Graduate CW Programs

And let's dust off The Atlantic Monthly's excellent feature on MFA programs, for those of you thinking five to ten years into the future (always a dangerous endeavor).

Undergraduate CW Programs

Here is an exhaustive list of what the Association of Writers & Writing Programs thinks a good undergraduate creative writing program should offer. It's right on the money.

Here's a completely unscientific (and utterly non-exhaustive) list of interesting places to study creative writing as an undergraduate:

Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA)
Knox College (Galesburg, IL)
Hollins University [womens' college] (Roanoke, VA)
Emory University (Atlanta, GA)
University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC)
DePauw University (Greencastle, IN)
Davidson College (Davidson, NC)
Kenyon College (Gambier, OH)

Most of the schools above award writing-related scholarship money (for current and/or prospective students) and/or prize money (for current students).

Below you'll find five totally random BFA programs in creative writing. There are others, I'm sure. What's a BFA, you ask? Hrmm. Well. I mean. You know. We'll talk. Here's those five schools:

University of Maine - Farmington (Farmington, ME)
UNC - Wilmington (Wilmington, NC)
Bowling Green State University (Bowling Green, OH)
Converse College [womens' college] (Spartanburg, SC)
Chatham University [womens' college] (Pittsburgh, PA)

Lastly but not leastly, Alabama isn't a bad option for undergrad CW-study either, though you're very likely to get an MFA student as a teacher for some of your classes, and it's nearly impossible to get out of taking the Intro class. They have a great reading series, though, and the full-time faculty is good -- both in the classroom and in helping their students further their "careers." Anecdotally, I've heard mixed reviews for some of the other schools in the state.

The other "strategy" (such as it is) is to go to one of them high-falutin' Ivy League (and its ilk) schools. Columbia. Princeton. Harvard. Yale. Etc. Lots of published writer types -- and the people who publish them -- have matriculated at those sorts of places (and that's likely to continue). If you got a spare $150-$200k rattling around in your pockets, go for it.

Truth is, you can make your writing life happen wherever you go to college. It's up to you.

Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz

(posted for Amber)

Dean Koontz (1945 - Present) is an extremely successful American writer in many different genres. He graduated from Shippensburg State College (Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania) in 1967 and was an English teacher for a year before his first book – a science fiction novel called Star Quest written in spare time – was published in 1968. He has since gone on to write a LOT of bestsellers in multiple genres from scifi to horror, suspense to satire. For fear of loosing loyal genre fans, he went by pen names for much of his different genre work among them Deanna Dwyer, K. R. Dwyer, Aaron Wolfe, David Axton, Brian Coffey, John Hill, Leigh Nichols, Owen West, Richard Paige, Leonard Chris, and Anthony North. Though not exactly the most acclaimed writer in literary circles, he’s frequented the New York Times Bestseller List with ten hardcover and fourteen paperbacks in the number one spot over the years and is tied with John Grisham for the spot of 6th highest paid author. He currently lives in California his wife and attributes much of his inspiration to his late golden retriever, Trixie Koontz.

Life Expectancy is (IMO) a suspense/ thriller piece about a man (Jimmy Tock) whose dying grandfather, on the night of his birth and even in the same hospital, suddenly made multiple predictions about his life and gave a list of five terrible days that he would have to face. Promptly after that and at the very moment Jimmy was birthed, he died. This all happens in the first chapter, leaving about sixty more to show him going through his life preparing for and trying to survive the days of his grandfather’s prediction. Challenges faced include eccentric grandmothers, battling a family of psychotic clowns and other circus performers, mouth-watering scenes of family dinners, meeting the love of his life, and raising three children all afraid of monsters in the closet.

Koontz does a phenomenal job in Life Expectancy of balancing Jimmy’s normal life and its supernatural elements. Though much of the novel is pretty outlandish, the narration and the crazy plot are really addictive, and keeps you turning the page. Simple language, quirky descriptions and really open 1st person narration create a good read that I think we can take notes on.

interpreter of maladies by jhumpa lahiri

So one of the books I read was "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri. It's a collection of nine short stories... and it also happened to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000. But that's not why I picked it. The reason I selected it was because we read one of her short stories (which is in a different collection of short stories) in English class and really loved it, and I felt the same way about this. The stories, while all very different, are about Bengali Indian-Americans and the way their nationality has affected them. All nine stories are heavily influenced by food and family.

Lahiri, who immigrated to America at the age of 1, is extremely well educated. She grew up in Rhode Island, and most of her fiction is autobiographical, laced with the experiences she's had. She went to college forever: she got her BA in English, and has three masters degrees in English, Creative Writing, and Comparative Literature, as well as a PhD in Renaissance Studies.

The other books she's published, one novel and one other collection of short stories, have also been very sucessful.

The Knight by Gene Wolfe

It has been some time since I read this book, nearly a month, but of the novels I have finished this year this one has been, by far, both the most enjoyable as a reader and the most interesting as a writer. The author is Gene Wolfe, a sort of wild card in fantasy whom I have been meaning to sample at some point yet have never had the time. He is old and well-regarded, one of the most prolific writers in the field, who could decorate his coat with as many awards as a five-star general. He was born in New York, began his higher education in Texas before being drafted into the Korean War. Upon returning to the states, he finished his education at the University of Houston and became an industrial engineer. His first novel was Operation Ares, a dismal failure both critically and commercially. His second major published work, The Fifth Head of Cerburus, was a widely succesful novella (practically an oxymoron in and of itself) called by Gardner Dozois the best novella of the 1970's. His most famous work is the Book of the New Sun, a vast and subsersive series of fantasy novels. He has no creative writing degree, two Nebula awards, five Locus's, and three World Fantasy Awards. He is famous for his ambiguous, mysterious, and difficult prose, and his gift for first-person narratives of unreliable characters.

So, The Knight.

This is a very odd book, in multitudinous ways. The back-cover blurb names it a YA book, and indeed the protaganist is a young boy, but I can barely imagine the plight of a twelve year-old trying to barrel through the obscure prose. The plot is both simple and dastardly complex. A young boy from our world, while living in a woodsy cabin with his older brother (their parents mysteriously and unremarkedly absent,) one day wanders out to the lake and, playing in the sand, is magically transported to a world of fantasy, a world comprised of seven stacked planes. He arrives in the middle plane of Mythgarthr, and finds himself under the tutelage of a onetime warrior named Bold Berthold, a man who thinks that our protaganist, himself never named, is his little brother. Over an undisclosed period of time, the protaganist finds that he too cannot remember which brother was the real one, Berthold or the one from our world. It is not all metaphyiscal misrememberence, though, as the protaganist accepts the blessing of a fairy queen and takes upon himself the name Sir Able of the High Heart, and sets out on an adventure to recover his blade Eterne from a dragon. Through the book, Able discovers that not everything is how it seems (or perhaps it is? Crypticism is part and parcel for The Knight) and finds himself dragged along by a near-infinite number of powers from Mythgarthr and the other six planes of this strange fantasy world. If this makes little to no sense, then I have explained it correctly.

I was unprepared for this novel. To an extent, I knew what to expect from Wolfe's subsersive writing style. I knew I was not going to experience the average fantasy novel, but I did not realize just how different Wolfe's voice is from the traditional fantasy writer. In fact, it is written as if unaware of all other traditions, as if the novel believes it is the first written about knights and dragons and a boy coming-of-age. This novel was excrutiatingly clever. The voice was that of a child's, using simple vocabulary and uncomplicated sentences. It shocked me how boldy Wolfe, frequently described as a prose master, used such an "idiot's voice" at the primary style of the novel. It intrigued me how he would describe a glorious vista in a way a child might, simple and even a bit ugly, yet expressing the beauty of the sight without using beautiful words. Wolfe has made me question, a little, my traditional baroque style. If he can achieve so much classical beauty with so little description, and so much modern commentary with so little conceptualizing, how then do I justify my heavy-handed description porn and blatant philosophizing? Wolfe has put these questions in my head, and now I am given to ponder them.

In all, a strong book, a surprising and tricky book, by a writer who certainly deserves his place in fantasy literature.

--CLAY GREENE

The Stranger by Albert Camus

This novel is about a young man named Meursault, and he lives in the Algiers. He recieves a telegram that informs him of his mother's death and so he jumps on a bus and rides to Marengo. His mother had been living in an old person's house and by the time Meursault gets to this house, he finds that his dead mother has already been sealed into her coffin. The old person offers to open to coffin so he can see his mother, but Meursault declines. He attends the funeral the next morning and then hops back on a bus to the Algiers.

At this point in the novel, Meursault decides that he wants to go for a swim at a public beach and happens to run into his former co-worker, Marie Cardona. They get along great and decide to go see a comedic movie that night...and he plays his cards well and she stays the night with him. However, when he wakes up, she is not there and he passes the morning watching cars go by on his porch. The following day, Meursault goes to work and then comes home. While climbing the stairs to his apartment, he runs into a man with a mangy dog and a man named Raymond, who is also a pimp. Raymond invited Meursault over for dinner and the conversation at dinner leads to how Raymond beat up his mistress because she cheated on him and how that lead to a fight between Raymond and his mistress' brother. Raymond now wants to torment his mistress even more, and so Meursault agrees to write a letter that will lure her back to Raymond.

The next day Marie returns to Meursault's apartment and asks him if he loves her. He is basically like, eh. The conversation is interrupted by a police force in Raymond's apartment a few doors down that claim Raymond beat up his wife. Raymond asks Meursault to testify for him in court, and he agrees...

Marie asks Meursault if he wants to marry her and he is like, eh, but they get engaged anyway. They go to a beach with Raymond and run into Raymond's mistress' brother, who is an Arab. Raymond wants to shoot him, but Meursault tells him not to and takes his gun. However, Meursault goes back to the spring later on where he sees the Arab and shoots him for no reason. He goes to jail.

In jail, Meursault feels no remorse for his crime, or even that his mother died a little while ago. A magistrate comes and tells him to swear his faith on a cross, but Meursault refuses because he does not believe in God. Marie visits him once in prison, reminds them of their marriage to be. Meursault adapts to life in prison, the lack of women, cigarettes, and nature. He learns to keep his mind on other things...and since I will not reveal the ending, I will just say that this narrator wrestles with believing in a purly physical world and if this view of life is good enough to live on.


*Written by Albert Camus who won the Nobel Prize in 1957, the second youngest person to receive it and at 44 years of age. He schooled at the University of Algiers and received something similar to an M.A. He is often associated with existentialism. I discovered after reading this novel, that I really like this style of writing. It takes a human subject and incorperates their feelings, actions, the whole living individual, and his or her own conditions of existence and questions them. It is a complete disorientation of what you think you know.

Killing Yourself to Live, 85% of a True Story by Chuck Klosterman

This is the nonfiction tale of Chuck's road trip to visit landmarks of rock legend's deaths. But this is only the plot on face value, past that he uses his epic journey to discuss and reflect upon his relationships with three separate women. He goes so far as to categorize all the women he has dated in his life as all the band members of KISS. Mixed in with the examination of pop songs, music history, and drugs/alcohol are philosophical musings on the meaning of life and death.

Chuck Klosterman is obsessed with Pop Culture. It has been the focus of all of his books. His vaguely stream of consciousness style and constant references put some people off, and he has always polarized critics. Some hold him up as a master of his style, someone of value, while the others see him as a false persona who is only catering to his publishers by churning out fabricated "true stories". Both sides of the table seem to be adamant that their opinion is one hundred percent right. He has published six books since 2001 and is if not well liked, then at the least well known. He began his career as a journalist for a newspaper in his home state of North Dakota. After, he became and arts critic and then moved up to be a senior editor of Spin. Since being fired, he has been a regular contributor in many publications and has published his first novel. He graduated from the University of North Dakota in 1994, but I can't figure out what his degree was in.