Making or building anything from scratch is hard. In academia, it can be almost impossible.
What’s happened over the past 15-plus years on the Southampton campus of Stony Brook University has proven it’s not.
Since 2007, Stony Brook has offered an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature through the university’s Lichtenstein Center for the Arts, and it has been a great success, launching many talented fiction and nonfiction writers, poets, memoirists and more into the careers of their dreams.
Stony Brook’s MFA in Creative Writing has been the flagship program of the Lichtenstein Center, which was formerly known as Southampton Arts. It was renamed in 2022 after philanthropist Dorothy Lichtenstein, who had been supporting the Southampton Arts program since the early 2000s.
The MFA in Creative Writing is the brainchild of Robert Reeves, the Lichtenstein Center’s founder, and Carla Caglioti, assistant dean.
Reeves was hired by Stony Brook President Shirley Strum Kenny in 2006, when Stony Brook acquired Southampton College from Long Island University, and they both shared a vision and goal to strengthen the arts programs at the university, using the former Southampton College campus as the main place to do that. Reeves immediately hired Caglioti to work with him on that endeavor.
Reeves said he knew at that time that building the program essentially from the ground up would be hard, but said he and Caglioti proceeded with a few key principles in mind.
“When I started at Southampton, we had nothing,” he said. “We built all of this from scratch. My initial judgment was that the arts, and the future of creative arts, was not to be housed in traditional academic programs.”
Housing the program within the preexisting English Department would not work, he said. He knew that an “entrepreneurial” approach would be necessary to succeed. “In universities, when really good ideas die is when you ask for money,” he said, pointing out that raising their own money would be key as well.
That’s where Lichtenstein came in.
Her endowment, which Reeves described as “a very interesting and effective use of philanthropy,” provided seed money for most of the programs, including the MFA in Film, MFA in Television Writing and more. The innovative approach, Reeves said, has allowed the programs to be sustainable.
The MFA in Creative Writing is geared toward writers who “seek to create original work primarily in fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction,” according to the program’s mission statement. Guidance in the program is described as being “friendly, rigorous, professionally useful and hands-on.”
That’s exactly the experience Genevieve Sly Crane said she had.
Crane earned her MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from Stony Brook Southampton in 2013, after earning her undergraduate degree from the University of Massachusetts. She is now the director of Stony Brook’s BFA in Creative Writing, working mainly with undergraduates on the main campus.
She speaks glowingly of her time in the MFA program. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that it made my career,” she said, pointing out that she used the program to work on what would become her first novel, “Sorority,” which earned a Publisher’s Weekly starred review. “I can’t speak for other MFA programs, but the size of the classes at that time and the caliber of the faculty is really what helped me get my foot in the door. They didn’t give up on me even when I was giving up on me.”
Crane said that she had the impression that many other MFA programs were not or would not be as friendly to writers as Southampton’s program is. “At other universities, the vibe you get is that they pride themselves on rigor, but, of course, you should pride yourself on rigor,” she explained. “The subtext is, we are punishing with our rigor, and we will deconstruct your identity as a writer and rebuild you as we think you should be. I don’t think I ever had that feeling at Southampton, not once.”
Another aspect of the MFA that sets it apart from similar graduate programs is the emphasis on building versatility and giving students exposure to different genres of writing, rather than honing in on one specific genre or writing craft exclusively.
That methodology is based in a belief that writing outside of a student’s chosen genre can and will benefit them in the long run. Aside from course offerings in fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry, the MFA program also offers classes in young adult novel writing, experimental fiction, and writing on location.
The faculty members are all working writers themselves, many of whom have excelled in multiple genres.
Emma Walton Hamilton is an award-winning children’s author, editor and producer, and a faculty member of the MFA program. She also directs both the Southampton Children’s Literature Fellows program and the Young Artists and Writers Project, or YAWP. She said the fact that faculty members are all actively engaged in their own creative pursuits is part of what makes the program special.
“None of us are just teachers,” she said. “We are all engaged in pursuing our various art forms ourselves, so we have a visceral understanding of what it means to write, to navigate the publishing industry, to wrestle with the challenges of being a creative person in a world that sometimes feels like it doesn’t value creativity.
“Our students can learn from our experiences as much as from our teaching,” she continued. “And this also means the program continues to adapt and grow with the evolution of the marketplace and the changing circumstances of our world. It’s not static, it’s living and breathing alongside us.”
Walton Hamilton said the program has grown and changed “tremendously” in the 15 years she has been teaching there.
“From one year to the next, I have seen emphasis shift, faculty come and go, people assume different roles and/or explore different creative strategies,” she said. “This can sometimes be challenging, in terms of maintaining consistency or fulfilling expectations, but it is never boring. Ultimately, it rewards flexibility, creativity, and initiative, which are probably among the most important life skills there are.”
One of the core tenets of the MFA in Creative Writing, which has been consistent from the start, is that the work created by the students is just as important as the degree itself, and the many writers who have graduated and gone on to become successful in the publishing industry is perhaps the best advertisement for the program.
Flexibility is a key component of the MFA program as well, and has allowed for diversity in terms of the age and lifestyles of the students. There are both recent college graduates and post-career professionals, as well as people working in different industries but seeking to make a transition to creative writing. Some students combine coursework with workshops offered at Stony Brook’s Manhattan campus, and many of the students also enroll in the popular Southampton Writers Conference, offered in the summer.
The versatility and options for customization are key attractive features of the program, and with so many highly talented and successful writers as teachers, it’s easy to see why the program has been so popular.
Cailin Riley on Jan 10, 2024