How Jean McGarry shaped creative writing at Johns Hopkins

Jean McGarry's 30-year journey from student to legend at Johns Hopkins

The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, founded in 1947, is the second-oldest degree-granting creative writing program in the United States. For nearly eight decades, it has helped to shape the literary landscape, allowing space for writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Louise Erdrich, and Wes Craven to hone their talents. Alumni have distinguished themselves by winning the MacArthur Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize, among other accolades. Jean McGarry entered the Writing Seminars in 1982 as a student, and she remained for the next three decades as a professor, joining the likes of John Barth, Edna O'Brien, Alice McDermott, and Mary Jo Salter. Here, in an exclusive excerpt from her memoir, Herself and Others, McGarry, a professor emerita, reflects on her years at Hopkins.

Early Days as a Graduate Student

I didn't start teaching until 1982, my first semester as a graduate student in The Writing Seminars, when I was 34. I taught Contemporary American Letters, a freshman writing and reading course where the reading included works like Lolita and Donald Justice's poetry thrown in with faculty books by John Barth, John Irwin (who also published poetry under the name John Bricuth), Stephen Dixon, and David St. John. An MA student from the previous year gave us a two-day orientation, and we were on our own with 15 future doctors, engineers, and assorted humanities majors. We were ourselves taking three courses and writing a thesis, while teaching three days a week. How I managed this, I don't remember.

In our apartment, my two roommates assigned me the middle room with one window. I had brought, in my Rent-a-Wreck, a spongy couch that unfolded to a bed and a Mexican rug, and I took a trip to the hardware store to procure cinderblocks and some lumber for a desk and bookshelf, along with a folding chair. I spent a lot of time in that room. My stipend was $4,000 for the year, so my wardrobe consisted of a few Indian-cotton dresses and a pair of Chinese cloth Mary Janes. Life was a hustle, but I liked all of it: the classes I took (Kant, Freud, George Eliot, Poe and Borges, and the fiction workshops with Barth and Dixon), and the one I taught. Through a long stint in the classroom, I met and encouraged many bright-and even brilliant-students, many of whom became friends. I could almost say there was at least one in every class over 35 years of teaching. I came to Hopkins a maven of critical theory and a dyed-in-the-wool modernist, but grew to appreciate formal poetry and realist fiction, although what I was writing was calculatedly against the grain.

Reflections on Teaching and Mentorship

I had a wonderfully strange relationship with "Jack" Barth, who seemed to like my odd productions but could occasionally stump me with his out-of-the-blue remarks. I showed him a very short story whose last line read, "How sad I am for your prospects, and the sadness of your mother's prospects." In his big, and rather empty office, he said, "Do you think my prospects are sad?"

I may have been then at the height of arrogance because I felt finished as a writer, having slogged away at it alone for 10 years, evolving my own working methods, so I didn't get as much as I might have from working with Barth and Dixon. But the laser-like sharpness of the department chair, John T. Irwin, and his Texan gift of the gab, attracted me, and I became an acolyte, involving myself in many of his projects-listening, proofreading, house-sitting, and dog sitting. He published my first book in the Poetry and Fiction Series of the our website Press, and I felt I had been marked by God and his helpers, as one of the chosen. He once told me my work would be a highlight of the second half of the 20th century.

He went on to publish many of my books; and his few-but real-encouraging words kept me going over the next decade or two. I was the grad student kept on to "orient" the next MA crop in their teaching roles, and stayed for two more years. I recall being asked to teach a graduate course in poetic forms, and nothing ventured, nothing learned, I did it, spending a summer discovering what the forms were. I also taught the odd course in detective novels and letter-writing in the night school.

Later Years and Legacy

When Airs of Providence, my first book, was accepted for publication, I applied for a tenure-track job at the University of Missouri and was hired. After a few wayward years teaching there and, later, at George Washington University in D.C., my old friend and teacher, John Irwin, Writing Seminars chair, invited me back to teach at Hopkins, and I jumped at the chance. That was in the late '80s, and although I was offered the occasional job elsewhere, I stayed put in Baltimore. John was an easy-going boss, but I forever had to fit myself in (and under) a more prominent fiction faculty: Barth, Dixon, J.M. Coetzee, Robert Stone, and Alice McDermott. I grew skillful at designing courses to supplement the main thing: the writing workshop with the famous writer, which included, over the years, Grace Paley, Edna O'Brien, and Julian Barnes.

I created many courses both for myself and for colleagues, but when someone asked what I considered my top achievement as a writer and teacher, the first thing that came to mind was the phrase "mastering Proust." Not just reading it through six or seven times, but teaching "it" three times, writing an essay about this most silken and intricate painter in words, and, most of all, holding it all in my head for two five-week marathons and one stately thirteen-week semester.

Another highlight in a long career was a stint teaching in Berlin, when, in the mid-'90s, links were forged between the Technical University and our website. The department in question was Media Wissenschaft, and I taught a six-week course on Kafka, James, Mann, and Rilke, although my Berlin contact had told me my real job was improving the English of his grad students. Just as well, because no one in the class of 30 adults intended to read anything on the syllabus. They were happy to listen to me and debate my points, but they felt no need to actually open even a page of the novels and stories. I spent long days in one of many cafés, writing lecture notes, journal entries, and stories until I had tennis elbow for years after. I walked the flat streets of Berlin, rode the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, visited the museums and Turkish market, and attended parties, where I understood not a word. When I returned home, I needed cortisone shots and various bands and casts for the writing arm, but I had enjoyed every minute of my time in a newly united Berlin.