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ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT ON THE HISTORY OF THE MFA PROGRAM FOR WRITERS AT WARREN WILSON COLLEGE
In the summer of 1975, a proposal for the first-ever low-residency graduate program in writing was approved by the Goddard College Board of Trustees, and the first residency was convened in January 1976, with 17 students and 3 faculty members.
The last Goddard residency was in July 1980. By November, as the college continued to struggle with overwhelming financial debt and potential loss of its accreditation, the entire faculty and MFA Advisory Board had resigned as a body and recommended to the Trustees that the program be closed. We were ready to take our place in history, perhaps alongside the equally short-lived and passionate experiment that once was Black Mountain.
Our students, however, refused to let the story end or consider educational alternatives; self-organized and stubborn, they would wait for us to resurface in a new location. Around that same time, hearing about us from faculty member Louise Glück (who was giving a reading at Warren Wilson), President Reuben Holden said simply, “Why don’t you come here?” Other institutions repeated a similar offer, but Ben’s had no fine print, no riders or codicils, and we also intuited immediately a natural fit with the mission of Warren Wilson.
The hiatus was brief: the low-residency MFA Program for Writers already had a design, a reputation for excellence, an experienced faculty, and an eager student body of 35. The first residency in Swannanoa, NC, was held in July 1981, with the newest Goddard alumni as our honorary guests. What we celebrate collectively every five years is a remarkable community of writers, begun in the Green Mountains of Vermont and reincarnated in the Blue Ridge, at Warren Wilson. What we honor continuously is the achievement of its individual members, their indelible, distinctive poetry and fiction.