RESEARCH General Arts

CREATIVE WRITING
New program to help already talented writers perfect their craft

Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@uiuc.edu

4/1/2001

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — An advanced creative writing program has been established in the American heartland. The new University of Illinois program will offer, its planners say, a first-rate opportunity for the nation’s most promising writers.

The UI's MFA (master's degree in fine arts) program in creative writing will begin in the fall of 2002. Only students who already are talented creative writers will be eligible for admission. Twelve students will be accepted each year.

Students who are accepted into the program, which is offered by the UI English department, will receive graduate study and professional training in the writing of fiction, poetry and creative
non-fiction. They also will be trained to become teachers of creative and professional writing.

"The primary goal of the MFA in creative writing is to give these literary artists time and space to work on and perfect their writing, and to study the craft and technique of writing," said Michael Van Walleghen, a professor of English at the UI, and the director of the new program.

The English department's staff of distinguished creative writing faculty, including National Book Award nominees and many prize winners, will teach.

"Very few places in the country can compete with our talent," Van Walleghen said. Largely because of its noted and productive teaching staff, the English department, he said, consistently is ranked in the nation's top 20 graduate programs in English.

Among the 11 creative writers who will serve as teacher-mentors are fiction writers Richard Powers and Jean Thompson, both nominated for National Book Awards and both UI alumni. The other MFA professors are Mark Costello and Paul Friedman, also UI graduates, and Philip Graham, Brigit Kelly, Laurence Lieberman, Michael Madonick, Audrey Petty, Van Walleghen and David Wright. A writers-in-residence series also is planned.

Illinois has long played an important role in the creative writing of the United States, Van Walleghen said. For example, for 20 years the English department published the prestigious literary magazine Accent, which featured such writers as e.e. cummings, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Wallace Stevens and Eudora Welty. The department also runs the Carr Visiting Writers series, which brings distinguished writers to campus. Among the Carr writers are Raymond Carver, Stanley Elkin and William Gass. For several decades, the department has offered undergraduate majors in rhetoric and in professional writing, and 10 years ago it established the Center for Writing Studies.

The future for creative writing also looks promising, Van Walleghen said.

"The demand is there," he said. In contrast to graduate school applications, which nationally are down, "Established writing programs are receiving some 400-500 applications a year."