Faced with rising costs for health care and other necessities, some workers are cutting back on retirement savings. The trend may spur employers to redouble their efforts to provide effective retirement education and financial planning benefits.

“People are really feeling the pain of rising health care costs in a short period of time,” says Paul Fronstin, senior research associate for the Employee Benefit Research Institute in Washington.

Many Americans – fully 63% – had to pay more for health benefits last year, according to EBRI’s 2007 Health Confidence Survey. Among them, 30% decreased their retirement plan contributions. What’s more, 52% slashed other savings. Some had trouble paying for basics like food, heat and housing (29%) and other bills (36%). Compared to just a few years ago, more people say health costs are negatively impacting their ability to save for retirement. However, says Fronstin, “They may be cutting back for a lot of reasons. Gas prices going up, the housing crisis, the economy in general.”

A hurting’ economy
A separate study by Watson Wyatt Worldwide in 2007 confirms that rising health care expenses are hindering the ability of some workers, particularly those with chronic conditions and low incomes, to save for retirement. Researchers surveyed full-time employees of companies with at least 1,000 workers. Overall, about 12% of respondents said they had decreased their retirement plan contributions as a result of increased health care spending over the past two years. Those whose families included a member with a chronic condition were more likely to say so (17%) than those without one (7%). Workers with lower incomes were more likely than other respondents to report increased stress levels, difficulty paying for basic needs and using savings to pay for rising health costs.

Higher premiums and out-of-pocket costs for health benefits, combined with a slowing economy, appear to be taking a toll on workers’ ability to bank any money for the future. “What seems to be a very slow economy is hurting even more than just a few months ago,” says Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health. “You don’t have to look hard to know that if wages haven’t gone up, but benefit costs and fuel costs have, people have less money to spend – and that means less money to save.”

People do what they can to keep their lives “patched together,” says Darling. That often means paying for the house, the car, the babysitting, the dry cleaning or even a haircut before investing for retirement.

Households at risk
The story gets worse. Rising health care costs are likely to impact more than the ability of workers to save for retirement. They may also affect people’s ability to maintain their standard of living in retirement.

Forty-four percent of U.S. households are considered “at risk” of being unable to afford their standard of living in retirement, according to data released in February from the National Retirement Risk Index, developed by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. That’s even if they work to age 65, buy annuities with their financial assets and take out reverse mortgages on their homes.

The above scenario figures people would dip into “pizza and wine” money to pay for retirement health care expenses if they had to, explains Alicia Munnell, director of the center. But she and the center’s researchers also wondered what would happen if people didn’t give up spending on everyday pleasures during the golden years. “You want to keep your pizza-and-wine spending constant over your life,” she says.

When the impact of rising health care costs is factored in explicitly, and pizza-and-wine expenses held level, the proportion of households at risk jumps to 61%.

People with lower incomes and in younger generations are generally at greater risk as health care costs rise and employer contributions to retiree medical benefits dwindle.

Educational tools lacking
“Health care costs are the huge wild card for all of us in planning for our retirement,” says Sally Hass, benefits education manager for Weyerhaeuser Corporation, the forest products company based in Federal Way, Wash.

“One of the messages employers can provide is to keep yourself healthy, well and safe, and to take full advantage of the preventive features in your health plan,” Hass continues. “Maybe you won’t hemorrhage money on health care expenses.”

Hass advises employers to include long-term care insurance and health savings accounts in their retirement education programs. Darling adds that workers need to understand that Medicare won’t entirely cover their
medical expenses.

John E. Nelson, author of “What Color Is Your Parachute? For Retirement,” urges employers to promote health risk assessments that tell workers what their health care needs may be in the future.

Tools for estimating short-term health expenses for flexible spending accounts are common, and those for projecting long-term health have emerged.

“There are no tools yet for estimating long-term health expenses,” says Nelson. “That will be the next wrinkle.” Such tools are needed in the marketplace. As of last year, a retiring 65-year-old couple needed about $215,000 to cover medical costs for the rest of their lives, according to Fidelity Investments. That figure increases annually by an average of 6.1%.

Employers are beginning to tie the concepts of financial well-being and health into retirement planning education, notes Cathy Tripp, national leader of consumerism for Watson Wyatt . “Financial health, emotional health and physical health is where some companies are starting to go,” she says.

The state health reform movement is speeding along Eisenhower highways to Washington, where some legislators want to roll back federal protections that allow employers to run health benefit plans outside of state law.

Maryland gave up on its “Fair Share”" law in April, after a federal appeals court concluded the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 prevents the state from requiring Wal-Mart to spend at least 8% of payroll on employee health benefits or pay the difference into a state Medicaid fund. But more broadly based pay-or-play proposals remain on the table in other states, including California, Pennsylvania and Illinois.

At least 32 states considered some kind of employer-financed health care legislation this year, according to the Tax on Jobs Coalition, a group of employers assembled by the Washington, D.C.-based National Retail Federation to fight state mandates. And while the pace of legislative proposals slowed this year, momentum remains considerable.

“States are pushing the employers, both large and small, saying, ‘You’ve got to be a player,’” said Joy Johnson Wilson, health policy director for the Denver-based National Conference of State Legislatures, at a recent briefing in Washington, D.C.

Even the widely publicized Massachusetts universal health law — considered an “individual mandate” because it requires residents to obtain health insurance — contains a questionable provision forcing firms with 11 employees or more to pay $295 per employee if they fail to offer a certain floor of health benefit coverage. At press time, the law was set to go into effect July 1 without a challenge from employers.

Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, two bipartisan bills — the Health Partnership through Creative Federalism Act and the Health Partnership Act — have been introduced to give states access to federal grants for health reform initiatives such as tax credits, risk-pooling arrangements or single-payer systems.

Some of these state plans, lawmakers say, would require Congress to take the unprecedented action of granting an ERISA waiver.

Employers express alarm at the prospect of ERISA erosion. The federal law, they argue, spares employers from a crazy quilt of state mandates and encourages them to provide health insurance to some 160 million workers.

The health care system is in danger of “creeping or galloping balkanization,” says Neil Trautwein, vice president and employee benefits policy counsel for NRF. At a congressional hearing on state and federal health care reform in May, he told lawmakers: “ERISA pre-emption is a crucial linchpin to employer-sponsored coverage. State experimentation should be limited to state plans.”

Kevin Covert, vice president and deputy general counsel for human resources at Honeywell, testified on behalf of the Washington, D.C.-based American Benefits Council that his company’s ability to avoid state health mandates helps provide an affordable and competitive health benefit plan that includes a disease management program.

“It is critical that Congress not do anything with respect to ERISA pre-emption that would stifle our health care innovation,” said Covert.

States, however, tell a different story. John Morrison, insurance commissioner for the state of Montana, where an estimated 20% of the population is uninsured, explained at the hearing that ERISA unfairly prevents his state from requiring local employers to pay into a risk-pool program for uninsured residents.

“Because of ERISA pre-emptions, self-funded employer plans do not contribute to the funding for this program, even though their employees are able to take advantage of the portability pool when they lose their employer coverage,” said Morrison.

Morrison and other backers of state-sponsored initiatives to cover the uninsured are pushing for ERISA waivers that would allow states to require employers to contribute to state health programs. They also want the ability to collect data on benefits, enrollment and claims from self-insured plans, which could be used to evaluate whether an employer’s plan meets state requirements.

Donna Cooper, policy secretary for Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, says ERISA looms as an obstacle to the governor’s state-subsidized health insurance plan that was unveiled in January. The “Cover All Pennsylvanians” program would levy a 3% payroll tax on businesses that do not provide qualified health benefits to workers.

“Let’s say [employers] offer a product that has a $10,000 deductible and can only be used if you fall off a ski slope,” Cooper said at a May forum in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Alliance for Health Reform and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “That wouldn’t count to get out of our free-rider assessment.”

But ERISA may halt Pennsylvania’s efforts to sort out which self-insured health plans are eligible for an exemption from the so-called “free rider” tax, said Cooper, since the federal law prevents states from regulating large group health plans.

Creeping threat to ERISA

The Arlington, Va.-based Retail Industry Leaders Association, which successfully sued Maryland in the Wal-Mart case, objected to Pennsylvania’s proposed 3% payroll tax at a hearing before state lawmakers in April.

“We’re not objecting to the theories of universal access and expanding insurance to individuals,” says John Rinzel, vice president for state government affairs at RILA. “Hopefully, these things will drive down costs. But when you introduce a payroll tax, you’re threatening the provisions of ERISA.”

RILA has no quarrel with the Massachusetts health plan, however, because it hinges on requiring people to secure health insurance on their own. “These laws don’t, in theory, affect the practices of a business in terms of offering health care,” Rinzel says.

Neither is Rinzel particularly concerned with aspects of the Massachusetts law that require employers to set up a Section 125 plan or pay a fee if their health benefits are deemed insufficient. RILA’s members, mostly large employers, are expected to meet those requirements easily.

Local retailers also support the law, says John Hurst, president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts.

“Keep in mind how far we came,” he notes. “The early versions of this included a pay-or-play 7% payroll tax, which we vehemently opposed. This is uncharted territory, and the employer community in Massachusetts is dedicated to giving it shot.”

Ed Kaplan, senior vice president and national health practice leader for the Segal Co., says the Massachusetts mandate may lower costs for large employers by reducing surcharges levied by the state for uncompensated health care.

In addition, he says, some employers will use the law to remove employees from the health benefit plan while still meeting minimum coverage requirements set by the state.

In the short term, the Massachusetts health care reform plan appears to have little impact on self-insured employers, which is likely why the law’s employer mandate hasn’t been challenged in court.

“No one has come out and said, ‘Hey, ERISA is pre-empting this,’” says Kaplan. “It may have a good chance of silently going forward without an ERISA challenge. If that happens, then the other states will follow. Then gradually, without any federal change, ERISA becomes less powerful.”

Some policy experts, however, say the Massachusetts law would be able to withstand a challenge from employers.

Amy Monahan, an associate law professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia, writes, “Unlike Maryland’s act, which has a very strong ‘pay’ provision, Massachusetts’ fair share contribution law has a weak ‘pay’ provision, arguably allowing it to survive an ERISA pre-emption challenge and be the first such law to do so.”

Phyllis Borzi, a health policy research professor at George Washington University, believes state health care reform laws that are structured like Maryland’s, but more broadly based, imposing a refundable tax on all employers, also would evade ERISA preemption.

“By ‘broadly based’ I mean something like Massachusetts or like what Governor Schwarzenegger has proposed in California,” Borzi says. “Something that reasonable people can look at and say the state has tried to make everybody bear the cost and didn’t single out one employer or group of employers.”

Self-insurance remains popular

Despite continuing threats to ERISA pre-emption, self-insurance remains a popular strategy among employers.

“Self-funding is alive and well,” says James Kinder, CEO of the Self-Insurance Institute of America. “Reports indicate more companies, municipalities and other governmental agencies are turning to self-insurance not only to save dollars but also to develop benefit programs to meet the specific needs of their workforces.”

In 2006, 55% of workers with health insurance belonged to a plan that was either completely or partially self-funded, up from 49% in 2000, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust.

One of the latest employers to switch to self-insurance is the City of Melrose, Mass. Between 2001 and 2005, the city’s health insurance premiums shot up by a total of 75%. CFO Patrick Dello Russo figured the city would be better off self-funding its plan, which covers about 800 employees. The new plan was implemented in 2006.

“We pay the claims that are submitted. The rate increase in the budget is less than it normally would be,” Dello Russo says. “This year it’s 7%.” That kind of self-insurance success story may be repeated for lawmakers if threats to ERISA pre-emption continue.

Meanwhile, two presidential candidates appear to have taken a cue from state health reform initiatives. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama have announced health plans with pay-or-play as a major feature. As details about these and other candidates’ plans emerge, employers are sure to look closely at the impact.

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Any start-up company would be jealous of these numbers. In just over one year of being in business, pharmacy benefit manager Rite Aid Health Solutions has attracted enough clients to serve 100,000 lives and has received kudos for customer satisfaction.

But the Camp Hill, Pa.-based PBM is no ordinary start-up. Rite Aid Corp. once owned PCS Health Systems, which used to be the nation’s largest PBM, serving millions of health care consumers. Rite Aid sold off PCS in 2000 during a period of financial troubles, but kept its eye on the market for a chance to re-emerge. That opportunity came in 2005, when the company established Rite Aid Health Solutions, aiming mainly at the small to mid-sized employer market.

“So now we’re back,” says Greg Drew, vice president and general manager of Rite Aid Health Solutions. “We didn’t want to be out of the business, but it was necessary at the time. Rite Aid Corp. is very committed to the new PBM.”

Drew says Rite Aid Health Solutions holds itself to a high standard of transparency, both in terms of rebate revenue and network pricing.

“We disclose everything that the manufacturer gives us. [We do] all the stuff you would expect to see from any PBM,” says Drew. “What’s more, all our rebates are 100% pass-through, so we don’t have a motivating force to drive higher-cost drugs. Everything we do is incorporated into our administrative fees.”

In other words, Rite Aid Health Solutions makes its money from client administrative fees alone.

“That’s the model we’ve chosen to operate on, and it’s the one we can feel best about,” says Drew. “It doesn’t make sense to drive a higher-cost drug for a client, and we would not want to engage a client where we’d be doing that kind of thing because it would be contrary to our corporate culture almost a bit hypocritical.”

Some PBMs share rebate revenues with clients, but Drew frowns on that practice too: “The motivation needs to be to develop an effective solution for the plan without driving higher costs. It doesn’t do any good to get a couple of extra dollars per claim on a rebate if you’re driving the average cost per claim by $10.”

Rite Aid Health Solutions prides itself on being consultative to customers. Its clinical services include prior authorization, utilization review, and disease management. Many firms, particularly small businesses, have switched to Rite Aid Health Solutions as their PBM to gain access to these services, says Drew. Most small business clients have between 300 and 1,000 employees, while larger clients have up to 25,000.

Another way Rite Aid Health Solutions stands apart from the competition is in its pharmacy network pricing.

“Like everybody else, we guarantee average claim pricing,” says Drew. “[But] we actually pass through the actual claim costs. So the plan benefits if what is actually paid to the pharmacies is lower than the guaranteed cost. We don’t retain it. Most PBMs retain any savings that comes through beyond the network guarantee.”

Rite Aid Health Solutions is also pioneering a 90-day retail program for maintenance medications at select pharmacies. The PBM contracted with Rite Aid and other pharmacies to offer a “very aggressive” cost structure that rivals mail-order rates for a 90-day supply of prescription drugs, says Drew.

Whereas mail-order programs typically attract 20% of plan members, a 90-day retail program can draw a 45% participation rate, says Drew, because customer satisfaction is so much higher. Consumers want to keep a relationship with their local pharmacist, and they like being able to purchase their medications on the spot rather than waiting for a package to arrive in the mail.

Customer satisfaction is a high priority in the competitive PBM industry, where wooing clients away from other PBMs is a common growth strategy. In this arena, Rite Aid Health Solutions has an edge: Wilson Health Information, a healthcare consumer research company, found Rite Aid Health Solutions to be the top-rated PBM in customer satisfaction in its 2006 WilsonRx Pharmacy Benefit Satisfaction Report.

Rite Aid Health Solutions has a full national network of 55,000 pharmacies, enabling the PBM to serve large clients with a far-flung work force. Rite Aid Corp.’s own network will mushroom to more than 5,000 stores in the first quarter of 2007, when the company’s acquisition of the Eckerd and Brooks pharmacy chains is expected to close.

It must be tough being married to a creative writer. You never know when an unflattering glimpse of yourself might turn up in one of your spouse’s stories.

Take Virginia Tech English instructor Lisa Norris (forestry ’79) and associate professor Ed Falco, for example. Norris and Falco are both married to creative writers–each other. Norris once objected to a harsh portrait of a woman doing leg lifts in one of Falco’s stories. Falco, in turn, disliked Norris’ characterization of a man with the annoying habit of shaking a peanut jar.

Fortunately for their marriage, Norris and Falco understand fiction’s tendency to borrow details from real life. “Writing is just like breathing in our house,” says Norris.

Not all members of Virginia Tech’s creative writing community are married to each other. But to hear them talk, you’d swear they were from one big, happy family.

“There’s a real celebration of each other,” says novelist Simone Poirier-Bures, an instructor in Tech’s English department. When a new book is out, a party is usually held to honor its author. As Poirier-Bures says, “We all bloom a little when somebody else blooms.”

Special friendships have also blossomed in Tech’s English department. Poet and novelist Lucinda Roy, alumni distinguished professor of English, says, “I certainly find it important to have Nikki Giovanni here. It’s nice to have another faculty member of color to go to.”

Giovanni, the acclaimed poet, encouraged Roy to submit her poetry to feminist press Eighth Mountain’s poetry contest. Giovanni bet Roy a bottle of wine that she would win. When Roy won, Giovanni demanded, “Where’s my wine?”

But when Roy’s debut novel was published earlier this year, Roy recouped her losses from Giovanni, who wrote a glowing back-cover review and sent Roy two bottles of wine.

Poet Katherine “Bonnie” Soniat and poet Jeff Mann have become poetry trading friends. “A lot of my poems begin as banyan forests,” says Mann, “you have to take up a machette.”

Mann admits, “It’s annoying not to be able to write the perfect poem all by itself,” but he is grateful for Soniat’s feedback. “Plus, her cat’s adorable,” he says. “A big, fluffy, orange Persian with one of those flat faces.”

The pure, friendly affection these writers have for each other goes beyond dutiful professional respect or admiration. Putting their writing aside, they often get together just for fun. Falco, for example, alternately plays tennis with Soniat and popular crime novelist Carl Bean.

Tech’s creative writing courses are extremely popular, although there is no creative writing major, only a minor. At the beginning of each semester, students from across the university–not just English majors–can be seen waiting in the hallways trying to get overrides into creative writing classes that have already been filled to the 21-student limit.

“From the department’s point of view,” says Johann Norstedt, head of the English department, “creative writing is one of our most successful offerings.” But even more important to Norstedt than simply filling classrooms is the program’s ability to help students explore, through the strenuous intellectual activity of creative writing, “the possibilities of the human condition.”

“It seems to me,” says Tech Provost Peggy Meszaros, “that any major university that is serious about developing the mind has a very strong creative writing program.” Furthermore, says Meszaros, “We’re preparing students for life. If we are only preparing people for that entry-level position, we are not doing our job as a university.” The creative writing program’s ability to stimulate creativity, Meszaros concludes, is vital to a university that prides itself on innovation and entrepreneurship.

Tech’s emphasis on creative thinking is also seen in an experimental interdisciplinary program on creativity, led this fall by architecture professor and Associate Provost Ron Daniel for teachers of Tech’s first-year students. “Creativity happens when you get those cross connections,” says Daniel. “It doesn’t just happen in the vertical slice of what we do.”

If creativity and writing are values Tech is developing throughout the university, the creative writing faculty, with their unique approaches to teaching, epitomize these values.

Soniat asks students to draw their feelings in crayon before they write a poem. This fall her advanced poetry students will turn a poem into a design, a song, a painting, or a dance.

In one of her recent advanced poetry courses, Giovanni played “March of Waters,” a Portuguese song by the late Antonio Carlos Jobim (his most famous song is “The Girl from Ipanema”). Students listened actively to the song, then translated it into a poem. “No one knew anything about what he was actually saying,” says Giovanni, but “everybody got the joy.”

Giovanni’s classes also have involved mock trials of fairy tale characters. “We charged Little Red Riding Hoodwith the murder of her grandmother,” says Giovanni. Cinderella endured a sanity hearing in Giovanni’s class. Through the fairy-tale trials, Giovanni’s students began to think in new ways about writing and story telling. (Was Cinderella an abused child who created a grand story out of the details of her wretched life to make herself feel better?)

Norris’ creative writing courses include a service-learning component. Students have the option of performing a community service–spending time with Special Olympics athletes or tutoring at a project in Roanoke, for example–then detailing the experience in a scene and describing how it influenced them as writers. Norris also organizes a panel of Virginia Tech writers with whom her student can consult.

Falco, Giovanni, Roy, and Soniat comprise a first-rate creative writing faculty–by the standards of any college or university. These writers have often had the privilege of seeing their former students have work published in literary journals or gain acceptance into prestigious graduate schools for creative writing. And the faculty members’ own writing careers are going strong.

Falco’s recent short story collection, Acid, won the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction. One of its stories, “The Artist,” appeared in the 1995 edition of The Best American Short Stories. His second novel, A Dream with Demons (1997), published on compact disc, received a positive front-page review in the American Book Review. To Falco’s amazement, the novel has sold 1,000 copies and is being taught at several universities in experimental literature courses.

Falco just completed his latest work, a “multimedia computer narrative project” combining photographs with bits of narration. He’s currently working on Cybertown, a novel set in Blacksburg.

Giovanni won this year’s NAACP Image Award for Literature for her book, Love Poems (1997), which now has 60,000 copies in print. At the awards ceremony, hosted by Jay Leno and televised on the Fox network, Giovanni read from her poem “But Since You Finally Asked” while Savion Glover of the Broadway play “Bring in Da Noise Bring in Da Funk” tapped to it.

In 1996, Giovanni won the Langston Hughes Award, an honor shared in the past by James Baldwin, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou. Giovanni’s latest project, Grand Fathers, is an anthology which includes writings by some of her former students. The book is scheduled to be published in February 1999. Giovanni has also turned in the first half of a new book which is influenced by environmental concerns, especially the encroachment of humans upon the world’s natural habitats.

After seeing her first novel, Lady Moses, published this year to much critical acclaim, Lucinda Roy has finished a second novel, Blood Sisters, scheduled for publication in 2000. Does Roy have ideas for a third novel? “I wish I didn’t,” she says. Although she had earned recognition for two successful volumes of poetry, Roy switched to writing fiction, she says, “Because the story wouldn’t be quiet–it just wanted to be written.”

Even while she was spending all her daytime hours writing grants and chairing committees as associate dean for the College of Arts and Sciences, Roy would work every night until 2 a.m. writing the story of a bi-racial woman compelled to explore her identity by travelling in Africa.

Soniat’s latest book of poetry, A Shared Life (1993) won the Edwin Ford Piper Poetry Award. Most recently, Soniat won the William Faulkner Prize from the William Faulkner Society of Pirates Alley, New Orleans. Soniat’s lyric poetry often considers the way people and their environment are intertwined. She traveled to Peru in July to absorb ideas and impressions for her next book under a Virginia Commission of the Arts fellowship. She has planned her next four books of poetry to focus on “those endangered parts of our landscape–the mountains, the rainforest, the water, and the desert.”

Why does such an impressive group of creative writers reside at a university more known for science and technology? “It’s a very supportive environment, as far as creative work,” says Soniat. Creative writing faculty typically teach two upper level creative writing courses each semester; the rest of their time is spent with research and writing. Soniat also cites the beauty of the Blacksburg area, the low cost of living, and a diverse and bright undergraduate population.

Tech’s other English faculty are no slouches either when it comes to creative writing publishing, awards, and honors. Anne Cheney has edited and contributed to Ophelia’s Legs and Other Poems, a collection of poems by Blacksburg writers. Professor Tom Gardner has a book of poetry out and publishes in literary magazines, as does instructor Gyorgyi Voros.

Carl Bean’s crime novel about a child abduction, Dust to Dust, was published this year. His next novel, With Evil Intent, about a medical experiment using children’s internal organs, will be out in December.

Bean is deeply concerned for children in our society, and his brutal novels are meant as a wake-up call about child abuse. He recently received a grant to become the first writer-in-residence at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Bean is currently working on two novels, one on the holocaust and another on a disease that causes children to age prematurely.

Mann recently won the Stonewall Chapbook Competition. As part of the prize, gay and lesbian press Brick House published 1,000 copies of Mann’s poetry in a chapbook named Bliss. Mann considers himself more of a “Southern” writer than anything else and often teaches courses for Tech’s Appalachian studies program. This fall, Mann is teaching Tech’s first English class in gay and lesbian literature, a class filled beyond capacity.

Poirier-Bures’ coming-of-age novel, Candyman, has just been approved for use in 10th grade English classes in the province of Nova Scotia. An abridged version of the novel was recently read on Canadian Broadcasting Company Radio, the equivalent of National Public Radio in the United States.

More recently, Poirier-Bures published That Shining Place (1996), a memoir of her stay in Greece as a young woman in the ’60s. The book, which Poirier-Bures says is about an “older self coming to terms with a younger, wilder self,” won the Evelyn Richardson Award. Poirier-Bures, who has also published 30 short stories and a handful of poems, is currently working on a novel set in Virginia.

Norris has had her Western-flavored short stories published in a number of literary magazines. She is currently circulating a collection of her short stories called Toy Guns, so named because many of the stories deal, she says, with “female hostility.”

The influence of Tech’s creative writing community doesn’t stop at the edge of the Virginia Tech campus. The Blue Ridge Writers Conference, the oldest and largest writers conference in Southwest Virginia, moved to Tech this fall. This year, the English department funded a creative writing outreach program in which Soniat, Mann, and Voros took poetry classes to Pulaski County schools. At the annual “Share Our Strength” hunger-relief benefit (part of a nationwide effort held at Tech on Oct. 29), Tech creative writers read from their works, charging an admission fee that is donated to the Roanoke food bank.

“It’s like there’s an energy source here,” Bean says of Tech’s creative writing community. One thing is for certain: Tech’s strong creative writing program will be around for a long time and may some day expand into an undergraduate major. “It wouldn’t surprise me,” says chairman Norstedt, “if in 20 years there were a creative writing major at Virginia Tech.”

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