The Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia directs, supports, and accompanies the coming-into-being of voices. No matter the genre or the exact nature of the approach, at bottom, ours is a project in emergent phenomena : voice. While read aloud and performed in various venues and forums, these voices enter the world and live their primary lives in print.
In this we allow that writing can’t be taught. We even allow that writing can’t, strictly speaking, be discussed. Like the graphic media and music, writing lives a primary life on its own. Our faculty and—quickly, at least—students are all veterans of the realization that, often, the origin (and for some, the author) of key components of a piece of writing are unknown. Therefore, we proceed with the understanding that he living spark at the core of what writing breathes cannot be requisitioned.
At the same time, we’re dedicated to the—if, in the end, untraceable—connection between writing and strict attention to (otherwise known as study) and talk (otherwise known as conversations) about aesthetics and criticism (literary and otherwise), experience (personal, theoretical, and otherwise), politics (electoral, cultural, and otherwise), history (earthly and otherwise). As an academic program, we’re also invested in the relationship between cutting-edge creative work and the living intellectual life of a university.
The Creative Writing Program is the home to a wide and constantly changing array of creative / intellectual energy the owners of which are busy attempting to acquire the skills they need to etch-out its design in print for readers to read.
We’ve designed the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at the University of Georgia to offer both the MFA and Ph.D. degree. MFA students complete a two-year degree combining graduate-level writing workshops, targeted study of literature, and culminating in a creative thesis of publishable quality. In addition to the MFA or MA degree (many of our Ph.D. students apply to and enter the program after completing their MFA degrees at programs such as The Iowa Writer’s Workshop, The New School, Johns Hopkins, New York University, and Brown University), PhD students complete three years of course work, take comprehensive exams in three subjects, and complete a (often a second) marketable, book-length project as their dissertation.