Seattle Pacific University MFA | Creative Writing

Welcome to the SPU MFA Blog!

This site grows out of the dynamic low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program based at Seattle Pacific University. At the heart of this blog will be creative writing by the talented authors emerging from our program. Continue Reading …

Reckoning the Marvelous

By Kelly Foster

I wouldn’t call myself a pessimist, but I often focus on and assume the worst possible outcomes in life, because I think that keeps me aware and safe. Of course, it doesn’t keep me either safe or particularly aware… Continue Reading …

Tree of Life, Tree of Light

By Vic Sizemore

Swirling eruptions on earth eventually lead to the formation of life. Organisms spring up, develop, evolve. Eventually creatures appear. Dinosaurs. They struggle. They kill. They eat. Continue Reading …

“Coming Home to a Place He’d Never Been”: Daniel Bowman Jr.

In “Rocky Mountain High,” John Denver describes first seeing the mountains of Colorado as “coming home to a place he’d never been before.” My experience in the SPU MFA program was like that. Continue Reading …

Snow on Snow

By MFA Faculty Mentor Robert Clark

There is a great clock-work above you in heaven, geared and laboring, and it will spin all night until there is nothing but snow. It will do the work. You may rest. Continue Reading …

Seeing It Now

By Allison Backous

The first nonfiction course I took, in college, was liberating. I had been writing poems and short stories since middle school, but after entering college, I fell in love with the scholarly essay, and spent my time reading Augustine and Plato, the poems left in a binder. Continue Reading …

Gilgamesh and Me

By Kelly Foster

In spite of good and even fortuitous events in my recent life, it’s been harder than usual for me not to nourish a similar sense of despair and defeat, not just about myself, but about the state of the world. Continue Reading …

Happy and Unhappy Families

By Vic Sizemore

When Tolstoy says that happy families are all alike, what he means is that they are all alike in this one thing: they are boring, not worth writing about. Unhappy families. Now those are interesting. Continue Reading …

The Love that Calls Us

By Allison Backous

I’m lucky. At twenty-seven, I’ve gotten to teach courses in creative writing, spiritual writing, theological aesthetics, spiritual reading. It gives me real, palpable joy to teach these courses, to discover students’ stories alongside them, to piece through the words of Shakespeare, Bret Lott, Luci Shaw. Continue Reading …

Food People

By Kelly Foster

There are people who love to eat food, people who love to make food, and people who love to talk about food. I am all three of those people. I think there’s something in the primordial recesses of my Southern-ness that partially contributes to this. Continue Reading …

Global Neighbors

By Kelly Foster

When we read, we encounter people throughout the millennia who have despaired as we have, loved as we have, feared as we have, dreamed as we have, and so on. The same holds true for travel, I believe, if we are attentive and humble and receptive. Continue Reading …