A Finch in the hand Stonecoast gets a new director, Maine gets a new poet BY SARA DONNELLY

It’s what you might label a pretty big score. Beginning last fall as the new director of the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program in creative writing, Annie Finch comes to Maine’s biggest university already established as one of the driving forces in modern American poetry. A poet, translator, librettist, and lover of all things language, Finch has been called "an American original" by poet Ron Silliman and a "central force in contemporary American poetics" in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. In December, Finch and her family moved from their home in Ohio to Falmouth so Finch could officially take the helm at the state’s only graduate-level creative writing program, a two-year, low-residency school which employs some 25 faculty writers to mentor students long distance and at two annual workshops at the Stonecoast stone house in Brunswick. This summer, Finch will oversee the first Stonecoast workshop of her tenure, and she reads her work this week as part of USM’s annual "Celebrate Writers" program.

Finch arrives in the wake of what by all accounts was a messy break-up with the program’s co-founder and original director, B. Lee Hope, who left in 2004 when the university allowed her contract to expire. Faculty member Dennis Lehane, author of the book Mystic River and a friend of Hope’s, resigned in protest of her departure. By the time the dust had settled, six members of the faculty had resigned for personal or professional reasons.

According to faculty member Dianne Benedict, who helped found the program and was part of the search committee which hired Finch, Finch as new director is the single "biggest gain" the program has enjoyed since the departure of Hope. On the cusp of a summer semester which enjoyed some of the highest interest from applicants since the program started in 2002, the Phoenix sat down to chat with Finch about her plans for Stonecoast, her philosophy of writing, and how poetry can put an MFA program back together:

Q: Before coming to Maine to work as director of the Stonecoast MFA, you worked for years as a professor of English and of creative writing, first at the University of Northern Iowa and then at Miami University in Ohio. Do you plan to change any elements of the Stonecoast program given your experience with other creative writing programs?

A: I’m definitely committed to diversifying the student body and the faculty in terms of cultural, ethnic, and aesthetic backgrounds and perspectives. We’re changing the academic format in various ways to have more student and faculty interaction on things like panels and seminars. We’re looking for ways to involve the [Portland] community more throughout the year in Stonecoast activities through a reading series, perhaps a weekly radio show. We’re looking into ways to have our alumni interact more with writers all around Maine, possibly being available to writers throughout Maine as teachers. I have all kinds of ideas.

Q: Any change to the classes themselves?

A: I’m looking into ways to make the residencies themselves more of a holistic experience for students. I think we may be having an Artist’s Way workshop as part of this [summer’s] residency. [Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity] is a program for enhancing creativity; there are thousands of them all around the country. It’s a way to access your creativity in a deeper way. And there’s yoga, and we’ve also improved the food. Those are some of the holistic ways to improve the pedagogy.

Q: There’s been significant debate in the industry about whether or not the career benefits of graduate creative writing programs are worth the expense and time to get the degree. You received a MA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston in 1986 — do you think the degree helped your writing career?

A: I think it’s true that an MFA is not necessarily anymore a reliable path to a teaching job; some places want PhDs for that. I think an MFA can help a writer a lot. It helped me by giving me a community of writers and a sense of how the creative-writing world works. And the experience of having your work read by other students in workshops and looked at critically by professional writers can make you much more aware of what it’s like to write for publication. I think it’s very important to be able to feel committed to writing; when you’re in an MFA program you really define yourself as a writer and that can subtly help your writing by helping you to take it more seriously.

I’m sorry, my grammar was wrong. It can help your writing by helping you to take yourself more seriously as a writer. Excuse me.

Q: That’s okay. Stonecoast offers relatively little in the way of scholarship aid. Current tuition is $4990 a semester and students must complete four semesters to graduate. Is the program worth the money?

A: [The cost] is obviously going to affect someone’s life. Often students come to our program when they’ve already had another kind of career and they’re feeling a need to honor their own creativity more and they’re willing to make the financial adjustment to put their creativity first for a while, but obviously [the cost] is a factor.

Q: Lately it seems like nearly every college in the country has some kind of graduate creative writing program — according to U.S. News and World Report, there are nearly 200 MA and MFA degrees offered in the country. How do you attract students and make Stonecoast distinctive?

A: There’s a certain commitment to a holistic approach to writing. We’re known for this. Though we do offer seminars and workshops on how to get published and succeeding in writing and things like that, I think as a community we’re more interested in nurturing writers in a holistic way so that they’ll be writing their best stuff. There’s a certain almost spiritual element to the belief in supporting each other as writers and to a certain kind of balance and I think that will translate increasingly to a very distinct flavor to the program. I think when you do have a distinct flavor people sense that and the people who will thrive there are drawn to that.

Q: You keep mentioning holistic writing . . .

A: Writers often write because they’re very sensitive people and they’re aware of the problems around us and I think in an environment that is somewhat healing to the whole writer, to the person of the writer as a human being — body, mind, and spirit — that the writer can then feel freer to move beyond their personal pain. The more healed the writer themselves can be, the more healing the writing can be.

Q: Do you think writers need healing more than most people?

A: That’s an interesting question. All people need healing the same, but I think writers may be more aware they need healing than most people and because of that they have a responsibility to heal themselves because when they heal themselves they can help other people to heal. Part of our job is to get our voices out there and help so that people can be healed through us vicariously.

Q: Is that something you learned as a student or as a writer?

A: Certainly, I did not learn that as a student in my program. My program was like a lot of other creative-writing programs, kind of into the drinking and the macho culture that sort of dominated the creative writing field during the 1980s when I was getting my master’s degree. I think I learned it as a writer trying to survive in this culture. I found that I had to create or find an ecosystem around myself that would allow me to create or relax as a writer and to have an environment that felt nourishing and balanced. In our culture, it’s not easy to find that, I think you have to consciously create it to some extent and I hope Stonecoast can do that for people.

Sara Donnelly can be reached at sdonnelly@phx.com

Annie Finch reads with Betsy Sholl on the seventh floor of USM’s Glickman Library, in Portland, on Monday, April 11. Call (207) 780-4291 or check "Listings" for "Celebrate Writers" events happening throughout the week.