Appreciations: A Holden Donor

 

Michael DiLeo (fiction �96) has been one of many significant donors to the endowment campaign for the Holden Minority Scholarship (hyperlink). The Holden Scholarship, which pays each recipient's full tuition and fees for four semesters, was established to promote ethnic and cultural diversity. Shannon Cain (fiction �05) spoke to DiLeo about his life after Warren Wilson and what inspired him to donate to the Holden.

 

What have you been up to since you graduated from the program?
 
After I graduated, I continued working as a freelance magazine writer for several years, then in 2000 I began teaching high school English and Creative Writing at the Austin Waldorf School, a private school here in central Texas. So right there the MFA led me in a new, very satisfying direction. In the last couple of years, I have reduced my teaching load down to part-time, and I am writing fiction again, working on a novel, primarily.
 
How has the WW MFA program impacted your life and your writing?

I think one unforeseen consequence of the program was the felicitous effect it had on my nonfiction writing. A story of mine on the Glen Canyon Dam in 1997 won the Lowell Thomas National Travel Writers Award, and a piece I did for Texas Monthly in 2000 on deer hunting with my father-in-law was anthologized in Best American Sportswriting that year. Coincidence? I think not. After getting "the treatment" from Charlie Baxter, Margot Livesey, Rick Russo and Andrea Barrett, I could hardly help writing with more imagination, taking more chances, thinking more deeply, evoking place and character more vividly, could I?

How has Friends of Writers been important to you? What benefit have you gained from its existence, and what benefit do you think it offers to other writers?

My first real interaction with Friends of Writers was the summer conference last year in Moraga. It took more than a decade for me to attend one. I'm not sure why. But when I finally did, it was a revelation: the wonder of reconnecting to the deeper levels of the work of writing, to the spiritual practice and pursuit of writing, mixed in with making new friends, watching the July 4th fireworks from the starlit, bare-breasted, wheat-straw hills of the East Bay, and some crazy dancing at the end. The Wally formula in a nutshell, really.

 
As a donor, what attracted you to the Holden Scholarship?  Why do you see this as a good place to invest your philanthropic dollars?
 
My view of the Warren Wilson MFA program is that it is one of the wonders of the world, lacking only in the diversity of its participants. And so I�m drawn to the idea of opening it up more, creating more possibility, spreading the wealth and the chance for depth.