the madison review Ron Kuka has been managing editor ever since, with talent and devotion and energy, developing the magazine into the respected literary journal it is today.
the madison review
Contributors
MR: What do you see as the future of creative writing? Ron W: When I started here in 1972 there were three graduate creative writing programs in the country and there were no really well-developed undergraduate programs. I would not have predicted that things would have grown as dramatically as they have. Today there are three hundred MFA programs, and many more undergraduate programs. There are an increasing number of post-MFA programs, and writers’ residencies, and conferences. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs has grown to the point that over 10,000 writers attended last year’s conference in Minneapolis. University presses and small presses and on-line magazines have expanded to publish more creative writing than ever before. So there are lots of opportunities for writers that didn’t used to exist. Back in the 1920s writers went off to Paris and formed the salons which were the predecessors of today’s creative writing workshops. If you weren’t able to fly to Paris and didn’t have the resources and the friends to get into those groups of writers you were left out in the cold. Creative writing has happily been democratized. More and more students have become involved in writing and publishing and I don’t see that changing. I doubt that there is much room for further expansion, but right now, as enrollment is decreasing in humanities in general and in English departments in particular, they are not decreasing in creative writing. Writing programs seem to be holding their own. I think that sort of outlet, that creative outlet for people, whether it is music or art or drama or creative writing, is going to continue to thrive, as it always has, since it is just such an important part of the human endeavor. Poetry, literary fiction, creative non-fiction, writing of all sorts, will continue. I don’t see young writers becoming any less interested in writing, from grade school on up through graduate school. My grandkids now are writing poetry and fiction and essays in and out of school. So I am optimistic about the future of writing. I think we are in a very good place.
Lisa Bellamy studies poetry with Philip Schultz at The Writers Studio, where she also teaches. Her chapbook,Nectar, won the Aurorean-Encircle Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Massachusetts Review, New Ohio Review, Hotel Amerika, The Southampton Review, Cimarron Review, and Calyx, among other publications, and she won the Fugue Poetry Prize in 2008. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and the Adirondacks with her family. Josh Bettinger is a dad, poet, and editor. His work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, journals in the United States, England, and Canada including Oxford Poetry, Salt Hill Journal, Western Humanities Review, Handsome Poetry, The Los Angeles Review, and Boston Review, among others. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and daughter. Mario Duarte lives in Iowa City, Iowa. He is an alumnus of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of New Hampshire. He has published poems in Slab, Steel Toe Review, and Passages North, among others, and short stories in Huizache, Oddville Press and Storyscape with another story forthcoming in aaduna. Tim Fitts lives and works in Philadelphia with his wife and two children. His short stories and photography have appeared in journals such as Granta online, The Gettysburg Review, The New England Review, Shenandoah, among others. Fitts serves on the editorial staff of the Painted Bride Quarterly and teaches in the Liberal Arts Department at the Curtis Institute of Music and Creative Writing at Penn State Brandywine. “Home Fries” is part of a series of linked stories set in Gainesville, Florida, early 1990s. Fitts’ short story, “Sand on Sand Yellow” is currently available on Amazon.com as a story single for Kindle. R.E. Hayes is a former Marine, retired labor lawyer living west of Chicago, and the author of two novels. His short fiction has appeared in Evening Street Review and Crab Orchard Review. Other works have been anthologized in Daring to Repair (Wising Up Press) and in Law and Disor-
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