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.