The MFA fiction program at Brooklyn College is a two-year course that maintains
an enrollment of thirty students. While every member of
the ongoing and visiting faculty works according to his or her methods,
we are united in our conviction that newer writers need a balance of encouragement
and serious, thoroughly-considered feedback.
The curriculum is designed sequentially. Students take
a workshop every semester. The
program typically offers two traditional short fiction workshops and one novel-writing workshop
each semester. The novel-writing workshop is meant to address the particular
needs of students who are writing novels, and who would prefer to receive
input on longer sections than a traditional workshop allows. The novel-writing
workshops are open to students in their second, third, and fourth semesters.
First-year students take a craft course in the fall and a reading seminar
during their fall and spring semesters. The reading seminars, led by faculty
members, discuss classic and contemporary literature from a writer’s
point of view. If a traditional literature course is devoted, for instance,
to understanding why Faulkner and Garcia Marquez are considered great
writers, the reading seminars are more concerned with how writers like
Faulkner and Garcia Marquez achieved their effects.
Second-year students take, along with their workshops, a one-on-one revisions
tutorial in the fall, and a one-on-one thesis tutorial in the spring.
The first is devoted to helping students with work that has already been
discussed in their workshops, the second to helping them look over what
they’ve done during their time at Brooklyn College, toward the completion
of their theses. Both represent the program’s desire to give each
student individual attention outside of the workshops.
We who teach in the fiction-writing program do so in part because we want
not only to be useful to younger writers but to know them. We care about
each student we admit. We are trying, to the best of our abilities, to
maintain the MFA program we wish had been available to us.
Among the writers and editors who will be teaching in the program in 2012-2013 are Irina Reyn, Fiona Maazel, Jenny Offill, Ernesto Mestre, Myla Goldberg, Alexi Zentner, Joshua Henkin, Julia Glass, Joshua Kendall, and Darcey Steinke.
Forthcoming books from our alums include Safe as Houses by Marie-Helene Bertino (University of Iowa Press, 2012); Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green by Helen Phillips (Delacorte Press, 2012); You Are One of Them by Elliott Holt (The Penguin Press, 2013); and Althea and Oliver by Cristina Moracho (Viking Children's, 2014).
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