Faith Diaz, Contributing Writer
After severe, on-going problems with the Creative Writing house’s electrical system and foundations, the home-turned-writer’s-hub is scheduled to be torn down this academic year.
Thirteen days before returning for the fall semester, creative writing students at UMF were notified about the fate of their building. On Aug. 20, Jefferey Thomson, the new creative writing Department Chair, sent out a mass email stating, “As many of you know (after sitting through many false-alarm fire-alarms) there have been some pretty serious problems with the house’s electrical systems. In addition, there are some serious issues with the house’s foundation.”
The email continued, reading, “What this adds up to, sadly, is that the cost of fixing the house has become prohibitive for the University and it needs to be torn down. As a result, by the time you get here, the creative writing program will have been moved to new offices in the bottom of the Fusion Center.”
When students arrived to campus they saw that the building still stood but no one was permitted to enter.
Thomson elaborated on how this decision came to be made and what it means for the creative writing students. “In June, the acting Provost, Kathy Yardley, emailed me and said she wanted to walk us around some spaces for the creative writing program. This was the first we [as faculty] heard about it specifically,” he said.
The board that was assembled for the first notification of the closure consisted of faculty members Linda Britt, Eric Brown (interim President of UMF at the time), Jefferey Thomson, and Kathy Yardley. Britt, the humanities chair, was unavailable to comment due to traveling.
Thomson said, “We, as in the creative writing faculty, we didn’t know that the house was in that bad of shape until that moment. And then because of the transition to the new president and people moving around in upper administration, we weren’t told officially we were moving until the 15th of August or something like that.”
He continued, “The reasons that students were surprised about it is because it happened rather quickly.”
Over the summer, UMF went through a presidential shift from Eric Brown to Edward Serna. This administrative shift stalled many projects, including the placement of creative writing majors, which meant that the official changing of locations happened within the official notification of the creative writing faculty, students and the start of the first day of classes this fall.
Upon students returning to campus, the creative writing faculty is aware of the general displeasure of students for the loss of the house. “There’s hope that the basement down here [in the Fusion Center] is going to be a temporary position for us,” Thomson said. “That within the next year or so, we will be able to move into an equivalent space.”
Thomson came to UMF in 2003 as an assistant professor and after four years, he received tenure. After six years of teaching as an associate professor, in 2013, he solidified his position and joined the full-time staff. Due to Patricia O’Donnell’s retirement, Thomson has become the Department Chair of the creative writing program.
He concluded his thoughts on the program’s location change with, “I’ve asked to be included in that discussion [of the future locale of creative writing courses] because, yes, writing is so solitary that it helps to have a space where you can have a sense of this, this place that is yours to share with your peers. And we are trying to make [the Fusion Center] like that but we understand that it is not the same.”