Welcome!

Welcome to our course blog for English 305B: Advanced Creative Writing! This will be your homepage for the online aspects of our class, a place where shared assignments, writing prompts, and selections from work in progress will be posted, and where your comments and responses will always be valued.

As we begin our work together, a gentle reminder: the teaching of creative writing is, in terms of the history of human narrative, a very recent development indeed, The photo above shows Helen C. White teaching one of the first creative writing courses in the United States as part of the Wisconsin Writers Institute, founded in 1945 (the very first in the country, the Iowa Writers Workshop, had opened just nine years earlier). People have been writing stories, tales, novels, plays, and poems for many thousands of years -- but the idea that such activities could be taught in a college setting is not even a century old. It's still evolving, and there's no one method, or fixed course of study, that everyone agrees on. In part, it's based on the idea of one-on-one mentoring, or apprenticeship; in other ways, it's more like a collective activity, conducted in workshops and small groups; in still other ways, it has a component of academic study and learning from one's precursors. There's no one-size-fits-all solution -- but here in this class, I'll do my best to find the method and approach that's best for each of you, and help guide you to the kinds of strategies that fit best with your work, whatever its genre or form. It should be a very interesting journey indeed.