Creative Writing

The Creative Writing major gives students the opportunity to engage with language as a fundamental artistic medium, one which is not only relevant in multiple contexts, but is multiple contexts. Through poetry, short stories, creative non-fiction and hybrid/interdisciplinary forms, students explore and explode not only the narrative possibilities of the written and spoken word, but expressive, and formal ones as well. At the AAC, Creative Writers aren't writers in a visual art school; they are artists who use the written and spoken word as their primary artistic material. Reading becomes writing; writing becomes drawing, and words become a means for getting at the limits of language, which are the limits of being itself. Through active reading, critical writing, and research in relation to the artistic process, students hone their craft and learn to undermine preconceptions and rules in favor of generative unpredictable outcomes, declarations and gestures. The study of literature and a variety of traditional and experimental workshop approaches support students as they develop their own radical vision and voice.

Additionally, Creative Writing majors at the AAC are taught not only by writers, who are active in writing, editing, and publishing at the national level, but also by practicing contemporary visual artists, including painters, sculptors, designers, photographers, performance artists, etc. Upon graduation, students are prepared to creatively articulate, critically examine, and reinvent the world in their image via the spoken and written word. They may also continue their education in graduate school, as well as teach at the college level. As creative writers and readers, adept at using the fundamental conceptual framework we have for making meaning and making the world, they are prepared to do anything they put their minds to with depth and beauty and transformative strangeness.