Carl Phillips was the 2019 Judith Kitchen Visiting Writer at the summer residency of the Rainier Writing Workshop. His reading was delightfully upbeat, arriving during a perfectly appropriate time in the residency. He was personable and took many questions with grace and humility. “I’m not here to prove anything,” he said, “just to show some observations and invite you to look at them too.” I’d like to think the night went so well in part to both the audience and the unique space the RWW community provides.

During Phillips’s visit, he taught a master class (seen below), walking the class through dozens of poems. He had an ability to show us what was right on the surface, say, the choice of verb, and burrow down into the poem to expose a world. Someone asked him, as a writer, to talk about his writing. Phillips replied “I actually want somebody who’s not a writer to want to look at my poems and think, ‘I get something from this.’”

Sometimes it can feel isolating to be in a low-residency MFA program. We live our lives often surrounded by people who don’t read or write, or know what an MFA even is. They know nursing, sweet corn, or coal mines, or strip traffic. A lot of times, the writing world and the real world don’t seem to mix, at least in more rural areas. That’s why it’s so fascinating and delightful when a visiting writer enters the residency and gives credence to the mundane outside, even subtly.