Literary Legacy

Novelist and Professor Emeritus Blanche McCrary Boyd mentored generations of writers, shaping America’s literary landscape in the process.

By Edward Weinman

alk into your local bookstore and you’ll see their names on the bestsellers’ display.

To name just a few: Ann Napolitano (Hello Beautiful), David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon), Sloane Crosley (Grief Is for People), Jessica Soffer (Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots), Hannah Tinti (The Good Thief).

These influential writers have a commonality—they belong to a literary family tree with deep roots tracing back to Blanche McCrary Boyd’s classroom on Connecticut College’s campus. Having developed their literary tradecraft with Boyd, these writers share a familiar shibboleth, a linguistic password that has led them to critically acclaimed careers.

“The accomplishments of writers who were in my classes are astounding,” says Boyd, the Roman and Tatiana Weller Professor Emeritus of English and former Writer-in-Residence at Conn. “I won’t start to list them because whenever I do, I inevitably leave some out because there are so many.”

She has “so many successful students” that Boyd, who retired in 2022, has helped shape this country’s storytelling terrain.

One of those writers is Ann Napolitano ’94, whose novel Hello Beautiful was an instant New York Times bestseller, not to mention the 100th Oprah’s Book Club pick.

“Connecticut College has produced many excellent writers, and I attribute that to Blanche and the program she built,” says Napolitano.

“She was our school, and it’s a great one.”

Blanche Boyd greets members of the standing-room-only audience, including Herbert Klagsbrun, second from right, at the 20th Klagsbrun Symposium in April, 2024.

Distinct Voice

The writers who traveled through Boyd’s classroom learned the techniques of writing, such as plot, pacing, point of view, structure and character development, of course. Perhaps more importantly, though, Boyd instilled in her students a sense of courage and belief.

“Her gift was making us feel worthy and sensible in our endeavor to write,” says Soon Wylie ’09.

Wylie is the author of the crime thriller When We Fell Apart, which The New York Times Book Review called a “suspenseful debut … a story about young people constrained in their self-development, one by his own internal pressures, the other by social expectations that are at odds with her true desires.”

Wylie says that Boyd was “one of those rare teachers who instilled wonder, excitement, fear and ambition in those of us taking her classes. She pushed us because she knew the business of writing was tough and unforgiving. I am forever grateful to her for it.”

Although 15 years have passed since Wylie left Conn, he still hears Boyd’s distinctive voice, which was “melodious and perfectly attuned, reading our stories aloud in class. It was a voice that could make even the rough drafts of scrappy undergraduates sound polished and wise.”

Boyd’s voice is a popular topic among her former pupils. When Hannah Tinti ’94, author of Animal Crackers, The Good Thief and The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, reads her own work out loud, she still hears the echo of Boyd’s voice.

“Blanche would often read stories to us out loud, student work, as well as pieces by well-known authors. This would reveal what was working (or not), line for line, on the page, an important revision tool for a writer. You can often hear what’s wrong with a sentence after it’s been released into the air,” says Tinti, who is also co-founder and executive editor of One Story magazine.

“I’ve kept this lesson with me throughout my writing life.”

A writer’s life is often filled with rejection, which creates self-doubt, an inner critic that stifles creativity. Every writer slips into this mindset on occasion, especially when just starting out, which is why Boyd helped her students to believe a writer’s life was a possibility for them.

The essayist and novelist Sloane Crosley ’00, in an interview with Writer’s Digest in July 2023, said Boyd showed her students that their voice mattered, what they wrote mattered. It helped Crosley stop “aping other writers and start writing like myself,” she said.

Crosley has a list of bestsellers from The Clasp to How Did You Get This Number to I Was Told There’d Be Cake. She recently published Grief Is for People, a memoir that explores the death by suicide of her friend and mentor. Like Boyd’s own work, the memoir veers from the traditional.

According to NPR’s Maureen Corrigan, “There’s nothing traditional or twice-cooked about Crosley’s voice, her arresting observations.”

Boyd’s workshops were where writers like Crosley found their distinct voice.

“Blanche was invaluable to me and to so many of my peers. She applied the care and rigor of an MFA program to an undergraduate writing program. It’s not hyperbole to say she single-handedly improved the education I received at Connecticut College.”

In the classroom, she was engaged, whip-smart, biting, hilarious and always had a smirk lurking just beneath the surface. She was cool in the effortless way truly cool people are.

— Lee Eisenberg ’99

‘Mesmerizing, Funny, Brilliant’

As a writer, Boyd’s own legacy leaves no doubt. She’s renowned for her fearless storytelling about characters who live hardscrabble lives in stories that are incisive explorations of identity, politics and social justice.

Boyd gained widespread recognition for what’s often called autobiographical fiction (as well as her journalism), especially The Revolution of Little Girls (1991), Terminal Velocity (1997) and Tomb of the Unknown Racist (2018). The trilogy grapples with themes of personal transformation and societal reckoning by following characters like Ellen Burns, an independent woman who challenges traditional gender roles and societal norms.

Boyd tells an anecdote that’s a forward echo to the backstories of her characters. She was in her first days at Stanford, where she earned the prestigious Wallace Stegner fellowship. At a dinner party for writing fellows, one of her classmates mistook Boyd for a server. “He asked me to bring him a glass of wine.” That night she went home, lopped off her hair and began wearing all black.

“I learned what I wore mattered. There are men. Women. And me. I didn’t want anyone to put me into a category,” she says.

It’s difficult to categorize Boyd’s work. She weaves complex, resonant narratives that have earned her numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. Tomb of the Unknown Racist was nominated for the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Boyd was one of five finalists for the award.

But not every successful writer has the drive to help others reach their calling. Not every author can teach writing. What made Boyd an effective teacher?

“Blanche was the first real writer I ever met, and she was an amazing teacher— mesmerizing, funny and brilliant,” says Napolitano, whose novel Dear Edward, also a New York Times bestseller, was recently adapted into an Apple TV+ series.

She was also tough. “She didn’t let anything slide. But she was incredibly supportive and encouraging. She made me believe that I could be a writer.”

Boyd’s toughness also influenced Tinti, who says that her former instructor “pushed us to ask hard questions, not just about our characters but about ourselves. Blanche believed that the best writing comes from a place of vulnerability, and she created a space where we felt safe enough to take those risks.”

Writers take risks throughout their entire career. Writing requires courage and so-called thick skin. Sometimes, these risks are in pursuit of comedy gold. The reward, for film and television writer Lee Eisenberg ’99, was The Office, a sitcom beloved by millions of fans who couldn’t get enough of the hilarious Dunder Mifflin gang.

Eisenberg, who wrote for the show, executive produced and directed selected episodes during its run from 2005 to 2013, studied with Boyd. In fact, Boyd was his first writing teacher.

“She taught me so much: wit, taking in your surroundings, crafting a character, surprising the audience with the unexpected,” Eisenberg says.

In addition to The Office, Eisenberg developed Lessons in Chemistry, starring Brie Larson (Captain Marvel, Room), a show about chemist Elizabeth Zott who begins hosting her own feminist cooking show in 1960s America. He executive produced and wrote four episodes. His Hollywood credits are abundant.

Also, his cool factor is off the charts, something he learned from Boyd.

“In the classroom, she was engaged, whip-smart, biting, hilarious and always had a smirk lurking just beneath the surface. She was cool in the effortless way truly cool people are, and I was and am desperate for her approval because I only play cool on TV,” he says jokingly.

Conn was an excellent fit for me. I never would have imagined it, never would have even known to want it, and it turned out to be key for me as a writer.

— Blanche Boyd

Never Just a Job

Boyd’s teaching career started as a happy accident with a one-semester visiting appointment back in 1982 when she was a “scrambling, broke writer who suddenly got subsidized to do what I love,” she recalls.

What this transplant from South Carolina loved was to write. And to teach writing, which came surprisingly easily.

“Teaching was never just a job for me—it was a partnership. Watching my students grow into the writers they were meant to be has been one of the great joys of my life,” Boyd says. “I didn’t create their brilliance; they had that all along. My role was to help them uncover it and to encourage them to keep going when the world tried to convince them otherwise.”

Over the years, Boyd brought many other professional writers to campus through the Daniel Klagsbrun Symposium on Writing and Moral Vision, established in 1989 by Emilie and Herbert Klagsbrun to create a positive, living memorial to their son Daniel Klagsbrun ’86. The symposium has allowed students to interact with and be inspired by the likes of Dorothy Allison, Saul Bellow, Joseph Brodsky, Sandra Cisneros, Michael Cunningham, E.L. Doctorow, Jhumpa Lahiri, Wally Lamb, Colum McCann, Jay McInerney, Adrienne Rich, David Sedaris, Art Spiegelman, Amy Tan, Elie Wiesel and Tobias Wolff.

Boyd says she always told her students that she couldn’t turn them into professional writers, but she could assure them that when they left her class, they would be better writers.

“Talent is not the issue,” she says. “It’s how do you cross that inch between talent and good. I couldn’t teach them that. I could teach them where the inch was.”

David Grann ’89 soared past that inch. He learned to hone the narrative precision that characterizes his bestselling nonfiction, some of which has been adapted into feature films, including The Lost City of Z and Killers of the Flower Moon. The latter, which was directed by Martin Scorsese and starred Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, received 10 Oscar nominations.

“Blanche had this incredible ability to see the heart of a story and to make you see it, too,” Grann says. “Her encouragement gave me the confidence to dive deeper into my subjects and to trust my instincts.”

Boyd retired in 2022 after 40 years in the classroom. She now splits her time between New England and the Caribbean island of Vieques—“I’ve had enough of Yankee weather,” she says—and continues to write. She has a Substack and has written several pieces for Journal of the Plague Years, an online magazine created by Susan Zakin ’79.

As she reflects on her (admittedly accidental) academic career, Boyd is grateful. “Conn was an excellent fit for me. I never would have imagined it, never would have even known to want it, and it turned out to be key for me as a writer.”

Boyd says that she taught writing the way she wished she’d been taught, and modeled much of her pedagogy after Wendell Berry at Stanford, whom she had as an instructor. “He mostly just demonstrated his great love, his passion for literature.”

Boyd’s students picked up on her great love and passion. As a result, her teachings became fingerprints on the imaginations of her students. One such fingerprint, Tinti says, was when Boyd had students write a secret down on a piece of paper, something they had never told anyone.

“We carried those secrets outside and as a group we burned them in a trash can. Blanche told us that this was the power of writing, the act of putting something unspeakable on the page,” Tinti recalls.

“And afterwards, what we chose to do with writing was up to us.”

A favorite portrait of Boyd’s, taken by photographer Jill Krementz, wife of Kurt Vonnegut, hangs in the portrait gallery on the second floor of Shain Library.