Q&A: Christian McLean Talks About Upcoming Open House for Writing Program at College

The Lichtenstein Center MFA in Creative Writing program at Stony Brook University, based at Stony Brook Southampton, will host an open house on December 6 starting at 6 p.m. that will feature a student and faculty reading event.

The open house will give attendees a chance to meet with faculty, get insights into the admissions process and financial aid opportunities, and meet current Masters of Fine Arts students to gain a firsthand perspective on the program. The event will be held in Chancellors Hall, and the readings will begin at 6:40 p.m. in the Rakoff Studio. The public is welcome to attend either or both free events.

Christian McLean, incoming associate director of the program, spoke on Friday via Zoom about the program, the legacy of success among both students and faculty in the world of literature, and the role of public readings for a budding author.

Q: The open house is an event that’s about bringing in prospective new people to the program, and it’s teamed with an event that allows you to showcase some of the writings of some of the students and the faculty.

Exactly. The best way for people to understand if this is the right place, I think, is to actually meet and hear what their future fellow students and their workshop leaders are writing and doing.

The open house is a great way to just connect back with our East End community. During COVID, obviously, we weren’t having public events, and we were just getting back to having public events and connecting with the larger East End.

Q: That’s got to make this an important event for everybody, because it is really the first one since COVID, right?

Yeah. It’s exciting. The students are really excited. The faculty are really excited. It just feels like making this, the reconnection, is crucial for our program. I think that our students haven’t understood that yet, actually how large and special it is to have an audience that’s beyond just the workshop.

Q: Tell me about the role that readings play in what you do, in the process of training writers and teaching writers. What do public readings bring to the table for the educational process?

It’s a great question. I think one is that it forces students to really nail down a piece that they are really proud of and is really polished. Much of what we’re doing in classes is workshopping raw material and generating new work, and the reading is an opportunity to take a small piece and refine it to the point that they feel they’re ready to read it out loud.

The other component is that, as writers, part of being a writer is reading to the public. Nowadays, whenever you have a book tour, you’re going to libraries, you’re going to bookstores, you’re going to other arts centers. So reading your work and reading it well is a skill unto itself, and it’s important for them to start practicing.

Q: I never really thought about that. Writing seems like such an isolated thing — you’re by yourself in writing. But you need to have the skill to be able to almost perform.

Yeah, yeah. I think you’re right. It’s the other part, once the isolated part is done. Hopefully, you have a bunch of people who are willing to come and hear you read and then buy books.

But it’s really just about sharing. The best way to share your work with people in a small space is to do that. Otherwise, everyone would sit there and read it quietly.

The other thing for our students is to see how things work — if a line is working. Do you have an audible gasp in the audience? Do you have a sigh, do you have a laugh, where you want those things to happen? Reading out loud, especially to an audience who doesn’t know you, will give you that kind of feedback as well.

Q: With drama, you get that feedback all the time, but with writing you really don’t.

Right, exactly. Because with drama, in some ways it’s meant to be put in front of an audience all the time. That’s the idea of it. It’s put into words, said by actors out into the public. Where traditional reading — reading is a private experience most of the time, but we have these moments as live authors, traveling and reading out loud. That makes it more communal in some ways, and when you read well, it does have that theatricality to it.

Q: Speaking of communal, I noticed that in promotional materials for the event, your colleague Susan Scarf Merrell noted that it’s going to be both faculty and students reading, and I love that she said, “It’s because we’re all teachers and students all the time.” Talk about that a little bit. This reading really does put teachers and students on an even level.

Yeah. I think that’s great. I think that our students, while they’re our students, they’re also fellow writers, and we try to treat them as such. I think that, as you know as a writer, you show up to a blank page whether you’ve written 10 books or no books. Every time you write a new article, you’re showing up to a blank page, and you’ve got to start from scratch.

I think that as writers, we often share — whether you’re still in an MFA program or an undergraduate program or writing on your own — we all share the same emotional experience as we create. Then, to get to share that work out loud with each other is a bit of a celebration. And I think that we do value our students as colleagues as well as students.

Q: Where do you get most of your students from? Are they young people? Are they people returning to education? What’s the norm?

It’s a mix. We have a good portion who are coming out of undergraduate and coming into the MFA [program], and then we have, like you said, people who are professionals who are working and taking classes. We have a few who have retired and are finally getting to the work that they wanted to be doing all the years while they were doing their day job — and I think that is fantastic. I think it adds a lot to the workshop space as well, all these different life experiences.

Q: Stony Brook Southampton — and Southampton College before it — has a fairly long history with this writing program. It’s been around in some form or another for a long time, and has had some amazing successes and some remarkable people coming through the program.

I think it was 2006 when we became part of Stony Brook University, but it existed before that as Long Island University. The Writers Conference is going to be celebrating its 49th summer.

But as far as in the past few years, even, we’ve had some really great successes from our students. Alison Fairbrother had a book come out in 2022 called “The Catch.” Marissa Levien had a book that came out called “The World Gives Way” the year before that. We actually had a book that just came out this past year called “The Tip Line” by Vanessa Cuti, which is a fictionalized version of a main character who answers the phone call with the first tip about the Gilgo Beach murders.

We’ve had several books coming out of the program over the past couple of years. If you go back I guess almost eight years ago, Helen Simonson, her thesis became a best-selling novel — that was “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” — and then she has another book, “The Summer Before the War,” that came out a few years later. I think she’s on her third book right now. So it’s been great.

In fact, on Wednesday, I went into our Manhattan location, where Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones just read from a collection that came out in October, and she graduated, I think, in 2019.

Our students are producing, and it’s wonderful. It’s one of my favorite things, actually, to see them come back and read. To see Claudia read the other night was just so much fun, because you see them working on this stuff for two or three years, and then they leave the program. Then, a year or two later, you hear about their success and just see how they’ve grown as writers even in that absence.

Q: Teaching writing is an interesting thing, because I’m guessing all of the different authors that you just described, and all of the different books that have been published, are very different in tone, in subject, in delivery. Teaching writers to find their own voices — that’s what you do, right?

Yeah. I think it’s crucial. I mean, a lot of it, there are some nuts and bolts that are pretty universal, but the idea is that each student leaves with the book that they want, the book that they feel that’s inside them.

Marissa’s book is speculative, a story that takes place on a spaceship that’s essentially splitting in two. Where Claudia’s is a collection of poetry and some micro-essays, really, that are structured around the six hurricanes of the past century in Puerto Rico. They’re so different.

Also, it’s important to have faculty who can shepherd each one of these projects. As the students are looking for their thesis advisor, they have taken classes with them, and they’re looking for the person who they think can best shepherd this project to the place it needs to be and that will make this student most satisfied with it.

Q: The change to the Lichtenstein Center, with the help of Dorothy Lichtenstein, what has that actually meant for the writing program? Has it changed anything in the way that you do what you do?

In the classroom, I don’t think it does very much. It gives us a cleaner organization idea. We have grown, as you talked about the history. We started off as the Stony Brook entity in 2006. It was just an MFA in creative writing, and since then and now, we have what now falls under the Lichtenstein Center umbrella is an MFA in creative writing and an MFA in film and an MFA in TV writing, and an undergraduate BFA in creative writing, and an undergraduate program in filmmaking.

Plus, we have a food lab and an audio podcast program, and there are a few others that balance the line between part MFA, part Lichtenstein. We have something called BookEnds, which is a one-year program, which takes novels that are very close to being where they need to be to the next level, and, hopefully, get those out. At the end, they meet with agents and things like that.

What the Lichtenstein Center does is it gives us an organizing principle and a collective group of programs that share the same ideals and vision.

… As students, our students do sometimes have the opportunity to take a class in something else. If a student wants to take a screenwriting class and they’re in the creative writing program, they do have that opportunity.

… We’ve always believed that writing in different genres really helps inform your other pieces. Screenwriting really helps you understand structure. Poetry helps you understand word-for-word selection, things like that.

Q: The open house and the readings, just to be clear, is for prospective students, but I’m guessing anybody who would be interested in the readings is also invited to come?

Absolutely. If they’re just interested in the readings, then that’s 6:40 p.m. there, and they’re welcome to come. It’s open to the public, and it’ll be exciting to have people from the public at their readings. If they’re interested in pursuing an MFA, then 6 p.m. for the open house.

Q: You’re going to be reading?

I’m not sure. Right now, I think we have six faculty and we have 10 MFA students, so that’s 16 people. Right now, I don’t think I need to, but I’ll probably be emceeing it. People will hear enough of me that they don’t need to hear me read. They’ll be thankful I’m not reading.

Q: Are you working on something right now?

Yeah. I’m working on a play, which, this weekend is when I get to start to really nail down some final things on it. But, yeah, I’m hoping to get it up, I’ve got to talk to them, but it’s either maybe in June or next fall.