Notes from the Director Dr. Ellie Wymard Director of the Master of Fine Arts program at Carlow University >>more about Dr. Wymard

From the Ireland Residency, June 2008

“Your faith in your writing will be pulled and tested in every way,” Niall Williams warned Carlow’s MFA students at the beginning of their residency  (June 14-24, 2008) in Carlow, Ireland. One of Ireland’s most respected novelists, Williams contends that  despair is a necessary part of the creative process, and writers need to develop strategies for defeating it. Returning to beloved literary classics like Great Expectations and listening to fine music renews Williams’ faith in the arts and rekindles his creativity.

During their 11-day residency in Carlow Ireland, students gathered inspiration, reassurance and advice from Ireland’s top writers. “Writers are in dialogue with writers who have gone before,” said Mary O’Donnell, esteemed poet, novelist and literary critic. Flannery O’Connor’s sense of surprise was an important influence on O’Donnell’s first collection of short stories. Claire Keegan, 2007 winner of the Rooney Award, also named O’Connor as an influence. For Carlo Gebler, at age thirteen, reading Camus’ The Stranger was an imaginative springboard.

In seminars, Michael Coady, Brian Leyden and Sean Hardie offered students solid advice about becoming stronger writers. Novelist and playwright Hardie names curiosity as key to creative writing. “All stories come from curiosity, and if you get blocked telling a story, then return to ‘once upon a time,’ to say this happened and then this happened. It’s a great way of getting unstuck.”

The nuts and bolts of writing were the focus of the workshops in fiction (Niall Williams and Carlo Gebler), poetry (Mary O’Donnell and Mark Roper) and creative nonfiction (Brian Leyden). Students appreciate that small workshop sessions allow mentors to give their work individual attention.

An excursion to Dublin on Bloomsday, June 16, led by David Butler, a Joyce scholar, is a highlight of every residency. After visiting Bray and Martello Tower, students followed in Leopold Bloom’s footsteps, and then visited Trinity College and the National Gallery to see the acclaimed exhibit on the works and life of William Butler Yeats. The evening ended at the Gate Theater to see The Weir.

The 11-day Ireland residency is a continuing conversation among students, mentors and invited speakers that goes beyond the classroom into restaurants and pubs. This immersion into Irish culture makes Carlow’s MFA hard to match.

—Dr. Ellie Wymard

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From July 2, 2007

Twenty-one happy MFA students have returned to the USA after spending two productive weeks studying with top Irish writers in Carlow, Ireland. One of these writers, Claire Keegan, is receiving rave reviews for her new collection of short stories, Walk the Blue Fields. Right now, she’s Ireland’s hottest young writer.

“Anne Enright is still pre-eminent as a stylist,” writes an Irish Times reviewer for The Gathering, a new novel by Enright, a mentor for the past three years. It will soon be available here from Random House.

Besides Enright, other mentors were Sean Hardie (fiction), Mary O’Donnell and Mark Roper (poetry), and Carlo Gébler (creative nonfiction). For the next five months, students will be working closely with them, long-distance.  Check our the rest of the website to see the entire schedule for our Irish residency.

Our Bloomsday trip was exceptional with Joycean scholar David Butler. On our way to Dublin, we stopped at Bray, the scene of the Christmas dinner in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The building is still standing where Joyce’s family lived before moving to northern Dublin. Martello Tower and Sandycove are at their best on Bloomsday (June 16) because of the townspeople who dress in the costume of Joyce’s day. After walking in some of Leopold Bloom’s footprints through Dublin, students visited the Book of Kells at Trinity College and Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ at the National Gallery.

That evening, we attended an elegant production of snippets from Joyce’s work, in Dalkey, a town where the young Joyce once taught at a boys’ school.

Returning to Carlow College, students were ready for another week of workshops, seminars and lectures. One highlight was Carlo Gébler’s “A to Z on the Practice of Being a Writer in the Early 21st Century,” a sharp, jaundiced and highly partisan account. Not for the faint-hearted. A is for agent: An agent never gets you work, Gébler counsels. You get your own work, and how well an agent does for you depends on how he/she is respected by the publisher.

A reading by Eavan Boland concluded the week. Standing in front of the 19th century stained glass windows of the new Brophy Library, Boland framed her intimate reading with an excerpt from the beginning of her memoir, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. Her reading was well-planned for an American audience, for she stressed her inspiration from Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser and Tillie Olsen. Boland welcomed questions, considered them carefully, answered precisely and said that the poetry of William Butler Yeats was the most important in her life. Boland currently lives in the USA where she is director of the MFA program at Stanford University.

Our two week residency ended with a bittersweet farewell dinner at Seven Oaks in Carlow Town. The highlight is always a reading by students who have completed their last residency and will soon be working on their creative manuscripts. 

— Ellie Wymard, Director

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From May 14, 2007

While continuing to make final plans for Ireland, I want to bring you up to date with current news.

Two poets have received their MFA degrees from Carlow University this year. Juilene Osborne McKnight studied in Pittsburgh with Robert Gibb, and in Ireland with Desmond Egan and Vona Groarke, also the advisor to her creative manuscript, Storyteller. Molly Prosser studied with American poets Robert Gibb and Jan Beatty, and with Irish poets Desmond Egan and Vona Groarke. Fourth River, her poetry manuscript, was directed by Marion Winik, a poet and mentor for creative nonfiction in our program.

The winner of the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award is Maureen O’Brien from West Hartford, Connecticut. “Incoming Wounded” was chosen from among 346 poems submitted by 176 poets. Blind submissions were read by poet Jan Beatty with poet Judith Vollmer making the final selection. O’Brien’s prize is to participate in our Ireland residency, June 12 - June 23, and to study with Mary O’Donnell, an acclaimed Irish poet, novelist and literary commentator. To read more about the contest winner, click here.

Marion Winik has written about her experience as a mentor in creative nonfiction for Carlow’s MFA program in “The Accidental Teacher,” published in Teachers & Writers, spring 2007. “I was so proud of them all, I couldn’t stand it,” Winik writes. “In fact, I had never felt so proud of anything in my life without also feeling gauche and overbearing.”

Winik has been a commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered since 1991. Among her books of creative nonfiction are Above Us Only Sky, First Comes Love, and the Lunch-Box Chronicles.

Red Sugar, a new collection of Jan Beatty’s poems, is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Jan, a winner of the prestigious Agnes Starret award, is director of Carlow’s Madwomen in the Attic poetry workshops, and the undergraduate writing program. She is the host and producer of Prosody, a public radio show on NPR affiliate WYEP-FM featuring the work of national and international writers.

Watch our Web site to see the program schedule for the Ireland residency.

— Ellie Wymard, Director

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