Creative Writing

 Checksheet

If writing is your talent, your hobby, or your passion, you can major in creative writing at Alderson-Broaddus College. On our peaceful and beautiful campus, you will find opportunities to develop your skills and talents in a warm and supportive atmosphere. You will find your own work encouraged and stimulated by lively interactions with other creative writing students and with our creative writing faculty, all of whom are themselves published writers and/or editors of creative work. You will study many kinds of writing (for all writing requires creativity), but you will focus especially on developing your skills in writing fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or drama, with an emphasis on the genre or genres you prefer. You will also learn to appreciate and better understand the work of great writers as you participate in the many literature courses that are part of our curriculum. And you will learn the fundamentals of correctness and rhetorical effectiveness-essentials to good writing of any kind-through course work in composition and advanced grammar. Your study of the creative process will also be enhanced by your choice of courses in art, music or theatre history or appreciation.

One of the most appealing features of the creative writing major at Alderson-Broaddus is the size of the program. We are small in numbers, and so students have regular opportunities for workshop sessions with other students in the creative writing class-which rarely includes more than ten students in a semester--and for individual mentoring by faculty members through independent writing projects. Students also work both with other students and with faculty through participation in A-B Writers, a group that meets regularly to hear and discuss original works and works-in-progress presented by participants. At Alderson-Broaddus, every creative writing student is viewed by faculty and other students as an individual with unique talents, and every student is helped and encouraged in accordance with those unique talents.

The creative writing program also offers valuable practical experiences in the publication of creative work through practicum and internship work with InFlux, a campus literary magazine that has been published annually at Alderson-Broaddus College since 1991. Students in the practicum serve on the editorial board of InFlux, reviewing and helping to select works for publication. Students enroll in the internship during the spring of their senior year and serve as editors or co-editors of InFlux, supervising the editorial board and making and implementing all decisions regarding content, format, design and production of InFlux.

The intense individualized creative work, the hands-on experience with publication, and the broad course work in literature and writing are ample preparation for graduate-level work in English, writing, or literature, or for continued education in professional schools, especially law school. But most of all, a major in creative writing at Alderson-Broaddus can provide a foundation for the life-long growth of your writing skills and creative talents.

For more information about the creative writing major, contact Professor Carol Del Col, Associate Professor of Literature & Writing/Chairperson, Division of Humanities, Ph. 304.457.6301.