Niloc Retseh

ENG 102-010

Professor Hester

Winter 2013 — Evaluation Paper

U. Montana’s Graduate Writing Program: The Last Best Place

In early 1989, while living in the suburbs of North Vancouver, British Columbia, my then-wife, Kim, finally grew tired of hearing my nightly complaints about my publishing sales job and my frustrated writerly ambitions. Kim grew so tired that not only did she secretly send away to a half-dozen U.S. graduate schools for their applications, but once those applications arrived, Kim forced me to sit at the kitchen table for six successive nights and fill those applications out. But when the time came to mail those applications, we hesitated. For, unfortunately, each school’s application required a fee of $100. Struggling with two young children on my paltry income, I had to narrow the choice to one or two. To do so, I would first have to research and rank each of them.

To do that, I first had to settle on some criteria for judging the schools. With Kim’s help and earnest input, we decided on three important criteria. First, I wanted to attend a program with renowned authors as professors. Those author/professors didn’t have to be world-famous authors who guest-appeared on the Tonight show, but they needed to be renowned enough that when they championed my book (its content back then still mysterious and amorphous), their editors would listen. Next, we needed a family-friendly place. As mentioned earlier, we had two children: boys, three years and two. Back in 1989, many regions of America still seethed with violent crime, and Kim and I would not only be risking our children’s safety, but also, coming from a quiet suburban town in Canada, we would be risking our sanity. Finally, I sought a supportive environment not only of fellow student writers but student writers of my age, because of all the crafts and occupations, writing is the loneliest and easiest to abandon. And if I abandoned my dream, I would have to resume my nightmare.

Of the half-dozen graduate schools under consideration, U. Montana’s program best met the first criteria. In fact Montana exceeded criteria #1. Montana’s catalogue listed on its faculty page William Kittredge, Beverley Lowry, Richard Hugo and James Welch. I ’d heard only of James Welch. Indeed, I read and loved his sombre if not sober Winter in the Blood. As for the other faculty, in the pre-Amazon late 80s, I decided to visit my local branch of the North Vancouver Public Library (as opposed to the main downtown branch) and see if the library’s card catalogue held any of U-of-M faculty titles. I was pleasantly surprised for my smallish branch did indeed hold their books: Kittredge’s book of short stories, We Are Not In This Together; Lowry’s Daddy’s Girl; and not only the poet Richard Hugo’s murder mystery, Death and the Good Life, but also his book of poems The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir which earned nomination for a National Book Award and which contained the fine poem, “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg.” Unfortunately, Hugo was dead. But, Montana had replaced the irreplaceable Hugo with a series of visiting poets, one of whom, Mark Strand, had served as the U.S. Poet Laureate. Truly, U. Montana won on this first criteria by a clear margin.

Next, the family-friendly criteria: again U. Montana, tucked away in the Rockies in the medium-sized town of Missoula, won outright. Back then, in the early 90s, we not only lacked access to Amazon.com, we lacked access to the entire internet. But if we could have accessed the internet back then, I would have Bingled “Missoula crime rates” and discovered in my search results neighborhoodscout.com. At that site, I would have learned how Missoula boasted a violent crime rate that stood at 30% less than U.S. crime rates nationally. Had I been able to further search the web, I would have landed on the FBI website which would have confirmed the national statistics that neighborhoodscout cited. From those FBI statistics, I could reasonably infer that neighborhoodscout also cited accurate figures for Missoula itself. However, back in those internet-lacking early 90s, I resorted to buying a Sunday subscription to the Missoulian newspaper, and Kim and I regularly monitored the “City” section for crime reports. Those reports would have substantiated the internet data we lacked. However, for even further substantiation, I telephoned the Missoula police department and spoke to the desk sergeant. The sergeant did indeed further confirm what Kim and I had intuited from the Missoulian: that Missoula offered "the safest urban environment in Montana — one of the safest states in the lower forty-eight."

Finally, I gathered data for my final criteria: a supportive environment with writers my own age. This criteria too, U Montana scored highly on, the details of which I found out by sheer coincidence. For when I had spoken with the desk sergeant about Missoula's crime rate, he heard that I was moving to possibly attend U of M's graduate writing program. The sergeant informed me that Missoula's police captain was a graduate of that program and had had several novels published. The Captain's name was Robert Sims Reid, and he had authored four crime mysteries: The Red Corvette, Big Sky Blues, Benediction and Cupid, the last having been translated into French of all things. When I tracked him down by telephone in his office a few days later, Captain Reid affirmed and validated my third criteria. "Well, when I attended a few years back," he told me, "I 'd say about a third to a half of the students were non-trads with the ink dry on their BA's for at least a decade." I asked him if those numbers differed between the poetry strand and the fiction strand, and he enlightened me: "UM's program doesn't officially have separate strands for poetry and fiction. Most students readily and eagerly cross over. But on sheer anecdotal evidence," he said, "probably the poets range on the younger side." "Angry young men?" I joked. "And even angrier older men," he quipped. "Angrier" and "older" In short, I would fit right in.

True, Kim and I remained concerned that Missoula’s school system might not measure up to the wonderful North Vancouver system. So Kim telephoned Missoula's School District 11 and a few days later, we received several pamphlets. One of the pamphlets, "Missoula Kindergarten Honored Nationally!" detailed how the U.S. Department of Education had bestowed an award on Rattlesnake Elementary School. We had another concern though. In the Missoulian newspaper, we read bothersome stories of mountain lions occasionally prowling the streets at night. But on the fringes of our North Vancouver neighbourhood, black bears often staggered into the back yards and even kitchens of the houses. Indeed, when we first moved to North Vancouver back in 1987, I read in a North Shore News article, how the year before, RCMP officers had shot and killed 37 black bears who had menaced people, even children (Hanson 37). Comparatively, our then-current black bear menace paled Missoula's one or two mountain lion sightings. Even so, Kim and I both resolved to not wander Missoula’s streets alone and after dark.

In the end, we agreed unanimously: U.M.-Missoula. And the authors, the town and my fellow students turned out to validate our choice. First, author and U.M. Professor William Kittredge suggested I send my manuscript to New York literary agent Patricia Van der Leun who sold it to publishing's eminence grise Jack Shoemaker. Secondly, in the 14 years I ended up living there in Missoula, I witnessed only one violent act. That violent act occurred when a drunken white student with dreadlocks bit the fingertip off my good friend, bartender and fellow author, Grenadian Claude Alick while Claude attempted to bounce the student. Finally, in addition to Claude, I met several other men and women — David Allen Cates, Peggy Christian, Jeff Hull, Tom Groneberg — U.M students who also became authors and, much more importantly, my life-long and cherished friends, both in that last best place and through the years since I 've moved on.