The Expanded Field at Stetson's MFA

Stetsons University’s MFA program, is a two-year, low-residency creative writing program that offers additional specialization in “the expanded field” for any students interested in the intersection of writing plus image, including comics, installation art, video, performance and site-specific making. 

What is "Poetry in the Expanded Field?"

"The phrase “expanded field” is borrowed from an iconic essay by Rosalind Krauss: Krauss suggests that if we map out the possibilities of what something “isn’t “when we try to say what it “is,” we'll have more room to make things: whole shared fields may suddenly appear! In practice this means writers might work among different studio practices and come up with wondrous new combos: text /sound/ textile/ video/ gesture/ photo/ action: what do you love that your writing leaves out? What does it mean to "make a mark"? With its long international history of cross-arts making, poetry offers an especially wonderful site for this text-based play: leave a poem in a sleeve with Lady Murasaki, draw words in air with Raul Zurita. So many great models to consider over historical time and real spaces, so many lovely moving parts to experiment with as we think of words having as much materiality other things in the world!" -  Terri Witek, Poetry in the Expanded Field Professor

What does the Expanded Field mean for Prose?

"On the prose side, we tend to think of the expanded field as an invitation: where might we wander and what might we learn there? What might be brought back with us, and applied to our own writing?

To expand the field in prose means thinking more holistically about our work, not only as it exists in conversation with others in our chosen field, but also as it exists more broadly in the literary and artistic landscape, across genre and medium. In this program we love to ask what literary fiction might learn from horror writing, for instance, about revelation or concealment. Or if it’s true that mystery is at the heart of all storytelling, shouldn’t we make a study of mystery writing? Can reading lyric poetry help us with our creative nonfiction? Or more broadly, what can painting teach us about color and how can we use that to make description of a scene more vivid? What does our favorite fantasy series have to teach us about defying genre conventions, or our favorite country song teach us about capturing heartbreak? What happens when we think about time like a filmmaker or collapse it like a poet or expand it like Proust? 

The “expanded field” in prose means encouraging students—through encounters and instructors—to see what else is out there and how different kinds of work might feed back into our practice as writers." – Brendan Bowles, Program Director & Prose Professor

What to expect while creating in "the Expanded Field":

• "The people who come to the program are from many different backgrounds. That is one of the things that is most interesting about our program...people come from the Visual Arts, some come from Theater, from Dance... it's people interested in expanding the possibilities of their creative life. We are text based, but there are very few programs in the United States that allow for the amount of experimentation that Stetson's MFA allows for." - Cyriaco Lopes, Poetry in the Expanded Field Professor
  
• "What attracted me to the program is that it is exploratory in nature. A lot of times I didn't fit into art or creative writing schools because they were pushing me to do things in a way they wanted me to do them. This program constantly surrounds you with ways of creating you may have never even heard of. You're exposed to everything from Prose to Poetry in the Expanded Field to Visual Arts...it's a beautiful creative space where you can find new parts of yourself and your art." - Blaze Carter '25
  
  
• "The professors here encourage me to be my most authentic self when I write rather than pushing me towards certain literary constraints. They used their knowledge and expertise to to help me navigate through various sources and so many different ways of writing...they opened up a landscape for me that has been truly transformative and rewarding." -Bre'Anna Bivens '24