September 23, 2024

This was the image—a mise-en-scène of the writer’s life—that advertised the Bennington Writing Seminars at its founding in 1994. Inside the promotional brochure, the MFA program was characterized as “a community of kindred spirits and constructive counsel” that would honor “the solitary nature of reading and writing and the collaborative voices of education.”

Its founder, the poet Liam Rector, described it as “the vortex.” The pull is undeniable as the program celebrates its 30th anniversary. “There’s something so seductive about Bennington,” said Taymour Soomro, author of Other Names for Love, who joined the faculty as a fiction teacher in 2022. Driving up the driveway to campus, it is as if the road itself disappears behind you. “You lose all sense of time. The world falls away,” he said. “It’s like nothing else exists.”

On an evening in June, Guillermo Rebollo-Gil MFA ’22 chatted with Eugenie Dalland MFA ’25 outside the Commons. It was midway through the summer residency, and students and faculty mingled on the patio, discussing that week’s readings and lectures as the shadows on the lawn grew longer in the slanted light. Rebollo-Gil, a residency volunteer from Puerto Rico, who studied with Craig Morgan Teicher, Brian Blanchfield, Carmen Giménez, and Jennifer Chang, recently sold the manuscript that came out of his MFA thesis, his first book of poetry in English, and he was considering its title, Hard Aspects. Dalland, a writer who lives in Kingston, New York, nodded in approval.

Rebollo-Gil came to Bennington hoping to get out of a creative rut. After sixteen books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, he felt stuck. Teicher helped him hone in on his new subjects—parenthood and masculinity—and working in English felt like discovering a new part of himself. “There are certain things I can write now in English that I wasn’t touching on in Spanish,” Rebollo-Gil said. “Being welcomed by all these writers gave me a sense of grounding in the language.”

One of the first low-residency creative writing programs in the country, the Seminars celebrated their 30th anniversary this year with events at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference in Kansas City in February and record interest from prospective students. The number of applicants was up 200 percent during the last round of admissions.

The MFA program, which continues Bennington’s long literary history, grew out of the Bennington Writing Workshops, a month-long summer program established in 1977, whose participants included John Ashbery, Grace Paley, Donald Barthelme, John Cheever, and John Irving, among others. Rector served as founding director of the Seminars until his death in 2007. Sven Birkerts, the essayist and literary critic who had been a member of the faculty since the program’s inception, took over as director until 2017, when he was succeeded by the program’s current executive director, the poet Mark Wunderlich.

Hugh Ryan, the author of When Brooklyn Was Queer, graduated from the Seminars in 2009 and still fondly recalls the “summer camp vibe” as a student. “It felt like you were being inducted into something,” he said. The writer Tom Bissell, who taught one of Ryan’s workshops, brought his first draft of a story published by The New Yorker to illustrate “the flaw and the fix.” Ryan still marvels at Bissell’s readiness to show students such an unfinished piece, a kind of pedagogic vulnerability Ryan has since emulated in his own teaching. “He really modeled how to be with my students,” said Ryan, who came back to Bennington after graduation as an alumni fellow and later to teach nonfiction.

The program’s tagline—Read 100 books. Write one.—highlights its emphasis on deep and engaged reading and the idea that writing is always a conversation with other writing. In their third term, students submit a 15-page critical essay, instead of the lecture they once gave in the graduating term. But the core pedagogic principles of the program remain unchanged from the original description in the promotional brochure: “In keeping with Bennington’s progressive tradition, the Seminars are largely self-structured. Students, in concert with teachers, form their own reading list and course of study, submitting original work—fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—for critique at regular intervals throughout the term. Students also submit ongoing nonfiction responses to the books they are reading.”

Wunderlich noted dramatic shifts in the culture over the past thirty years and how those shifts—along with changing needs and expectations from students—have resulted in some dramatic changes to the program. Many new faculty have been added, and recent years have seen the departure of a number of faculty, some of whom had been with the program since its inception.

“As the conversation about literature in America shifts, we need to change with it,” he said, adding that the administration has worked hard to recruit new faculty to bring a diversity of voices and approaches. “We need to continually have an eye toward our own reinvention while holding to the core values of how we go about instructing people.”

At the heart of the program, then as now, are the packets: the epistolary exchanges between the student and their assigned faculty member. Once a month, the student sends a letter comprising creative writing as well as shorter analytical work, and in return, gets extensive written feedback.

Mara Naselli MFA ’13, an editor and nonfiction writer, calls it a perfect model. “The correspondence is fantastic,” she said. “Each one of my instructors were very different. My private project was to write for them, so I was doing different things,” said Naselli, who was taught by Wyatt Mason, Dinah Lenney, Phillip Lopate, and Birkerts. “Going into this intense correspondence, generating a ton of material in a month, and doing the annotations, which I loved, was like sharpening the knife,” she said. “I was constantly practicing; understanding my way around different registers, different forms, different narrative positions; and collecting all these tools.”

Naselli, who won a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Foundation Award and who came back in 2024 to teach a seminar on essay writing, calls her time at Bennington “the best two years of my life.” The correspondence between teacher and student is a deep and dedicated conversation, and the intensity and care with which students work is read by faculty is unmatched, said Wunderlich. “Imagine getting a letter about your work from one of your favorite writers.”

Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars Megan Culhane Galbraith MFA ’15, recalls the importance of the generous feedback she received as a student and how she found her subject and form with the help of her teachers, who included Peter Trachtenberg, Joan Wickersham, and Benjamin Anastas. A decade later, she still refers to a large notebook containing her reading lists and the letters and notes from faculty. “I realized there was a thread,” she said. “What I try to tell students is...don’t worry. It’ll all come together.”

Every six months, students come to campus for a ten-day residency, an intense period of readings, lectures, workshops and conversations. Students and faculty are housed on campus and dine together in the Commons.

“The campus has a certain energy,” said Etan Kerr-Finell MFA ’23, recalling bonfires at The End of the World and the loveliness of fireflies during nighttime walks across campus. Kerr-Finell, who studied with Giménez, Teicher, Monica Ferrell, and Michael Dumanis, has kept in touch with fellow students from the program through WhatsApp groups and in-person meetups in the Hudson Valley, events he helps organize. Recently, the Kingston-based poet started a support group that meets bimonthly on Zoom to work on submissions for publications, contests, residencies, and grants. He considers a writer’s life deeply communal and deeply solitary at the same time. “You need to be with other writers. That’s critical,” he said. “Even if the hard work of it is you moving words around on the page.”

The writer Rebecca Makkai, who recently joined the faculty, said the Seminars has one of the best reputations among low-residency programs, and she has been impressed with the dedication of the students and the quality of their work. “I always say to my students: It’s half-time, not half-assed,” she said. “And everyone here seems to really understand that.”

Moriel Rothman Zecher MFA ’21 had already written two novels when he applied to study poetry, a genre he wasn’t familiar with. During his time at Bennington he studied with Teicher, Chang, Giménez, and April Bernard and found the workshops “a very sweet and generous space,” a common appraisal among students. “It’s a space to take reading seriously, to take writing seriously,” said Zecher, who returned to campus this summer as a fiction teacher.

He originally applied to Bennington because he wanted to pursue a low-residency MFA as it is “a truer-to-life model of what the writer’s life looks like. You have to weave it into the life you already live,” he said. “Bennington felt like a good home for me as someone who was already shaping my life around writing.”

Diana Ruzova MFA ’23, who studied nonfiction with Chelsea Hodson, Jenny Boully, Eula Biss, and Trachtenberg, said she was “completely blown away” by the beauty of the campus and the conversations about writing when she arrived for her first residency. “I barely slept,” she said. “I spent the whole time walking around, trying to do everything. I went all in.” Ruzova credits Bennington with teaching her a rigorous approach to reading and writing as well as giving her the confidence to call herself an artist. She also found the “community of kindred spirits and constructive counsel” that Rector had originally envisioned. “The education, the degree, the diploma is one thing. But it’s really about these lifelong friends and the community of friends you build,” she said. “You can’t make art in a silo. You have to build a community together.”