Summer, 2023
Washington DC
Dear Friends of the Cheuse Center—
I hope this note finds you well at the start of another busy academic year. I wanted to let you all know that I will no longer serve as Founding Director of the Cheuse Center.
Over the first seven years of our existence, we have awarded twenty MFA students the opportunity to travel abroad for their creative projects; hosted ten international writers to our campus for residencies; and produced dozens of events that have featured dynamic, award-winning writers and translators from across the world. I could not be prouder of what we have accomplished, our impact on individual lives, or our potential as a Center moving forward.
The Cheuse Center is in great hands with Leeya Mehta at the helm and with the input and advice from our dynamic Board of Advisors.
Those of us with a passion for literature—as creators and readers—often possess a strange duality. Writing and reading is a solitary pursuit. We write in and through our imaginations; we read absorbed in another’s world and mind. This is often the solitary part of literature, the one that drew many of us to the written word when we were young.
Yet, the other side of literature is community. It is building relationships with people and organizations, bringing people together to listen to stories and engage with ideas—to have our humanity both affirmed and challenged. To laugh. This part of literature, though more social, is also a beautiful creative act.
I have had the great fortune of spending the last six years of my life engaged primarily in community building through literature. We have taken an idea and created a Center that has impacted hundreds of lives and brought people together from all over the world. It is as important to me as any book I have written or will write in the future, and no less creative.
But I now turn to the more solitary side of writing, fostering the creative intensity it takes to write books. I am excited about what lies ahead both for me and the Cheuse Center.
Before I leave, I want to thank the incredible people I have worked with over the years: Our Board of Advisors, our staff at the Cheuse Center, and the amazing MFA Faculty at George Mason University. Working with all of you and establishing meaningful, life-long relationships has been the highlight of my job.
I specifically want to thank Bill Miller, who was the Director of the MFA Program at George Mason in 2015. Bill and I had a glass of wine in April 2015 to discuss the potential for an international literary center at GMU. From that day to now, Bill has championed and shared in this vision. The Cheuse Center does not exist without him, and I cannot thank him enough.
I also want to thank the Cheuse family. I came into their lives at a tragic moment, when Alan unexpectedly passed away, and I want to thank them and their friends for their support and grace as we built a Center in Alan’s name so close after his passing. Alan’s widow, Kris O’Shee, has become a dear friend, and through laughter, tears, and cups of coffee at her dining room table, it has been a joy to find this friendship in the midst of loss.
We started the Cheuse Center because we believe that literature offers the opportunity to better understand our world: the different cultures and philosophies that exist across time and space; the political circumstances that impact people’s lives and art. The Center has been an attempt to take this opportunity that literature provides and allow it to shed light on all the beauty and pain of our common humanity.
It has always been a lofty goal, one not easily measured in statistics, and why not. We as readers, as writers, as citizens of the world, should strive for lofty goals.
I look forward to seeing this next iteration of the Cheuse Center under the leadership of Leeya Mehta, and of watching the Cheuse Center continue to grow.
Warmly,
Matthew Davis
August 07, 2023