When Laura Tims ’14 came to Goucher at age 18, she knew she wanted to be a writer. But she didn’t have an exact plan to make that happen, and, she admits, she also had “no backup plan.” By the time she graduated, she had a two-book deal with HarperCollins; her first novel will be published next year.
Whiting Writers Award-winner John McManus ’99, on the other hand, came to Goucher as a pre-med student, but ultimately found writing to be his calling. He’s in South Africa researching his second novel.
Sheri Booker M.F.A. ’07 was drawn to Goucher’s creative nonfiction graduate program, where she spent two years editing a memoir that last year won the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Image Award for outstanding literary work by a début author.
With an 18-year-old prodigy, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Pushcart Prize-nominated poets, and several New York Times bestsellers among its graduates, Goucher has become a haven for promising writers.
The college’s undergraduate creative writing program, headed by fiction writer Madison Smartt Bell and poet Elizabeth Spires, includes workshops for beginning and advanced writers, classes in screenwriting and creative nonfiction, and seminars with visiting writers. In 1999, the Kratz Center for Creative Writing was founded with a $1 million gift from Eleanor Kratz Denoon ’36. It since has become the bedrock of the undergraduate writing program and has expanded to include a major visiting author event in the fall and a spring writer-in-residence series. Now the center hosts undergraduate master classes, symposia, and a student-led writing group called Word for Word, and it offers summer writing fellowships that provide up to $3,000 for writing-related travel, research, internships, or professional development.
And Goucher’s Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Nonfiction, created in 1997, has a limited-residency format that brings in faculty members from around the country who have excelled both as writers and teachers of creative nonfiction. Coming from successful careers as published book authors and as editors and writers for such publications as The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly, they are adept at working with a wide range of student interests—narrative, memoir, personal essay, and literary journalism. In less than two decades, the program’s graduates have produced more than 70 books.
What follow are interviews with a few graduates of the two programs:
Dusting Off Her Wings
Jenn Crowell ’99
A batik phoenix, traced in swirling white, decorates the cover of Jenn Crowell’s latest book, Etched On Me. The novel, which came out in winter 2014 from Washington Square Press, is Crowell’s first in 12 years. Appropriately, the author feels as if she’s brushing dust from her wings, rising again to a literary spotlight that she was thrust into years ago—but this time the phoenix has earned its feathers.
Crowell drafted her first novel when she was 17, the summer before she came to Goucher. The Jacobus, Pennsylvania, native mentioned offhand to Madison Smartt Bell, co-director of the undergraduate writing program, that she had written a novel. Bell asked to see it.
“I was shocked when he came back to me and said: ‘This is publishable work. Do you mind if I send it to my agent with a recommendation letter?’” says Crowell.
So began her surreal journey to publication. Bell’s agent liked the book, a domestic drama set in England (which Crowell had never visited) that details the struggles of a widow in her 30s as she works through grief and raises her son. Necessary Madness (Putnam, 1997) secured Crowell a six-figure, two-book deal with Putnam Penguin, and the precocious English and women’s studies major found herself being photographed by The New York Times at her graduation.
Articles about the author and her novel appeared in The New York Times, The London Times, The Baltimore Sun, and Style and People magazines. Her youth was trumpeted wherever the book was reviewed. Crowell and a friend were even sent by British Airways High Life magazine on an all-expenses-paid trip to England.
Being in the spotlight boosted Crowell’s career, but it also had its drawbacks.
“The pressure was really on in terms of being hyped,” says Crowell. “I don’t think that does young people any favors. The expectations are so high, you get in a situation where there’s nowhere to go but down.”
Crowell did some graduate work in women’s studies at Towson University and traveled to Iceland to research her second book, Letting the Body Lead (Putnam Penguin), which came out quietly in 2002. She wrote a screenplay for Necessary Madness that was selected for the Independent Feature Project Market, and she attended the Berlin Film Festival in 2004. But the project was never optioned.
What followed was a tumultuous period in which the writer got divorced and had a severe mental health breakdown. Upon her recovery, she moved to the West Coast, got remarried, and had a daughter, Maya.
“I started writing again in 2007 when my daughter was a year old and had to write thousands and thousands of pages of complete trash to get back into it,” Crowell says.
That’s when she decided that, despite being a published author, she wanted to get her Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing. She chose a low-residency program at Antioch University Los Angeles. When friends asked why a published author would go back to school for writing, Crowell responded, “I’m here to learn. I’m here to grow as an artist. Every book that you’re writing has a different challenge in it; it’s not like you get published, and you’ve reached this ‘mountain of mastery.’”
Etched On Me was inspired by the true story of Fran Lyon, a pregnant woman who was threatened by British social services with the removal of her child due to her mental health history. Crowell found herself shying away from fully delving into the protagonist’s head.
Her adviser, Leonard Chang, urged her to dig deeper, saying, “I’m going to level with you because you’re a professional: You are dodging the heart of this story.”
In the end, Crowell says, writing as the character 21-year-old Lesley Holloway, whose infant daughter is taken from her by social services, seemed like channeling a kindred spirit. “I feel like it is a gift and a privilege to speak in someone else’s voice and do justice to it,” Crowell says.
Referring to her own experiences with the mental health industry, she adds that when writing the novel, she felt “a sense of righteous indignation. We were fighting odd, parallel battles in which our mental health histories were used against us.”
These days, Crowell lives in Forest Grove, Oregon, with her husband, musician Michael Luezane; their daughter, now age 8; and two dachshunds. She works as a freelance writer, teaches an online class in Antioch’s M.F.A. program, and gives talks on parenting and mental health issues. Crowell wants to “combine activism and fiction, my two loves.”
Suburban Gothic Poems
Peter Ramos ’92
Peter Ramos’ childhood in the suburbs of Ellicott City and Catonsville, Maryland, has provided him with a reservoir of rich visual memories of his parents, his childhood, classic American suburbia, and loneliness.
“The architecture and layout of that area was and still is very much in the post-war, mid-century, Learning from Las Vegas-style: motels, used-car lots, strip malls, fast food chains. As a teenager, I was drawn to the urban spaces of Baltimore and New York, but in my 20s, I began to fall in love with the decadent, post-war suburbs, what I would call ‘suburban gothic.’”
Ramos quotes renowned poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote that poets spend their adult lives trying to make sense of the images that haunt them from their early childhoods. “So astronauts, the Kennedys, the war in Vietnam, black-and-white movies, and shows from the 1950s and ’60s—these were the images on television that I saw when I was very young—and I continue to obsess over them,” Ramos says.
He says the poetry he creates conjures these memories and evokes the isolated figures and “sharp, cold, modern lines” of an Edward Hopper painting.
At Goucher, Ramos took courses in literature, philosophy, and fiction in addition to poetry. Elizabeth Spires, Michelle Tokarczyk, and Bob Bradley were among his instructors; Spires also introduced him to poet and critic Allen Grossman, who then worked at the Johns Hopkins University. “He kindly met with me and discussed my poetry during his office hours. He was and is a master and a mensch.”
Ramos went on to earn a master in fine arts degree in poetry from George Mason University and a doctorate in English at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. He now teaches 19th- and 20th-century American literature and poetry as an associate professor at Buffalo State College in Buffalo, New York. He has published a poetry collection, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVox Books, 2008) and two chapbooks, Watching Late-Night Hitchcock & Other Poems (Handwritten Press, 2004), and Short Waves (White Eagle Coffee Store Press, 2003). A third chapbook, Television Snow, is forthcoming this year. He has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize.
Ramos also publishes critical articles focusing on writers with Latin American heritage or those who grew up speaking many languages. In his own childhood home, multiple languages were spoken. His mother, Jane Ramos ’84, spent many years in France as a child. Ramos’ father, born in Venezuela with Lebanese ancestry, spoke French, Spanish, and Arabic growing up. Although the poet didn’t learn Spanish from his father, he and his brother picked it up from their Venezuelan cousins and in school.
He calls being bilingual, or having an immigrant background “an essential American experience.” He adds that first-generation writers—such as Jack Kerouac, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and Sylvia Plath—“see language itself as a fluid and plastic material.”
Ramos also is working on Remarkable Bridge: Poetic Encounters in the Americas, literary criticism that examines the conversation between U.S. and Latin American modernist canons. In it, he examines the translations of 14 U.S. and Latin American poets, from Walt Whitman to Pablo Neruda to Langston Hughes.
“As a professor of American literature and as a critic, I want to reposition the idea of ‘American-ness’ so that it includes, and is in many ways based on, the idea of people from other countries coming here.”
Days With the Deceased
Sheri Booker M.F.A. ’07
“After Aunt Mary died, the ground beneath me shifted. I expected the world to pause for my grief—and it didn’t, not even for a moment of silence,” writes Sheri Booker in her memoir, Nine Years Under (Gotham Books, 2013). “Living in the house where Aunt Mary had died made me feel like a killer. I wanted to pour bleach on everything or set Aunt Mary’s belongings on fire. … I didn’t want to erase her memory; I just wanted to rid myself of every single reminder of that moment.”
With these words, Sheri Booker describes how she felt as a 15-year-old girl when a beloved aunt died. Much as she wanted to escape from death, Booker made an unusual decision that transformed her life: She applied for and accepted a job at the Albert P. Wylie Funeral Home in West Baltimore. Years later, in darkly humorous anecdotes, Booker tells all, from being hired to answer phones to picking up bodies of the deceased from homes and morgues. By the end of her nine years there, Booker was practically running the funeral home. She was also wise in the ways of grief—and coping with loss.
By the time Booker left Wylie Funeral Home, she had graduated from the then College of Notre Dame, worked as a journalist, and was completing a master’s degree in creative nonfiction at Goucher.
In 2007, footloose after completing her degree, she visited Maggie Messitt M.F.A. ’07, a fellow alumna who was running the Amazwi School of Media Arts, a journalism school for women in Limpopo, South Africa. Booker stayed for seven months, teaching women with high school educations to write articles and find employment. “It was important to me because women don’t have much of a voice” in journalism there, she says.
After returning to Baltimore, Booker and her sister, Chanta Booker M.Ed. ’04, an assistant principal for Baltimore County Public Schools, established Prodigy Youth Services Inc. The nonprofit provides workshops, mentoring, leadership training, and other services to at-risk Baltimore City youth. “I find myself ending up in these places where I’m hoping to empower young women and girls. It’s my niche, my purpose,” says Booker.
The author, who since 2008 has been teaching at local community colleges, Stevenson University, and the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, also writes poetry and performs spoken word. In 2003, she published One Woman, One Hustle: Short Stories and Poetry Written on Inspiration, Identity and Love (Book Her Publishing), and in 2011, she produced an interactive, digital collection, I Am the Poem (Vook). Last year, her memoir, Nine Years Under, won an NAACP Image Award, given to outstanding people of color in film, television, music, and literature.
“When I look at my life, it’s all been about serving the people of Baltimore. I was able to serve at the funeral home, and now I’m serving them in a different capacity,” she says and adds that her days with the deceased might not be entirely over. “If I’m not rich by 30, my backup plan is to open my own funeral home.”
Useful Outrage
John McManus ’99
John McManus jokes he was pre-med at Goucher “for about five minutes,” but then he met Professor of English Madison Smartt Bell, a fellow Tennessean who shared his taste in Southern literature. Some of the stories he wrote in workshops with Bell eventually were included in his first collection, Stop Breakin Down (Picador, 2001). Following the book’s publication, McManus became the youngest winner of the $50,000 Whiting Writers Award, 10 of which are given annually to emerging writers.
Now, he is the author of two published short story collections and a novel, and he recently completed a third collection of short stories, Fox Tooth Heart, which will be published by Sarabande Books in 2015.
He has been working as an assistant professor of English at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, but took the 2013-14 academic year to teach creative writing at the University of Cape Town as a Fulbright Scholar and to research and write a novel-in-progress.
Hank Hardesty, the protagonist of this upcoming novel, is a gay American journalist asked to cover the enactment of the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2014, a.k.a. the “Kill the Gays” bill. Afraid he’ll be harmed or killed, the fictional journalist remains in his hotel room and fabricates a story that goes viral and wins a magazine award for reporting. Ultimately, the character discovers the lies he created are harming the gay refugee community.
“I’m gay, and I’m obsessed with politics, and so the struggle for gay rights in every country interests me,” says McManus.
During his leave of absence from Old Dominion, McManus worked and traveled in Africa to inform his latest work. He volunteered with the Legal Resources Centre, a human rights organization headquartered in Johannesburg. He interviewed refugees and turned their experiences into narratives demonstrating “ongoing persecution or threat of violence” to qualify their petitions for asylum.
McManus then wrote much of his novel after he spent four weeks at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, California, during the summer of 2013.
As he explained in a presentation at the Creative Capital Artist Retreat in 2013: “I want my protagonist to epitomize reductive, knee-jerk thinking in Western reports about gay life in Africa. He’s anxious and lazy, and he tells himself he’ll stoke the useful outrage by exaggerating the brutality of anti-gay regimes—as if that’s a subject that needs embellishment. The truth is he is too ignorant to write well about such a complex story.”
No Backup Plan
Laura Tims ’14
“I decided that I wanted to be a writer when I was pretty young. I never really had any backup plan,” says Laura Tims, an English major who now has a two-book contract with HarperCollins.
Her first novel, Please Don’t Tell, is scheduled to be published next fall. Tims describes the young adult (YA) contemporary novel as being about “a girl who kills the boy who hurts her sister. But someone sees it happen and blackmails her.”
Tims, who grew up in Freeport, Maine, was driven by something akin to fear to write the book while still a college student. After discarding a novel that she had worked on since high school, calling it an “unfixable hot mess,” she pushed herself to adopt a new plan. One day in the summer before her junior year at Goucher, Tims went to a coffee shop and didn’t leave until she had a fresh idea.
That fall, she juggled classwork and writing (with the consent of some very “tolerant” professors) to produce a first draft in October. She revised the book that November and sent out publisher query letters. She told herself, “If I don’t sell a book at some point in the near future, I’m going to have nothing to do when I graduate. I’m probably going to freak out, and it will be terrible.”
She ended up with six offers and had about 20 agents speed-reading the manuscript over the holidays. By the following January, Tims had an agent, and in May 2013, she sold her first book. “When it actually happened, it was less of a surprise and more of a relief,” she says.
Tims devoured fantasy books as a child. At age 10, she had a piece of fanfiction published on the main page of Neopets, a virtual pets website. “I think fanfiction is how a lot of teenagers nowadays get into writing,” she says. “It’s an easy step to get into it because you can start with characters you already love.” She admits that she wrote 900 pages based on the popular Pokémon television series.
The Internet has certainly helped Tims in her success. Not only did writing fanfiction boost her confidence, but she also received guidance from fellow writers. Her online critique partners and a summer internship at the Fine Print Literary Management Agency in New York City (funded by a Kratz Summer Fellowship) showed Tims the ropes for publisher query letters and gave her ideas about where to send them.
At the agency, she learned specifically about publishing trends and how to pitch a novel. “If you’re going to get an agent to represent your book, it has to have a strong hook. It has to have something about it that makes it unique and that makes it stand out.”
Tims learned by experience—her first, “failed” novel, she says, was none of these things. “It was that book that you spend a really long time writing, and then you sort of realize it’s not very good.”
She surprised herself with Please Don’t Tell: “I always thought I was going to be a fantasy writer because that’s what I liked to read the most. But the book that I ended up selling was a contemporary novel, and it turns out I’m a lot better at writing contemporary novels.”
She’s already got a couple of new projects in the works, a YA thriller and a YA contemporary novel, as well as a proposal for a book for middle-grade readers. Tims keeps busy with a blog, Literature & Laura, where she reviews books and offers writing advice. And, of course, she’s always reading.