate professor Bland Simpson, also a successful author and a member of the famous Red Clay Ramblers string band. "We don’t take it for granted, but we feel it constantly. We’re just stunned."

McFee and Shapiro "have done us proud in the last 24 months," he said. "Theirs are works that are being celebrated at the highest professional artistic levels, and that comes on top of the excellent teaching that they do." McFee won a James M. Johnston Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, a UNC honor, in 1998. Shapiro won a 1998 Students' Undergraduate Teaching Award.

"The Poet’s Prize comes from other poets, so it means that you’re getting the respect of your peers," Shapiro said. "This shows that in the world of poetry, Michael is very highly regarded."

Bringing home accolades from non-university sources helps the faculty help the university and its students, Shapiro said. The awards raise Carolina’s profile in prestigious circles across the country. They also raise the stature of the writers – and therefore, the university – especially when the writers give public workshops and readings, in North Carolina and beyond. Between those events and the followings writers gain through their work, the creative writing faculty are among Carolina’s most active ambassadors, Shapiro said.

"This is especially important for a university that sees its mission as serving the state," Shapiro said. For example, "Bland, as a writer and a musician, is forever out in the world garnering attention for the university and creating a lot of good will for UNC," Shapiro said.

Certainly the great love and respect among students, readers, writers and professors for Doris Betts, honored with truckloads of awards in her 32 years of teaching at UNC, led to generous private support. Among Betts’ recognition for her nine books and other works were three Sir Walter Raleigh Awards, the N.C. Medal for Literature, a Medal of Merit in the Short Story from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Southern Book Award, a John Dos Passos Prize and a North Caroliniana Society Award for her contributions to the state’s literary and cultural heritage.

Yet Betts inspired rather than intimidating students. "Carolina changed my life," said Dessen. "I had been writing all my life, but it wasn’t until I sat down in ‘Intro’ next to Doris Betts that I realized, ‘You can do this.’ "

In 1998, when Betts began a phased retirement, 1950 Carolina graduate Ben M. Jones III of Naples, FL., initiated fund raising for a professorship in her honor, the first endowed chair in creative writing. Other Betts admirers pitched in to complete the campaign.

In that way, private giving sustained top-notch faculty talent. The first Doris Betts Distinguished professor of creative writing, Pam Durban, won the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Fiction soon after she began teaching at UNC that fall. The award, from the Southern Regional Council of Atlanta, recognizes outstanding writing about the South. Durban won for her novel "So Far Back" (Picador, 2000).

Generous donors also have made possible the Thomas Wolfe Prize and Lectureship each fall at Carolina and the Morgan Family Writer-in-Residence program each spring. Both have brought noted writers to campus for public lectures and meetings with students.

As for the awards’ effect on students, "the more attention we get, the more likely it is that students are going to respect us and listen to us," Shapiro said, laughing.

Simpson, McFee and Dessen credited former program director Marianne Gingher with much of the current recipe for success. The associate professor of English has won an American Library Association Notable Book distinction, two N.C. Literary Fellowship Awards and the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, presented annually by the Historical Book Club of North Carolina.

"She was very enthusiastic about having published writers come and teach," Dessen said.

Gingher was key in getting creative writing classified as a minor at the university and creating the new writing for the stage and screen minor that will start this fall. Faculty from creative writing, dramatic art and communication studies will teach the courses.

The new program can only benefit from having two faculty members with movies of their work out during its first semester, Simpson said. In both genres, Wallace will add a real talent for the especially difficult art of writing humor, he said.

"He’s got a different sort of wit and humor than anybody in our group, a different slant on things," Simpson said. "He’s a serious writer, but he is very effective at unexpected comedic turns.

Sometimes students think they have to really point to the humor to make sure people get it, where in fact, that’s where the sort of sly fox is the one that gets the bacon and runs away, and Daniel is a sly fox. I would put him in the picture dictionary next to ‘droll.’ We’ll all learn something from having him around."

Holman will bring another specialty, memoir writing. In 1974, a year after Hearst and her captors robbed a bank, Holman’s mother took her and her sister to a remote cottage and set up what she saw as a field hospital for a war she thought would soon come. They stayed there four years.

"Hers is a very well crafted book, and a strong one," Simpson said. "It’s a riveting story about her extraordinary childhood, a very unusual one." Despite the topic of confinement with a schizophrenic mother, the book is not without humor, he said. "Eventually, she came to understand that there was a different reality than the one her mother saw."

At Carolina, Holman will give a reading, teach a course each semester and work on a new book. She will be the program’s fourth Kenan writer, a position supporting production of new literary work, funded by a 1999 gift from the Spray Foundation of Atlanta and the College of Arts and Sciences. The gift counted toward Carolina First, a comprehensive, multi-year, private fund-raising campaign to support Carolina’s vision of becoming the nation’s leading public university.

The new faculty will fill gaps left by other instructors on leave, Simpson said. Currently the program has about a dozen teachers.

Carolina’s is not the only creative writing program in the country or the state. And UNC doesn’t have a creative writing graduate program or major. But Carolina offers four levels of undergraduate coursework each in poetry and prose. The last two levels, advanced and honors, are open only to students admitted by faculty on the bases of earlier work.

"As far as we can tell, there are far fewer undergraduate creative writing programs that are as articulated and developed as ours," Simpson said. "Most colleges and universities have a creative writing course or two, but we have many courses every semester."

Dessen and Kenan, who hit the big time without graduate degrees, exemplify the success that can come of an undergraduate program. Undergraduates often are especially receptive creative writing students because they’re younger, energetic, less experienced and anxious to learn, McFee said: "They are willing to take instruction and try different approaches."

Their teachers emphasize that writing is serious hard work, and that willingness to revise is essential. Also, he said, "We tell our students that a writer is somebody who writes, not somebody who talks about it." Thus he has a new collection out to publishers for consideration and is writing more this summer. Simpson also is "doing some new writing work."

Houghton Mifflin will issue Shapiro’s next book, "Tantalus in Love," a collection of 29 poems, early in 2005. Meanwhile the author is at home converting a new translation of "The Trojan Women" by Euripides to poetry. The work will be part of a new Greek tragedy series by Oxford University Press. He already finished similar work for Oxford on "Oresteia," a trilogy of plays.

Heaven only knows what the rest of them are up to, or how they write so much while still teaching young folks and winning awards for both. McFee offers an explanation: "Thank God for summer."

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• McFee, Michael: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/faculty/mcfee_michael2.jpg
• Shapiro, Alan: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/faculty/shapiro_alan2.jpg;
• Simpson, Bland: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/faculty/simpson_bland.jpg

A photo of Dessen is available on her Web site at http://www.sarahdessen.com/pkit.html

Note: For more on Dessen and "How To Deal," visit http://www.sarahdessen.com/movie.html

Creative writing program contact: Lisa Foley-Pellicani, 919-962-4000, lfoley@email.unc.edu
News Services contact: L.J. Toler, 919-962-8589, laura_toler@unc.edu