>> Medium close up slate take 1.
>> Do it further away one more time.
>> Medium closeup slate take 1.
>> Awesome, thanks.
And whenever you are -- [music].
>> Okay, great.
>> My awareness of the program started in about 85.
I'd been in Amarillo working as a groundsman in an apartment complex.
And I was at a really seedy party in Amarillo,
Texas when there was a People Magazine on the table.
And in there there was this great picture of Raymond Carver and Jay McInerney.
And this is right after Bright Lights, Big City had come out.
If this was a movie you would see -- you know these lights would converge
and all the debauchery would die down, I'd think I've got an idea.
I'm going to Syracuse.
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>> At the beginning of the program's existence there was a sense that the fact
that he started the program wanted to keep it small, have really good faculty
who enjoyed teaching and were dedicated to being good writers and good teachers.
>> I've really enjoyed being at Syracuse.
It's become home to me in part because my colleagues feels like family.
But also because we get such great students.
They keep me on my toes.
>> Well, when I was a student I worked principally with Hayden Carruth who I took
as a mentor whether he would have me or not.
And I worked with Phillip Booth who's been here,
who's one of the founding teachers in the program as well.
Toby Booth came here and Ray Carver came here as teachers when I was a student here.
I didn't take places with them, but I played poker with them.
[Laughter] That was a learning experience.
Well, Ray was a very unassuming person.
He was just a decent, attentive, funny, kind man.
I will tell you that at the poker table he liked to play a lot of really strange games
where you would buy extra cards and have weird wild cards.
And he won all the time.
So he knew the odds in these games better than anybody.
I loved Ray.
He was a sweet man.
>> I came here as a teacher in 93, so it was shortly after Mary Karr came here.
>> It's a very scrappy kind of program.
I think we figured out at one point
that Toby didn't finish high school, I didn't finish high school.
I don't think Ray finish high school.
Chris Kennedy [phonetic] didn't finish high school.
It's actually kind of a blue collar program.
We really just look at the work.
We don't really study academic records.
So that might mean, you know, you have a student from Harvard and a student from Brown
and a guy who's been working in the train yards, has been writing short stories at home
in his spare time, and a woman
who is a practicing Buddhist who has been on the monastery.
I mean you get a very wide range of students.
If you go to someplace like Columbia where it costs $50,000 a year to go,
and there are 130 students and two scholarship programs, you get a lot of rich kids.
And it's just a much more generic cross-section.
>> One of the jobs of the program was to enable people
from different say disparate programs to come to the program.
So, for example, when I got in here I was broke,
had a kind of old truck that didn't run very well.
Had never been to grad school.
Didn't have an English degree even.
I had a geophysics degree.
But because the way the program was set up in terms
of their financial awards I could come here right away even though I didn't have any money.
>> Do it again.
>> Goddamn it, what the fuck.
>> Exactly.
>> I was a hick from north Florida.
My mom was a secretary.
My dad was a car salesman.
I never knew an artist in my life.
And I went up there and met George Saunders and Arthur Flowers and Mary Karr and Mary Caponegro
and Brooks Haxton, people who'd lived their whole lives as writers and artists.
>> Last year we got in fiction 520 applications for six spots.
And by the time you get to the top six they are so not only talented,
but they're talented in six unique flavors.
You know you can feel all the lives that they've lived on the page.
And it's just an amazing thing.
So at that point what are you teaching them really?
Are you teaching them to write?
No, they figured that out years ago.
What you're really doing is you're kind of bringing them in, trying to get some sense
of who they are, and then trying to get them to have the talent
for having their particular talent.
So that's something entirely different than teaching someone to write,
and we make that pretty clear, that we're not really there to get them a career.
We may or may not.
We're there to give them the opportunity to do this almost impossible thing.
And then they go and do it which is pretty cool.
>> I've never once gotten the feeling that anyone was trying to get my work to be something
that wasn't already when I came in.
It's more of a refining and a bettering of your own work.
>> We don't want it to be a matter of who can pay.
We wanted it to be a matter of who's the best.
So we will pay them to give us the opportunity to help them become the best.
>> I wouldn't have been able to do the program without the funding.
A piece of really good advice that I got as an undergrad was not to get $100,000 in debt
over a writing degree because there's just no way
that anything I really want to do is going to pay that off.
And then you'd have to do something crazy like go
to law school afterwards or get a job and not write.
>> If you can fix your eye on the strangest, craziest,
most beautiful aspiration you can imagine try it.
Will it sell?
I don't care.
Just try it.
It certainly won't sell if you're only half way in the game.
>> Don't be worried about whether you're going to publish something.
Worry about if you're going to write something that's good enough to publish.
>> We're able to say, yeah, you can go to this program,
they'll bring in agents, they'll bring in publishers.
We don't really do that.
Occasionally but not very often.
>> Your head is not in the agent game.
You're not already thinking about once this thing is done
where am I going to get it published?
We're totally focused on process.
>> It borders on a spiritual pursuit to say to a young person what does beauty look like to you?
What does truth look like to you?
What do you do in the face of obstacles
when you write a foreign page book and it turns out to stink?
What do you have in you that allows you to rally?
Those are really cool things to do.
>> Our students are so good that we are constantly growing just to try
to stay one step ahead of them, to appear like we're one step ahead of them.
When you're getting 500 applicants a year and choosing six you only get the best.
>> Do it again real quick, real quick, real quick.
Now. [Background Conversation]
>> It's my upbringing, I'm sorry.
>> I went to a college that really left the students.
I really felt abandoned by the structure of the courses, by the faculty.
It was such a new and strange thing to arrive at a place that not only did you know the names
of the faculty and they talked to you like human beings on a regular basis,
but they also nurtured your work.
>> I've had stories that I know that I never could have ever even written without being
in this atmosphere and environment that really marked a change in how I viewed my own writing
and the types of things of myself that I could put in my work
and what I was okay with and what I wasn't.
For me to be more vulnerable in my work and to present it
and have other people respond to it is a breakthrough.
>> The gentle scrutiny of my teachers.
Everybody insisted that I do my best work.
I mean not like in words, but that's what I felt.
>> The amount that they actually care about the students' work I mean I guess it was surprising
to me because from what I've heard like when you get up there some of them are as successful
as they are you don't have to be a good teacher to be a creative writing professor.
It seems like every single professor on poetry and fiction,
both sides that I've taken classes with, they are.
So they're like these great writers on top of being great teachers.
>> I had a family there, I mean, and it was
so not hierarchical the way so many writing programs can be.
>> Arthur I remember him taking me out the first week I was there
to crappy Mexican food on Erie Boulevard.
It was really bad, don't go there.
And just wondering what kind of a world I had just stepped into where my professors sat
across from me, feeding me tortilla chips.
Not literally feeding.
We actually fed each other.
>> We have coffee hours at Sarah Harwell's house on Friday afternoons a few times in the semester
to just give people a place to sit around talk to each other outside
of a classroom, outside of a bar situation.
Just talk about their experiences why
they're here.
Faculty talking about their trajectory in terms of their own writing lives.
People tend to feel reliant on each other in a good way and supportive of each other.
>> I went to the program partly because of Mary Karr, and it all changed my life.
I became a writer.
I also got a whole new wardrobe, and I got a new boyfriend.
And Mary Karr actually got me the boyfriend.
So it was -- no, actually all the wardrobe.
Mary Karr said you can't wear anymore hats.
>> You have to want to teach to work here.
A lot of creative writing programs they just hire like the next most famous person.
It's just a very teaching oriented place.
We also have a lot of difference in the kinds of writers who work here.
Brooks Haxton knows Greek and Latin.
Michael Burkard is very surrealistic, does a lot of things with visual art.
I write autobiographically, some people never would.
Brian Evenson is a very different kind of writer than Dana Spiotta.
They were all different writers than Tobias Wolff.
>> I think what's sort of gotten into [inaudible] is a kind of affable humility like,
wow, this is a hard thing we're doing.
Let's try to help each other.
But mostly just keep in mind that it's mysterious.
>> When readers come to read at the Raymond Carver reading series for instance,
afterwards everybody goes to this restaurant we pre-arranged.
I've been to a lot of universities where you go to an event like that you're at a table
with all the faculty and the students were over there.
Here usually the person sits there and people get up and come and sit and visit.
It's not these little precious students who are being presented to the famous writer.
It's must more collegial.
>> I think that our students get a stronger sense of what the writing life is like from
that as well as getting a sense of what a particular writer is doing.
>> The reading series is attached to a class, an undergraduate class.
And there's always a kid at the end of the semester who comes up to one of their TAs
and says, you know, this class it changed my life, I'd never read a book before.
They have to read contemporary poetry, they have to read contemporary fiction,
and they don't have any access to that in any other place.
And then they actually meet the person, and they can ask them questions.
Because poetry's hard for kids.
So they can say, well, why did you do this?
And they get to see that there's a real, live human being behind the poetry
or behind the fiction who thinks about their choices,
who agonizes, who is a human just like them.
Some of them are inspired to write, some of them are inspired to read more.
>> The reading series inspires me.
I always feel like I want to go home and write after I go to a reading.
It adds fuel, you know.
>> They have done well I think.
One administration to the next at hiring young writers who become big.
Toby Wolff had one small book of short stories when they hired him here.
Ray had only one book, Ray Carver.
I had one slender book of poems when they hired me here.
Dana Spiotta who we just hired has just written a very big for this year.
George Saunders didn't have a book.
He had a book in press, and he'd had a piece in the Atlantic and some small literary magazines.
Shirley Jackson went here, Joyce Carol Oates, William Safire, Donald Justice,
Phillip Booth, Hayden Carruth, Heather McHugh.
It's just a big lineup.
And, of course, more recently Ray Carver and Tobias Wolff and Mary Gaitskill, Junot Diaz.
I mean the people who are winning Pulitzers are people who have taught here.
>> And with students the same thing.
They come here just as they're maybe starting to work on something
that becomes a really dynamic piece of fiction or poetry collection.
>> If you look at the alumni you look at Sal Plascencia, Maile Chapman, Jeff Parker,
Courtney Queeney, E.C. Osondu, just like a rogues gallery of every writer
that we will be talking about ten years from now in a way that we talk
about Franzen and Eugenides and Zadie Smith.
>> Cheryl Strayed memoirs was my student is in Oprah's book club ths month and is number two
on the Times best seller list, soon to be number one.
Keith Gessen founded one of the -- probably the pre-eminent literary magazine in the country.
Tryfon Tolides won the National Poetry Series.
Courtney Queeney had a book from Random House.
Young Phil LaMarche a novel called American Youth.
Somebody asked me how do I know this is the best place?
Because our students percentage-wise out publish everybody else.
They just publish better books.
They last longer.
I think it's a better place to get educated to be a writer.
What I would like to see is us to have a funded reading series
which we're the only major creative writing program in the country that's unfunded.
>> I wish that this program lasted ten years and not three.
[Laughter] I'm like already sad about graduating,
and I still have another two years left.
>> I like to compare it to the family you wished you would have.
I told my husband before we got married that I would never be happier
than the three years I was at Syracuse.
I would always care about writing and a writing community more
than I would care about my relationship with him.
>> You walk out of there three years later a completely different being
than what you were when you walked in.
I published a couple books with some independent presses.
Whatever I am now I owe it all to that.
>> I actually also said I think at graduation I was very emotional, and it was very embarrassing
that Syracuse didn't just teach me how to be a writer, it taught me how to be a person.
>> I hear it from other people that they are so tired of teaching
that they just can't wait to retire.
You're going to have to drag me out kicking and screaming.
>> Going to Syracuse was the most important thing that ever happened to me.
>> I love it here at Syracuse.
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