. The graduate Creative Writing Program at George Mason University, one of the oldest MFA programs in the country, has earned a national reputation. Here you will learn from a diverse, dedicated faculty whose writing has been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Whiting Foundation, the Yale Series of Younger Poets, and others, a faculty who publish books and essays in leading venues across the country and the world—sixteen books in the last five years. Our are likewise productive, publishing notable and prizewinning books every year. Some of the most important things that happen in an MFA program happen outside the classroom.
At Mason, share a commitment to teaching, mentoring, and creating an environment that is intellectually, imaginatively and socially rich. You will become part of an extensive and thriving literary community that boasts a student-organized program of readings and potluck dinners with faculty, plus three arts-and-letters journals, a literary small press, and our annual Fall for the Book literary festival and New Leaves Writers Conference. Our Visiting Writers program brings to campus some of the best authors writing in the English language (and outside of it) to work with our students in small workshops. In addition, our students take advantage of Mason’s proximity to Washington, D.C., with its cultural institutions and lively artistic scene. As writers, our faculty believe that books are the best teachers and that a community of writers provides critical support to a writing career. We are proud to have nurtured writers whose styles vary widely and whose achievements attest to the strengths of our program-and to that of the American literary landscape. We believe that our success depends on our ability to help each writer make the most of his or her individual talent. Application Deadlines Fall Deadline: January 10.
Also see: A guide to graduate programs in creative writing. (July 16, 2007) Edward J.
Delaney discusses the country's best graduate writing programs and how to compare them. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop can be found in a quaint wooden house at the north end of the University of Iowa campus. The Workshop’s brand-new and clean-lined Glenn Schaeffer Library adjoins the house in the rear, as a fashionable offspring might flank a more elegantly dressed parent.
In the library’s Frank Conroy Reading Room, which overlooks the gray waters of the Iowa River, are tall, glassed bookcases containing some 3,000 volumes published by graduates of the Workshop since it began, in 1936. Upstairs, in an unused office, are 16 large boxes of alumni books for which no shelf space is yet available. In a wire basket, on the desk of program associate Connie Brothers, are dozens of clipped reviews of recent books. “And those are only the ones I happen to have seen,” Brothers says.
The Writers’ Workshop is the best-known, most-established writing program in the country, and the books in that pantheon are both humbling and inspiring to the students there. “Most of us are still walking around amazed we got in,” says Drew Keenan, a 34-year-old former software engineer from San Francisco who gave that life up to spend the two years in Iowa’s M.F.A.
The students at Iowa, like the thousands of others enrolled in the growing number of graduate writing programs nationally, are infected with the fever of the emerging artist, and the desire to succeed against the sobering odds of the publishing landscape. Trying to assess graduate writing programs is like rating the top-10 party schools: You can count how many bottles go in, and how many empties go out, but you can’t prove the party was fun. Determining which writing programs are best is an alchemy of hearsay, tenuous connectors, certain measurable facts, and one’s own predilections about the art of writing. The number of graduate creative-writing programs has risen from about 50 three decades ago to perhaps 300 now.
All have the presumed goal of training soon-to-be-published writers. But which ones promote the best new work, and how?
Each year, some 20,000 people apply for admission to these programs. Those accepted will, at least in theory, have access to skilled teachers, be surrounded by other talented rising writers, be funded in a way that lessens their financial constraint, and earn an entree into the world of books and writers. For all those reasons, the question of which programs are “best” has value beyond just “writer talk,” and the answers—there are many—aren’t always easy to determine.
The Alumni One prominent consideration in rating these programs is, of course, reputation itself. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop may be the best example of a program possessing an aura that puts it high on everyone’s list: A common refrain is “Everyone applies to Iowa because it’s Iowa.” The Iowa franchise, which had a three-decade head start on just about everyone else, has become bigger than any of its measurable components.
A mythology is a difficult thing to parse. But one source of reputation is the work and the renown of a program’s graduates. Among those thousands of would-be writers who apply, many are driven by the implied example of other notable writers who have emerged from one or another program.
Success, for a writer, is rarely immediate. And by the time success truly comes to pass, judging a writing program by that success can be like observing a star burning brightly in the sky after it imploded an eon ago. Richard Ford, an early product of the University of California at Irvine writing program, eventually won a Pulitzer for his novel Independence Day. But Ford didn’t really break through as a writer until he published The Sportswriter in 1986, some 16 years after getting his M.F.A. This measure often seems more meaningful when a newly minted writer has a quick success that seems directly related to having been in a particular program. Irvine saw its reputation spike after one student, Michael Chabon, got a $155,000 advance for his master’s-thesis novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which went on to become a best seller. (Chabon won the 2001 Pulitzer for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.) Alice Sebold’s memoir about being raped, Lucky, began as a 10-page writing assignment in an Irvine class.
It was published in 1999, a year after she graduated; she followed it with her best-selling novel, The Lovely Bones. Irvine, already a top program, could not have been hotter. “Chabon was the first of a series of people from our program who got a lot of attention, and because of that, we were getting huge numbers of applications,” says James McMichael, a poet and longtime UC-Irvine faculty member. Across the continent, Boston University’s program director, Leslie Epstein, speaks of a particular group that has cemented BU’s reputation. It includes Ha Jin, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Peter Ho Davies, all of whom were quickly and resoundingly acclaimed after graduation.
And at Michigan, 2004 M.F.A. Grad Elizabeth Kostova earned a $2 million advance for her novel, The Historian, a year after she finished the program. One shorter-term measure might be the annual Best New American Voices anthology, which publishes student work from graduate writing programs as well as from a host of non-degree-granting conferences and fellowships. Each program nominates two stories a year, and each entry is read blind by the final editor. In the series, published by Harcourt, the submissions of Iowa students have been selected more times than those from any other degree program, though both Virginia and Florida State have consistently had strong showings. (Oddly, Columbia, always considered a top program, has placed none.) A seemingly accelerating trend is that of students graduating from two or more programs. The winner of the 2006 Booker Prize, Kiran Desai, had attended both the program at Hollins University (then a master of arts, now converted to a two-year M.F.A.) and the M.F.A.
Program at Columbia; her win was duly celebrated by proud announcements from both programs. “Program hoppers,” who might study briefly at two or more programs, or even get multiple M.F.A.s, also seem increasingly common. From Atlantic Unbound: (June 15, 2006 ) Gary Shteyngart, author of the novel Absurdistan, discusses American rappers, Azerbaijani kidnappers, and what makes satire serious fiction A single faculty-member writer who’s having a notable success often seems to trump a legion of others quietly publishing work that is respected but not widely celebrated. Columbia University’s Web site features its Nobel Prize–winning faculty member Orhan Pamuk, who began teaching last fall; Gary Shteyngart also recently joined the faculty. Boston University has the estimable Ha Jin, along with Robert Pinsky and Derek Walcott in poetry.
Syracuse University’s fine M.F.A. Program, once synonymous with Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff (who is now at Stanford), seems known these days for the short-story writer George Saunders and the poet and nonfiction writer Mary Karr. New York University has the novelist E. Doctorow and the poets Philip Levine and Sharon Olds. In addition to helping students learn the craft of writing, good teachers can also be good advocates, connecting top students to agents and publishers.
“Programs like Michigan, Iowa, Columbia, and Stanford put out great writers who publish strong stories and novels,” says New York agent Gail Hochman of Brandt & Hochman, “but perhaps more important than which program the student attended is which writers that student studied with. And we look favorably on anyone who has an M.F.A., simply because it shows they’re serious about their writing.” At some programs, however, famous writers seem guilty of propagating the notion that writing can’t be taught at all. “Good faculty members don’t treat the job as if it’s a prize for writing a great book,” says Ben Marcus, the chair of the Columbia University M.F.A.
“You’ll find a lot of people who run programs desperately trying to eliminate the attitude that nothing is really possible in these classes.”. From Atlantic Unbound: (November 17, 2004) Marilynne Robinson talks about her long-awaited second novel and the holiness of the everyday. At Iowa, some of the faculty members work in large offices where their classes and workshops also meet, like one-room schoolhouses.
Marilynne Robinson, the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, says that the Iowa teachers, in their duty to the students, “are putting aside things we could otherwise be doing, such as our own work.” But elsewhere, employing writers with large reputations but little enthusiasm for teaching leads to exactly the type of disconnected instructor many former students rue. “Spending your program’s money to buy a really famous person who’s just not much of a teacher isn’t a good idea,” says Eileen Pollack, an Iowa grad who directs the graduate program at Michigan. Many of the top writers at the top programs teach infrequently (one class in a year or year and a half seems typical), because their published works are believed to do more than their teaching for the program’s image.
This is because writing programs must contend with the authorial “star system.” While the stars in most other disciplines are known chiefly to specialists, many of the big names in writing are cultural celebrities; having written The Book They Made Into That Movie, a famous author might even have currency with high-school seniors or alumni donors. In the sense that a workshop is a meeting of working artists, however, “the work of a faculty member is extraordinarily important,” Marcus says. “It shows students their professor is laboring away, just as they are.”. “Sometimes we’re accused of not being willing to expand,” Irvine’s McMichael says. “We say we would, if we felt the quality of the pool argued for it. Sometimes we have some trouble identifying more than four people we really want.” With those exacting standards come certain pressures, “but we’ve had some years where every member of the class ends up with a book contract,” McMichael says.
In writing, more than in almost any other academic discipline, “the content walks through your door,” says the novelist Christopher Tilghman, who teaches at Virginia. There and at Irvine and Michigan and Texas, to name a few, the numbers of applicants are staggering—often 500 or more. The eventual notoriety or prominence of one’s program can be made or broken in that first step. At Virginia, the fiction faculty meets in Tilghman’s living room to hash out the choices. Almost every program director says virtually the same thing about the process: GREs, college grades, and what institution one attended as an undergrad are nearly meaningless, used at best as tie-breakers.
Of main importance is the short writing sample each student submits for consideration. Almost exclusively from that sample of 10 to 50 pages or so, the selectors must try to divine talent, ambition, teachability, and collegiality—the four critical elements of the ideal apprentice writer’s makeup.
Ha Jin says, “Looking at the writing samples allows you to get to a list of 30 to 40 out of the 300. From there, each person in some ways deserves to be accepted. That’s where other factors enter the discussion.” Here may be where the personality of a program is truly shaped, even if not consciously. For example, he says, “what if you have someone applying who has already published four books? Is that person really willing to consider re‑ examining his writing?” Others worry that applicants who have already published extensively are looking for the degree only as a teaching credential. Funding When the historical novelist James Michener endowed the University of Texas with $20 million to support a writing program, the university “started to get good writers,” says James Magnuson, director of the James A.
Michener Center, probably the top program in the country in funding creative-writing graduate students. The Michener Center gives its writers free tuition, a $20,000 annual stipend for three years with no teaching responsibility, and a $6,000 “professional development fund” for travel and research.
Texas has the distinction of being a university with two graduate programs in creative writing, which seems something like being a college with two basketball teams. The Texas English department offers a two-year M.A. In creative writing in poetry or fiction, and the Michener Center is a three-year M.F.A. Program that requires its students to work in two of the four disciplines offered—playwriting, screenwriting, poetry, and fiction. While paying customers might be more attracted to a program that confers a degree in fewer years, the Michener Center “offers the gift of time,” Magnuson says. “We sometimes overvalue what we do as teachers, when it’s about just letting people write.” In 2005, University of Michigan alumna Helen Zell donated $5 million to the university’s graduate program in creative writing, to be spent quickly to build the program’s reputation.
While Michigan had already been considered one of the country’s top 10, the donation allowed the program to claim to be, as director Eileen Pollack puts it, “one of the top two programs in the country.” Michigan M.F.A. Students have their tuition waived for both years. In the first year, each receives a $20,000 stipend; in the second year, each student teaches and receives a slightly smaller amount. Michigan increased its stipend in February from $18,000, in part to match that given by Texas, raising the stakes for the University of Virginia, which had already increased its award to keep up with Michigan’s former rate. “This has changed everything,” says Virginia’s Tilghman. Virginia was concerned enough to reduce the six or seven available slots in its program to five or six in order to boost its financial award (now about $15,000 for first-year students, Tilghman says).
His colleague Ann Beattie is more direct: “It doesn’t compute to do all this work, only to lose people to other programs. We’re not talking about huge amounts.” Cornell takes only four poets and four fiction writers a year, funding them nearly as well as Texas; its faculty-to-student ratio is a touch more than 1:1. Across the country, Irvine’s McMichael says that after these award increases, “we lost two top candidates to Texas, and we had really not been losing anybody we’d accepted before that.” Another program that may be on the rise is the one at the University of Washington; last October, it was promised a $15 million donation in the will of philanthropist Grace Pollock. At 87, Pollock is alive and well, “but we have time to plan how we’ll use the money,” says director Maya Sonenberg. The program’s faculty boasts three MacArthur “genius grant” recipients, including novelist Charles Johnson.
When programs are assessed on the basis of the financial support they offer, Columbia fares relatively poorly. Its Web site lays out the applicant’s cost bluntly: The estimated total per year, including materials and living expenses, is $50,000.
Criticism of Columbia has been harsh from those who can’t comprehend how a university with a $6 billion endowment could not find a way to fund a few poets and fiction writers. But the history of the School of the Arts, which houses the writing program along with film, theater, and visual arts, has often been one of marginalization. Dan Kleinman, acting dean of the School of the Arts, says that in its first 25 years or so, the school “was a bit of a backwater, created and left to its own devices.” Little more than a decade ago, Columbia’s creative-writing program rarely tenured faculty, had high turnover among its professors, and got little help with fund-raising. All through, students got little aid. Marcus says that up to now, “it’s our dismal fellowship situation that really hamstrings us.” Columbia, as a consequence, has lost out on a number of applicants. Roman Skaskiw, a 30-year-old Stanford grad and former Army captain who served as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne in both Iraq and Afghanistan, was accepted at Columbia, “but when they told me what it cost,” he said, “it made my decision very easy.” He’s at Iowa, which now funds all its students (although not equally) for both years. Marcus believes that with greater financial aid, Columbia’s would be “right up there among the most serious, attractive programs in the country.” And good news came to the program in June.
Columbia President Lee Bollinger pledged to provide the School of the Arts an additional $1 million annually in financial aid for graduate students, a chunk of which will go toward the M.F.A. While there are no firm plans yet for disbursing the money, “I suspect it will be used to match other institutions to get the students we most want,” said Kleinman. “I also hope it will stimulate fund-raising, as it’s another sign of the support the M.F.A. program has from administration.” Students entering during the 2008–2009 academic year will be eligible for the increased assistance. The financial-aid escalation at the top programs has been like an arms race among superpowers.
Brian Evenson, director of Brown University’s Literary Arts M.F.A. Program, echoes a growing attitude among the top programs: “With the struggle it already is to start one’s career as a writer, we feel it’s unethical of us to give the students a large debt to carry around with them. We admit only people to whom we can give financial support, which is why our program is so small.” “One worries—especially if people are paying tens of thousands of dollars for a worthless degree,” says the novelist Chang-rae Lee, currently the director of the creative-writing program at Princeton. His program doesn’t offer a degree but gives its Hodder Fellows the opportunity to write with financial support (like Stanford’s Stegner Fellows and the fellows of the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing, which now is associated with Wisconsin’s newer M.F.A. Lee, a former director of Hunter College’s M.F.A. Program, says, “I did tell my students at Hunter that only if you publish a book or two does the degree become worth anything at all.” He notes that public universities such as Hunter and Brooklyn College can’t give much money, but don’t charge very much, either. Workshops are always useful, sometimes useful, or never useful, depending on whom one is asking.
“The ethos of the workshop has become much more polite,” according to the poet T. Hummer, who directs the three-year M.F.A. Program at Arizona State University’s Piper Center—but still, “a good workshop leader can probe a basic assumption until it begins to collapse.” At Boston University, legions of students have carried on a love-hate relationship with the program’s plainspoken director, Leslie Epstein.
“BU was a pretty competitive environment—a real and helpful spur to me,” says Peter Ho Davies, now teaching at Michigan, “though I’m not sure it was an ideal environment for all.” Christopher Castellani has published two novels with Algonquin since finishing BU’s program. He says Epstein “used to read my work aloud in funny voices.” While Castellani says such treatment “can have short-term benefits for people who respond to it,” he confesses to feeling a perverse satisfaction when Epstein’s most recent book got banged around by one reviewer. Ha Jin, whom Epstein calls “the only true genius I’ve ever known,” has helped leaven the BU program. Epstein is famously demanding, in a landscape that’s often blandly accepting. “Almost no one here gets an A,” says Epstein, who has high and clearly defined expectations for the program: “I don’t like super-literary fiction.
I still want to be moved.” Over the years, Epstein has condensed much of his teaching philosophy into what he calls his “tip sheet”—eight pages, double-spaced, beginning with a disquisition on punctuation, with special distaste for the ellipsis: “those three dreamy dots.” The tip sheet is a compilation of the specific—“Clowns, midgets, mimes and people wearing masks should be abjured,” he writes. “Nor am I a fan of wind chimes.” He moves on to larger perceptions about the process: “One must have in mind between sixty-eight and seventy-three percent of the ending. Any more than that percentage and the writer will be in a strait-jacket Any less and the project will meander and find itself in danger of sinking into the swamp of indecision.”. Though one student has complained of being “paralyzed” by the demands of the tip sheet, Epstein says he wants to “give students something to react to.” He might have a point. In speaking to many creative-writing graduates, I frequently found a kind of buyer’s remorse: They’d come to bemoan the lack of specific criticism or guidance.
But this lack appears to have come about by design. In most cases, the professors and program directors characterize their programs as places where writers can find some sanctuary from judgment. Cunningham says that at Brooklyn, “unless you simply don’t give a shit, you’ll get your A.”. From Atlantic Unbound: (June 14, 2004) Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler talks about tapping into different points of view and writing 'from the place where you dream.' But the Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler, who teaches at Florida State, differs. He and his colleague Mark Winegardner, the director of the program, have big, energetic personalities and have no problem saying that good teaching leads to good writing.
“You can’t teach every piano player to be Thelonious Monk,” Winegardner says, “but no piano teacher seems tortured by the question of whether piano can be taught.” Butler is devoted to something he loosely calls “method writing.” He believes that too many writers intellectualize their writing but never tap the deep emotions that create great art, and that the practice has led to an abundance of polished, bloodless prose. “Creative-writing students, who are typically trained almost exclusively in craft and technique, come to me knowing the second through the tenth things about being an artist,” Butler says. “But they don’t know the first thing about it.” In his workshop, students first struggle to find what Butler says is a primary element of a story: the yearning of the character. “Many don’t get it by the end of the workshop. Some will get it later. But some will never get it,” he says.
“Not everyone is destined to be an artist.”. “Every program devotes 50 percent of its time to the workshop,” Tilghman says, “but the question may be what you’re doing with the other 50 percent.” Brooklyn, rather than requiring its students to take English classes, conducts its own “craft classes,” including one called “Time Management,” a semester- long look at how writers attend to the passage of time in their works. Master classes are another way of connecting young writers with more-accomplished ones. For a day or a week, students can attend mini-classes or lectures given by a prominent writer.
“Not every writer is a great workshop leader, or likes the informality typical of a workshop,” Tilghman says. “I suspect if Nabokov were alive, you wouldn’t find him and the students sitting around a table with someone saying, ‘Hey, Vlad, what do you think?’ He’d be doing a master class, and lecturing about writing.” Surrounding events also have much to do with a program’s value. When I was at Iowa, guest speakers at the Workshop in a week’s time included the novelist Charles Baxter, who teaches in the M.F.A. Program at the University of Minnesota, Kiran Desai, and the poet Richard Kenney. Many lesser programs would build an entire semester around such events. Some programs have taken more-definable approaches in their efforts to distinguish themselves.
The University of Oregon’s program, which the poet Garrett Hongo revived by using what a former director called a “dojo” model, requires stringent graduate exams. In Pittsburgh, Chatham University offers an M.F.A. That focuses on nature, the environment, and travel. Indiana University’s prestigious three-year M.F.A.
Program is one of the few to offer a course in teaching creative writing. Winegardner says Florida State’s program will now partner with the university’s film school.
The University of Arkansas has a highly regarded program in literary translation to go along with its four-year M.F.A. The University of Nevada at Las Vegas emphasizes global literature, and it funds fellowships from a donation by Glenn Schaeffer, the 1977 Iowa M.F.A. Grad turned casino mogul and literary benefactor (for whom the Iowa Writers’ Workshop library is named). And one of the most exciting programs has yet to commence: The Rutgers-Newark Real Lives, Real Stories M.F.A. Program begins this fall and will be led by the novelist Jayne Anne Phillips.
The 36 writers entering the program range in age from 24 to 60; one-third are students of color, many are raising families, and some have ongoing careers in other fields. Some programs, such as Mississippi’s and Brooklyn’s, seem to form around a dynamic teacher—Barry Hannah and Cunningham, respectively. The Hopkins program, once known for being led by the encyclopedic John Barth, is still identifiable as a place hospitable to metafiction and linguistic innovation (although the faculty also includes National Book Award winner Alice McDermott, who writes in a realist vein). Surrounded as it is by doctors and scientists who often don’t see the point of made-up stories, the Hopkins program has something of a bunker mentality and a feeling that it must constantly prove its seriousness.
It prizes both rigor and inventiveness of language, says program director Jean McGarry. “If workshops are only about self-expression, then you have literary bums floating in and out,” she says. Brown University’s Literary Arts Program may be the most unusual of all, a program that is habitually innovative. At 75, Robert Coover teaches “Cavewriting” in the Literary Hypermedia sequence. “Brown has the reputation of trying to reinvent the alphabet,” says Columbia’s Marcus, a graduate of Brown’s program. “I’d like to think a good program works against consensus.”.
Ph.D.s and Low-Residency M.F.A.s The emergence of Ph.D. Programs in creative writing seems at times confounding.
Something different, or more of the same? With more universities demanding doctorates for all tenure-track teaching positions, says Florida State’s Butler, “the Ph.D. Is the new M.F.A., and the M.F.A.
Is the new M.A.” With only about 100 tenure-track faculty jobs in creative writing becoming available each year, and more than 2,000 graduate students emerging with new degrees in creative writing, the Ph.D. In creative writing may become more common. Programs vary, but they all attempt to subject students to the same level of rigor as other Ph.D. The one at the University of Southern California, like many others, has its students take the same comprehensive exams as other doctoral students in English. Max payne 3 crack. Another fast-growing segment of the market is the “low-residency” M.F.A. First developed at Goddard College in Vermont, the low-residency model appeals to people with careers.
Students typically attend intensive 7-to-10-day residency periods in winter and summer, which emphasize workshops and offer direct contact with faculty members. With such a schedule, programs such as Bennington’s and Warren Wilson’s can attract star faculty members who are based elsewhere. Bennington’s faculty includes Amy Hempel, who also teaches in the M.F.A. Program at Sarah Lawrence; Jill McCorkle, now at North Carolina State; and Sven Birkerts, who teaches at Harvard. Warren Wilson’s complement includes the novelist Robert Boswell, who teaches at New Mexico State; and the poet Tony Hoagland, at the University of Houston. The low-residency programs distinguish themselves by working with generally older students.
Many emphasize close, directed readings of as many as 30 books per semester. At a recent Goddard commencement, one graduating fiction writer referred to the event as “the moment we’ve all been annotating for.” As the low-residencies have multiplied from a core of four programs two decades ago to nearly 30 now, some have found innovative ways to build identity. A couple of the newest are at the University of Alaska at Anchorage, which is converting its three-decade-old residential M.F.A. Program to a low- residency model, and at Hamline University, which is adding a low-residency M.F.A.
Focused on writing for children and young adults to its residential M.F.A. Seton Hill University, in Pennsylvania, offers an M.A. In popular fiction, focusing on mystery, romance, sci-fi, and horror; the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast M.F.A. Includes in its program young-adult and popular fiction and offers a residency in Ireland. Lesley University’s program includes a concentration in “writing for young people.” Antioch University at Los Angeles focuses on “literature and the pursuit of social justice.”.
Not so long ago, graduate programs in creative writing were considered oddities; now it seems odd for an institution not to have such a program. And at least one consequence is that more good work is now in circulation than in the past. Canin says that when he began teaching at Iowa, “about half the stories I got were quite bad. Now hardly any are.” Highly regarded programs such as those at the universities of Montana, Alabama, and Indiana are seeing droves of graduates publish soon after finishing their M.F.A. Or even while working on it.
David Fenza, director of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, says he sees a landscape changing in the way that television did when it shifted from three networks to more and smaller channels. “I think a lot of good work will be out there, much of it published by smaller presses.” The poet Chase Twichell, an Iowa grad who runs the nonprofit Ausable Press, says she gets about 600 submissions a year, “and the majority read like M.F.A. Theses.” But even in that formalization of the art through degrees and curriculum, the factors that make for a good program are an alchemy of the measurable and unmeasurable. And many still believe that the real writers, rather like the truth, will out, regardless of the pedigree of their program. “Does any program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them?” asks Chang-rae Lee. “And, after identifying them, not ruining them?”.
The financial and political power of the National Rifle Association leaves many politicians terrified of crossing it. And because of its ideological and propaganda power, a segment of Americans now equates any proposed limit on gun use or ownership as a catastrophic step toward the extinction of individual liberties and the dawn of a confiscatory, totalitarian state. Americans recognize that public-safety controls on use of a car—licensing laws, speed limits, insurance requirements, DUI penalties—don’t threaten the “right to drive.” They recognize that restrictions on some prescription drugs don’t threaten their right to buy aspirin, nor limits on what they can carry onto a plane threaten their right to travel or fly. But the NRA and its allies have succeeded in making gun control an absolute issue. If you believe in the Second Amendment, then whatever the potential control—on gun-show sales, on bulk purchases of ammunition, on waiting times for background checks—it must be fought as a step not so much onto a slippery slope as over a cliff and into the abyss.
The city of Cape Town was plonked by its founders onto a peninsula where the Indian and Atlantic oceans merge, often violently, beneath the imposing banks of Table Mountain. To its north lie the fertile fruit and wine farms that weigh down the city’s restaurant tables with unimaginable bounty. Every day when the clock strikes noon, a cannon blast echoes from Signal Hill, a reminder of the city’s colonial heritage. It was established first as a vegetable garden by the Dutch East India Company in 1652, then repurposed as a stronghold for the British until the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910; later it served as the apartheid regime’s parliamentary stronghold. In 2014, The New York Times the best place in the world to visit. Britain’s Daily Telegraph. H ere,” Nancy Pelosi likes to say, “the currency of the realm is the vote.” With a majority of the votes in Congress, you have power.
Without them, you have nothing. Pelosi, the House minority leader, knows it as well as anyone in Washington.
She had the votes to make history in 2007 when she became speaker of the House, not only becoming the first woman to hold that title but in the process, rising higher in U.S. Electoral politics—and closer in the line of presidential succession—than any woman before or since.
Four years later, the votes were gone, washed away in a Republican wave that relegated Democrats back to the minority. Now, with Democrats poised to make a run at recapturing the House majority this fall, Pelosi has a chance to set another mark: the first person to reclaim the speaker’s gavel in more than 60 years and the first ever to do so after so long an interval. Shortly before the election of 1860, a man a plantation near Marlin, Texas, some 20 miles southeast of Waco. Though nobody knew who he was, the plantation owner took him in as a guest. The stranger paid close attention to how the enslaved people working on the plantation were treated—how they subsisted on a weekly ration of “four pounds of meat and a peck of meal,” how they were whipped and sometimes sold, resulting in the tearing apart of families. Eventually, the stranger said goodbye and went on his way, but a little while later he wrote a letter to the plantation owner, informing him he would soon have to free his slaves—“that everybody was going to have to, that the North was going to see to it.” The stranger told the owner to go into the room where he’d slept, and see where he’d carved his name into the headrest. And when the slaveholder went and looked, he saw the name: “A.
On Monday, The Atlantic contributing editor Jeffrey Rosen spoke at length with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the National Constitution Center, where Rosen is president and CEO. In a wide-ranging conversation before a live audience, Ginsburg offered a supportive critique of the #MeToo movement, confessed her affection for Millennials, discussed the Supreme Court cases she’d like to see overturned, and told some personal stories about the progress women’s rights have made—while reminding the audience of just how recently gender discrimination in American law seemed not only normal but entrenched. What follows is a condensed and edited version of their conversation. —Adam Serwer Jeffrey Rosen: What are your thoughts on the #MeToo movement and will it prove lasting progress for women’s equality?
Pornography is officially a “public-health crisis” in Utah, according to 2016 legislation. The Republican representative Todd Weiler, who championed the bill and at the time that he sees a lot of porn in his Twitter feed, has been working to make it illegal for internet service providers to provide internet that contains porn. When I covered this story it felt like a fringe movement, born of conflicting ideas about the role of government in public health. Banning porn means expanding government oversight in a way that infringes on personal liberties and squelches an enormous industry that creates wealth and jobs. These tenets seem contrary to many conservatives’ stated objectives and free-market approach, yet it was conservatives beating the drum. This article is from the archive of our partner. Let's make no bones about it: the headlining sport in the Winter Olympics is figure skating.
No other sport comes close to the drama, the athletes, the subplots, and politics that figure skating has. For skaters, all those hours, jumps and training are boiled down to around six or seven minutes. That's what makes the Olympics' skating competition so wonderful and so heartbreaking: skaters don't necessarily have to be the best, they just have to be the best for seven minutes (see: Lipinski, Tara). That's why we watch. For most of us though, the benchmark of a good skate is not falling (part of the reason people were surprised that Mirai Nagasu didn't make the Olympic team despite skating a clean program).
To the untrained eye, a skater just transforms into a spinning blur for a few nanoseconds, and then lands (or doesn't) while we hold our breath. After a deadly shooting, the debate always, it seems, breaks down like this: One side argues for gun control, and the other argues there is no research proving those measures work. There is, in fact, —especially compared to other causes of death in the United States. The modern origins of the impasse can be traced to 1996, when Congress passed an amendment to a spending bill that forbade the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from using money to “advocate or promote gun control.” The National Rifle Association had pushed for the amendment, after public-health researchers produced a spate of studies suggesting that, for example, having a gun in the house increased risk of homicide and suicide. It deemed the research politically motivated.
Gun-rights advocates zeroed in on statements like that of Mark Rosenberg, then the director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. In response to the early ’90s crime wave, Rosenberg had, “We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes. It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol—cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly—and banned.”.
Fifty-eight people are dead from the worst mass shooting in recent U.S. As happened after Omar Mateen killed 49 people at a nightclub with a gun, or after Dylann Roof killed nine African Americans with a gun, or after Adam Lanza killed 26 children and teachers with a gun, or after James Holmes killed 12 moviegoers with a gun, the call for action from some policy makers has centered on one commonality between these events: All of the killers had brains. “Mental-health reform is the critical ingredient to making sure that we can try and prevent some of these things that have happened in the past,” House Speaker Paul Ryan in response to reporter questions about mass shooters. (President Obama also proposed better mental-health care, when recalling the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.).
It seemed like an easy question. The query came from I spotted on my news feed last week, from user @cgpgrey. “Please help resolve a marital dispute,” @cgpgrey wrote.
“You would describe the color of a tennis ball as:” green, yellow, or other. Yellow, obviously, I thought, and voted. When the results appeared, my jaw dropped with cartoonish effect. Of nearly 30,000 participants, 52 percent said a tennis ball is green, 42 percent said it’s yellow, and 6 percent went with “other.” I was stunned. I’d gone from being so sure of myself to second-guessing my sanity in a matter of seconds. More than that, I could never have imagined the question of the color of a tennis ball—surely something we could all agree on, even in these times—would be so divisive.
We have created a 2018 ranking of the best colleges in California that offer Creative Writing degrees to help you find a school that fits your needs. Each school's ranking is based on the compilation of our data from reliable government sources, student surveys, college graduate interviews, and editorial review. In addition, you can view our entire list of all 35 Creative Writing schools located within California. We also provide reviews, facts, and questions and answers for schools on our site and offer you access to get valuable information from colleges and universities today.
The MFA in creative writing is a three-year residency program offering tracks in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Students in the program are members of a literary community that includes a student-organized program of readings, potluck dinners with faculty, three journals, a student-run publisher—Stillhouse Press—and the annual Fall for the Book literary festival. Resident faculty members include recipients of prestigious writing awards such as the Guggenheim Foundation, the Yale Series of Younger Poets, the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. The is the authoritative source for information on program requirements and courses. The is the authoritative source for information on classes scheduled for this semester. See the for the most up-to-date information and see to register for classes. Requirements may be different for earlier catalog years.
Degree Requirements Total credits: 48 Students should be aware of the specific policies associated with this program, located on the tab. Core Courses Literature Course List Code Title Credits Literature Select two to four courses in consultation with an advisor 1 6-12 Craft Seminars Six to twelve credits of 6-12. Advanced Workshop in Poetry Writing Select at least one course in another genre (fiction or nonfiction) 1 3 Total Credits 15 1 This requirement may be filled by a section of in another genre.
Electives Course List Code Title Credits Select up to 15 credits from electives in consultation with the writing program faculty 1 15 Total Credits 15 1 The number of electives will vary according to the number of literature courses and workshops that students take. Exam or Project Poetry Concentration Students in poetry must pass a written MFA exam based on the authors they have chosen. The authors are selected in collaboration with the writing faculty any time after completing 12 credits of course work and before completing 32 credits. The exam must be completed at least one semester before the student registers for the final 3 credits of thesis. Fiction and Nonfiction Concentration Students in fiction and nonfiction writing must pass an MFA exam or complete an MFA project. Students who elect to take the MFA exam select, after the completion of 18 credits and with the approval of their faculty advisors, a list of authors and an area of emphasis (for example, the European novel).
Students who elect to complete an MFA project (such as editing an anthology) must carry out the project under the direction of a faculty member and may register for to fulfill this requirement. The project must be completed at least one semester before the student registers for the final 3 credits of thesis. Course List Code Title Credits Directed Reading and Research 1-6 Total Credits 1-6 Thesis may not be used as thesis preparation.
Students who want to register for thesis credits in the summer need the permission of the thesis committee. Students should be aware of the university policies governing theses. They must follow the thesis enrollment policy and once enrolled in, maintain continuous enrollment. These policies are specified in. Course List Code Title Credits Thesis 6.
Creative Writing Graduate Programs might be a great opportunity to develop your writing through a balance of academic study and practical application. First, you could broaden your literary horizons with rigorous curriculum. Classes might cover subjects like English theory and scholastic criticism.
Second, graduate writing programs could develop your skills and knowledge through workshop courses. This part might provide you with valuable peer feedback to help improve your work.
The Basics of Creative Writing Graduate Programs Creative Writing graduate programs aim to improve the skills and knowledge students bring to their writing. Of course, writing isn’t limited to one category.
Graduate writing courses reflect this by supporting multiple genres in their programs. For instance, you could pursue some of the following areas in your postgraduate studies. Fiction. Young Adult Fiction.
Children’s Fiction. Creative Nonfiction. Poetry. Literary Translation While students may be focusing on different genres, they may take similar, if not identical, coursework. Your preferred genre mainly effects your personal writing projects and the feedback you receive.
Speak with your intended creative writing school for more information about possible concentrations. Creative Writing Masters Programs programs, often called MFA in Creative Writing programs, are a popular option that focuses on writing development and academic instruction. Students in these programs may encounter a holistic education that is equal parts workshops and in-classroom study. Some schools may also ask creative writing masters students to take part in a residency requirement. This may require students to live and write on campus for an assigned duration. Keeping in mind these core requirements, students could potentially earn a masters degree in creative writing in 1 to. Program lengths vary by school.
Antimalware program. Treba mu dokumentovan radni staz zbog ispunjavanja uslova za. Programerima koji nemaju iskustvo radni staz. Besplatan program za obracun radnog. Program za radni staz programs. Jeste li znali da su 84 zanimanja u Hrvatskoj u kategoriji izuzetno teških zvanja za koja je propisan beneficirani radni staž? Sva zanimanja s.
Unlike typical graduate admissions, creative writing masters programs might place equal weight on previous writing experience and undergraduate transcripts. Typically, students are asked to submit samples of their previous work. Samples could include things like completed novel chapters, poems, or stage plays. Check with your intended university for more information about their admissions guidelines and writing requirements. MFA Creative Writing Workshops A large portion of a creative writing masters program is devoted to writing new pieces for workshop classes. These are writing intensive courses where students may be required to submit new drafts of their current writing for peer feedback. These classes might be a great way to practically apply your writing know-how and also see what your peers are creating.
Mfa Creative Writing
Additionally, writing workshops could provide a welcoming and safe environment for students to give and receive critical feedback on their work. It’s important to note that creative writing workshops may combine students from different writing genres. These students could provide constructive feedback from their different creative perspective. For example, you might find that students writing creative nonfiction could offer insightful critique on your children’s book. Workshop requirements may differ by school. For more details, speak with your preferred mfa creative writing program about their workshopping process. MFA Writing Courses In addition to practicing writing, creative writing masters programs may help expand students’ understanding of the writing process with core academic courses.
For this purpose, many schools offer classes that deal with new perspectives or ways to interpret literature. These courses may challenge writer’s status quo and encourage them to try to experiment with new writing styles or methods.
In addition, creative writing masters programs may require students to take graduate English courses to round out their literary knowledge. Classes could touch on the following topics. Literary Adaption. Cross-genre Writing. Literary Criticism.
Regional Writing Traditions Courses offered may vary by institution. Check with prospective masters in writing programs for more details about their course guide. PhD Creative Writing Programs are writing intense programs concentrated on taking your work to the next level.
Unlike the MFA, PhD Creative Writing Programs may emphasize the workshop experience over other coursework. However, these programs similarly may require students to take part in an on-campus residency. A great example of this is the creative writing doctoral dissertation. Other doctoral programs typically have students present research for their dissertations. In comparison, creative writing dissertations usually require students to submit long-form works. This could include some of the following.
Manuscripts. Short Stories. Poems. Screenplays While this may be a mandatory assignment, it might also help jumpstart a writing career.
These finished pieces could be a great addition to your professional portfolio. Due to the intensity of the above-mentioned writing requirements, students could potentially complete a Creative Writing PhD program in 3 to 5 years. Program length may vary by school and enrollment.
Creative writing PhD programs may require previous graduate experience, as well as a 3.5 graduate GPA. Additionally, writing schools may ask students to submit samples of their previous work. Check with intended programs for more admissions details. Creative Writing Graduate Certificate Programs programs might be a great way to quickly build your creative writing skills and knowledge.
Many certificate programs only workshop one specific genre. For example, they might focus solely on children’s literature instead of combining students with opposing styles. This may provide a succinct curriculum without requiring unnecessary academic electives. Additionally, these programs typically do not require a minimum GPA for admissions. This may make it more accessible to a wide array of students so that they can begin to hone their craft before moving on to another graduate program.
While the writing focus may sound like the PhD Creative Writing program, graduate certificates are often shorter. This is because they focus on starting new writing pieces as opposed to completing long-form ones. Full time students could potentially earn a Graduate Certificate in Creative Writing in 1 year, although program lengths vary. Contact an advisor to learn more. Low Residency Writing Programs Residency requirements are common in many Graduate Creative Writing Programs. Biannually, students may be required to live and work on campus.
This is done to provide a space for students to concentrate on writing, reviewing, and revising their work. During this time, you could be sharing housing with other students from your program. Students are also encouraged to workshop pieces with others in the residency program to further refine the final product.
Typically, graduate writing programs either offer a low or high residency option. Low residency writing programs are shorter and may last around 10 days. High residency writing programs are often lengthier, lasting from 2 to 6 weeks. Residency lengths and details may vary by university.
Graduate Creative Writing Program Formats Pinpointing Creative Writing Graduate Programs that complement your daily routine could be difficult. But, there are several different program types that could ease your educational transition.
Creative Writing Schools On campus programs are what you might picture when you imagine the traditional university experience. Provide the opportunity to develop your work alongside your peers and mentors. Things like workshops and office hours could make seeking out additional assistance to help polish your work easier. Additionally, this might be an opportunity to build professional relationships with classmates. You never know who might be your connection to a literary agent or publishing house. Online Creative Writing Graduate Programs Online programs are a great way to stay in your creative writing space while earning your degree.
No matter where you’re living, you could attend classes on your own schedule. And, you could still receive valuable feedback from peers and professors via email or online forums. An may be a perfect option for students who are working. This way, you could pursue your professional endeavors while honing your craft. It’s important to note that online programs may require students to take part in residency programs.
Typically, these are offered in the low-residency format but could require you try travel to campus or a nearby location. Hybrid Graduate Programs in Creative Writing offer a little taste of both above programs. Depending on your personal schedule, you could choose to pursue one style of learning at any given time.
For instance, you could take online courses while working. Or, take on campus courses in between jobs. This might be great for current freelance writers because of their constantly changing work schedule.
Depending on your future responsibilities, you could plan your semesters accordingly. Find Perfect Graduate Writing Programs Looking for a way to elevate your writing? You may find inspiration in creative writing graduate programs. You could start by browsing the list of potential programs on this page. Or, you could narrow your search by selecting your preferred degree program and learning format from the menus on this page. Then click on any of the sponsored creative writing programs to learn more and contact schools directly. Now you're one step closer to you're graduate creative writing degree!