Meet the Grad: Tiffany Grimes

On July19, the final day of the upcoming residency, the MFAC program will have a Graduate Recognition ceremony to honor the men and women who have just completed their studies and will receive an MFA from Hamline University. Between now and residency we'll be posting interviews with the grads. Tiffany Grimes is today's grad; she lives in St. Augustine, Florida and can also be found on Twitter: @Qtiffany.

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What do you do when you’re not working on packets?

I’m a huge fangirl, which is why my etsy shop is called FangirlBoutique2014; I sew nerdy skirts, pouches, and scarves. I obsess over Harry Potter and frequently visit Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade (in Orlando). I also spend lots of quality time with my cats (Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow, Lady Sybil Cora Branson, and Former President Andrew Jackson). My day jobs: nannying three kids and working at Barnes and Noble.

How did you hear about the Hamline MFAC Program?

I researched low-residency creative writing programs and found Hamline. Two seconds later I found out that a friend from my undergrad was also applying (Meg Cannistra), and that my undergrad Children’s Lit professor (and the nicest, most inspirational person I have ever met), Becky Stanborough, had graduated from Hamline. Seemed like a good sign!

What was your writing experience prior to entering the program?

I started writing in elementary school (at about the same time I learned how to write sentences). My childhood was troublesome, so writing was an outlet, even when I was just writing in a journal. By sixth grade, I knew I wanted to be a writer. In high school I was sure I would be a journalist, but by college, I knew fiction writing was for me.

At Ollivanders. (Click to...)

What do you especially remember about your first residency?

Everyone was so nice and asked every twelve seconds how I was and reminded me that it was okay to be overwhelmed. Then, I spent a few days with a fever (what better way to spend your first residency?) before [classmate] Judi Marcin reminded me that she’s a doctor.

Have you focused on any one form (PB, novel, nonfiction; graphic novel) or age group in your writing? Tried a form you never thought you’d try?

Throughout the program, I focused on young adult (though I started with sci-fi and ended up with realistic fiction). I never thought I would dabble in fantasy, but I’ve started a fun project about ghosts and guardian angels (which is so so different from my realistic fiction piece).

Tell us about your Creative Thesis.

My Creative Thesis is a realistic young adult novel about a fourteen-year-old girl named Tate. When her mother died and her father decided he couldn’t handle being a father, Tate became a foster child. After three horrible homes, she ended up with a perfect sister and a wonderful mother, but suddenly dad wouldn’t let her be adopted. Every time she sees her father, he seems more and more put together, with a new girlfriend and now a baby on the way. Her sister, Caleigh, starts college when Tate starts high school, and Tate feels empty without her.

She starts trying to be more like Caleigh, getting into uncomfortable situations, always thinking about what Caleigh would do. Later in the novel, it becomes clear that Tate is hiding something very important from herself, something she needs to deal with and accept in order to move on.

What changes have you seen in your writing during your studies?

I’ve been able to take more risks and write from deep down, even if it means uncovering memories I’d rather not remember. (Thanks, Jane J). But my writing has become more realistic and less void of emotion, and for that I’m grateful.

Any thoughts for entering students or for people considering the program?

So many people told me not to go to Hamline (because of money or life experience or time), but I ignored them. Hamline has been the best decision I have ever made. Follow your dreams. If writing is for you, you know you can’t run away from it.

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The public is welcome to attend the graduate recognition ceremony on Sunday, July 19, 3:30pm, (Sundin Music Hall, Hamline University). Tim Federle is the speaker. 

Alumni Voices: Becky Stanborough

Why I Am Taking Two Terms Off

1973. Two sisters are deep in a game with some bean bag dolls. The dolls are fending for themselves through a long, hard winter in the woods. There is trudging. There is hunger. There are wrenching soliloquys. Then the bean bag girls—Puffin and Jocelyn—build a schoolhouse out of red bible story books. Puffin herds her beanie children inside. Jocelyn stokes a fire in the imagined wood stove. Everything is always okay once they get inside the school.

I have been playing this game my whole life.

1988. I should be blowing on the sparks of my freelance career; instead, I am on a stepladder, painting the eaves of a schoolhouse red. That year, I write brochures, catalogues, copy for the backs of other people’s books. But my heart is in the schoolhouse, where we read Romeo and Juliet and paint canvas teepees with the juice of berries we stole from the woods.

Ponce de Leon Hall, Flagler College

2010. MFA in my back pocket, I pack a bag and head into the forest, this time for a week-long retreat with our Jane, Marsha C., and Phyllis. All week, writers sit knee to knee with their mentors, talking about their stories. They amble down dirt roads and over footbridges, still talking about their stories. At the end of that week, I take a job teaching at Flagler College. I want the life Jane, Phyllis, and Marsha have—not just the words on the page. I want the relationships they have with their students. My first term under Flagler’s red roof tiles, my classroom has a hearth in it.

Here’s the question I’ve been trying to answer recently: Am I a teacher who writes, or a writer who teaches?

It’s not a semantic distinction. At Flagler, I have written more than four hundred pages of lecture material and dozens of critique letters. But very few stories. I know that the first few years of teaching, when you’re creating courses out of thin air, there’s not a lot of creative energy left for story-drafting. Still, most Hamline professors and lots of graduates somehow balance the demands of the classroom with the demands of the book.

Maybe I lack discipline.

Maybe it gets easier once you master the courses.

Maybe I made a mistake. Maybe, feeling a little lost after graduation and facing a small flurry of rejections, I turned to the safest, warmest place I know.

Not that teaching is anxiety-free. Every single term, I stand in front of a new group of students, awash in strangely adolescent anxiety. What if they hate me? What if the soccer players in the corner laze audaciously like that all term? What if that girl is twisting her hair because she’s bored? Then, about week four, something happens. The students write an essay in which they tell me about the event that changed their lives forever, or if it is a fiction class, they submit their first manuscripts. I read them. I write back. And that is when love shambles in, barefoot and late, as usual. Ten essays and two workshops later, I don’t know how to let them go.

Once, I opened a note from a student I knew had been beaten and berated every day of her childlife. She had written, “I think I am Matilda, and you are my Miss Honey.” That kind of letter is lifeblood (though if I’m in a bleak mood I might call it a crack pipe). I start asking questions like, “Do I spend my time writing on the off chance something gets published, or do I help this person standing in front of me right now?”

And it’s not just the love that has me hooked. In the classroom, I’ll try anything. When I taught Skellig, I thought, What if, instead of talking about the book, we responded with a sculpture instead? I lugged a thirty-pound slab of clay into the room, made a whole bunch of mistakes about how best to cut and distribute it, and let everyone play. They sculpted owl-embellished branches, babies enfolded in petal cradles, and many other lumpy, indistinct things—and if ever a story celebrated the lumpy and indistinct, it is Skellig. What keeps me from turning myself loose like that on the page? Why don’t I relish the grand foolish writing mistake?

I don’t know. Here’s what I know: This year I turn fifty. I am deep in the game. All the time, I’m thinking about the teachers without whom I’d never have dreamed of writing, and the writers whose books saved me when I was in school. Heaven help me, I don’t know which one is more important, and I sure don’t know which one I’m better at. Two roads do diverge in the yellow wood, and all I know to do is wander back and forth between them, making my wrenching soliloquys.

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Becky Stanborough is a January 2010 graduate of the MFAC program. She teaches and writes in Florida.