That made it possible for us to get entrenched here, get a faculty who would stay. He notes that there were relatively few women faculty, until poet C.D. Wright was hired, and then fiction writer Meredith Steinbach. Novelist Robert Coover came on board part-time in the early 80s and Paula Vogel joined the faculty in the mid 80s. Of course, with so many writers around, things didn't always go smoothly. They have strong egos and sometimes those egos brush against each other.
Lots can happen that way.
Honig, ever discreet, won't reveal those writerly skirmishes. Honig, who is the accomplished author of approximately three dozen volumes of poetry, prose, translations and academic works, says he is pleased with the way the Graduate Program in Creative Writing has turned out. It almost has a momentum of its own. Its virtue is that it isn't a big program, and also that it has faculty who've become an active part of the Brown community. When I first came here, none of the writers would go to faculty meetings.