Hollins MFA

Zooming from her home in Memphis, Martha Park (MFA ’15) tilts her laptop to show us the illustrations she’s been working on just prior to our call: a series of landscape paintings. Fitting for Park who is a writer, illustrator, and an emerging voice at the intersection of religion and the environment. With recent features in The Bitter Southerner, Image Journal, and Guernica, Park’s work brings stories woven with regional spirituality to the national stage. She explores the tension and kinship that arises between faith and place with a care and conscientiousness that can come only from a life lived close to her subjects. 

The daughter of a United Methodist preacher, Park says her journey to becoming a nonfiction writer may have started in the pews listening to weekly essays in the form of her father’s sermons. A disciple of famous Hollins alumnae Annie Dillard and Sally Mann, Park found her way to Roanoke and earned an MFA in Creative Writing in 2015. Following her degree were a myriad of early-career successes including the Philip Roth Residence in Creative Writing, a fellowship with The Religion & Environment Story Project, and grants from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Though she says writing and illustration require separate parts of her brain, she frequently weaves the artforms. The landscape paintings sitting to the left of Park are for an upcoming essay to be featured in Orion Magazine this spring, adapted from an essay in her debut collection, World Without End, out with Hub City Press in 2025.  

Our conversation touches on her forthcoming collection as well as reflections on the time she spent at Hollins, her journey to writing nonfiction, and her identity as a Southern writer. About her experience at Hollins, Park says, “It’s such a precious time.” Before we sign off, she asks if there is still a poster of Sally Mann in the graduate student lounge. She turns her laptop again to show us the same Sally Mann poster, framed and hung in her home—a gift to her from former faculty member and program director, Richard Dillard. It’s a testament to the strong community at Hollins, but it’s also indicative of Park who makes space for the places and people around her, living fully with and among them.  

Before you were in the MFA program and writing nonfiction, you were focused on visual art. How did you make that transition from art to writing, and when did you know you were interested in an MFA at Hollins?

When I was in college in Ohio, I was there primarily for studio art and printmaking. But I always liked writing and, toward the end, I decided to add a creative writing double major. I was kind of done with my art degree and had another year, so I just took a bunch of writing classes. After college, I took a graduate level workshop at University of Memphis, while I was working at a coffee shop and trying to decide what I wanted to do, and I really liked it. But at that point, I had only written fiction, and I just knew it wasn’t really for me.  

I applied to MFA programs with a fiction portfolio, but I wanted to study nonfiction or at least have the option. I was drawn to Hollins, in part because of the openness of the program to genre experimentation, but I also had a huge obsession with Annie Dillard, Sally Mann, and Natasha Trethewey. Once I realized they all had Hollins in common, I was like, I will go there. 

I came into Hollins with a fiction portfolio, but I used Hollins’ seminar classes to experiment with nonfiction. In my second year, I was in a workshop with a group of really brilliant nonfiction writers, and I was able to go all in on it.  

How did you know you wanted to switch your focus from short stories to essays? 

I started to realize a lot of my short stories were actually nonfiction. There was one story of my grandmother’s that I kept rewriting because she didn’t really remember how it ended. I was trying to figure out different ways the story could have gone. Things like that. It was also when I started reading more nonfiction—I think it was really when I read Annie Dillard—and partially from my dad being a preacher. I really feel like I grew up hearing an essay from my dad every Sunday. I’d go to church and get a 30-minute snippet of what he’d been thinking about that week.  

When I read Annie Dillard, particularly her theological writing, I was like, ‘Oh, I can just come at this directly.’ I don’t have to make a whole story just to get a shade of what I’m thinking about. I can just think about it and write about it. 

Many of the essays in World Without End deal with environmentalism, spirituality, and sometimes philosophy, and there is reportage and portraiture involved, too. Do you have a background in any of these disciplines from which you pull, or an approach to research for your work? 

I don’t have a formal background in anything! I spent most of my time at Hollins on personal writing, and eventually it just felt very lonely. I think that’s why I was initially drawn to writing about other people. I don’t feel like I’m comfortable writing about myself unless I’m writing about what I learn from other people. I don’t necessarily think of myself as someone with a lot of opinions or beliefs until I’m hanging out with somebody who’s different from me and I suddenly can see myself more clearly. 

Another writer in my nonfiction tutorial, Holly Haworth—who’s just one of the best writers I’ve ever read or been around—she was doing journalism at the time, and I had never read anything like her work. It’s so deeply imbued with her person, even as it’s outward-looking and reported and researched. I cried at all of her readings. I think her work showed me the real artistry of writing about and in relationship with other people. I just felt drawn to that. 

When writing about climate urgency in places with deep faith traditions, how do you approach the tension that sometimes exists between those two issues? 

Last spring, I visited four different conservation cemeteries in the South. These are places where they are doing natural burial as a way to protect the land through different burial practices. One of the people I spent time with was a member of an Evangelical church in South Carolina that had decided to open a conservation cemetery. It was just so interesting because almost everything about the way they conceived of the cemetery, and the way they were carrying out that work—almost all of their background reasons—seemed to be the opposite of what I would have assumed could motivate this kind of work.  
 

Some of their beliefs were challenging for me, and it’s become something I think about a lot. Is there space for people doing work that addresses climate change—or environmental degradation or environmentally damaging practices—to have wildly different reasons for what they’re doing? And who may not even think environmental work is what they’re doing at all, who might actually be offended if you were to say that’s what they’re doing. We perceive these things to either be in alignment or in confrontation with each other, but what if there’s a third option? There’s language around this that divides things into sides. Within the question about how to get more conservative religious people on board with environmentalism, with working to avert the worst effects of the climate crisis, there’s an inherent assumption that the people you’re trying to reach are the ones who need to change. But, for those of us who are comfortable saying we want to address climate change, are there alternate ways for us to think about the work, the beliefs, and the people involved? 

Something I’ve written a lot about in the book is how religious language shows up in the environmental conversation. When we talk about resurrecting a lost species, or a lost ecosystem, what do we mean by resurrection? Do we all mean the same thing by that? How do different interpretations shape the way we live in the world and with each other?  

With many of your stories and subjects set in the South, how would you describe your relationship to the region? 

I lived outside of the South for college, and I don’t think I could ever do it again. I feel very much like the South is my home. I think it’s a place that’s always gotten the shortest end of the stick, and that has seen the worst of people. But it also has a rich tradition of resistance and community and collective action that also allows you to imagine the most possible futures. I think the communities I’ve gotten to be a part of here, the work I’ve seen people do, and the way people are in relationship to each other, it just has a particular texture. For a lot of people in the South that are actively doing something in the places that they love, to protect them or show their care for them, there’s an undercurrent—a lot of inklings—of something like spirituality that’s still there even when they wouldn’t personally describe themselves as religious. That’s just something I’m really fascinated by. The South is a place that’s really clear to me, I can see it and hear it in somebody.  

Are there any aspects of your time at Hollins or professors you had here that stand out to you as inspirations for the work you’re doing today? 

Carrie Brown, who was at Hollins for a few years as a visiting professor. I was in every class of hers that I could take. My workshop with her was life-changing. Around her, you wanted to be a better person, and better in your relationships. You wanted to slow down and make space for other people. I think sometimes, when you go to grad school for writing, you think you’re doing a solitary thing, and it can feel very isolating. She was a model for how writing can be an extension of hospitality.  
 
I wrote an essay for the Rumpus in which Carrie plays a big part. In our last meeting with her, she said, all of you have these visions for your writing life after your MFA. But there’s going to be a day that you sit down for your scheduled writing time, and your kid comes up and pulls on your sleeve and says, I’m hungry, and your writing time is going to be over, and you’re going to go make a snack. It was a reminder that art has to exist within full lives lived with other people. That is the work, not to push your life away to make sure you have a kind of hermetic writing existence. As a parent, that’s the stage of life I’m in right now, and I think of Carrie all the time.  

Carrie helped me to understand what my time at Hollins was. I was finding some muscles, learning what different muscles do, strengthening them even if I wasn’t sure how I was going to use them yet. The essay at the beginning of my book came from my thesis. That essay means a lot to me. So I have one essay that has moved forward with me from Hollins, but mostly, I felt like Hollins gave me time to just get to know how I wanted to write and who I wanted to be. 

Written by Marta Regn (MFA ’24) with interview support from Ruby Rosenthal (MFA ’24).

This interview has been condensed and edited for grammar and clarity.