Seattle Pacific University MFA | Creative Writing

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 …

“Beautiful Work is the Soul of Our Culture”: Elizabeth Myhr

When I decided, after twenty years of writing, that it was time to go back to school, I looked for three things in a program: intellectual rigor, high standards for the art, and a program that would support what I considered a fact of art — that beautiful work is the soul of our culture. Continue Reading …

Choose Ye This Day Thy Paradox

By Vic Sizemore

I am not overly interested in the so called battle between Science and Religion. I have my opinions, but my deep interest is elsewhere. It just seems to keep popping up around me lately. Continue Reading …

My Own “Rex Manning Day”

By Allison Backous

After my parents’ divorce, my mother moved us kids to a trailer on the northeast side of town. It was long and narrow, like a ship’s galley, and the wallpaper’s thin brown stripes seemed to carve themselves into the drywall. The trailer never felt like home, never felt like a place you could settle. Continue Reading …

Tasting the Animal Kingdom

by Alissa Herbaly Coons

I have carried a deep ambivalence about my place in the food chain since the summer I raised a flock of chickens at age thirteen. I was a town child, my pre-chicken agricultural experience extending only to our backyard tomato plants in Kalispell, Montana. Continue Reading …