UCI's tiny creative-writing program has become a darling of the literary world.

August 25, 2002

By VALERIE TAKAHAMA
The Orange County Register

IRVINE – Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones" got a big boost on its way to the top of best-sellers lists this summer when novelist Anna Quindlen told the "Today" TV audience, "If you read only one book this summer, read 'The Lovely Bones,' " and the New York Times ran a rave review on the cover of its arts section.

But at least as important to the book's stellar success - more than 1 million copies in print - is an institution that's as far removed from the New York media world as a writer can get: the University of California, Irvine, creative-writing program.

"I think it was really important, because it provided a space where what everybody cared about most was writing, as opposed to the real world where very few people care about writing," said Sebold, who lives in Long Beach and wrote the novel as a UCI graduate student.

In 1992, Newsweek called UCI's fiction writing workshop "the hottest writing program in the country." Now it's exponentially hotter, thanks only in part to Sebold's daring and uncannily timely novel.

Among the smallest of the 99 MFA creative-writing programs in the country - only six students are admitted each year - it has enjoyed an amazing run of success.

Within the past two years, recent graduates have published or sold eight novels and short-story collections, including "Carter Beats the Devil," a rollicking first novel about a Houdini-type stage magician written by Sebold's husband and classmate Glen David Gold. It sold for a reported $700,000 at auction two years ago, had a splashy debut last fall, and was optioned in the spring by Paramount Pictures for Tom Cruise's production company.

"It totally changed my life. UCI gave me time. It gave me a roomful of really good readers," said Gold, who entered the two-year program in 1995.

"It gave me focus. It gave me teaching skills. It gave me access to great teachers and great writers. It gave me a life as well."

The 38-year-old program has had other publication flurries, notably one that followed the debut of Michael Chabon's acclaimed first novel, "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," in 1988. What's impressive about the current wave is the range of styles and the variety of voices of the books:

Charmaine Craig's "The Good Men," a novel about religious strife in medieval France.

Andrew Winer's "The Color Midnight Made," a novel about a resilient 10-year-old white boy growing up in a troubled family in a mostly black neighborhood in the Bay area.

Maile Meloy's "Half in Love," a collection of stories set mainly in Montana.

Mary Yukari Waters' "The Laws of Evening," a collection of linked stories dealing with Japan's emergence from World War II due out in May.

In addition, David Benioff's "The 25th Hour," a novel about a young Manhattanite's last night of freedom before serving a seven-year sentence for drug dealing, was published in January 2001 and has been made into a movie by Spike Lee starring Edward Norton. (Benioff has since made a career as screenwriter of note.)

The range of books out of UCI is partly a reflection of a sea of change in publishing and in perceptions about the so-called literary novel. These days, the critically praised serious novel can be a multinational love story centered on opera like Ann Patchett's "Bel Canto"; a Civil War saga like Charles Frazier's "Cold Mountain"; or a passport into a shrouded, exotic world like Arthur Golden's "Memoirs of a Geisha."

As with television, magazines, pop music and nearly every other aspect of American culture, the book world has splintered into niche markets - or looked at another way, become democratized. And readers, until recently, seemed less enthralled by the hot first novel of The Next Big Thing than by any book Oprah has recommended.

All of which makes it even more surprising that not one but two hit first novels and several other critically praised works have come from the same university writing program - especially one that is almost militant in its focus on "the work" as opposed to the marketplace, and when set against the conventional wisdom that writers' workshops tend to promote bland, cookie-cutter prose.

Of course, some of it may be coincidence. One literary agent brought up cancer clusters and the laws of random chance when asked about the program's string of publishing successes.

Others, though, say that Geoffrey Wolff, the novelist, memoirist and director of the program's fiction arm, and creative-writing professor Michelle Latiolais, herself a UCI writing program grad, seem unusually adept at spotting talent.

"I think that Irvine has developed such a fine reputation, and they pick very good people to go into the program. It can't be an accident. There are so many MFA programs," said B.J. Robbins, a Los Angeles-based literary agent.

Undoubtedly, the program's small size and the number of applicants - 320 for the fall quarter - allow Wolff and Latiolais to be extremely selective.

"People ask me, what do I do for the application? We always say just send us your best writing," Latiolais said. "It is not scientific. It's as smart as we can be."

They seem to be willing to take a chance on the not-so- sure bet. Winer, for example, was a visual artist in New York for 10 years before applying to the program; Craig was a Hollywood actress as well as a magna cum laude Harvard graduate who hadn't written much fiction; Gold, a former receptionist and day- care worker, said he'd written "four very bad novels before UCI, none of which will ever be published."

And then there's Sebold, 39, whose novel about the murder and dismemberment of a 14-year-old girl has captivated the reading public this summer. It rivets readers from its first paragraph:

"My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. ... It was still back when people believed things like that didn't happen."

Sebold had written several novels, including two that had attracted agents but no publishers, before getting accepted at UCI in 1995.

"My biggest achievement as a writer by the age of 33 was not to be in debt," she said. "That's really true. It sounds funny, but you can't stop your life and go to school if you're in debt."

She started "The Lovely Bones" in 1996, but put it aside to work on a memoir that dealt with her own experience with violence, an assault and rape when she was a freshman at Syracuse University. She called the memoir "Lucky" because another woman who'd been raped at the location of Sebold's attack had been murdered, so the police told her that she'd been lucky.

She credits Wolff, the author of an acclaimed memoir, "The Duke of Deception," with helping her to write about her past, which put her on the right path with "The Lovely Bones."

"The simplest way to put it is I wrote a memoir instead of writing an autobiographical first novel," she said. "It was key to my process, and key to the rest of my writing career."

Winer, who entered the program the year after Sebold, said he noted little of the watering-down or homogen izing of writing styles that supposedly takes place at some writing programs. It's probably because of a philosophy or guiding ethos among the UCI writers and instructors, he said.

"You open yourself to the work's highest intention," he said. "And then you attempt to make it better, giving up your own prejudices and tastes."

Aside from the sheer goodwill of faculty and students, that attitude may be somewhat easier to maintain because of the way the program is set up. Unlike at some MFA programs, an equal amount of financial assistance in the form of teaching pay is available to all students. They receive a little over $14,000 a year, with graduate health insurance and a significant reduction in student fees, in exchange for teaching one undergraduate composition or creative-writing class per quarter.

"Everybody starts out equal and they finish equal," Winer said. "There's a sense of respect that's established immediately when you come into the program. Rather than about competition, it's about, 'Hey, we're all really glad to be here, isn't this great? Let's all try to get better.' "

For some, the workshop format breeds a healthy competition.

"There's a certain energy that's contagious," said novelist James Brown, who graduated in the mid-1980s and has a memoir, "The Los Angeles Diaries," due out in fall 2003.

"It can create a dynamic where you see if this person is writing every day and making progress on his work, I want to go back to my room and do some good work," he said.

Gold said he came out of the program a different writer.

"What changed was I learned how to take criticism," he said. "I stopped being clever. I let other people's voices in. I started learning how to rewrite.

"I understood more the idea that just because I was talking about something didn't mean it was good."

But what are the downsides to good fortune? Will success spoil UCI?

"I think the only downside would be the unrealistic expectations on the part of students who are there now," Robbins said. "It's not a magic bullet. Go to UCI and you'll be published. You really have to work hard and have the goods."

Writer Elizabeth Rosner, who studied at UCI in the '80s, said it's probably inevitable that the next crop of writers will compare themselves with their best-selling predecessors, and that that might make it harder for them to do the difficult work of writing.

"Very, very few people rocket to best-sellerdom and get seen. But that's now the standard," said Rosner, 42, who recently published her first novel, "The Speed of Light."

"It's hard not to compare. It's hard not to measure yourself against that stellar response and say, 'If that doesn't happen, then I'm a failure.' Truth is, just getting a book published is a huge accomplishment."

And success in publishing seems to breed success.

Dan Smetanka, executive editor at Ballantine, said editors and agents are likely to look closely at manuscripts submitted by graduates of the program in the wake of its current boom.

"Sometimes, New York publishing isn't always as inventive as it can be when it comes to finding talent," said Smetanka, who published Rosner's novel.

"Manhattan is an island of liberal-arts majors. Irvine's rise to such prominence reminds you that there (is) a lot of the country out there, and it gets more diverse all the time."

"The Color Midnight Made" by

Andrew Winer

"Conrad must save himself, and though his family disintegrates and the naval station is shut down, by the novel's close he triumphs quietly and believably, as does his creator."- Susan Straight, The Washington Post<8,4>

"Carter Beats the Devil" by

Glen David Gold<8,2>

"(S)omething of a magic trick itself: materializing out of nowhere with a flash and a puff of smoke, it is one of the most entertaining appearing acts of recent years." -- Ben Greenman, The New Yorker.

"The Good Men"

by Charmaine Craig

"Craig has the fluid, shapely prose that blends mysteries both religious and erotic with the scratchy, stinky realities of peasant life." - Lev Grossman, Time

"Half in Love"

by Maile Meloy

"The right thing in Ms. Meloy's stories tend to be a gesture of acceptance, delivered with the brass-tacks sense and clarity that makes her characters memorable." - Janet Maslin, The New York Times

"An Invisible Sign of My Own"

by Aimee Bender

"Still, 'An Invisible Sign of My Own' is an intelligent and engaging work by a recent arrival on the literary scene, with a fanciful and original take on the quietly helter-skelter world that lies within." - Richard Eder, The New York Times

"The Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold

"The novel is an elegy, much like Alice McDermott's 'That Night,' about a vanished place and time and the loss of childhood innocence." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"The 25th Hour"

by David Benioff

"... Mr. Benioff creates a pungent, funny urban tableau full of shrewd operators and unfulfilled desires." - Janet Maslin, The New York Times