Learning to make a life: Reflections from award-winning poet, Professor Ryan Vine

“So the less and less I hold each morning I work to revise, and revision is the place I plan to spend my days. There’s no such thing as done.” — from “Sea Glass” by Ryan Vine

Professor of English Ryan Vine ’99, MFA, explored multiple career ideas and identities as an undergraduate student at The College of St. Scholastica before settling on something unexpected yet just right: he longed to be a poet. “It wasn’t until I got here — and sat in classes I didn’t even know existed — that I was capable of imagining the kind of world in which I wanted to live. As a student here, I realized, wow…I can be a working poet,” Vine said. “I wasn’t going to make a lot of money. I knew that, and that was fine with me. What I really wanted was time and to think my own thoughts. I wanted to read. I wanted to write. I wanted to live my life with other artists, and so far I’ve been lucky enough to do that.”

After completing his English degree at St. Scholastica, Vine earned his Master of Fine Arts in 2002 at Emerson College. He joined the faculty at St. Scholastica a year later and has taught a variety of courses in what’s now known as the School of Arts and Sciences. Though much has changed in the 23 years he’s been teaching, Vine sees students continuing to ask life’s big questions and seek the answers through the liberal arts.

Widening the vision

“There’s this timeless desire in students who come here wanting to read and write and think for themselves, and we aim to provide a space where such things are possible,” Vine said. “Seeing young adults thinking for themselves most likely leads to the weird narrative out there that the liberal arts, or college in general, is about ‘brainwashing’ students. I feel like most of what I do is say, ‘here. Read this.’ It’s about widening the vision beyond ‘you go to college, you get a job, you work.’”

“I think what students really want doesn’t change much: they want possibility,” Vine continued. “They want opportunity. They want social mobility, and not just the kind tied to socioeconomic mobility; this is about learning to make a life, not just a living.”

The concept of learning to make a life, not just a living, is one Vine credits to former faculty member Pat Hagan, professor of English, who, he remembers, said to him, “You’re here to make a life.” That life, for Vine, is steeped in words and meaning: “I’m a poet. That’s what I do. Coming here gave me the confidence to admit that. Studying creative writing with poet Nancy Fitzgerald was just what I needed at the time. And it was here that I encountered the work of Mary Ruefle, who once wrote: ‘I generate poems.’ And that’s it! That’s how I feel about it, and the rest I don’t really think about, because I want the particulars. I want the image. I want the metaphor. I want the sound. I want the language. I feel I can do something with that. It’s been single-hearted: ‘I want to write poems.’ And that’s been my life for 25 years now, for better or for worse, I guess.’”

Dedication to his craft

Vine’s dedication to his craft has been noted and celebrated by regional and national awards and publications. His first chapbook, “Distant Engines,” won a 2006 Weldon Kees Award, and his first full-length collection, “To Keep Him Hidden,” received the 2018 Northeastern Minnesota Book Award. He’s received multiple grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and his poems have appeared in some of the best magazines in the country: The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and on National Public Radio’s The Writer’s Almanac.

His latest book, “The Cave,” published by Texas Review Press in October of 2025, secured an honorable mention for the prestigious 2024 McKnight Fellowship before it was named one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2025” by The California Review of Books. “There are so few best-of lists at the end of the year. To make even one of them, considering that more than ten thousand books of poems are published each year, is a welcome surprise,” Vine shared.

The collection of poems in “The Cave” was not a solitary pursuit, but a work crafted and curated over years within a supportive community of colleagues and peers. Vine appreciates how the collaborative environment at the College and beyond — including a semester-long sabbatical that coincided with a 2023 Creative Support for Individuals Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board — helped shape the experience and the completed work. Even more, Dr. Drew Mannetter, a former professor of Philosophy at St. Scholastica, added a meaningful contribution to the book with his new translation of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

The meaning of it all

In many ways, Vine has made a full-circle journey at St. Scholastica — from a student discovering his voice to a professor publishing a major collection supported by the very institution that first taught him how to make a life out of words — and yet, as the line from his poem, “Sea Glass,” suggests in the epigraph, his own work reflects the continuous opportunity to not only find, but make, meaning in our lives.

Vine reminisced: “I studied with a poet in Boston, a fantastic poet, Bill Knott. Say we were reading my poem, and somebody asked, ‘Well, what did you mean?’ Bill would say, ‘He doesn’t know what he meant. He just wrote the poem.’ So what is the meaning? Where is the meaning? It’s somewhere in between intent and interpretation, and it’s always in flux. The best poems, you can’t say what they mean. They’re mysterious, right? You just continue to live with them. You keep coming back to them, because they’re almost like living things. It doesn’t ‘mean something; it just is. So we don’t tell students how to think. We do our best to expose them to the history of thinking and say, now it’s your turn. Work hard. Have fun. Let’s see what we can do together. Let’s see what you can do on your own.”