Student Finds the "Real Stories" in English Department Internship

By Bethany Meadows, English and Integrated Language Arts Education major, Creative Writing and Public Relations minor

Bethany Meadows (left) confers with fellow intern Emily Wirtz during the MFA residency

From May to August, I have had the privilege to be an intern for Ashland University’s Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing, which is home to a creative nonfiction journal, River Teeth, and the Ashland Poetry Press. Much of my summer was spent behind the scenes working on the logistics of these three departments.

One of the biggest tasks to pull off logistically was preparing and executing the MFA’s summer residency. Since the MFA is a low-residency program, the students spend most of the year online. However, for two weeks in July, they all come to Ashland’s campus to have on-site classes, workshops, and readings.

This residency became the highlight of my summer. There were faculty, students, visiting authors, and visiting editors all in one place; what more could I, as an English major, want! The faculty’s lectures about the craft of writing, the faculty readings of their own published work, and the visiting authors, such as Terry Tempest Williams, Rebecca Makkai, and Dexter Booth, were all fantastic experiences.

However, in these short two weeks, I was not only surrounded by people who wrote stories, but also people who became the stories for me. For example, I drove two of our faculty members from the airports to Ashland. In the time with them, they cared about me and my interests and connected them to their own experiences, both personal and professional. These conversations allowed me to see beyond their published pages and their lectures because they were the person behind the words—the person that cared about their readers.

Not only were my connections with the MFA faculty becoming the real stories, but so were all my experiences with the MFA students and interns. Over the course of two weeks, I am honored to have become friends with many of them through eating meals together, playing games, having long conversations about life, and so much more. This experiences have allowed me to forge lifelong connections with other people that care about both me and writing. Throughout the two weeks, these connections with the MFA community will be forever ingrained in my memory and in my heart.