Emily Carr, 35, has authored two books of poetry, “13 Ways of Happily” and “Directions for Flying.” A third book, titled “Up the Shinbones, Superlative!” is expected out in May.

On May 1, poet Emily Carr moved to Bend to take her post at Oregon State University-Cascades Campus, where she’s the director of the new low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program.

The following day, Carr headed east into the High Desert to shoot a short promotional video for the creative writing program, which she and her faculty are in the process of building from scratch.

While the desert jaunt was a “fabulously disorienting” experience for someone who’d never before set foot in the High Desert, it was also promising for the award-winning poet, who’d arrived here after 3 1/2 years as an adjunct professor in Santa Cruz.

Carr, 35, has written two books of poetry, “13 Ways Of Happily” and “Directions for Flying,” with a third book, “Up the Shinbones, Superlative!” due out in May.

The desert fired her imagination.

“I write spatially … and while we were driving I could see this new kind of poem rising up out of the landscape and onto the page,” Carr later told The Bulletin by email.

While she hit the ground running last spring, Carr is likely having an even busier fall: The first cohort of her MFA students will convene for the first session, or “residency,” Nov. 1-10.

While that will be going on, Carr will also serve as a guest author at The Nature of Words literary festival, being held around Bend Nov. 7-10.

On Nov. 10, the last day of the session, Carr and the students will attend Carr’s reading at the Downtown Bend Public Library for The Nature of Words at Second Sunday (see “If you go”).

While Second Sunday is a year-round event featuring monthly readings by poets and authors, this time it’s also wrapped up with the conclusion of The Nature of Words. Carr is on a guest author roster that includes James Prosek, Jim Lynch, Lawson Inada, Karen Finneyfrock and the festival’s founder and former executive director, Ellen Waterston.

As tradition has it, the last day of the festival usually features a festival author along with an open mic for other writers.

The Nature of Words and OSU-Cascades have long been partners, with festival writing workshops being held on the campus. Therefore, it’s “a natural fit” to have Carr as a guest author, said Amy Mentuck, executive director of NOW.

NOW also “looks to offer a well-rounded representation of genres, and Emily’s poetry work is unique and really resonates with our audience,” Mentuck said.

The MFA

Unlike traditional, “high-residency” MFA programs, low residency means students need not move to or near a campus to pursue their master’s degrees.

Instead, they meet with instructors for intensive residencies a few times a year, writing and communicating with instructors via phone, email, Skype and other means when they aren’t meeting in person.

OSU-Cascades’ program will bring students and instructors Arielle Greenberg (poetry) and T. Geronimo Johnson (fiction) together for intensive 10-day residencies in November and June.

“Students in a program like this — of course, they miss out on some things, like they don’t get 15 weeks of coursework every semester — on the other hand, they get all this one-on-one time with their instructor that you wouldn’t normally get in a full-time graduate program,” said Greenberg,

So far, the program has accepted seven students, who will join Carr, Greenberg and Johnson at Caldera Arts Center, on the shores of Blue Lake west of Sisters.

“That’s one of the best things I’ve accomplished as an administrator, and one of the features that really shined,” Carr said. “Having an environment like that, and having facilities specifically designed to inspire community and creativity.

“It’s one thing to tell somebody, ‘Go write a sonnet,’ and they’re all cramped in a classroom with no windows and florescent lights,” she added. “At Caldera, one of the first things students are going to do is find their private writing nook or cranny.”

Doctor of poetry

If Carr wasn’t a born poet, she became one young. She was born in Missouri and raised in Quincy, Ill., the oldest of three daughters of Jerry and Lois Kruse. (Carr was once married, and kept her married name after the split, she explained.)

“She was very interested in reading and writing and communicating by the written word very early on,” said her father, a physician. Though high school basketball was the epicenter of community life in her hometown, Carr was interested in poetry. “Even in grade school, she wrote poems,” Kruse said.

“I had a poem that won a national contest,” she said. “I got $1,000, which is a lot for a poem, or any piece of writing.”

Carr almost became a medical doctor, like her father. She was accepted into medical school right out of high school.

“All I had to do was maintain a certain GPA and take certain science classes (in college), and I had my spot waiting for me,” she said. That unique situation allowed her to “be a piano performance major and write a lot of poetry, which is probably why I only survived a year” of medical school, she said.

She earned her bachelor’s at the University of Missouri, where she also began, and dropped out of, medical school.

“It always comes back to what your parents want. I was always encouraged to write — I don’t have one of those sob stories — but they encouraged that to be on the side,” she said.

“Their thought was always, ‘You can be a poet after you become a doctor,’” she said. “Many, many physicians do. It’s not uncommon.”

Common or not, writing poetry on the side of having even a part-time practice didn’t mean she’d become a great poet. It occurred to her that “if I actually want to be really good at this, I can’t wait until I’m 40 or 45,” she said.

“When you drop out of medical school to be a poet, I don’t think you can really articulate what the decision is. There’s really no way to rationalize that,” she said, laughing.

While the decision to leave medical school was hard on her parents, she said, “They’ve completely come around, and they’re very supportive.”

Carr’s father writes rhyming poetry related to medicine.

“He’s known for this when he goes to conferences and goes to holiday parties,” she said. “He dresses up like Dr. Seuss and recites these rhyming poems … some have even been published in medical journals.”

Kruse told The Bulletin, “My poetry’s much different than Emily’s. Mine rhymes and is not too good, and hers is excellent.”

He doesn’t credit his poetry sideline for influencing his daughter’s career path.

“Probably her mother … influenced her more than I did because Lois is a real avid reader of novels and other literature, epics and classes. When Emily was young, she’d pick up the books Lois was reading and read them herself.”

Carr went on to earn her own MFA in creative writing at University of North Carolina-Wilmington’s high-residency program, then taught subjects including “mindful drumming” and “the spoken word revolution” at a Quaker school in North Carolina for a couple of years. She’s also taught fitness classes for many years, and is planning to incorporate that other teaching component into her Second Sunday appearance.

After visiting Canada one summer, she decided to apply to schools in Canada to pursue a doctorate. She earned her Ph.D. in poetics from University of Calgary in 2010.

‘Turn out a whole writer’

Her dissertation supervisor, the author Tom Wayman, was “lovely and super-practical,” Carr said. Wayman directly influenced an ambition Carr has for the program — helping OSU-Cascades’ low-residency MFA students to take a practical approach to earning a living after earning their MFAs.

Carr said that many would-be authors, after earning their MFAs, “crash and burn.”

“They were in a cocoon, and so they can’t survive outside the cocoon. Many of them … stop writing at all,” she said.

The challenge, she said, is finding “what you can do to turn out a whole writer, meaning one that is self-sufficient, and can survive.”

That’s not the prevailing direction MFA programs are heading in, “but they should be,” Carr said.

Her thoughtful approach to turning out writers appealed strongly to Greenberg, who said, “Emily is clearly a visionary about reconfiguring what it means to be in an MFA program.”

Greenberg told The Bulletin the traditional creative writing MFA — which dates back to the 1960s and steered many a writer on a career path toward teaching writing — isn’t necessarily the best model for today.

“I’m certainly not alone in this, but I’m one of a small movement of poet-academics who feel like there’s a lot of revision we need to do to the MFA model at this point in time,” Greenberg said. In her own years of teaching, “it felt increasingly unethical to encourage my students to expect a career in academia.

“The market is glutted with MFAs, and there’s no (teaching) jobs. I was on many, many hiring committees, and … we would easily get 300 applications for a job,” Greenberg said. “We would be putting people in the ‘no’ pile whose books had won the most prestigious award possible. It’s so competitive.”

According to Carr, OSU-Cascades will still teach students about teaching, “but the assumption is a university or college will no longer have classes open for you,” she said. “You have to create a workshop that you sell to (for example) The Nature of Words … or you come up with a class that you pitch to a nonprofit, and get them to pick up. Or you write a grant to teach workshops in prisons or hospitals.”

Of course, not everyone’s cut out for teaching either, Greenberg added. “Just because you can write really well doesn’t mean you can teach writing really well.”

Said Carr, “The best thing you can learn from a Master of Fine Arts … the bottom line, if it does its job, is something magical and alchemical, which is that you are a writer by the time you leave.”