Saturday, June 14, 1997

Christian writing center facing tough economic times

By Laura Addison

Knight-Ridder Newspapers

WICHITA, Kan - The one-of-a-kind, national Christian writing center that has featured such established writers as Madeleine L'Engle, Annie Dillard and former poet laureate Richard Wilbur is facing tough economic times.

Nonetheless, says Virginia Stem Owens, director of the Milton Center at Kansas Newman College in Wichita, the 11-year-old organization will continue focusing on its primary mission: developing the best in Christian-based writing.

"We want distinctive voices that will be as engaging as any other voices appearing in our national literature," she said.

The Milton Center, by its own statement, "supports work by writers who seek to animate the Christian imagination, foster intellectual integrity, and explore the human condition with honesty and compassion."

It was created in 1986 as the Center for Christian Writing by Richard Foster, noted Christian author, at Friends University in Wichita, with a private gift of $350,000.

Eleven years later, the Milton Center now on the Kansas Newman campus continues to sponsor two post-graduate fellows each academic year, as well as put on the national Glen Workshop for emerging writers, and convene a meeting of the Chrysostom Society, where fellows can meet and be guided by established writers. Friday workshops on the Newman campus allow Milton Center writers to read from their works in progress and be critiqued.

"We have enough of an endowment to keep going on some level," Owens said. "And we have hopes of some of the contacts that we've made paying off in the future. So we're not shutting down, but we are, after this next year, going to restructure some."

In 1992, the Pew Charitable Trusts provided a three-year matching grant of $250,000. Two years later, the Lilly Endowment Inc. awarded the center a $153,000 project grant. And there has been other support from organizations and individuals.

But grant money will be gone after September, said Essie Sappenfield, program manager at the center.

"In the past five years, we have built up our endowment to over $212,000," she said. "From now on, all Milton Center programs will have to be funded by the interest from this endowment, or additional grants or contributions."

The annual operating budget for all Milton Center programs is approximately $100,000, Sappenfield said.

Owens and Sappenfield are the only staff at the center, with each Milton fellow working in the office 10 hours per week during the academic year. Owens succeeded Harold Fickett as the center's director in 1996 after Fickett replaced the original director, Richard Foster, in 1992.

Directing the center and its programs, mentoring its two post-graduate fellows, plus finding time to write, has "beaten me down," Owens says.

"I've been doing the entire thing, both running the programs and fund-raising, since last spring. And I have to maintain my own writing, to have any credibility," she said.

It takes time to build effective networks, travel and speak to groups and foundations.

"Because we have a national constituency of writers, we need a national network of funding, as well," Owens said. And location makes that difficult. "Kansas is not the big-money center of the country."

Religious books now generate $3 billion worth of sales a year, in national chains and Christian bookstores three times as big a market as 15 years ago. But that is not the type of writing the Milton Center wants to support, Owens said.

"We are not aiming to help people write devotional pieces for Guideposts Magazine," she said. "There are plenty of people who do those, and they are edited to sound like they're all written by the same person.

"We want to find people who will chronicle the contemporary life of faith which, in Christian bookstores, is about the same as fantasy. Nobody says or hears a bad word, (characters) always conceive immaculately and in wedlock. The dishonesty of representing the life of faith in a glib kind of way is not even truth in advertising," she said.

What's ahead for the center?

One income-generating option under consideration is a non-academic mentoring program, in which writers would come to campus for two-week intensive sessions at the beginning and end of the academic year. In between, people in the program could be mentored by established writers, using e-mail or other correspondence.

Although Saturday Writing Workshops, begun in February 1997 and open to any writer, may continue, there is talk of limiting the two fellowships to one semester. The center also has begun to seek underwriting for students who wish to attend the Glen Workshop. And more minority writers need to be brought to such sessions, Owens said.

"Their education does not aim them toward the arts, but toward business the same as for everybody else," she said. "But that means all those stories are not being told.

"If we believe people are shaped, not just through reason but through imagination, and what is fed through the imagination, then we need to support people who are trying to do that."

For information on the Milton Center's programs or underwriting opportunities, call (316) 942-4291, Ext. 326. Office hours are 1 to 5 p.m. central time Mondays through Fridays.

(c) 1997, The Wichita Eagle (Wichita, Kan.).

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