Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction
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About the Program
Goucher College's limited-residency MFA in Creative Nonfiction allows you to complete most of the requirements off campus while developing your talents as a nonfiction writer under the nurturing supervision of a faculty mentor. The program can be completed in four semesters of work, with residencies of two weeks every summer and a long weekend every spring.
Everything begins with the August residency on our scenic Baltimore campus. For two weeks, you will be immersed in small, intense writing workshops along with craft lectures, panel discussions, and faculty and student readings. Sometimes affectionately referred to as "summer camp for writers," it is a time both exhausting and exhilarating, when you will shut out the world and concentrate on becoming the writer you've always wanted to be.
Off campus, you will complete a minimum of 50 pages of creative writing each semester and participate in online discussions of six to eight books of exemplary creative nonfiction. You will work with a different mentor each semester, receiving feedback online, by mail, and by phone, gaining the perspective of four accomplished writers over the course of two years.
The spring semester begins with a weekend mini-residency in late January, when you will meet with your mentor and his or her other assigned students for three days of workshops and one-on-one conferences.
In your second year, you will broaden your experience and understanding of writing and publishing by completing a 45-contact-hour internship at a literary journal, a commercial magazine, a recognized publishing house or literary agency, or with a published writer. You will also have the opportunity to travel to New York to meet editors and agents at such places as The New Yorker, Harper's, Paris Review, Esquire, Penguin USA, Houghton Mifflin, and the Creative Culture and ICM literary agencies.
The end goal is a 150-page manuscript of publishable quality, many of which have become the basis for a book.
MFA CNF News
| New Book Contracts Sherry Bosley's (2001) book Toepicks, Cadaver Dogs, and Sports with No Balls, just published by Wheat Field Press, placed No. 2 last week on Amazon's HOT new releases in the sports and humor category. Wheat Field Press is a new publishing venture launched last year by fellow MFA classmate Melaney Moisan. Chipmunkapublishing has just published Larry Franklin's (2003) book Cherry Blossoms & Barren Plains: A Woman's Journey From Mental Illness to a Prison Cell in ebook form. The British publisher of mental health books will issue the paperback within the next five months. You can access more information HERE Meredith May (2011) has won a Society of Professional Journalists Award for feature writing. The award was given for her narrative story "Olga's Girls" about an 83-year-old Sausalito, CA , woman who is eradicating girl slavery in Nepal by encouraging impoverished families to buy goats for livestock instead of selling their daughters. Brian Mockenhaupt (2010) has an article titled "The Doctor's War" in the October issue of Atlantic Monthly. You can read the story about doctors and the injured civilians in Afghanistan HERE |