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May 14, 1998

After nearly 2 decades, Ochester is stepping down as head of Pitt's much-expanded writing program

After nearly 20 years of heading one of the largest programs of its kind, Ed Ochester, English professor and poet, is passing on the proverbial red pen.

On Sept. 1, Lynn Emanuel will take over as director of the writing program in the Department of English. Emanuel, a faculty member for 25 years and a poet in her own right, takes over for Ochester, who has accepted the faculty early retirement option package, effective at the end of the 1998-99 academic year.

Ochester will continue through next year as adviser to the program.

"I've been telling a little joke lately, and I think it's true, that nobody in the history of the University has been director of anything as long as I have," Ochester said. "So I think it's time [to step down].

"I won't miss the committee work or the paperwork, which has increased over the years," he said. "I will miss teaching — I've always had a great affection for the students at Pitt and still keep in touch with many of my former students — and I probably will do some visiting professorships at other universities.

"I'm not going to disappear," he said. "I'll still be involved with editing the Pitt Poetry Series and in my work with the University Press with the Drue Heinz prize and so forth. Plus, I can use the time to read and write, which I'm very much looking forward to." Reflecting on his tenure as director, Ochester pointed with pride to the program's record of publication. In 1990, Pitt graduate Li-Young Lee's "The City in Which I Love You" won the Academy of American Poets' Lamont Award, and three other recent M.F.A. students in poetry won major book publication awards, he said.

Among nonfiction M.F.A. students, Ochester said, Jeanne Marie Laskas became a contributing editor to Life magazine and the Washington Post, and Pei Minxin was appointed to a professorship at Princeton. In fiction, Michael Chabon's "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" was a Book-of-the-Month selection, and Cynthia Kadohata's novel, "The Floating World," was a selection of the Paperback Book Club. David Shiffrin signed a contract with Doubleday for his third novel, and Jane McCafferty won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for short fiction.

According to Ochester, during the past several years Pitt writing program alumni have published dozens of other books, and hundreds of stories and articles in The New Yorker, The New York Times, American Poetry Review, Harpers, MS, the Georgia Review, Esquire, The Nation, Paris Review and many other venues, and have won numerous fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and many other agencies.

Ochester also singled out his English faculty colleague Lee Gutkind for making the program's creative nonfiction track a reality and, ultimately, a strength. "Our M.F.A. in literary nonfiction is the first of its kind, and Lee, going all the way back to his involvement in setting up the program in the mid-'70s, is the prime reason. He's really responsible for organizing it at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. It started as the smallest [track], but now applications are running about even for it and poetry and fiction." The biggest change in the writing program, Ochester said, "is probably in the number of students. We've gone from fewer than 100 in 1980 to 80 M.F.A. students and 290 undergraduate writing majors [currently]. And the number of double majors has grown significantly. About 10 percent of our grad students are double majors." According to Ochester, the main reason for the growth of the program is that "our graduates have a better time than most other departments gaining employment, because writing is certainly a marketable skill. Also, young writers like having the constant editorial supervision that their work gets, all within the context of a liberal arts degree," he added.

A contributing factor to employment opportunity, Ochester said, is "our internship office, which helps place students at newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations, and other businesses and nonprofit organizations. "It's not imposed on people, but we encourage students to branch out into other disciplines," Ochester continued. "We've had some students who come in thinking if you're in [a track] you're working in some kind of discreet box, looking at light through a tunnel. But that doesn't make sense in actual practice," he said.

Ochester noted that alumni are employed as journalists, and in public relations, publishing, technical writing, teaching, advertising and many other professions; undergraduates have gone on to graduate work in journalism, creative writing, law, and even business and medicine. Prominent writing program alumni include poets Gerald Stern and Jack Gilbert; Don DeCesare, vice president, CBS News; Al Primo, former vice president, ABC News; Virgil Fassio, publisher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer; Peter Beagle, novelist, "The Last Unicorn"; Leonard Baker, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, "Days of Sorrow and Pain: Leo Baeck and the Berlin Jews"; and Joni Evans, former publisher at Random House.

"Flexibility is certainly a major strength of the program," Ochester said. In a separate interview, incoming writing program director Emanuel concurred. "I think the single biggest trend is not [favoring] one track over another, but that particularly graduate students are interested in working across genres," she said.

"We would hope, actually, that students leave with an ability to write in at least two 'languages,' " she said, referring to the genres of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. "The students clearly want this flexibility, and it's what's happening in the larger world of contemporary writers.

"I think it's a disaster when writing programs, you know, [act as though] it's some sort of a marriage contract, that a student can only work in one course of study," she added. Regarding her new role, Emanuel said, "You have to realize the writing program is really the size of a small department. I think it's inevitable that I'll have to be more available for administrative and advisory duties," she allowed. "People will come to the director for programmatic advice and, yes, the director hears all the complaints. "But the best thing about [my becoming director] is that the program is in extremely good shape, thanks to Ed's leadership. I see my role as trying to keep the writing program as strong as it is. Emanuel is looking forward to one programmatic addition in particular. "We're starting up a new [component], formally called the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series, in the fall. We will have six to eight 'writers of note' coming to campus who will be giving free public readings. Gay Talese, for example, is almost 99 percent surely coming." Other writers with whom the program is negotiating, Emanuel said, include Maxine Hong Kingston, Mark Doty, Marita Golden and Barry Lopez.

"The series will serve at least three important functions," said Emanuel. "First, it will bring both our graduate and undergraduate students into contact with a wide variety of writers. Second, it will provide the larger community of the city of Pittsburgh access to these same writers. And third, it will enable the writing program to work with other departments and programs in the University and with other organizations in the city to co-sponsor a variety of events having to do with both literature and other arts.

"We're also planning to have some of these writers do a three-to-five day residency, attending classes, talking to students one-to-one, giving a reading. I'm very excited about that." q When asked about challenges facing the program, Ochester said, "Perhaps our biggest problem is having to turn away some qualified students. We have too many students right now. We cannot grow any more, without increasing faculty.

"A second problem is that we have no fellowships that don't require teaching. This is a problem throughout [the Faculty of Arts and Sciences], really. We can offer teaching fellowships, but some of our competition — Iowa, Johns Hopkins — can recruit students with writing fellowships. Don't get me wrong; we do successfully recruit. But I think we'd do even better.

"We have, as of a couple of years ago, started a major push to build an endowment for [writing] fellowships, but it takes time," Ochester continued. "At least we've started. The hope is the new series will stimulate some support. Writers like Gay Talese and Tess Gallagher, who is also coming, with national reputations, can be the perfect [ones] to stimulate interest and show the good work we do here." Pitt's writing program is the oldest program of its kind, dating back to the 1930s, and is one of the nation's largest, according to Ochester. It offers undergraduate concentrations in poetry, fiction and journalism (in two tracks, news and magazine). The M.F.A. program was established in 1978.

Ochester, who came to Pitt in 1970, is the author of "Allegheny," "Changing the Name to Ochester," and "Miracle Mile." Emanuel is the author of two books of poetry, "Hotel Fiesta," and "The Dig," with a third book forthcoming. She was featured on the cover of the March/April issue of "The American Poetry Review," which has the largest circulation of a journal devoted strictly to poetry in the country.

"Perhaps the biggest indicator of the success of the program is the amount of published material by our graduates, which is what, after all, [the program] is all about," Ochester said.

–Peter Hart


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