When students visit 309 Humanities Instructional Building to see English professor and Master’s in Fine Arts (MFA) Programs In Writing Director Michelle Latiolais, an explosive collage of images decorating her office door greets its onlookers. A photo of Jackie Kennedy reading “The Dharma Bums,” prints of Anthony Hernandez’s photography, “Escaping Criticism” (1874) by Pere Borrell del Caso and a photo of Damned Spot, Latiolais’ late bull terrier, are part of the expansive collection.
Her office is lively, bursting with books and towering stacks of papers. A gifted copy of Henry James’ “Portrait of a Lady” from former Programs In Writing Director Oakley Hall sits on one of her filled bookshelves. Her desk holds M.A. candidate Hannah Liberman’s freshly finished novel manuscript and a soon-to-be-released edition of Faultline, a journal produced by the writing graduate students that she advises.
Graduate alumni notes and pictures hang on the wall above her computer. The center features Latiolais’ favorite note from a former M.A. student.
“Hi, I came by and you’re not here and I just realized you’re in class and I have serial killer handwriting,” the student wrote.
Latiolais likes to stay in touch with former students, sometimes bringing them back to campus to read their work for current students.
“You know, it just amuses me to have their pictures and their little notes and to be remembered,” Latiolais told New University.
Photos of Latiolais (left) and her wall of memories (right) by Mackenzie Lee / Staff
Latiolais received her Ph.D. and began teaching at the University of Denver (DU). Later, she taught at the University of Southern California for six years before returning to UC Irvine. Latiolais’ experience as a student encouraged her to take a slightly different, more revisionist approach to workshops.
“I did think that [at the time] there was a kind of criticism allowed at the table that I felt was personal and political,” Latiolais said. “And I did not feel that was aesthetic or intellectual.”
For her, it’s important for workshops to listen to what’s on the page; listening is at the core of her teaching.
“The answers to what might help develop a piece of writing or augment it in some way, make it more vivid, forceful. It’s already there in the writing,” Latiolais said. “They just haven’t turned up the volume of it enough. They haven’t met it face on, that sort of thing.”
Often, she reviews a student’s passages and asks them to dig into what they’re about. Although Latiolais is primarily involved with graduate students, she also interacts with undergraduates. She teaches Writing 101W, a seminar about applications in literary theory and criticism for creative writing, and switches up the content frequently.
“I’ve never known exactly what it is, so I just teach literature that I think students will be interested in,” Latiolais said. “I mean, I work very hard to find things that I think are compelling but that are challenging too.”
After her advanced fiction workshop was canceled several years ago, Writing 101W became her only undergraduate course. Latiolais loved the advanced fiction workshop and said it was “ridiculous” that the department canceled it.
Despite teaching for over 30 years, Latiolais said she initially had no interest in entering academia like her father had. She describes her foray into academia as “dumb luck” that spiraled after she worked with writer John Edward Williams at DU, and “one thing led to another.”
“In fact, I said to my late husband, if I ever write an academic novel, shoot me dead,” Latiolais said. “But I’ve managed to be in academia, but be with the artist, be with the characters.”
Latiolais received the Gold Medal for Fiction in 1991 from the Commonwealth Club of California for her novel “Even Now.” Her two professions stay separate: if she works on somebody else’s writing, she refuses to work on her own that same day.
“[Teaching and writing] take from the same well,” Latiolais said. “I find it very hard. So if I need to do my own work, I have to do it in the morning. And then I’m still kind of emptied out to work on anybody else’s … So, it’s not a happy marriage for me.”
The ability to support burgeoning writers, she said, is “the great bounty” of the graduate workshop.
UCI’s distinguished MFA Program in Writing is one of the strongest across the country. With 10 poets and 11 fiction writers currently enrolled, the program reduced admissions to 10 new poets and fiction writers per year.
Latiolais helps select these students, alongside English Professor Claire Vaye Watkins.
“We have no orthodoxy, I don’t care what they’re writing — you know, in fact, we actually actively try to have a huge variance in style and material,” Latiolais said. “And I actually love that. I mean, if you looked at all the books published by our writers, you couldn’t homogenize them in any way.”
Despite the program’s success, not a penny has been spent on advertising it. Hall, who helped develop the writing program, believed that advertisements suggested a writer could be made.
“You can’t make a writer,” Latiolais said. “I always say they arrive at the door.”
Zoë Chang is a Features Intern for the spring 2025 quarter. She can be reached at zoeac@uci.edu.
Edited by Alyssa Villagonzalo