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AROUND THE QUADS

Columbia Introduces Creative Writing Major

While Columbia has produced countless authors — think Jack Kerouac ’44, Allen Ginsberg ’48 and Paul Auster ’69, among others — none could have majored in creative writing while students. That has changed effective this year, thanks in large part to Ben Marcus, chair of the School of the Arts MFA writing program, and Sam Lipsyte, director of undergraduate studies for the new creative writing major.

Thirty-five undergraduates have been admitted to the by-application-only major in its inaugural year, and hundreds more have enrolled in newly designed classes that teach students to approach fiction, poetry and nonfiction as crafts to be learned as opposed to traditional

English classes that teach students to approach literature as works to be interpreted. In all, 25 new courses were created for the undergraduate major.

“We always had writing workshops in which a student’s work could be critiqued, but now we have workshops running alongside rigorous seminars in which they have to read a great deal and learn about literary history, but from a practitioner’s perspective,” said Marcus, who authored Notable American Women, The Father Costume and The Age of Wire and String, among other works. “If students are only reading literature in an English class, they might not acquire that real, tactile sense of how to make a sentence.”

The courses include writing workshops in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, playwriting and screenwriting as well as craft seminars such as “Exercises in Style,” “Techniques of the Short Story” and “Voices from the Edge.” The classes are small and are taught by full-time faculty members who have been published and translated all over the world.

This is the sixth new major created for Columbia undergraduates in the past five years, according to the College’s Office of the Dean of Academic Affairs. While College students could take individual creative writing workshops prior to this fall, and General Studies had a creative writing major (albeit half the courses came from outside the major), this new major for both schools is as thorough and ambitious as the MFA degree on which it is modeled.

Lipsyte, the author of Home Land, Venus Drive, and The Subject Steve, said he found it exciting to create a curriculum for undergraduates that mirrored the hands-on approach taken by the MFA program in writing. The graduate students “already understand the approach of ‘reading as a writer’ that we are trying to teach,” he said. “With the undergraduates, you are explaining a new way of reading to them. And I see in their eyes when we begin that it’s something they’ve been looking for. It’s a way they have secretly connected to these texts all along. The major is giving them permission to pursue that line of inquiry.”

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