Just Write

Best-selling books and award-winning screenplays are high-profile results of UC Davis’ creative writing program, which gives students encouragement, inspiration and time to just write.

By Robert Celaschi

Like many young writers, Chris Markus, M.A. ’96, worried that his ideas were not grave enough. While he was in the creative writing graduate program at UC Davis, though, one of his professors literally gave him a permission slip to lighten up.

“I still have it in a frame,” says Markus. “It says ‘Permission to be a comic writer — Jack Hicks,’ and the date. It was great, and it worked.”

With that encouragement, he began teaming up with classmate Steve McFeely, M.A. ’96, and eventually headed to Hollywood. The two picked up an Emmy in 2005 for their television screenplay The Life and Death of Peter Sellers and went on to join the scriptwriting team for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

Likewise, Jodi Angel, ’01, M.A. ’03, found the creative writing program a springboard to professional success. Her first book of short stories, The History of Vegas, grew out of her master’s thesis. Other alumni are now running creative writing programs elsewhere.

Each year 13 or 14 students join the two-year master’s degree program at UC Davis. But while many dream of landing a deal, that isn’t what the creative writing program is all about.

“This is not an M.B.A. or a law degree. What you are buying is time and space for yourself, space for your art and a community of like-minded people,” says Pam Houston, program director and prize-winning author of Cowboys Are My Weakness and Sighthound. “We tell people who are thinking of enrolling that this degree will not give you anything except two years to write a book.”

For many writers, that’s exactly what they need. Day-to-day obligations often push writing to the back burner.

Markus was a few years out of college when he enrolled in the program in 1994.

“I was a waiter and generally feeling like if I didn’t throw out a lifeline I could slide into my 50s without having published anything,” he says. “When you are out in the real world living your real life—or not living it—if you write half a paragraph you think ‘I’m a writer.’ Because you know the guy who works the table next to you did not write a paragraph.”

But the crucial catalyst is spending that time among like-minded people.

“There is something about the shared angst,” said McFeely. “Half the thing I took away from Davis was the community and camaraderie.”

Markus was surprised at how seriously everyone in the program took writing—“and how seriously they took me.” UC Davis made him believe that writing was not just self-indulgence and inspired him to press on.

“Had I had the opportunity to write on my own, I probably wouldn’t have done it,” he says.

Can self-expression really be taught?

“I think you can talk about all the elements, about what makes writing powerful and effective,” says Houston. “You can talk about structure, form, rhythm and cadence, and beginnings and endings.”
That doesn’t mean all the faculty members have identical visions, however.

“There are times when the students are driven crazy by how different our approaches are,” she says with a laugh. “I think that’s great. We’re giving them a lot of choices.”

For Jack Hicks, who ran the program in the 1980s and again from 1992 through 2001, the basics are constant.

“The equipment changes and the emphasis changes, but for a fiction writer you are dealing with the same things—character, voice, narrative—whether you organize them on a piece of parchment or a typewriter carriage or a computer screen,” he says.

Yet there’s also what Houston calls the “X factor.”

“You can call it talent or facility or agility of language. Some are not going to get that no matter what you put in front of them,” she says.

Jodi Angel, who is now a guest lecturer at Davis, put it this way: “I was once told you can tell anyone how to make a jump shot, but you can’t teach them to be Michael Jordan.”

For Angel, feedback from writing workshops helped her gain a better understanding of her own strengths, weaknesses and personal style.

For Markus, there was a chance to see whose work habits paid off.

For McFeely, it helped when faculty members could attach names and descriptions to techniques he was trying.

All appreciated being pushed to deliver.

“Part of what needs to happen in a creative writing program is that you have to break the preciousness of people who have been writing. You have to crack their shell,” says Markus.
Students knew they had to provide material, not excuses.

“There wasn’t a lot of tolerance for bull,” says McFeely.

At the same time, those with talent found encouragement.

“I can tell you right now that we would not be here if it were not for Jack Hicks,” said Markus, referring to the instructor who freed him to explore the lighter side of writing.

It was also Hicks who spotted an undergraduate in the late 1990s who stood out in his fiction class. The student was Tony Swofford ’99. With Hicks’ encouragement Swofford went on to develop the best-selling memoir Jarhead, based on his experiences as a marine sharpshooter in the first Gulf War. The book has sold 350,000 copies to date and been the subject of a major feature film.

The creative writing program was established in the 1970s by a quartet of heavy hitters: poet Karl Shapiro, winner of a Pulitzer Prize; novelist and screenwriter Diane Johnson, author of Le Divorce and Le Mariage; poet Sandra Gilbert, former president of the Modern Language Association; and Elliot Gilbert, editor of the California Quarterly.

Over time the quality of the program grew with the addition of such faculty as Gary Snyder, the department’s second Pulitzer Prize winning poet.

When Houston took over, one of her innovations was to require students to take at least one writing workshop outside their genre, mixing the poets with the fiction writers.

“That came from my own regret about not taking poetry classes when I was a grad student. I was just too intimidated,” Houston says.

Some students leave the program with a finished book, or something close to it. But the goal is to take risks, sometimes fail, and always learn.

The program continues to evolve. In addition to Houston, the department has hired two fiction writers and two poets. Several of the new additions have what she calls an experimental edge.

“They are in tune with what is being published in some of the more radical places. I don’t believe that we are moving entirely in that direction, but we are more balanced now in terms of the fiction writers,” she says.

She cites Lynn Freed as more traditional, Lucy Corin as more edgy and Houston herself as somewhere in the middle. Likewise, poet Joe Wenderoth is more traditional and Joshua Clover less so, but “Joe and Joshua are both rock stars in their own right.”

Exploring the gray area between fiction and poetry, plus a low ratio of students to faculty, helps avoid “that factory feeling that some programs have now,” she says.

Last year another element was added: an annual five-day workshop at Tomales Bay. It offers a chance for some second-year students to meet editors and agents, listen to speakers and mix with about 45 writers outside the graduate program.

“Tomales Bay—I just get a smile on my face thinking about it,” says Houston. “It’s the time when we say to the grad students ‘Take your work to someone entirely different from us.’ It’s a completely different community.”

The Tomales Bay workshops got a financial boost in 2005 from best-selling author John Lescroart. While not an alum, he sits on the UC Davis Foundation board of trustees.

“I wound up joining the trustees, and then I spent about six months waiting for someone to tell me what I was supposed to do,” Lescroart recalls. He finally decided to take the initiative.

Half of his $50,000 gift went toward the Tomales Bay workshops and half to start an annual $5,000 prize for the best work of fiction by a student or alum of the on-campus program.

“That’s what really changed my life—winning an award,” he says.

All of this has made Davis a sought-after program. About 100 people typically apply for the 13 or 14 slots available each year, with about a 2-to-1 ratio of fiction writers to poets.

“It’s getting more and more competitive. They call us the best-kept secret in the West these days in the chat rooms,” Houston says. “It’s a nice position to hear people say ‘Hey, have you heard what’s going on at Davis?’ instead of resting on its reputation.”

On Houston’s wish list for the future is to give some students a third year. The first year is experimentation, the second is for writing a thesis, which can be a novel, a full-length play, a collection of poems or other book-length project.

A three-year program would provide time to teach students how to sell themselves and their writing. “You would get more finished products that are salable,” Markus said.

But the real test of a graduate program, says Hicks, is the success of its graduates. On that score, the creative writing program is already hitting the mark.

Robert Celaschi is a freelance writer based in Sacramento.