Creative Writing
The M.F.A. program in Creative Writing gives promising fiction writers and poets an opportunity to study and
practice their art with dedicated fellow writers. For three decades, one of the prime strengths of our program
has been the excellence of our students. The strictly limited enrollment, with six poets and six fiction writers
admitted each year, guarantees that students work closely together with a faculty that includes four fiction writers
and four poets of national acclaim. Students are selected on the basis of academic credentials and writing samples.
High admission standards and small class size insure that students' writing receives thorough, consistent attention
from faculty and fellow students.
Support and Teaching:
Since only a few exceptionally promising applicants are admitted to our program, Syracuse
University offers these talented students particularly strong support in the form of fellowships, scholarships,
and teaching assistantships to cover the three years of residency. (More detail about financial
support.) Our students' experience teaching introductory composition courses
in the Writing Program (a separate academic unit) helps prepare them for various kinds of teaching.
In the third year, a few student appointments are available to teach in the Living Writers course which focuses
on the work of the nationally prominent authors who visit campus each year to give readings as part of our Raymond
Carver Reading Series. While we offer our students valuable experience as teachers, we do not encourage anyone
to think of this, or any other M.F.A. program, as career development in teaching or publishing. Our
emphasis is on the development of our students as artists. Most of our students
do intend to publish, however, and faculty members offer useful advice and assistance based on their
wide publishing experience. Salt
Hill, a student-run literary magazine, provides further opportunities to learn about editing and publishing. The
Creative Writing Program is a close-knit community of writers working together on important challenges
in our development as artists. We invite promising writers to join all of us--students, faculty, and alumni--in
celebration of the intrinsic value of reading and writing poetry and fiction.
Degree Requirements:
The basic requirements for the degree are 48 hours of coursework,
which includes 3 credit hours for the Essay Seminar and 6 hours for the thesis. All students are also
encouraged to take as part of their coursework ENG 631: Critical Theory. This course provides an overview
of the major issues in critical theory and sets out debates over meaning, subjectivity, textuality,
and historicity.
Courses:
Students take 9 credit hours of creative writing workshops (one workshop each fall semester) and 9
credit hours of graduate-level forms courses taught by Creative Writing faculty. The rest of the coursework
will be split between 12-15 credit hours in other English Department courses and 6-9 credit hours of
elective work outside the department. The elective work can be taken in another artistic medium; in language,
history, philosophy, religion; or in whatever area would best benefit the student's writing.
Essay Seminar:
This seminar will address some aspect of the work of a single major writer. The emphasis will
be on one writer's understanding in depth of the work of another writer: What was the nature of that
writer's craft and how did it develop? The seminar will see each student essay through several drafts,
with the final essay being about 5,000 words.
Thesis:
The thesis is to be a collection of poems or stories commensurate in quality with materials published
by major magazines or presses. Thesis credit may, technically, be earned at any time in a student's
career, but it usually comes in the third year. The thesis itself is to be prepared in consultation
with a member of the creative writing faculty who must approve it. |
