Creative writing eliminates applications for intro courses

Fiction courses will still be assigned through an application process.

According to Susan Wheeler, director of the Program in Creative Writing, the policy change had been under consideration for some time.

“As a faculty, we had been tossing around for some time the idea of open enrollment along with more offerings as a way of the creative writing program’s responding to the increasing demand for courses, and to deepen the Lewis Center’s and the University’s commitment to putting the arts at the center of each student’s education at Princeton,” Wheeler said in an email.

Although the faculty were supportive of the original application process, which allowed them to “get a sense of the student’s past exposure to the particular genre and their level of endeavor, as well as an indication of their commitment,” they were “equally on board with giving this alternative a go,” Wheeler said.

Representatives of the program hope the change will open up creative writing courses to students who may have originally been daunted by the application or deterred by their relative inexperience, she said.

“Applicants will not need to have written poems or screenplays, or to have done literary translation, in order to take classes," Wheeler explained. "Since we are offering additional workshops, and students will be able to add the classes until the registrar’s last deadline, more students will have the opportunity to take the courses."

Professor C.K. Williams said he is a strong proponent of the retraction of the application process.

“I don’t think the application process ever had any advantage. It was [a policy] that was inherited and continued and I’m not sorry to see it go,” Williams said.

Professor Paul Muldoon said in an email that the removal of the application will resolve one noticeable ongoing problem. “We think this will solve a problem we've had with students applying for classes with writing samples, being accepted and then not taking the class," he said. "It makes judging class size very difficult."

Although class size may become more uniform, Wheeler said she believes that diversity and competency within the classroom will not change.

“We are confident that the workshops will continue to draw a diverse [group] — in the sense of stylistically and disciplinarily as well as in terms of gender and sexual orientation, race and economic background," she said. "Some of our most promising students have been from the sciences and the social sciences and, as demand for our courses grows, we want to offer as many students as possible an opportunity to try their hand at a sestina.”

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Holding to the idea that beginning workshops should be designed for beginners, the curriculum of each course may be modified by professors as they see fit.

“Princeton’s creative writing faculty may be the strongest group of teaching writers of any undergraduate creative writing program in this country, and each has a lot of latitude in structuring a syllabus and a workshop,” Wheeler said. “One may choose to use more time at the outset, for example, on how to differentiate a poem from merely descriptive or evocative sentences, lineated or not, and another may afford more time to in-class exercises and reading.”

Students with prior experience in the creative writing program had mixed reactions to the change.

“[An application] shouldn’t be imperative,” Rafael Abrahams ’13, who is currently in an introduction to fiction workshop, said. “Anyone who wants to learn how to write should be able to.”

Yet Ricky Silberman ’13, who is currently taking his second course in the department, said a potential conflict could arise from the change if excessive interest in the open program were to shut out genuinely talented students.

“Now maybe it will be harder for the students who would have gotten in by application to get into the class, since now it's open to a much larger group,” Silberman said in an email.

If the change is successful, Wheeler added, fiction courses may soon follow suit.

“We’re testing the waters with these classes and, if it works as well as we hope, will consider adding beginning fiction next year,” Wheeler said.