OSU-Cascades Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing
Our goal, quite simply: to think seriously about why we write how we do, whom we hope to reach by writing in this way, and how to do it better.
Reflections on the June 2014 Residency
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Cascades Adventure
In the mountainside arts center we call home for 10 days twice a year, everyone is responsible for his or her own education, setting individual goals and urged toward discipline and self-realization in an atmosphere that emphasizes creating across genres and valuing process over product, with faculty who believe passionately in this approach.
Alliances
The basic premise behind our alliances is, quite simply, this: we are all better—as writers, as explorers of consciousness, as artists and, by extension, risk takers—when we create together. It also helps to play around: like the Surrealists, with their parlor games. Or the Beats, with their cutups. Or a third-grade poet writing there are more yeses than no’s.
The Oregon Way
Residences are an opportunity to create, to learn more about the contemporary writing scene, to tackle the challenges of the creative life, to brainstorm solutions, to share resources, and to get inspired by 120 acres of old-growth forest, a collapsed volcano, and Oregon’s second deepest lake, all while the sun sets on one mountain and then the next.
OSU-Cascades Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing 
It’s 6:28 am, and the senior citizens are making their rounds, around and nowhere in particular, except inside the perimeter of Kahala Mall before the vendors open shop, before the consumers peruse shelves of randomness to fill their homes with more stuff. It’s day five of being home, which means living a vastly different lifestyle than with the writers’ community.
Before I flew up for my second residency, I didn’t understand why we’d visit a rodeo or run around a lake–but I get it. We went to be, to be among each other and live together without lines of hierarchy, with playful trust and tempting risks. We utilized ten days to build a caring community to set tables, wash kale and chop onions, to learn crossfit or ballet stretches. I remember these moments more so than my lecture notes on polyphony, starting with voice, lineation, hibun, dog-lefting a sentence, and vertical interrogations.
I think ten or fifteen years from now, Akua willing, one day I will be speed walking these same rounds, around and nowhere in particular, except the inside of Kahala Mall. I will see in my peripheral vision a younger woman sitting at the center tables, typing away passionately on some new techno gadget I haven’t had the time to learn, and I will imagine she’s an aspiring writer, maybe an MFA student, but she won’t be like me. She will have none of the nourishing foundation and support nor memories of stomach crunches in skirts or learning the secrets to a good roasted bell pepper dressing or hearing the crunch of gravel beneath her shoes when she walks to the Great Library for classes. But one can hope.
One can hope that future MFA programs will be innovative and holistic, daring and purposeful in whimsy.
Thanks, Austin and Shareen. You are very much missed. I think, maybe, I am gradually starting to allow my post-residency self to enter back into its (former) society. I think. But frankly, I haven’t the faintest and the weather’s just phenomenally tumultuous and nourishing here right now. So I suppose that’s where I’m at, I’m at the chaotic open mouth of some weathery aftermath. Thank you for adding to the changes within the whole.