Archive note: This article first ran on the Bennington website in January 2007, when the late Liam Rector, the founder of the Bennington Writing Seminars, was still the program's director. Rector passed away in August 2007. Sven Birkerts is now serving as the acting director.

Intense, inspiring, rigorous, engaged: You could use any of several adjectives to describe the Bennington Writing Seminars, the College's low-residency graduate program in writing and literature.

Liam Rector has a more colorful phrase: "Solitude punctuated by hysteria."

Rector, the Writing Seminars' founder and director, also teaches poetry in the program. When the MFA program was launched at the College in 1994, only three others like it existed. Nearly a dozen other low-residency programs have sprung up since then, but this one seems particularly suited to Bennington. "Given Bennington's history of writers in residence and its mentor/apprentice tradition," Rector says, "it occurred to me what a splendid marriage the college and a graduate program would be."

All of the MFA faculty are accomplished practicing writers, but the apprenticeship is not only to these flesh-and-blood teachers. The program is grounded in the notion that Good writers are good readers, and each student reads anywhere from 80 to 120 books during the two years.

"Our ideal student is much like the ideal Bennington undergraduate student," Rector says. "Self-directed, already in the midst of things, up-and-at-'em."

Each January and June, approximately 150 people--students, faculty, and staff--converge on the Bennington campus for ten-day residencies. This is the "hysteria" part of Rector's formula. Between the workshops, lectures, readings, and various seminars, upwards of 80 events are packed into a carefully orchestrated week-and-a-half.

The "solitude" lies between residencies. Writing Seminars students do the bulk of their coursework from their own homes, putting at least 25 hours a week into writing in their chosen genre (poetry, fiction, or nonfiction); reading widely; and reflecting on that reading in short essays. The resulting work goes into a monthly packet the students send to the teacher they're working with that semester; the writing is returned with a "packet letter" offering suggestions and critique. Some alumni say that months and years after graduation, they still refer to these letters for guidance.

Residencies: Connections between writers' lives

"A sustained, relaxed, but very serious kind of constant conversation happens across and through a whole community. The feeling is that you've had one great conversation, when in fact you've had 60 conversations in workshops and on lunch lines and walking out of Tishman auditorium."--Sven Birkerts, nonfiction faculty member

Each day begins in Tishman Auditorium, with morning lectures by graduating students. Writers settle in with tote bags and jackets. Coffee cups dot the planks that run along the bench seating. Supplementary reading is handed out: excerpts from Virginia Woolf's diaries, poems by Charles Simic.

Over the course of the day, the events spread out across the campus and keep on rolling straight through to the evening faculty readings, often continuing into the night with more open readings organized by students. Endurance is challenged. Mettle is tested: In five workshop sessions throughout the residency, students critique each other's work and get to know their new teachers.

Passion plus practicality: Creating a writer's life

"Students are asked to always be engaged in what they're doing and why they're doing it. Most students who come in are already reading and writing quite a bit, but have to do it now in a very concentrated way. It does mirror the writing life, and after graduation it's up to students to imitate it on their own."--Priscilla Hodgkins, Associate Director

An understanding of the practical side of the writing life is built into the program. Each residency offers two "publishing modules," seminars with editors and other figures in publishing (a feature founded at the first residency by Tree Swenson, now executive director of the Academy of American Poets). But these are not meant to be networking sessions, Rector says: "We established them not to aid students in getting published, but so they won't be too romantic or ignorant about it, so they can better effect the communion between writer and reader."

All students and faculty, however long or short their list of publication credits, share one challenge in common: maintaining a life of letters while attending to life-in-general. "It is a constant juggling act," says fiction writer and faculty member Jill McCorkle. "Yet I find so much inspiration comes from the students and the time of the residency. I leave pumped up and ready to write. As a writer, feeling that you're a part of this wonderful literary community puts it all in perspective."

The program's greatest gift to students may be helping them decide for themselves what makes the juggling act so worthwhile.

That, and the company of 150 other jugglers.

More:

• Schedule of Writing Seminars readings (open to the public), June 14-24
• The Bennington Writing Seminars
• Writing Seminars Core Faculty

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