Ashley Thompson

Ashley Thompson (she/her) graduated in June with her MFA in creative writing with an emphasis in poetry. She taught English composition for two years at Western and is the recipient of the English Department’s Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award. Thompson has a background in writing center tutoring—a job that first sparked her love for teaching English.

Thompson started teaching English at Western during the pandemic when all learning was remote. It was a difficult time for a lot of educators, and many understandably elected to teach asynchronous classes online. From the beginning, Thompson held synchronous meetings twice a week with her online classes even though “sometimes it was nothing more than a sea of black boxes starting back at me,” she says. Thompson was glad to be back in the classroom this year.

Thompson says a central pillar of her teaching philosophy entails entering every new classroom knowing that the students are really smart, capable, interesting people who already have many skills they need to be good writers—an idea she brought to her teaching at WWU from her writing center days as an undergraduate. Thompson says writing can feel scary because often in public school situations, grammar and other technical components are graded harshly, which is not an equitable situation for non-native speakers of English and students with learning disabilities. Thompson says, “I feel very lucky to work and teach in this program as well because our English 101 curriculum is really based in equity.”

Even though Thompson says some of her MA colleagues have a stronger background in rhetoric, she says her background and emphasis on creative writing has been an asset in the classroom space. “I like the idea that even if the assignments I’m teaching are focused more on rhetoric than creative writing, the students and I come together to play with language and create interesting meaning.”

Western has roughly 300 graduate teaching assistants, research assistants, graduate student assistants, and graduate student mentors at any given time across campus, who teach classes, lead labs, tutor in the Writing Studio, and mentor undergraduate students in other capacities. 

Of course, Thompson was here as a graduate student as well. Her MFA thesis is a collection of poems on labor. She’s worked a lot of minimum wage, customer service jobs, which she says helped get her through two degrees. Thompson says, “I’m really drawn to the humanness of those part-time, minimum wage jobs. I’m interested in the repetitiveness of them, and if you’re in customer service, your whole day is about having small interactions with people. Interesting things happen in that space.” Her interest in employment led her to a lot of other places as well. She says it was a good gateway into writing about the body. She adds, “Writing about the body led me to writing about family because, obviously, labor is another word we use for giving birth—there’s a connection there. Relationships are hard work, etc. It started with a very concrete idea of employment in certain settings. Then it bloomed into a study of life as a labor. And just how much work it is but that it’s also rewarding to be alive, to be human, to notice small things and enjoy it all.”

Thompson’s committee was chaired by Kelly Magee, and her second reader was Stefania Heim. Thompson is from Boise, Idaho. She has a gray tabby cat named Wednesday, and she studied creative writing as an undergrad at Utah State University in Logan. Now that she’s graduated, she plans to move back home to Boise and look for full-time work in writing.

Learn more about WWU's multigenre MFA program in creative writing.