It could be a scene right out of the movies.

A blackboard to his back, the college professor stands in front of some 20 students, most seated around a large oak table, the rest lining the back wall. North Dakota’s Poet Laureate and the state’s most acclaimed resident writer cradles in his palms what looks like a No. 10 envelope box. His rich, deep baritone voice sets a reverential tone.

“Here it is folks — the first one done.” The class claps, and the blushing author smiles and giggles shyly.

“Without question, Larry Woiwode is the most experienced writer we have had in more than a hundred years of UND English." -James McKenzie, professor of English

“Nice box,” jokes one student, sottovoce. Everyone laughs, but they eye it with a mixture of joy and respect, and maybe envy. They know that the pages contained inside represent countless hours of struggling to rein in a story that has been roaming around inside the head, countless hours of trying to put it down on paper, and countless more tweaking the copy to hone the structure, the form, the language. The box is a literary Maltese Falcon, the stuff that dreams are made of. The concept of “price” or “value” doesn’t apply here. It is the first novel of the class. And everyone feels somehow connected to it.

To his great credit, Larry Woiwode has created a writing community, a group of students who care about each other’s work and who care about the class. They come back each week for his pearls of wisdom, his stories about writing, his humor, his stage antics, sometimes mocking himself with a Cheshire smile. He seamlessly moves back and forth from classroom leader to court jester, as if the caricature of Puck from the famous British magazine has been brought to life.

But the students also share a camaraderie with Woiwode and with each other, which often spills past class time and continues at a coffee shop or a restaurant. After weeks of meeting together for three hours every Wednesday night, it is clear this isn’t just a class — it is a family. When Brenda Ling turned in the fruits of her labor, everyone in the class took pride in the birth of her novel.

Later that night, Woiwode tells the class what it has already begun to suspect: this is a community of artists, the kind, he says, envisioned by leaders of the Agrarian Movement. “Something like that has happened here when we have moments like we’re having together, and you can share that with someone you regard.”

It wasn’t like that in the beginning. On the first day of class you could look around the room and see in the faces and eyes that bittersweet combination of fear and anticipation, so familiar to students in writing workshops who want to improve their work but know they’ll have to read it out loud and then sit back while their classmates slice it up and return the carcass on a platter.

This is a different story, however: a different kind of class, made up of writers who support one another and who have modeled their approach to constructive criticism after their mentor. These are mostly graduate students, mostly English majors, some with kids old enough to be parents, others just barely old enough to vote.

They enrolled in this English class, Writing 515, to study under Woiwode because, well, Larry — as he asks his students call him — has a reputation. In the literary world, Woiwode is a “made” guy, a member of the Literati Family. He became a made guy under the tutelage of one of the top bosses of the fiction world. There are a number of ways to become a member of the Literati Family, but the surest — and maybe the fastest — way is to get published in The New Yorker, THE magazine for those who are writers, those who enjoy great writing, and those who aspire to be great writers.

North Dakota Poet Laureate and nationallly acclaimed author Larry Woiwode encourages aspiring writers to be supportive of each other even as they challenge themselves.

Starting in the late 1960s, “L. Woiwode” was in The New Yorker a dozen times or more. His first piece appeared on a page with a poem by his favorite poet, Theodore Roethke. But it gets better: Not only were many of Woiwode’s pieces published, but he was mentored by William Maxwell himself, the very powerful if unassuming longtime fiction editor of The New Yorker.

It was Maxwell who suggested that Woiwode write novels as well as short stories, stellar advice from a man who knew fiction. Woiwode wrote several acclaimed novels, including the classic Beyond the Bedroom Wall. Through his fiction in The New Yorker and his semiautobiographical novels, Woiwode became noticed for his poetry and the poetic, lyrical quality of his prose. Popular writer Stephen King has said he wishes he could write like Woiwode. When writing guru John Gardner, who literally wrote the book about writing, The Art of Fiction, met an untimely death, Woiwode was called in to take over Gardner’s classes, another testament to Woiwode’s literary stature.

“Without question, Larry Woiwode is the most experienced writer we have had in more than a hundred years of UND English,” said Dr. James McKenzie, now a retired professor of English who was chair of the department when he hired Woiwode. “He brings to the department a lifetime of experience with the publishing world, editors, agents, publishing houses, literary prizes. That he is also North Dakota’s Poet Laureate is an added bonus.”

Google Woiwode’s name today and you’ll find him mentioned among the great 20th-century American writers. For example, in “Writers on the Difficulty of Writing,” you’ll find this gem from Larry amongst quotes from other literary luminaries such as P.G. Wodehouse, W.B. Yeats, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, Virginia Woolf, and James Dickey: “Anyone who wants to write should expect to work at it every day, day after day, like a bricklayer, or at least plan to keep banker’s hours, and anybody who hopes to get rich at it should maybe be a bricklayer.”

This was the kind of aphorism the class wanted and came to expect, often with the preface, “this is something Bill Maxwell told me,” often with an index finger jabbing for emphasis, and always delivered in that wonderful deep, rich, theater baritone and intonation that made anything that Woiwode said sound important. Take this example, from the first day of class: “Always assume you are writing for readers who are at ‘least’ as smart as you.”

Some more gems, all from the first day of class:

• “What you really want to do is tell a story.”
  
• “The story is more interesting than any idea you have about it, invariably.”
  
• “Make sure you have nice light where you are writing.”
  
• “The temptation with the computer is to get a perfect page,” which is best understood in conjunction with this one: “When drafting, don’t worry about spelling or punctuation.”
  
• “Write the first draft of a short story in one sitting” and “Don’t disrupt the (narrative) arc — write it right through.”
  
• When working on a novel: “Shoot for three pages a day.”

The students quickly came to appreciate Woiwode’s ability to teach and his guidance in letting students critique each other’s work but keeping the comments constructive. It wasn’t hard to see the Shakespearean actor of his youth and the experienced teacher of writing workshops who wove humor into his discussions, and who said: “I’m here to serve as editor. I’m here to serve as servant.”

He was “entertaining, informative, inspiring,” said Christopher P. Jacobs, who writes, directs, and produces North Dakota-based films and teaches film at UND. Jacobs said it was “a great experience that helped the students critique each other’s work in constructive ways. Larry’s approach led the students to bond as a group of writers to the extent that they would hold class anyway on the rare instance when he couldn’t be there, and the students continued meeting long after both the class sessions and the semester were over.”

“I thought he was very funny,” said Kathryn Sweney, who teaches freshmen composition at UND and works for North Dakota Quarterly. “I thought he had a wonderful classroom presence. He has an incredible ability to listen to somebody and to recognize the essence of a piece and also what tweaking it needs to make it better.

“He spends more time feeding back than anyone I know,” Sweney continued. “And he does line-by-line editing on everyone’s stories — close, careful editing which really helped polish the writing and got it ready for publication. Another thing that he did was to point me to a lot of good sources, in terms of learning to write and in terms of polishing writing. I just felt like he was really supportive and encouraging, and pushed you beyond the limits of what you thought you could do. I learned a lot. I wrote stuff I wouldn’t have written without that class, without his help and encouragement.”

Larry Woiwode (standing) created a community of writers eager to further expand their craft with North Dakota’s best-known and most-honored resident writer. Dan Wakefield (red shirt) made the 90-mile trek from Devils Lake, N.D., every week.

Ling, information officer at the Grand Forks Human Nutrition Research Center, agrees: “What Larry does is he challenges you to go beyond what you expect. So when I started writing short stories, I thought that was good enough. But he had a different vision and said, ‘Why don’t you try writing a novel?’ It was very hard work, but it expanded the way I thought, the way I write, everything.

“He was my thesis advisor,” Ling added. “He’s totally committed to helping you out to do the best work that you can do. And he’s a line editor. That’s very rare for a writer who is also doing his own work. He is very giving in terms of his knowledge, his advice and his support.”

But it is a two-way street, said Ling. The student has to produce first. “The thing I learned about Larry is he doesn’t give you easy answers. He basically doesn’t give you any magic potion. What you learn from him is that it all comes from the writing. It takes a lot of discipline, it takes a lot of work. You need to check your ego at the door. If you don’t write, you don’t get published.”

Undergraduate students in Woiwode’s English 305 Creative Writing class felt the same way. “Woiwode is an excellent teacher, and UND is privileged to have an award-winning and internationally known writer on its staff,” said Karen Borgen. “Woiwode was credible because he’s walked the walk; he’s lived the life of a starving writer and an acclaimed one. He offered insight to what the writing world is really like, what it takes to be a good writer, what it takes to get published. He encouraged us to embrace where we came from, to write what we know, to think about the meaning and necessity of each word. He’s honest, grounded, open-minded, witty, and kind. He’s a wonderful teacher, but he’s an even better person.

“He and his class changed my life,” Borgen continued. “It sounds corny, but it’s true. He knows life isn’t all fluffy and pretty, and told us our writing didn’t have to be that way either. Because of his encouragement, guidance, and acceptance, I was able to purge some horrible events into a story — a story that I never thought I would write, let alone read to a class. It gave me a freedom and a peace that I had never before experienced.”

That sentiment is not unique, according to McKenzie. “Across the board I’ve heard heartening things about his teaching. He seemed to create, almost instantly, a sense of a writing community among students. Students were at first kind of shocked at the demanding, close attention he paid to their work, but the results seem to be extremely good. Probably the most interesting responses to his teaching have been from graduate students. Three or four of them told me excitedly about how he had succeeded in getting them to launch into novels, having previously written only short fiction. It was clear that they had been stretched further than they had ever expected to go. Isn’t that what good teaching is about?”

Larry Woiwode’s fiction has appeared in the Atlantic, Harpers, Paris Review, Partisan Review, and a variety of other publications, including two dozen stories in The New Yorker. His fiction has been translated into a dozen languages and his stories chosen for four volumes of Best American Short Stories. His nonfiction has appeared in Art & Antiques, Books & Culture, the Chicago Tribune Book World, Esquire, the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, The World & I, and other venues.

His books include What I’m Going To Do, I Think, Beyond the Bedroom Wall (finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics’ Circle Award; Association of American Publishers Distinguished Book of Five Years for presentation to the White House Library), Indian Affairs, Silent Passengers, and the memoir What I Think I Did, his sixth book to be listed as a “notable book of the year” by the New York Times Book Review.

He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Lannan Foundation Fellow, and has conducted writing seminars across the United States and in England and Europe. For three years Woiwode directed the writing program at the State University of New York, Binghamton.

In 1995 he received the Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, presented once every six years, for “distinction in the art of the short story.” He has received the Aga Khan Prize, the William Faulkner Foundation Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, the Theodore Roosevelt Rough Rider Award, and a Lannan Foundation Artist’s Residency, among others. In 1995, by a joint resolution of the state House and Senate, and confirmation by the governor, he was named Poet Laureate of North Dakota.

In May, Woiwode will bring the National Writers Congress to Grand Forks, Bismarck, and Medora for a “Discover the Spirit” conference.

He lives in southwestern North Dakota where, with his wife and family, he raises registered quarter horses.