Beginning Creative Writing

This course offers an introduction to creative writing in several forms. Students try their hands at writing short stories, poems, and creative nonfiction essays as well as additional in-class creative exercises. We also read well-known authors, study their aesthetic strategies, and draw inspiration from them. Creative writing can be challenging and require hard work: it requires a flexibility of mind, leaps of imagination, the patience to revise, and noticing when your subconscious is tugging very lightly at your sleeve, trying to get your attention while you're busy with something else. But it also can be deeply fulfilling and offer a kind of pleasure available nowhere else. The poet Louise Glück writes that "[F]or me, always,/ the delight is the surprise," and in this course we explore the many surprising delights that creative writing has to offer.