The Boat We Are Building
TWO years ago, Gary Dop was about to enter his tenure year as a professor of English at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia. His debut poetry collection, Father, Child, Water, had recently been published by Red Hen Press and would help him secure a comfortable future as an academic. Dop grew up in a conservative military family, bouncing from Tennessee to Germany to Texas, and his goal to provide a different kind of upbringing and stability for his three daughters was now close to reality. It helped that he enjoyed teaching and had fallen in love with the natural landscape of the region—the college sits along the James River, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. And yet he felt incomplete. If he was going to stay in this location for years to come, he realized he needed to continue to enrich it by inviting an entire writing community to join him. So he decided to build a low-residency MFA program.
The product of a low-residency graduate writing program himself (he received his MFA at the University of Nebraska in Omaha), Dop appreciated the flexibility that the low-residency model allowed—a community that came together in the spirit of mentorship but then dispersed, the writers pursuing their own individual, independent journeys. Dop joined forces with Laura-Gray Street, the English department chair at Randolph, who
