‘Farewell to BGSU’ talk is March 19 at 7 p.m. in Prout Chapel
By JULIE CARLE
BG Independent News
After 25 years of teaching and writing at Bowling Green State University, Dr. Lawrence Coates, a longtime creative writing professor, is preparing for a new chapter—one that will take him back to the West Coast, closer to the landscapes that shaped his work.
This summer, he and his wife will move to Port Angeles, a scenic town on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.
“It’s a beautiful place,” he said. “You’ve got the Strait (of Juan de Fuca) right there, the mountains behind you, and Olympic National Park just down the road. I was looking for a pretty place to land.”
Port Angeles is not entirely new territory. Decades ago, before his academic career took shape, he worked as a merchant seaman.
“When I was a younger man, our ship used to pull into the port there,” he said. “So, I actually have a connection with the place.”
A writer’s journey
Born in 1956—“It was a very good year,” he said with a smile—he knew early that writing might be part of his future.
“I loved reading,” he said. “Most writers really love reading first.”
He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Santa Cruz, before briefly pursuing literary scholarship. Fascinated by “Don Quixote” and fluent in Spanish, he continued his studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed a master’s degree.
But the pull of creative writing never faded.
Coates discovered a Ph.D. program at University of Utah where a novel could serve as the dissertation. His first novel did exactly that.
He wrote “The Blossom Festival” for his dissertation and graduated with a doctorate in English-Creative Writing, which led to his first teaching position at Southern Utah University, a small school with an undergraduate writing program.
While at Southern Utah University, Coates’ first book was published earning him the Western States Book Award for Fiction and the credentials to move into his dream job of teaching in a graduate-level writing program.
“That worked out for me,” he said.
That opportunity arrived at BGSU.
Building writers
At Bowling Green, he joined one of the country’s oldest Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs in creative writing.
“The chance to teach graduate students is what brought me here. I didn’t come for the landscape,” he joked. “I came for the program.”
The Bowling Green State University MFA Program in Creative Writing—established in 1968—has a long history of producing notable writers. One of its alumni, Anthony Doerr, later won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
And during his tenure, Coates has written and published four additional books: “The Master of Monterey” (2003); “The Garden of the World” (2012), which won the Nancy Dasher Award from the College English Association of Ohio; “The Goodbye House” (2015); and “Camp Olvido” (2015), which won the Miami University Press Novella Prize.
Over the past quarter century, in his role as professor and mentor, Coates has focused not only on his own writing but on helping students find their voices.
“One of the best moments as a teacher,” he said, “is when a former student publishes their first book and asks you to write the blurb.”
A classroom built on imagination
Among the classes he developed over the years, one of his favorites is a techniques course that breaks fiction down into its fundamental elements—character, plot, point of view, beginnings and endings.
The class also includes an unusual creative exercise.
Each semester, the class invents a strange image—something like “a lobster in a laundromat,” “bats in purses,” or “a widow with a can of sardines.” Every student must write a short story using that image.
“Me and my five graduate students would all come up with our own version,” he said.
The results vary wildly—some surreal, some realistic.
One student turned a prompt about a rusty vending machine into a moving story about siblings cleaning out their parents’ home after their deaths.
“That’s the beautiful thing about the exercise,” he said. “Everyone takes the same image and goes somewhere completely different.”
Writing the long story
Alongside these short experimental pieces, his own novels tend to be sweeping historical works rooted in California, the region where he grew up.
His latest manuscript—currently being submitted to publishers—is an ambitious novel spanning more than 150 years in a single fictional town, beginning in the Gold Rush era and moving through the modern age.
To write it, he spent years researching archives, historical documents and cultural artifacts.
Libraries—including OhioLINK and BGSU’s Browne Popular Culture Library—played a crucial role in his research.
“They had Spider-Man comics from the 1980s, Sears catalogs, all kinds of things,” he said. “Those little details help bring a time period alive.”
A farewell reading
As he prepares to retire at the end of the academic year, he will give one last public reading March 19 at 7 p.m. in Prout Chapel on the BGSU campus—something he hadn’t originally planned.
“I felt weird scheduling a reading for myself,” he said. “But my colleague, Amorak Huey, insisted that I needed to do a farewell reading.”
The event will feature selections from his upcoming novel as well as one of the surreal flash pieces that grew out of his classroom prompts.
Even as Coates prepares to leave, he believes the creative writing program at BGSU is entering a new phase.
New faculty hires and curriculum revisions signal a generational transition.
“I’m happy to see new energy coming in,” he said. “After 25 years, I’m fresh out of new ideas.”
Still, he hopes the program continues its strong connection with the arts community on campus—from music and theater to visual art collaborations.
“I’m proud that creative writing holds its place among the arts at Bowling Green,” he said.
Soon, he’ll be writing from a new home overlooking mountains and water in the Pacific Northwest.
But the stories—and the students—will continue.
“I’ll exit stage left,” he said with a laugh. “But the program goes on.”
