Terrence Krehbiel, MFA

Hello! I am extremely excited to be a team member at The Well-Trained Mind Academy! My life-long love of writing began as a boy in Iowa where I grew up on the banks of the Mississippi River. I earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from The University of Iowa in 1981 and a Master of Science in Education in Reading from Western Illinois University in 1988.

In the fall of 1984, I walked into a high school English classroom in Illinois to teach English and remedial reading. I thought I would stay a year or two while I figured out what I wanted to do in life. Who knew that I would walk out of that room for the last time thirty-five years later, in May of 2019—thirty-five back-to-school nights, Christmas vacations, Spring breaks, homecomings, proms, and graduations.

During that time, I taught thousands of students The Declaration of Independence and The Gettysburg Address—The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet—Hamlet and Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice—The Rubaiyat, The Bhagavad Gita, and the books of Genesis and Ruth. I’ve taught The Good Earth, A Tale of Two Cities, and A Separate Peace—the stories of James Joyce’s Dubliners, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz age, and Hemingway’s lost generation. I’ve shepherded students through the poetry of Dickinson, Whitman, and Frost, of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Neruda, and Garcia-Lorca. In addition to teaching all that literature, I prepared our students for the numerous State of Illinois writing achievement exams that have come and gone through the years.

In 2014, with an empty nest at home, I put all my extra duties aside and set off to pursue an MFA in fiction writing. In July of 2016, I graduated from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC. In my time there I studied under some of the finest fiction writers and poets in the United States, including Antonya Nelson, Charles Baxter, Lauren Groff, Lan Samantha Chang, Joan Silber, Peter Orner, Stephen Dobyns, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and so many others. In addition to the faculty, I was inspired, supported, encouraged and instructed by my many talented classmates there. The Warren Wilson program introduced me to the tribe of writers I had sought for a lifetime and finally found. And so, I write in my retirement with all the time I never had before while teaching and raising kids. But I am so grateful that I do not have to say goodbye completely to my life working with young learners, and I look forward to meeting you and your families in my classes.

On teaching: I rely on direct instruction of writing skills and methods, involving definition, demonstration, and then guided and independent practice. In class I tend toward Socratic questioning, which over time sharpens reasoning and encourages critical thinking. My instruction is always sensitive to the specific demands of the writing task and the age and development of the learners. The amount of review or reteaching is dependent on the group performance from lesson to lesson.