by Jessi Kalvitis

When asked how their time at WVU influenced their writing, WVU’s nonfiction MFA students have a lot to say.

“Kevin [Oderman] has really shaped my writing,” says Sarah Einstein, who graduated in 2010, “and I know he’s had the same impact on most of his students. I wanted to make certain that, before I left, he understood the profound effect he had on us as writers, so I solicited submissions from everyone whose thesis he had directed and put them together into the K.O. An Anthology of Creative Nonfiction, with a lot of help from Katie Fallon and Sara Pritchard.”
The anthology includes essays from a broad and successful group of WVU MFA nonfiction graduates, including Sarah Beth Childers, Emily Moore, Steve Oberlechner, Amy Colombo, Kirsten Beachy, Matt Ferrence, Jillian Schedneck, Erin Tocknell, Kelly Sundberg, Sarah Einstein, William Haas, Katie Fallon, Christine Lamb Parker, Emily C. Watson, Elissa Hoffman, Ami Iachini Schiffbauer, and Jessie van Eerden. The Blue Moose hosted a reading to celebrate the publication of the book.

“Some of us were writers before we entered Kevin’s workshop,” Einstein says, “and some of us didn’t yet think of ourselves that way, but we all emerged as better writers. The ways in which we were better, I think, become obvious when you read our work together. While there is a great variety in terms of style and content, the attention to detail and to language that Kevin instilled in us is obvious in every piece. There isn’t an uncareful word or a sloppy phrase in the entire book. I really wanted him to know that and to see that we are all, to a person, grateful.”

Einstein is currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Ohio University. Her essays have appeared in journals including PANK, Ninth Letter, Fringe, and Whitefish Review. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and her work has been shortlisted by Best American essays and included in the Best of the Net anthology. She is also the Managing Editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Nonfiction.

Kelly Sundberg, a 2011 graduate, currently works as a Live Learn Community Specialist in Summit Hall, with the Resident Faculty Leader (her husband, Caleb), to develop and implement academic programming for the dorm. She teaches the WVUe 191 University Orientation course, and continues to teach English 101 and 102. She has essays published or forthcoming in Mid-American Review, the Southeast Review, Slice Magazine, Reed Magazine, flyway, Fringe, and others. In 2011, she won Slice Magazine’s “Bridging the Gap” contest and was a finalist in the Southeast Review’s Narrative Nonfiction contest.

Sarah Beth Childers, a 2007 graduate, has pieces published in the Tusculum Review, Paddlefish, SNReview, Beside the Point, and on wigleaf.com, including “Shorn” and her “Dear Wigleaf” postcard. Childers’s book Shake Terribly the Earth is forthcoming from Ohio University Press’s Series in Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Appalachia.

Says Sundberg, “My writing matured while I was in the MFA program. After I had my son, I stopped writing for a long period, and I didn’t have a large body of work, only two or three essays. I was also very insecure about my abilities. When I was applying to MFA programs, I read an essay by Debra Marquart titled ‘Great Falls, 1976’ in Mid-American Review. I remember thinking how much I would love to be published alongside work like that someday, and now, three years later, I am being published in Mid-American Review. That’s so exciting to me, and I know it’s because of the mentorship of Kevin Oderman, Ethel Morgan Smith, Katie Fallon, and the rest of the English department faculty . . . the English department is incredibly supportive, but being a graduate student who was also a parent was difficult in ways that I probably don’t have to explain. I’m really proud of what I was able to accomplish in terms of my academic and publishing life, and I hope that my son will be proud of me as well when he’s old enough to understand what that means.”

“I struggled a lot with fiction when I first came here,” says Childers, “mostly because I really was just wanting to tell my real stories, and fictionalizing was holding me back. So many things in real life are improbable—and I struggle when I have to make things ‘realistic’ to make them work in fiction . . . In the program, besides learning what an essay was, I learned how to write a tight line, to use better verbs, to use real people as characters, to use description effectively, to tell my thoughts about a story instead of just telling the story (and when it’s not necessary).”

Recent graduates of WVU’s creative writing program are full of good advice for those of us who are still up to our eyeballs in literature classes, student emails, and endless revision. “I shouldn’t have panicked during my last year about what I would do next,” says Childers. “I wasted my energy on unnecessary despair.”

“I encourage every MFA student to make their thesis year as much about writing as possible,” Einstein admonishes. “Don’t take classes you don’t need or ask for extra teaching assignments. You will probably never again have the opportunity to work with so many kind, brilliant people who are focused on your work and you should take full advantage of it.”

Sundberg also speaks to issues of focus. “The most important thing I learned during my last year was to put my writing first. I knew that, in order to accomplish the strongest possible thesis, I was going to have to sideline some other things. That was difficult because I’m a perfectionist in most areas of my life, but for that year at least, I decided just to be a perfectionist with my writing.”

When asked for their tips for work/life balance, all three alumnae respond with bemused good humor. “By definition,” opines Einstein, “I don’t even believe that there can be balance . . . it’s okay to stop grading long enough to mop the floor once it gets sticky, but probably not before . . . I’ve finally learned how to make time for laundry and can happily report that, in my second year as a PhD student, I have not yet had to smell anything before wearing it to teach. (Weekends are none of your business.)”

Sundberg admits she hasn’t figured out the balance yet herself, and is open to tips. “My days are kind of a blur. Last week, I taught my 4 classes, graded stacks of papers, counseled dorm residents who were struggling with their midterm grades, and, along with my husband, hosted a floor dinner with twenty students, a neighborhood Safe Zone training and a Bolton Creative Writing Workshop. We also participate in lots of staff events at the dorm, and, of course, we have a precocious and energetic six-year-old. It’s all very busy and fun, but I try to find time to write during the rare quiet moments.”

To find time for writing, Childers says, “I need most of the day, since that lets me be lazy in the morning, or procrastinate with housework or reading a book and still get a lot of writing done in the afternoon. I can’t write after I teach, so I work late on those nights taking care of small, irritating tasks that will keep me from writing the next day, and I make time for some laziness (crappy TV, cookie baking, etc), so I’ll have energy to write the next day. Also, I have to remind myself when I’m working too hard on the grading that my writing matters more to me, and the sooner I get my grading done the sooner I have my writing time back.”

What does the future hold for these talented women? “This is a great time to be writing, and working with other writers,” remarks Einstein, “because the opportunities are so limitless . . . but of course that means there are also new and unexplored avenues for failure as well as success. I hope to find a professorship in the ever-shrinking world of academic employment. Like every graduate student, I read articles about PhD’s collecting food stamps and the dwindling employment opportunities for new graduates and reach for the wine bottle. It’s a scary time to commit to a teaching career. Wish me luck!”

“I’ve applied for a few residencies,” says Sundberg. “The allure of 2-4 weeks of undivided writing time was too tempting to resist. My book is nearly completed, but I’d like to polish it some more before sending it out to contests, and I could use some time to power through those final edits.”

Childers would like to “go back to England and get more ideas for a creative nonfiction book about the Brontës that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I feel a connection with Charlotte Brontë since I also grew up with two younger sisters and a younger brother, and we all wrote together as children, making little magazines, books, and newspapers like the Brontë children did. We also, like the Brontës, wrote through play, though we had Cabbage Patch Dolls and paper dolls we made of Bible characters in place of their wooden soldiers. Like the Brontë sisters, my sisters and I lost our brother too early. I would also like to get a dog.”

In the meantime, though, she’s excited about her book. “It’s called Shake Terribly the Earth, and it is forthcoming from Ohio University’s Series in Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Appalachia. I’m a huge fan of this series, so I felt really honored for my book to be included in it. My book is a memoir in essays about growing up in a fundamentalist Christian community in southern West Virginia. I focused on several important relatives who have passed away, including my PaPa, who drove me to kindergarten, bought me fudge-covered Oreos, and took me to see Big Bird at Sesame Street Live; my Granny, who taught me about life through Uno, romance novels, and greasy fried chicken; and my Uncle Mark, who flew kites and canoed with my siblings and me. Writing about these people made them feel less gone. My voice is influenced by Appalachian oral storytelling, since my family communicates in stories, so approachability is important to me, as well as finding humor in every situation, no matter how painful it is. In the book, I worked to capture my corner of Appalachia through our particular places, like the grass-covered floodwall next to the Ohio River, where my dad caught bugs and fished with his beagle when he was little.”

It wouldn’t be a creative writing alumnae spotlight without some book recommendations. This group has strong and delightful opinions on what we should be reading. Childers continues “to learn from the old British writers, particularly Austen, all four Brontes, George Eliot, and Trollope . . . I still love Jo Ann Beard, David James Duncan, and Brenda Miller (my grad school favorites). And I’ve been passionate about Alice Munro since I discovered her late in life in Gail Adams’ workshop. I feel like trashy Canadian girls and trashy Appalachian girls have a lot in common.”

Einstein has “been mostly reading the works of my colleagues lately, because they are such fabulous writers. Jason Jordan, Patrick Swaney, Brad Modlin, Sarah Greene, and Maggie Messitt are all writers that you should get to know!” Colleagues from WVU still figure prominently in Einstein’s reading list. “I’ve also just reread Kevin Oderman’s excellent White Vespa, and I am halfway through Ethel Morgan Smith’s equally admirable Reflections of the Other: Being Black in Germany.”

Sundberg appreciates “when female writers are willing to go to the dark places that women aren’t usually encouraged to explore. I’m tired of redemptive memoirs. I want more honesty than that.” Her recent favorites have included Lydia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild.

Follow the link to find out more about the Nonfiction and Creative Writing programs at WVU.