During the Spring 2020 semester, two first-year MFA students–poet Joshua Garcia and fiction writer Lauren Cortese–taught creative writing online to University of Bahrain students. Their planned travel to Bahrain in April was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Joshua Garcia

Though writing is often a solitary pursuit, one of the greatest joys that comes with writing is finding a group of people to explore that pursuit with. This Spring, I was fortunate enough to find such a group with undergraduate students at the University of Bahrain. Through the College of Charleston and the University of Bahrain’s Creative Writing Mentorship Program, I was able to meet with students weekly via Skype to share about the art of poetry and creative nonfiction. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the program given our geographic distance, cultural backgrounds, and varying levels of familiarity with creative writing, but I found myself looking forward to our meetings every week. The excitement and curiosity with which my students explored their own writing was infectious, and I found myself motivated to push my own writing along with my students. It’s this mutual exchange of encouragement and exploration which makes a writing community so valuable, our time together fueling the time we spend isolated with paper and pen.

We learned a lot about creative writing as we surveyed different poetic forms and the contemporary and versatile genre of creative nonfiction, but what I most enjoyed was how much I was able to learn about my students through reading their work. I was able to get a glimpse of this in class, especially in the last ten minutes of our sessions, which I saved for unguided conversation. We gushed over the Oscars, shared Netflix recommendations, and talked about each of our studies and what we hope to do upon graduation. But I was also able to learn so much through their writing about Bahraini food, culture, family life. I read impassioned lyric essays about their favorite colors, poetry that dug deep into wells of personal strength, and creative nonfiction which challenged gender and generational expectations in really interesting ways.

This virtual community of writers proved even more meaningful as we entered a worldwide pandemic together. It would be difficult to share about our experience of this program without addressing the impact of COVID-19. Naturally, a planned trip to Bahrain was cancelled due to the pandemic, but for me the greater impact was how much more together we felt even as our plans to meet in person were foiled. My students began self-isolating and conducting their studies virtually weeks before it was clear we would join them in this new mode of living. Eventually, we all faced extended time at home with limited social interaction and the unique rigors of virtual learning, but our meetings continued as normal and proved to be a time of solace (for me at least) as we came together, though half a world apart, under global circumstances. This time of community kept me sane and made our pursuit of creative writing that much more consequential. One of my students unfortunately lost her grandmother to the pandemic, and she turned her writing into a tool for navigating her grief. Other students were able to reflect on the world we live in now and wrote beautifully of how the world could be. I’m beyond thankful for this experience for a number of reasons, but to find this community of writers at a time when the world demands we use our imaginations was invaluable.

Our time together culminated in a virtual reading with students also taught by my colleague Lauren Cortese. Though not the in-person reading we had hoped for, the joy and pride our students radiated as they shared their work was not lost on our screens. I encouraged my students while discussing the revision process that the act of writing and of continuing to write is an investment we make in ourselves. With the time and energy we put in it, we say to ourselves, What is inside of me matters. When we share the fruit of our labor with others, we say to ourselves, My voice deserves to be heard. If anything, I hope this sticks, and I look forward to hearing those voices again and again and again.

Prof. Bret Lott’s best-selling novel Jewel was featured on the New York Times “50 States, 50 Love Stories” representing the state of Mississippi. Tina Jordan and Elisabeth Egan praise the book, writing:

This novel might be our favorite about the love of a mother for her child. Under the headline “Blessed Are the Ordinary,” our reviewer described it like this: “In this sweeping and beautifully written book, Mr. Lott has given us something unusual — an unsentimental account of the life of a woman from rural Mississippi who transcends poverty and ignorance to become part of a pioneering movement in the treatment of children with Down syndrome.” The woman is Jewel; her daughter is Brenda Kay. You won’t forget them.

Lauren Cortese is the Woodfin Fellow in Fiction (’21). She grew up near Annapolis, Maryland, and graduated from George Washington University with a background in psychology. Her poetry peer Ivy Keller talked with her on a balmy Charleston afternoon over some excellent margherita pizza at Bakers & Brewers.

Ivy Keller: What made you decide to join an MFA program to study fiction?

Lauren Cortese: I’ve always loved fiction. It’s what I like to read the most, so it was natural to me that that’s what I would write. I like writing longer projects; I like getting to spend that time with my characters. Last summer in 2018, I did an artist residency for about three weeks. It was super life-changing to get to live with other artists, to meet them and hear about their work. That made me realize what I could gain from writing with a community instead of just writing on my own.

IK: It sounds like you’ve found that community here. How are classes going? What have you learned from the MFA program so far?

LC: It’s been great. I’m learning how to read my own work with a different eye instead of being stuck within my own way of thinking about writing. And then, learning a lot of technical elements of writing too. How to be more consistent with point-of-view, how to create a more vivid setting, just sort of the nuts and bolts of quality stories.

IK: You took a few years between undergrad and the MFA to work, right? 

LC: I interned in DC for a little bit, where I went to undergrad, and then I got a job in Boston where I was working for a health tech company doing a lot of user research. It was cool because I studied psychology in undergrad, so it was a great way to use my major. But I realized that I enjoyed the creative aspects of my job more than anything else, and that I was really enjoying my time spent writing after work. I was getting more out of that than I was getting from my 9-5 job. That was when I decided, after about two years, to try writing. I spent a year doing the application process and it worked out. It was a long process!

IK: What topics do you like to write about? Do you have any specific archetypes or themes that interest you?

LC: Definitely! I mostly write about women characters, I like family structure, and definitely prefer writing about contemporary topics. Pretty much everything that I write takes place today. I don’t do much historical fiction or anything like that.

IK: Inspiration also comes from other writers who deal with similar topics, like family relationships. Who inspires you?

LC: For the project I’m working on right now, I’m drawing a lot from Celeste Ng and a little bit from Gillian Flynn, even though there’s not as much of a thriller element to what I’m writing. I love Ann Patchett, I think she’s absolutely brilliant. I read a lot of everything, so I kind of try to pull from everywhere. I find a weird amount of inspiration from podcasts too. I like listening to documentary-style podcasts, stories of real people. That’s always a really cool way to learn about and experience something I don’t know anything about.

IK: And what podcasts are you listening to at the moment?

LC: I’m a big fan of “Invisibilia,” and I really like “Freakonomics,” which is all non-fiction, but it’s a cool way to learn about industries or jobs or patterns in society that I don’t know anything about.

IK: What is your favorite place to visit in Charleston so far?

LC: I think that the Battery is super beautiful, to wander around that park and be on the water, and have all the beautiful historic mansions around. It feels exactly what I imagined moving to the South would feel like. It’s just very beautiful.

Ivy Keller is the MFA Woodfin Fellow in Poetry (’21). Her fiction peer Lauren Cortese had a chance to sit down with her at Bakers & Brewers where they discussed her craft over margherita pizzas. Lauren learned what brought Ivy from a small town in Ohio east to the College of Charleston.

Lauren Cortese: Hi Ivy! Let’s start with, what drew you to studying poetry?

Ivy Keller: In high school I was obsessed with Emily Dickinson. To the point where I was quoting her to people––and they did not appreciate it.

LC: But that’s impressive!

IK: Yeah, but also at that point I didn’t understand what she was writing about a lot of the time [laughs]. I also paint and draw so I ended up going into college for art originally and then I realized that I liked poetry a lot more than I liked sculpture. I was better at it, so that was pretty much it. I read poetry a lot in high school and got grand delusions.

LC: So, do you write poetry inspired by visual arts? Or does it impact your work?

IK: Sometimes, I’d say it impacts my work. Most of my writing is more inspired by fiction than by poetry. I am inspired by poets, too. My work is definitely inspired by weird fantasy fiction and also magical realism a lot.

LC: What topics do you most enjoy writing about?

IK: I enjoy writing about, at least at the moment, about interpersonal relationships, my family and their weird behaviors, and I’ve been writing a lot about consumerism and the act of consumption recently. I’ve kind of become disillusioned by society.

LC: A little postmodern?

IK: A little too postmodern [laughs].

LC: And what is your favorite place that you’ve found in Charleston since moving here?

IK: My favorite place in the area so far is probably either Magnolia’s Audubon Swamp Garden or the Cypress Gardens. I find the forests and swamp gardens around here really beautiful. There are a lot of amazing birds and plants that you just don’t see up in Ohio. And every time my family visits, my dad insists on trying to find an alligator. The first time he visited Charleston, he spent a good couple of hours in the Audubon Swamp Garden calling out, “Here, gator, gator!” to any alligators he could find, trying to get a picture of them. At one point, a gator actually rushed toward him on the path. It was just a baby, but still. It was a whole experience.

LC: What did you do during your time between undergrad and starting the MFA?

IK: I worked a lot of retail, but the big thing I did was I worked at a newspaper. I had a background in professional writing like journalism, sort of copy-writing a mixture of that, so I worked at a newspaper as the crime reporter.

LC: [At this point I audibly gasped and wondered how many more questions I could ask about this most fascinating of jobs before Ivy would remind me this interview is supposed to be about her poetry.]

IK: This was in a small town. I would go to court every day and I would basically watch the court proceedings and take notes on them. It was mostly drug crimes or petty theft or petty robbery. It was just high stress. Not to say that poetry isn’t high stress, but it’s a different kind of stress.

LC: [I then spent a long time asking Ivy about the craziest crimes she’d reported on. Eventually, I did get back to poetry.]  What’s the most high stress part of writing poetry?

IK: You just go into it with an idea. Like with a book you can kind of plot it out, this is my climax, these are my characters, with a poem I’m like, okay I only have an idea. You go into it with this idea and you don’t know how well received it will be. I feel like I also scrap a lot of my poetry like I keep a notebook and I have so many lines and poems that I write that never end up seen by human eyes because they’re just bad, or they don’t fit anywhere.

LC: And what have you learned so far in the MFA?

IK: I feel like I’ve learned to have a more critical eye on my poetry to figure out what things would be well received, what things are working and what things aren’t working. I’ve also, it’s been an opportunity to see kind of what poets are doing right now through what we’re reading and through the other people in the class, seeing what kind of poetry they’re writing which is something that I didn’t get so much when I was on my own. I’ve also definitely learned not to start a poem with “I.”

LC: What are you reading right now?

IK: I am reading Marie Brennan, well, technically, I’m listening to it as an audiobook, “Turning Darkness Into Light,” which is a delightful alternate history where dragons exist. It’s very much based on our world and the social questions raised about our purpose in the world in the presence of dragons.

In April 2019, two first-year MFA students–Dakota Reed and Rosie Kopman–traveled with Prof. Bret Lott to Bahrain to meet their University of Bahrain creative writing students. During the week, they held workshops, gave readings, toured, feasted, and learned about Bahrain’s history and culture.

Dakota Reed (MFA poetry ’20) with camel.

Dakota Reed

To be granted access into someone’s world is an incredible privilege, and one we, as creative writing mentors, didn’t take lightly. The students at the University of Bahrain not only physically allowed us into their school and classrooms, but also into their lives. As early as the first few weekly Skype sessions, students were sharing some of their most personal moments through their writing. They were vulnerable and unabashed. We connected over experiences of heartbreak, grief, insecurity, and loss. Flash fiction and ghazals unspooled stories of feeling alone, or different, or out of place. Creative essays celebrated moments of goodness, childhood memories. Despite being thousands of miles apart, we found such solid common ground to walk upon. We quickly discovered we were all so much more similar than we could have previously imagined.

Within the program were two separate classes: poetry and fiction, each pulling a couple lesson plans from the other so that the students had the chance to write a bit of both. They had one creative nonfiction session as well, and all wrote tremendously both within and outside of their individual concentrations and comfort zones. It was especially wonderful to watch the students surprise themselves with their own writing and truly feel proud of their work.

The opportunity to be flown out to Bahrain to meet our students was unparalleled. The country itself was beautiful, the people even lovelier. Our guides from the embassy worked hard to make the trip feel special. We observed traditional textile weaving and visited the Royal Camel farm. We tasted Bahraini produce and juices at a farmers’ market and strolled through the lush botanical garden in which it was held. All the food we ate during our time there was incredible, ranging from chicken liver for breakfast to lamb biryani for dinner. Being able to share meals with the students who we had spent the past several months getting to know from afar was a feeling much like coming home.

Before traveling to Bahrain, we compiled our students’ work into an anthology of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including two original works by each student. Presenting them with these books of their words, ideas, and thoughts was a really special moment—their pride and excitement was palpable, as was ours. Two readings were held, one at the university and one at an art space in town, where we and the students all had the chance to read our work to an audience. Watching other people listen to and react to the work our students had put so much energy into made for a wonderful and heart-swelling evening, one that we will certainly not forget.

We are so thankful to everyone involved in the facilitation of this program, as it functioned as a fantastic bridge between cultures. The entire experience was met by all the students, professors, and embassy ambassadors with such love, openness, and an eagerness to learn and connect. We feel incredibly lucky to have been so wholly welcomed into Bahrain, for the chance to teach what we’re passionate about, and for the new friendships we will always cherish.

Congratulations to Professor Anthony Varallo whose novel The Lines was published this month by the University of Iowa Press.

Set in the summer of 1979, when America was running out of gas, The Lines tells the story of a family of four—the mother, the father, the girl, and the boy—in the first months of a marital separation. Through alternating perspectives, we follow the family as they explore new territory, new living arrangements, and new complications. The mother returns to school. The father moves into an apartment. The girl squares off with her mother, while the boy struggles to make sense of the world. The Lines explores the way we are all tied to one another, and how all experience offers the possibility of love and connection as much as loss and change.

Read more at the Charleston City Paper: “CofC professor’s debut novel is rooted in a 1979 national crisis.”