Best Creative Writing Professor?

While there is certainly no way come up with any way of measuring or determining who is the best professor of creative writing in the land - a small argument might be made for Southern Illinois University's Mike Magnuson.  On what grounds you might inquire?  Is it something beyond word of mouth? Beyond my own friendship with the man?  My admiration for his own writing?

This time around, it is.  Adding subjectivity to an already subjective statement, my argument would come from the fact that Magnuson taught two of the writers that can be found as contributors to Best American Short Stories 2006:  Benjamin Percy, with his story "Refresh, Refresh" was under Magnuson at Southern Illinois University, and Kevin Moffett, whose story "Tattooizm" is included, took classes from Magnuson while at the University of Florida a while back.

I asked each if they even remembered the former Lummox. 

From Kevin Moffett:  "... the first time I gave Mike a story, when he returned it to me it looked as if someone had drawn up battle plans on it: arrows, diagrams, declamations, exclamations. He was a heavy-handed editor when a heavy-handed editor was just what I needed. He loathed dramatized phone conversations, "It is/it was" constructions, and sentence-level laziness. He once wrote on a story of mine, How about mixing in a good verb or two, hey?  He also wore camouflage, I think, and made fun of me for not wearing socks."

From Benjamin Percy:  "Magnuson is a good name for Magnuson. Like some kind of gun and some kind of man came together and made him one night in a laboratory. When he walks into a workshop, people go tense. Their eyes glance back and forth between their hands and his face. They want, and don't want, to know what kind of storm will befall them: one of high comedy or utter despair or terrible anger or hearty congratulations. It will never be temperate. He is a man of great passion, in his life and in his work and in his teaching. He will never not care. Every sentence, to him, matters like scripture matters to some: a lot. He takes apart stories piece by piece, word by word, questioning every grammatical choice and its rhetorical effect. He writes so many comments that your work appears encased in barbed-wire. For this -- for his enthusiasm, for his anger, for his discipline, for his anality and intelligence and barbarism -- I owe him the world. I emerged from his workshop as if from a refiner's fire: stronger, better, purer in my ability to hammer prose into the page. There is no doubt in my mind: if I had not studied under him, I would not be in BASS today."

The Best?  Again, pretty subjective, and I'm sure similar stories and quotes can be found for a great many professors out there helping students with the craft of writing.  But, for Magnuson, if not best, pretty damn good?  Based on the above, I'd say that's the very least that can be said about him.

Comments

[Chris Bryson]

I can say from first hand experience Mag will, if you let him, make you a better writer. I've told all the first year fiction writers to buy books on rhetorical grammar so they won't get destroyed once they get into his workshop. I have also seen Mag reduce a grown man to tears during an hour long (a solid hour, mind you), line-by-line critique of a story. If you're not on the receiving end of a Magnuson critique, it's a beautifully tragic and often enlightening period. If you're on the other end of the stick, it's apocalyptic, but most students, once they rise from the ashes, cannot deny Mag has pointed them in the right direction.

I won’t taint this website with the worst critiques he’s given my work. As Mag would say, they shall remain unspoken. Some pet peeves of his: Comma in direct address, damnit. If you’re under the age of 40, you’re not allowed to write about God or existence. Finally, if you send him an email, make sure it’s punctuated correctly or his response will consist of nothing but a grammar lesson (this goes for text messages, too).

Best teacher ever? Sure.

[J.W. Dunnan]

Magnuson's workshops are fantastic. I've never been in another workshop at the undergraduate or graduate level that focuses so intently on sentence-level problems. Mag is much more concerned with how you write as opposed to what you write and damn the inexperienced students who can only discuss fiction in terms of “believability” and “character motivation”. When a student turns in a six-page piece with more grammatical errors than a chatroom log and then tries to direct the workshop to focus on their “character development” Magnuson will say something like, “What’s the point of working on your characters when you can’t write a sentence to save your life?”

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