What are the best colleges for writing and/or literature?

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I need the best schools for writing and/or literature, preferably on the east coast. These are the areas I'm interested in, but I don't which are the most revered or anything. Please help out if you have had any personal experiences/heard things.

― Michael Copeland, Thursday, 17 March 2005 18:58 (twenty-one years ago)

Cornell maybe for lit? I don't know shit about writing (I assume you mean creative writing) as I think it is possibly the all time stupidest major in the history of the world.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:06 (twenty-one years ago)

Except that there is that school in Iowa that everyone talks up. I guess I know that much.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:06 (twenty-one years ago)

I think being named Alex is stupid.

― nabiscothingy, Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:07 (twenty-one years ago)

Especially in the Bay Area.

― nabiscothingy, Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:07 (twenty-one years ago)

This brings up a broader question I was curious about - where does one go to research schools in general (by location, field, etc.)? Besides the internet, is there some other general resource?

― VIC MACKEY (nordicskilla), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:08 (twenty-one years ago)

Hahaha oooh did I touch a NERVE.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:08 (twenty-one years ago)

nabisco, be nice to Alex. Nobody wanted to play with his nipples last night.

― M. White (Miguelito), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:08 (twenty-one years ago)

There is that big yearly college guide that gets published. I don't know the name of it.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:09 (twenty-one years ago)

My nipples got plenty of action last night. Just not from strang-o's in bars.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:10 (twenty-one years ago)

How about a journalism degree? See any use there, Alex? (...honestly, I'm in the same situation.)

― David Allen (David Allen), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:11 (twenty-one years ago)

Alex, I'm immensely relieved.

― M. White (Miguelito), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:15 (twenty-one years ago)

what happened to Nabisco and Michael's logins?

― Ken L (Ken L), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:21 (twenty-one years ago)

I can see plenty of uses for journalism degrees. Creative writing, poetry writing, etc, are the only ones I don't get.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:23 (twenty-one years ago)

Mine's changed for reason's of total idiocy.

xpost

― M. White (Miguelito), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:24 (twenty-one years ago)

WHY?

― VIC MACKEY (nordicskilla), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:24 (twenty-one years ago)

There are several big annual guides to universities, for both undergrad and graduate school. There should be a section of them in any major bookstore, next to the standardized-test study guides. US News & World Report is the magazine that puts out the annual rankings.

― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:24 (twenty-one years ago)

And my first thought for (creative) writing was indeed Univ. of Iowa.

― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:25 (twenty-one years ago)

Thank you.

(Coincidentally, I just wrote you a very short email while you were posting that)

― VIC MACKEY (nordicskilla), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:26 (twenty-one years ago)

Iowa has the most respected creative writing program, or did when I was in college (like, years ago) for graduate school anyway; I don't know about undergrad but that might make a difference (I don't know why anyone would get a bachelors in writing, an MFA is useless enough; you should at least get a BA or BS that will enable you to get some kind of job that will help you pay your bills).

― kyle (akmonday), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:29 (twenty-one years ago)

the workshop at iowa state is probably the best known writing program. I dont know enough to call it the BEST, but a lot of big names have both gone through the program and taught it. They probably have a particular method which you may or may not respond to (the workshop method being a very general example).

if, Michael Copeland, you happen to be a girl, i do hear that Smith college is good for that too.

― AaronK (AaronK), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:31 (twenty-one years ago)

emerson is suposed to be ok too.

― AaronK (AaronK), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:32 (twenty-one years ago)

one's as good as the other.

― AaronK (AaronK), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:32 (twenty-one years ago)

they're all full of hipsters anyway.

― AaronK (AaronK), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:33 (twenty-one years ago)

do they have writing programs anywhere that don't have workshops? i don't see how that would work or be beneficial at all.

― kyle (akmonday), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:33 (twenty-one years ago)

definie workshop

― VIC MACKEY (nordicskilla), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:34 (twenty-one years ago)

im not sure they do. it seems to be the std procedure everywhere. maybe not EVERY class is a workshop, but some are.

― AaronK (AaronK), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:37 (twenty-one years ago)

workshop: students read each others work and comment on it in addition to the teacher doing the traditional teaching role.

― AaronK (AaronK), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:38 (twenty-one years ago)

it works like communism works.

― AaronK (AaronK), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:38 (twenty-one years ago)

Yeah, I thought workshopping was pretty much S.O.P. in MFA programs?

― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:41 (twenty-one years ago)

It is.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:43 (twenty-one years ago)

For creative writing – Iowa (duh), U of Houston, Brown, Columbia, John Hopkins, NYU, Cornell, Syracuse… Ummmm… I guess it’s been a couple years since I was looking into this.

― jill schoelen is the queen of my dreams! (Homosexual II), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:44 (twenty-one years ago)

my roomate went to grad school for writing for one year and he was takin all workshop classes. he quit because he figured he could form his own workshop with his classmates and not pay thousands to do it. And he did.

― AaronK (AaronK), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:44 (twenty-one years ago)

My feeling is that if you are good enough at your craft, you don't need a workshop. I suppose they could be helpful for absolute beginners (and I'm not just thinking writers here, but musicians also), but once you reach a certain level, you're your own best critic.

― 57 7th (calstars), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:45 (twenty-one years ago)

There was a lot of good college talk here: This is the thread where you recommend a college for my daughter

― Curious George Finds the Ether Bottle (Rock Hardy), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:46 (twenty-one years ago)

ive actually been quite curious about that (but lazy too, since i havent researched it). Do any schools have musicians songwriting workshops?

― AaronK (AaronK), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:46 (twenty-one years ago)

workshops are nice to find people whose writing you respect and who you can get to read your stuff outside of school (I was a creative writing minor at Berkeley, and we set up our own workshops and those were really nice for the two years they lasted; then everyone I liked moved away so that was the end of that).

Note that Iowa is pretty hard to get into; anywhere good is.

― kyle (akmonday), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:47 (twenty-one years ago)

off-topic: Alex are your nipples still pierced?

― gygax! (gygax!), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:47 (twenty-one years ago)

You don't need a university degree to learn how to write; you need a lot of time to read and study and to write your first million words. College or university can provide a respite from the need to earn a living while you do these things.

You don't need a university degree to learn how to write fiction; you need the degree to get you that job as an assistant editor, editorial assistant, publisher's reader, tech writer or some such. These can come in handy when you need to put food on the table while still learning your trade.

You don't need a university degree to learn to write poetry; you need it so you have the right bona fides when you write those grants to beg a position as poet-in-residence and you need it to help make valuable contacts among the professors (who used to think they were poets) so you can stay in grad school long enough to have a respectable corpus of published work before having to trudge out into the cold cruel world as a (heavens!) poet.

In short, university is not necessary at all, except as it provides you with a means to get through the practical roadblocks and obstacles on the way to earning a living writing. But somewhere along the way, you will need to learn to write, and university can be a huge impediment to that.

― Aimless (Aimless), Thursday, 17 March 2005 19:59 (twenty-one years ago)

I attended hamilton college in clinton, new york. I loved it. And the english department was wonderful, as were the creative-writing and comparative literature divisions. There's a tremendous amount of faculty-contact, and many great opportunities for independent writing projects. Tons of support for private work, too. I'm now in graduate school writing, and realize daily how much better prepared I am than most of my cohorts for professional writing work. Due, almost exclusively, to my hamiltonian training. What's important, IMHO, is finding a small liberal-arts school which'll force you into constant communication w. your professors & a daily writing routine.

― Remy (null) (x Jeremy), Thursday, 17 March 2005 20:49 (twenty-one years ago)

Just for the record, most of the writing programs people are referring to here are graduate / MFA programs. Said schools tend to have decent instruction in undergrad writing as well, of course, but they're obviously different things. And it's still kind of rare to see a proper undergrad major in creative writing; what you tend to get are English / Lit degrees with concentrations or "minors" in writing.

People who go on and on about how useless it is to study writing tend to either (a) not get how writing works or (b) not realize that you can wind up basically getting paid to study this stuff or (c) not realize that there's such thing as an actual job market for writers or (d) just like to pretend that they know better than everyone else. That said, I don't think anyone should sink actual money into a writing degree with the expectation that he'll make a living publishing books; and I don't think anyone does do that, really.

Don't buy any suggestion that journalism is a substitute for writing literature or even creative non-fiction; maybe there are people whose approach to writing could go either way, but I think that's a very small group. I started off in a big journalism school, as a bit of a compromise with the parents about studying "writing"; within a year I was scrambling like hell into an English/writing program. I don't recommend convincing yourself that maybe working your way to the "magazine" side of a journalism program will be a substitute for creative writing of any sort; chances are you'll realize you were kidding yourself.

Anyway. As an undergrad I wouldn't worry extensively about the writing end of a program; you just want to get somewhere with a good literature program (think a bit about the ratio of lit to theory you want to deal with) that'll give you the opportunity to take a decent workshop or two. Then take a few years and either work on writing or don't write a thing and just live normally for a while, and then ... then maybe an MFA, and hopefully at a place that'll fund you for it. I followed pretty much this path and I feel generally good about it.

― nabiscothingy, Thursday, 17 March 2005 21:22 (twenty-one years ago)

Thanks nabisco, that helped a lot.

While on the topic, what are some of the best schools for english and literature studies? You seem to know quite a bit about it..

― Michael Copeland, Thursday, 17 March 2005 22:27 (twenty-one years ago)

Yale

― BiasedYetCorrect, Thursday, 17 March 2005 22:30 (twenty-one years ago)

MFA's are great if you can get a T.A. and don't have to pay for it.. I don't think it's wrong to want one. I certainly want one. However, I've learned that I hate workshops. Of course in every workshop I've ever been in I've been the smug one who thinks everyone is full of shit, and that if I were to ever get into a proper MFA program I'd probably BE humbled SO BAD! Anyway, yeah... well.. I'm too much in debt to.. ever attempt at something like this.

― jill schoelen is the queen of my dreams! (Homosexual II), Thursday, 17 March 2005 22:40 (twenty-one years ago)

Plus I'm not a very good writer.

― jill schoelen is the queen of my dreams! (Homosexual II), Thursday, 17 March 2005 22:41 (twenty-one years ago)

The problem with creative writing programmes is that I get the impression that you are doing yourself out of the opportunity to study something to write about.

― Ed (dali), Thursday, 17 March 2005 22:42 (twenty-one years ago)

There's a nice thread on ILBooks about creative writing workshops. Aimless OTM here.

xpost Ooo, and Ed too! Ed super OTM with cherries on top. It is my biggest regret as an undergrad English/Creative Writing major.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Thursday, 17 March 2005 22:43 (twenty-one years ago)

"off-topic: Alex are your nipples still pierced?"

Hahaha yes, as a matter of fact they are.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Thursday, 17 March 2005 22:59 (twenty-one years ago)

Michael -- I'm serious w. what I said above. For undergraduate education, most 'good' liberal-artsy schools are great. Find a small & rigorous place w. generous financial aid (most of them have this by default) and ride for four years. I'd recommend taking as many creative writing classes as you can - specifically workshops (which are invaluable, practice even if they're infuriatingly dumb) - but will echo the advice said upthread: don't just take writing courses or you'll end up moping about not being able to write sellable lit-fic. Go for breadth of knowledge and variety of experience. Most good undergrad (and I speak very biasedly) liberal arts programs are more about rehearsing & conveying thinking skills than actual experience, and I think this is their great benefit. As long as you're in a place where you feel you can contribute and be involved in your own education rather than a passive receptor of purely academic theory and jargon you're doing well, and a service to your writing career. And if there are workshops? Even better.

― Remy (null) (x Jeremy), Thursday, 17 March 2005 23:06 (twenty-one years ago)

"Find a small & rigorous place w. generous financial aid (most of them have this by default) and ride for four years."

Hahaha oh what a world.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Thursday, 17 March 2005 23:08 (twenty-one years ago)

I've just realized that I bristle at people calling the study of creative writing "useless" because, umm, well, as soon as you've decided to make an effort to be a writer at all the battle against uselessness is kind of already lost.

Michael: I'd like to help but I don't really trust myself as an evaluator of undergrad programs, particularly on the east coast, where I barely set foot until starting grad school. What I can say is that studying lit is one of those things where you benefit pretty strongly from being surrounded by students on as high a level as you can find them. And Ed's right -- you'll definitely benefit from a school that gives you plenty of room to study as many other things as you'd care to, at as high a level as you can handle.

But seriously, Alex, what's with all the sneering?

― nabiscothingy (nory), Friday, 18 March 2005 02:05 (twenty-one years ago)

Also, further to Ed's comment and others, the last thing you should do is go into your undergrad years thinking of yourself as being on some career path toward writing in the creative sense. Study lit, study as many other interests as you can work in, and just kind of let your intellectual development, so to speak, take its own course. You'll come out the other end in a very different place, obviously, and hopefully in a different spot you wouldn't have anticipated beforehand. For most people the decision to commit to really studying writing happens in the mid to late 20s, when you can take stock of where you're headed and decide whether the time (and often money) investment in an MFA is going to be helpful to you.

― nabiscothingy (nory), Friday, 18 March 2005 02:09 (twenty-one years ago)

Best in undergrad creative writing: Princeton, Sarah Lawrence

― - (smile), Friday, 18 March 2005 18:17 (twenty-one years ago)

Sory to be a little over cynical but at University you'll do a lot of writing whatever you study, so you'll have plenty of opportunity to hone your skill, plus under the US system you can take a few creative modules if the fancy takes you. Plus you could learn some cool stuff like second order differential equations or the english civil war.

― Ed (dali), Friday, 18 March 2005 18:24 (twenty-one years ago)

I can see that an undergraduate degree in creative writing might require less reading than an English lit degree, but how would it possibly be less useful? I mean, what is less useful than a [insert almost any liberal arts field here] degree?

― Maria (Maria), Friday, 18 March 2005 18:30 (twenty-one years ago)

It's not that studying writing is useless, it's that undergrad writing programs tend towards the useless.

Ed: I taught ESL for a bit in college, and was amazed at how poor the writing skills of some of the students were, considering how far they had gotten in their (science-based) college career (although not considering how recently they'd arrived from Ukraine and how terrible their home lives were). You had to pass this pre-freshman comp class before you became, I think, a 2nd semester junior, and some of these students were at the deadline.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 18 March 2005 18:34 (twenty-one years ago)

For most people the decision to commit to really studying writing happens in the mid to late 20s, when you can take stock of where you're headed and decide whether the time (and often money) investment in an MFA is going to be helpful to you.

good.

― VIC MACKEY (nordicskilla), Friday, 18 March 2005 19:11 (twenty-one years ago)

WHAT makes the english civil war a cool thing to study, i wonder.

i also wonder what an MFA is. i am tired of seeing it brought up on these threads.

please help me, ilx, sort these things out.

― the adrifterizer, Friday, 18 March 2005 19:49 (twenty-one years ago)

Master of Fine Arts.

― jill schoelen is the queen of my dreams! (Homosexual II), Friday, 18 March 2005 19:52 (twenty-one years ago)

WOW. i want one of those.

― master of dine-carts, Friday, 18 March 2005 19:58 (twenty-one years ago)

Mother Fuckin' Attorney

― M. White (Miguelito), Friday, 18 March 2005 19:58 (twenty-one years ago)

You can't understand the american revolution or indeed the early settlement of the 13 colonies without a good grounding in the english civil war. It is the pivot on which the history of the English speaking world turns.

― Ed (dali), Friday, 18 March 2005 20:00 (twenty-one years ago)

You might be told that Eugene Lang College (New School University) in NYC is good. I think you'd be lied to. I go there and have had unpleasant experiences in literature classes, but I've never taken any writing classes. So maybe writing is a-ok.

― Ian John50n (orion), Friday, 18 March 2005 20:04 (twenty-one years ago)

thank you ed. i will clearly have to look into it.

hm let me see now,

english civil war - ---
american revolution - check?
french revolution - ---
american civil war - check?
russian revolution - ---
russian civil war - ---

― the historianizer, Friday, 18 March 2005 20:06 (twenty-one years ago)

Slip like Adornian / Your first and last step / To playin' yourself like accordion.

― fields of salmon (fieldsofsalmon), Saturday, 19 March 2005 21:14 (twenty-one years ago)

as someone who went to the graduate faculty at the new school, i'd advise against it altogether - eugene lang is little more than a funding source for other parts of the "university" framework (parsons design to thread - eugene lang, swarthmore trustee, also to thread). many students are frustrated by the difficulties in keeping full time faculty.

and you'd have the venerable bob kerrey as univ president (fwiw, he didn't sign my diploma).

― blackmail.is.my.life (blackmail.is.my.life), Saturday, 19 March 2005 21:42 (twenty-one years ago)

I am studying literature and creative writing at this very moment. I'll not say where. I was a bit worried about it beforehand, but I'm getting more out of it than I bargained for.

I have found that writing creatively has made the academic writing I do much more enjoyable. I now feel there is little distinction between the two styles, and yet I am able to satisfy the formal requirements laid out in research-oriented courses.

Studying writing is as much about editing as is it is writing. Learning to edit is very, very valuable.

― fields of salmon (fieldsofsalmon), Sunday, 20 March 2005 04:25 (twenty-one years ago)

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