Transcript

Jared McCormack

Welcome to MFA Writers, the podcast where we talk to creative writing MFA students about their program, their process, and a piece they’re working on. I’m your host, Jared McCormack.

Today I’m with Oli Peters. Oli is a second-year MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Notre Dame. Oli’s work is forthcoming in Annulet, DIAGRAM, DREGINALD, and mercury firs, and her past work appears in Pleiades, New World Writing, Rain Taxi, Heavy Feather Review, and abo zine. Her dance-performance piece "Body Glyph State" will be performed at the 2025 Iowa Choreography Festival. Oli, thanks for being here.

Oli Peters

Yeah, thank you.

Jared McCormack

So your work is super interesting. And artistically, you have really eclectic interests. You write a lot of poetry, of course, but you also write short stories and book reviews. And you do work with dance as well. So I'd love to hear more about your creative background. Have you always had these various creative interests?

Oli Peters

No. So I went to the University of Iowa for undergrad and my freshman year there, took an introduction to lyric poetry course. And I just was obsessed. I was like, this is the weirdest stuff I've ever read. I don't understand it, these people must be geniuses. I just kind of fell in love with the contemporary poetry I was reading. Of course, being at Iowa, everyone will encourage you to write. And so I kind of drank that Kool-Aid, I guess. And yeah, and so then I was kind of exclusively writing poetry, some short stories here and there, but poetry really had my heart. And then graduated, then for like five years, again, I was kind of writing poetry alone in my room. And then I came to Notre Dame and the program is so encouraging of hybridity, crossing genres, stuff like that. And I took a class from one of our fiction faculty and just like for an exercise, wrote a short story in it. I was like, oh, that was super fun. And then just something unclasped and unlocked. And I was like, oh, I can actually do whatever I want. And I think also because you focus so intensely on these poetry workshops, cause I'm there for poetry. I had to focus so intensely on my thesis project. And so when I was getting where poetry started to feel stale, then I'd be like, let's do something fun, write a short story. Yeah. And then my interest in dance stuff came the summer before I started Notre Dame. I just randomly went to this contemporary dance performance at the Walker Museum because I was living in Minneapolis, which is the piece that I read. And I was like, so wrapped by it. I think, again, I kind of had a parallel moment to the one I had as a freshman in my undergrad in the lyric poetry class. I was sitting in the theater at the dance performance and was like, this is crazy. I do not understand this. These people must be geniuses. Like, how can get my claws in there and try understand

Jared McCormack

Yeah, I think that's so interesting that you heard these things you were like, that's weird. I don't understand it. And you moved towards it because I think a lot of people would be like, I don't get that. I'm going in the other direction. Right. And at the same time, I think there are a lot of people who feel like they have to choose a lane with writing and stick with it, right? But you are kind of embracing writing in these different genres, embracing blurring the lines between genres, writing hybrid stuff. So what do you think are the benefits of trying out different genres and blurring those lines?

Oli Peters

Like I mentioned, for me, it's just like, if poetry starts to feel like I'm getting too serious about it, I mean, my poetry also is like, my looking at series is a bit more infused with a sort of humor and levity, but my thesis project is all the spell drive poems are elegies. They're like, very solid, they're very serious. And I was just like, Yeah, I was reading it. I was like, man, I'm a fun loving girl. So then also, especially writing fiction, honestly, when I write, I'm just kind of trying to make myself laugh in addition to getting lost in characters and stuff. So yeah, for me, it's just like the different forms allow me to access different parts of my creative self. But then also, before going to Notre Dame, I was kind of afraid of different genres infecting my poetry or something. Because poetry just for me, it was like this little pearly bubble wanted to keep pure. And of course, I was reading a lot of poetry. And maybe your work kind of gets infected by the authors you read, which I think is a good thing. Yeah, but I was like, well, what if I start writing short stories and then I start writing prose poems? And for some reason I was like, no, don't want to write prose poems. I don't know. But then I worked through that fear and it isn't true. It's like my work has only benefited and expanded from having little tentacles and everything kind of. Yeah.

Jared McCormack

Well, I want to talk about your process a little bit. I like that idea of when you write fiction, you're just trying to make yourself laugh. You're just trying to have fun in the process. That's something that I'm always trying to do, right? If I'm not having fun writing a story, I'm like, there's something wrong. It's not going to turn out well, right? I should be having fun when I'm drafting something. So I love hearing that in relation to writing your fiction, but I also want to hear about how you write your poems, like how they come to you. How long does that process take? Do you find that you have an idea and it just comes out quickly or is it something that you kind of slowly work at and slowly revise and rewrite and all that?

Oli Peters

So I write pretty much daily and I have for a really long time. And so for poems, I can't go for more than like my maximums, like two hours at a time because my brain is just working so hard. So the Ekphrastic series I'm working on, it's so nice because you can just be like, my generating, the idea that I'm using to generate this poem is a thing. Like it is this piece of art. So it's almost a little bit cheap for me. I'm like, just like a cheap way to get an idea. Yeah, but with, like, the spell drive poems, those took a while of me just kind of, like, carving at what felt like a big slab of marble. I'm, like, carving at it, trying to get to something, and I stumbled a lot. Like, there was an entire poetry workshop spring of 2024 where I was just, like, turning in these, like, poems that, like, I was not, I didn't feel great about, like people are really encouraging, but I was like, this is like not it. And then like all of a sudden just like, oh, this is how I include the dance ekphrasis. This is how I include elegy. This is how I include language poetics and more lyric stuff. And it was just like one day, like all these like disparate elements that I was working with just kind of merged. So that's like conceptually how that came together. But then, in terms of just writing, it takes me a week to write a poem. I don't know why, it just always takes a week. Yeah. And if I'm working on it every morning for like one or two hours, it's just word by word. I'm like, if this word isn't perfect, I can't get to the next one.

Jared McCormack

Well, I know you also told me that experimentation is really important to your work. And I'd love to hear you talk about that because experimentation might mean different things to different people. So what does it mean to you and how do you integrate experimentation into your process?

Oli Peters

Yeah, I took a translation workshop with Johannes Joronsson, which was huge for that. That was also spring semester, that same semester when I was turning in these bad poems to workshop. reading the translation theory was really helpful because I could apply it to how I was integrating phrases and dance notation into my thesis project. But then we also had to do a final portfolio translation project. And so I chose to use these phrases of motif lava notation, which is a type of dance notation. And so I found a video from the 80s, where it was horrible music. And people were dancing out these dance notations in this like class at Ohio State University or something. And so I would like, look at the dance notation phrase, watch it danced, and then translate based on a key, like the symbols, and then after seeing them danced, basically write a prose lyric poem, like a frastic thing. And again, I was writing those and I was like, these are trash. Like so stupid. I can't believe Johannes is encouraging me to do this. Yeah. And then, I kind of would avoid them, even doing them. And then one day just sat down and I was like, let's bust these out. And I think it was like literally all day from dusk till dawn, I just did them. And I still don't know if they're good, but they're like, they were a big step into entering a space I'm not comfortable with. That type of writing, I wasn't as careful with it as I am with the Spelder poems. And so I think it was much more like, just spit something out and trust it.

Jared McCormack

I think that's probably a pretty common experience for people when they're experimenting with something. They try something that's completely outside the box and then they think to themselves, this isn't working. What is this? I don't know what this is. And then if you continue, if you allow yourself to continue down these rabbit holes that may or may not lead anywhere and be comfortable with them maybe not leading anywhere. You can get lucky, right? You can stumble onto something really interesting, something that really resonates. And so I think, I mean, I'm curious to hear what you think, but I imagine a big part of the difficulty is getting to that point where you feel comfortable being like, okay, I might spend a lot of time doing this thing, it might go nowhere, but I'm okay with that.

Oli Peters

Yeah, it's interesting because the five years that I spent out of undergrad, I was just like writing poems, sending them to no one. Like, so I was comfortable with them not getting published. I was comfortable spending all this time with them and writing and not necessarily knowing what would happen. But so then when I got to like the MFA, I think inherently in any program there's like a pressure to publish, there's a pressure to produce a publishable manuscript. So that was like a new pressure to deal with, which I think once that starts to creep in it's very damaging to my writing process. But at the same time, I was in these classes where they were just like do the weirdest thing you can. And like, the classrooms were genuinely a space of exploration for me at least. And they felt like in the best way possible, it's just like, they're just like, like garbage bins. Like, you know what I mean? Like, in a way that feels like really, like it combats the pressure to publish. So yeah.

Jared McCormack

Yeah. I think that's a super common experience in MFA programs. It was for me, it was for a lot of people that I've talked to that you get in there and inherently some of the talk, a lot of the talk is about what comes next, publishing, you know, getting an agent, putting out a book, all those things, right? And I found exactly the same as you. I found that that was so detrimental to my writing, to actually like drafting stories was when I was starting to think about publishing already. And then, you know, we talked about that idea of trying to move towards the fun in your process. I found at that point it was just all pressure. There was no fun. And so then it became a lot of work to try to get back to having fun with the process and realizing when I was having fun that the stories, the stories I wrote when I was having fun were so much better than the stories I was writing before. So that's, that's an interesting thing to hear you went through that as well. And I think anyone listening who's entering an MFA program or in a program right now, and maybe struggling with this, it's common, it's common. it's something that, you know, you should be aware of and maybe try to combat before it gets too far down the road. Yeah. But it's great. It sounds like Notre Dame has created some spaces, some classrooms where that idea of trying to perfect something is pushed outside the classroom walls and you're allowed to just dig around in the trash and see what you find. Right?

Oli Peters

Yeah. Which has just been super useful to me. And I think like, Yeah, writing will inevitably, I think, sometimes feel like your soul is being hacked at, which is what my entire thesis project felt like. But yeah, it's like a different sort of awfulness to have a part of that hacking be the pressure to publish. It's just so poisonous.

Jared McCormack

Yeah, because you end up in this place where you're writing for other people instead of writing for yourself, right? And I'm of the opinion that First and foremost, at least in the early stages of a piece, you really should be writing for yourself. You should be writing whatever you find interesting and fun and exciting. Okay, so you mentioned these few years you spent writing alone in your room. And I want to talk about that because you applied to MFA programs right out of undergrad and you didn't get into any programs, which you said ended up being a great thing for you as a writer. And that's because of that time you got to spend writing alone. I want to hear about that. What was that time like? And what did you discover during that time?

Oli Peters

So right when I applied out of undergrad, I was pretty devastated that I didn't get in anywhere because I was like, I thought that was the only path forward. Like all the writers I admired had these MFAs and yeah, and stuff like that. One of the reasons it was beneficial is because COVID happened immediately after. I was like, that would have been a totally different experience to go to an MFA program during COVID. But so then there ended up being five years between undergrad and grad school. Right when I popped out of undergrad, I was like writing these contemporary lyric poems is like how I think about them. And lived in Montana for a year during that time. In Montana, my writing just changed immensely. Like I don't, I don't know what it was. I mean, I was isolated on a ranch. But all of a sudden I started writing this like super weird, like more like language poetry stuff. And the first poem I wrote was a deviation from what I was writing before, apparently I just discovered the apostrophe key on my keyboard. And I was like, oh, what if I take out certain value vowels of words and just place them with an apostrophe which was revolutionary for me, like this little key on my keyboard did so much for me. Things just got weird after that. And then to kind of prepare another portfolio, I took an online writing course with Shai Watson. And it's where I first showed those weirder poems to people. Because it was like, these are unreadable. These are unreadable. Then people are like, no, no, like maybe they are, but also like I read them. Yeah, I'm just now realizing I'm like, there was pre-Montana and there was post-Montana for my writing career. Or my, not career, you know, my writing path. But both a good and a bad thing about the way that I came to poetry was that I was in an institution.

Jared McCormack

A really well-known institution that everyone knows as the writing place, right? I imagine that creates some pressure.

Oli Peters

Yeah. And like, my professor in undergrad who I took that lyric structures class with and then I took as many classes I could with the entire time was Robyn Schiff. And I'm absolutely indebted to this woman. But at the same time, I was writing to impress my workshop peers and impress the professors that I respected. So I wrote like them. Like I wrote how they wanted me to write, which, like I said, at the time, that was like, since it was kind of like all I knew, it was pretty authentic to me. But yeah, then I reached this place in Montana where I was like, this, this isn't working like it used to. And then I realized I was able to parse out what I learned in the institution of poetry writing was serving me and what wasn't in a way that I hadn't been able to before.

Jared McCormack

I think that's super interesting. I love the idea that you were like, the apostrophe. Why would I put this into my poem? But also why not? And just giving it a shot and seeing what happens. I mean, like, this is kind of fun. This is kind of interesting. And then somehow during, like through that process, coming to a new kind of writing, new kind of poetry, a new way of writing poetry that felt more authentic to you. And that's going to look different for every person, right? Like I had a professor in my program who told me every writer goes through the process of, first, learning the rules, like learning the basics, learning how to write stories. And often those are kind of emulating people, you know, emulating writers, you know, and then you get to a point where you say, okay, I know how to do it. Now I can just do whatever I want. Now I can get weird with it. Now I can have fun and find out who I am as a writer. And it sounds like that's what you went through during this time period. Maybe the lesson here is we should all just go to Montana for a bit and chill out on a ranch and see what happens.

Jared McCormack

If you can. I mean, it was really useful, I guess. Like said, I'm just not realizing. I think Montana had a lot to do with it because I was there. I was like this ranch and was like, I'm literally writing like for nobody. You know, it was me and the elk. I was like, the elk can't read my work. Like, was just like, who am I trying to impress with this? Like, I'm not trying to get it anywhere. I'm not trying to publish it anywhere. yeah.

Jared McCormack

Yeah. I think that's great. That's so cool and such a great thing for listeners to keep in mind that, yeah, sometimes you just got to get out of your own head, get out of the institutions, get out of whatever spaces create pressure for you and just see what happens when you have some fun. Okay, so then you applied to programs again. You ended up at the University of Notre Dame, whose two-year MFA program in creative writing offers tracks in prose and poetry. though they seem very open to and even encourage hybrid work. So what was it that drew you to Notre Dame's MFA?

Oli Peters

So basically the faculty, like Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson, I just really, I've read their work for a long time. I really appreciate them. Yeah. And then all the places I got like waitlisted my first time wanted nothing to do with me. Again, because my writing changed so much. The biggest thing was just the faculty and their work was emblematic of the work that I was aspiring to write as well. Yeah.

Jared McCormack

So the direction your writing had moved in kind of seemed to align more closely with what they were doing. So in what ways has the program fostered those hybrid interests, those experimental interests of yours?

Oli Peters

So Joyelle is my advisor. And was like, every time I turn in something to her that I think is absolutely unpublishable, verging on unreadable, she doesn't bat an eye. She's just like, okay, cool. I really don't know if any experimentation is too extreme for them.

Jared McCormack

Well, the website also mentions how besides taking workshops, students have the opportunity to take courses in gender studies, art and art history, book arts, languages and literatures, film, television and theater. And I know you have taken classes in medieval manuscripts, theater and theory, playwriting and translation, among others. So what have been some of your favorite and most influential classes outside of the workshops?

Oli Peters

Yep. So, the medieval manuscript class, the title eating, kissing, damaging books, medieval manuscript as multisensory object. That really helped me because I was thinking about how to include this dance notation, like, which kind of made the material of the page kind of pop out to me, the landscape of the page starts to feel more physical. That class helped me reimagine like the corpus of the book. And also it was just really fun. Like it was, it was very rigorous, but I got to go to like special collections and like, you know, our professor was like, you have to smell the book. Like you put your nose in the book to like, fully read the book you have to touch it you have to like uh look at it's yeah it's been damaged and stuff so we didn't get to eat any books which was a disappointment but yeah and then also like that that was the first class that I took out of the English department and so also had to like You know, like me, it's way that you can just like riff and spitball, like in a poetry workshop does not work in a medieval manuscripts class. have to be more critical and analytical. And that was also kind of like, just made my brain work a little bit differently. The theater and theory class is also really useful because, which I'm currently in, absolutely fascinating, I think, especially because I've been working with like dancers and the way that they conceive of like 3D space. I'm like, how can I push that into the page?

Jared McCormack

So within the MFA program itself, I'm curious to hear about the sense of community. Do you feel like the program does a good job of fostering relationships between students? And have you gotten the kind of mentorship from faculty you hoped for?

Oli Peters

Yeah, mentorship, I'd say for sure. Like I mentioned, I think almost every faculty member in the creative writing space has just encouraged me to explore. That's kind of like the best case scenario for me. It gives you the confidence that you need. So for some reason, I just needed an authority figure to tell me yes. And then I was like, oh my God, now I can do anything. And yeah, in terms of community, it feels very small, which, yeah, I mean, I've met deer and true friends through it, which has been, again, like a best case scenario. What's interesting about being at Notre Dame is that it does feel a little bit like you're kind of in this creative silo. It kind of feels like our department, the creative writing department is one of the more robust arts departments. And people at Notre Dame, I mean, are very focused. I mean, like every undergrad I feel like is like a business or theology major. And I mean, I'm teaching inter creative writing right now. And it's like, they just kind of are shocked that I let them do whatever or just think creatively. Yeah, so I'd say it's an interesting dynamic being at the university. But once you get out of the university, there's actually a lot of, there's some pretty robust community-based art stuff going on.

Jared McCormack

All right, well, I wanna hear a little bit more about teaching at Notre Dame. The website says, all admitted MFA students receive full tuition waiver, fellowship providing a full stipend and health insurance subsidy. In most programs, students teach in return for those benefits. It appears at Notre Dame that you only teach in your second year. And before that, you have other responsibilities like editing at the Notre Dame Review or doing community outreach, things like that. So I'm curious to hear what kinds of responsibilities students have in their first year and also what teaching has been like in your second year.

Oli Peters

My first year, you have different fellowships. So my first year, I worked as a poetry editor for the Notre Dame Review. And yeah, I mean, it was a pretty standard editor position at a reviewer magazine, reading all submissions. And then I also had a team of like six editorial assistants. So, you know, organizing all of that. And then would just send them off to the poetry editor and he would decide. So, That was pretty standard. But also, some people have fellowships with Action Books, which is a really unique indie press based out of Notre Dame. And then some people are campus coordinators. So they do lead MFA workshops with undergrads and graduate students. And then another person's community outreach. So getting people to volunteer with like community organizations. So the second year you teach, you do take a pedagogy course for one semester during your first year. You kind of prepare for that. I really love it, but it is a lot of work. Getting my syllabus together took me so long. Fall semester, just like, my students were just super into it and super engaged and like willing to experiment and play. So I teach intro to creative writing, and you completely make your own syllabus and then you just send it off to get it approved. And so in my class, I just do like a fiction unit, nonfiction, creative nonfiction, and then poetry. And then we do a big workshop at the end. And some people do intro to poetry and some people do intro to fiction.

Jared McCormack

And how much is the stipend that you receive? Because I couldn't find that anywhere on the website.

Oli Peters

This year it's 25. So I don't know. I think that's pretty good for an MFA program. And like the fact that you don't have to teach your first year and South Bend is really cheap. So yeah, it's for me, it's been enough. I mean, obviously I haven't saved a ton of money, but.

Jared McCormack

But it's been plenty to kind of live comfortably and get by?

Oli Peters

Yeah.

Jared McCormack

One thing you said that has been unique about your experience in the program is you've gotten to travel a lot through the program. You've gone to Ireland and Paris, as well as to conferences like ALTA and AWP. So in what ways does the program encourage and support that travel? And what were those experiences like?

Oli Peters

Yeah. I hope it's not tacky for me to say, but you know, Notre Dame is a fancy place and they've got cashflow, which I, I didn't quite realize going in. But if you're willing to seek out independent research grants and there's a grants office who have these really wonderful advisors who help you work on your proposals, Yeah, if you're kind of like shrewd and like nowhere to look, like, yeah, and you write a strong enough proposal, like they are not opposed to funding creative projects. And so the Paris thing, I went to Paris for two weeks on this like graduate research grant. There's like a European studies like funding source. And because I and I went to study, go see some dances to write ekphrastic stuff into my thesis and then also to go to this really cool dance notation archive to better fit together all of that. And it did really help. Notre Dame owns a castle in Ireland. They have a summer writing program open to undergrads and grad students. And if you get funding for you as a graduate student, you get to live in a castle for a month in basically a national park in Ireland. There's like a chef who cooks your meals. It's crazy. It's so crazy. And, Yeah, and so then in the mornings, I think they're gonna maybe change up how the program works exactly for grad students. But when I went in the mornings, you're in a creative writing class with a few different faculty members. And then in your afternoons, just stick you on a tour bus and you go explore Ireland. It was absolutely crazy. I mean, every time I told my family and friends, they would just laugh. It was ridiculous. Lap of luxury. Then, yeah, so the Alta funding, Alta is a translators conference and, you get a little bit of money, like you get $500 graduate professional development funding, per year, just automatically as a grad student, which people just used to go to AWP. And then, Alta, since it was kind of like this extra thing, it was also just in Milwaukee, so it wasn't expensive to go, but yeah, I got just a little bit of funding from the grad school for that.

Jared McCormack

So speaking of that Alta conference, I hear you presented an experimental dance notation translation project there that will be performed at the 2025 Iowa Choreography Festival. So I have to hear about that.

Oli Peters

So Body Glyph State is what I ended up calling my translation project, which I did in that translation workshop. And then a few of us who were in that class, we were just like, what if we just like sent in a panel proposal and kind of to our surprise, Alta said yes. Yeah, that's what I presented on. It was really cool. Alta's awesome. Translators are so awesome. So if you're interested in that kind of stuff, I highly recommend going. And yeah, I just kind of randomly know this dancer in Des Moines and I ran into her and mentioned it to her and she was like, oh, like I help out with this choreography festival. It's really low stakes, so it's a good place to try out getting stuff performed. So yeah, like I said, I've been kind of sheepish about the Body Glyph State project. But then I presented on it at Alta and people thought it was cool. And I was like, it's crazy. And then this dancer friend, like I sent a proposal to the choreography people and they were like, wow, this looks cool. So yeah, now I'm trying to figure out how to take it from paper onto 3D stage space. yeah. Again, I've just been really surprised with where all the dance stuff has taken me. Like, you know, I got to go to Paris and do that stuff. And yeah, I never thought I'd be presenting at a translation conference. So on dance notation, but yeah, there was also another girl there who does dance notation translation stuff.

Jared McCormack

All right. Well, before we wrap up, I want to give you the last word. What is one way in which the MFA experience has been different for better or for worse from your expectations when applying?

Oli Peters

Yeah, so like I've kind of mentioned, I thought I was just a poet for so many years. And I thought I'd be just coming to Notre Dame just to poetry more intensively. So working within so many different genres and mediums has been the biggest unexpected thing to happen. I also thought that publishing my work was the answer to all my problems. And then I started getting just a few things published and I was like, oh, it's the writing. That's the satisfying part. So yeah, that's been an important thing to realize. It goes with what we were talking about earlier in the conversation, that idea that you know, how like focusing too much on publication can affect your writing.

Jared McCormack

I find once you're published, that can become even more enhanced. So it's, it's just like a constant process of reminding yourself it's about the writing. It's about the writing, which is easier said than done. Right.

Oli Peters

Yeah. And like, yeah, I was like talking to Joyelle and we had, I had like my main, we had my, my manuscript between us and We were both just kind of like looking at it at one point. She was like, you know, you don't have to publish this. And I was like, I don't. And yeah, it's just it's so like it's a revolutionary thought sometimes. Like you don't ever have to publish anything if you don't want.

Jared McCormack

Yeah. And when you're drafting something and playing around and experimenting, nobody even has to read it at all. You don't have to show it to anyone if you don't want to. So that should take some pressure off. But somehow, us writers, we are pretty good at putting pressure on ourselves.

Oli Peters

Yeah.

Jared McCormack

Well, it's been super fun talking to you. I'm super excited for you, excited for your work, and excited to see what you do next. So congratulations on finishing your thesis and turning that in. Good luck on the rest of your final semester at Notre Dame. And thanks for stopping by and chatting with me.

Oli Peters

Yeah. Thank you so much. It’s been lovely.

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