Writing with the stars

These undergraduates weren’t waiting for tickets to a concert or a boat trip, but to sign up for their preferred sections of creative writing courses in poetry and fiction.

Now entering its 70th year, the University’s Creative Writing Program has seen a steady increase in applicants, and this semester a record 175 students are enrolled in the writing workshops in poetry, fiction and translation. Students who are accepted to the workshops, which are limited to eight to 10 students, may also apply to write creative theses. About 15 to 20 seniors each year are accepted into the certificate program to write theses.

The program faculty includes Joyce Carol Oates, winner of numerous National Book Awards and widely noted for her prolificacy. Also in the faculty are Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon and James Richardson ’71, who received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his poetry.

“The chance to work on my writing with someone like [Oates] is unbelievable to me,” said Sam Nicholson ’10, who is writing his thesis with Oates. “There are professional writers who would kill for that opportunity.”

Liz Dengel ’10, who is also working on a creative thesis, noted that her writing professors’ different views on fiction have helped shape the way she writes her stories. Dengel, whose background in theater often led her to write “dialogue-heavy” fiction, said Oates’ class taught her not to disregard the visual elements of fiction.

“She pushed me to ground characters in real physical places,” Dengel explained. A history major, Dengel is currently working on a creative thesis with Susan Choi in addition to the academic thesis required by the history department.

Big-name professors aren’t the only thing that set Princeton’s creative writing program apart from those at peer institutions. Unlike most other universities, which offer creative writing primarily to graduate students working towards Master of Fine Arts degrees, the University’s program focuses on undergraduates.

Working solely with undergraduates “is a lot purer than working with [graduate] students who are more worried about career and success,” said program director and novelist Chang-rae Lee.

“[With undergraduates], it’s about the art,” he noted. “The discussions in [undergraduate] class are about the literature, the work and the text, rather than agents and publishers.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and professor C. K. Williams echoed Lee’s sentiment, saying he finds that teaching undergraduates allows him to focus more on writing itself, rather than the career that could be made from writing.

“Graduate students are more desperately ambitious,” Williams said, adding that undergraduates “are more open to hearing new things … that aren’t directly associated with publishing.”

Yet while publication is not the focus of the undergraduate seminars, some creative writing certificate students have gone on to successful literary careers. Noted graduates of the program include best-selling novelists Jonathan Safran Foer ’99, author of “Everything is Illuminated,” and Jodi Picoult ’87, who has written two novels that debuted as number one on The New York Times’ bestseller list.

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Given its success, it comes as no surprise that every semester more students apply for the workshops than there are spots available.

“[The application process] doesn’t seem to be that difficult,” Nicholson said. “I’ve never been rejected from one of the courses.” Dengel echoed that sentiment, noting that she found the application to be a “low-key process.”But David Mendelsohn ’12 said he thinks the selective nature of the courses is “creating elitism artificially.” Mendelsohn, who is finishing his second creative writing workshop, was rejected from the program his freshman fall, accepted freshman spring and waitlisted sophomore fall.“I feel like they’re using selectivity as a means to cull out who they think are the best writers … almost a measure of self-promotion,” he said, adding, “School is for students, not for prestige.”

Lee explained that it is “hard to present any kind of requirement or formula or successful features” of the students who are accepted to the seminars.

“We look for something within the sample that has intellectual spark, a feel for language, something that makes it stand out,” Lee explained, adding that the program offers 50 percent more workshops than it did five to seven years ago.

Still, Lee said, the program and its faculty “don’t want to encourage everybody” to take the advanced seminar or write creative theses.

“As faculty, we sit around and talk about applicants and talk about their work and decide if a thesis is appropriate for them … if it would serve a student well [to do] the senior thesis,” Lee explained. “Maybe they didn’t show the same level of in depth talent to make that sort of commitment … [or] maybe their time would be better served doing something else.”

Students who were successful in their thesis applications, however, said they enjoy a thesis writing experience completely different from those of their classmates who are pursuing academic or experimental theses.

“It’s definitely easier to write a creative thesis,” Dengel said. “The creative thesis is telling a story, and it’s more organic to me.”