University of Florida - MFA Creative Writing Posted on April 22nd
We are one of the oldest writing programs, begun in 1948 by Andrew Lytle, who later edited the Sewanee Review. Richard Adams, John Ciardi, Harry Crews, Robert Dana, James Dickey, Richard Eberhardt, Noy Holland, John Holman, Donald Justice, Maxine Kumin, Sam Michel, John Frederick Nims, Nancy Reisman, Josh Russell, Marjorie Sandor, Dave Smith, Stephen Spender, and Peter Taylor have taught here. We require an equal interest in writing and in reading literature. We don’t believe in any particular school of writing; we have no wish to foster or found one. Criticism in the writing workshop here attempts to fulfill the design of a poem or a story on its own terms.
Our aim is to cultivate good writers. When we are successful, you leave here capable of writing a better poem or story or novel than you might have written had you not come here. If we effect this bettering, we do so by admitting that the question “Can writing be taught?” is best answered “Yes and No.” Aspects of it can be taught, other aspects cannot.
A good writing program replaces the counseling that was once obtained privately between writers. Hemingway denigrated the idea of writing schools, but he had in Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound arguably the two best teaching editors in Western letters. Faulkner sought out Sherwood Anderson, Robert Lowell spent a summer with Allen Tate, and we have Famous Pairs: Coleridge and Wordsworth, Melville and Hawthorne, Eliot and Pound, Joyce and Beckett. The writing program is the modern equivalent of this kind of collaboration. But a good program also serves to connect its students to the world of publishing, something we work at informally and also through our annual Visiting Editors weekend. (Some of our students go on to work in publishing; graduates of our program include editors at such magazines as the New England Review, the New Yorker, and the Oxford American.)
We look for writers whose work is suited to the strengths and interests of our particular faculty. Often the students showing us workable potential are not the most accomplished writers in the applicant pool, and those who are most accomplished may not be so in ways that we can address. The students here are ambitious and modest. The atmosphere is comfortable, the workshops small (six to nine students). Students offer their writing in an atmosphere of rigor and respect, where they learn the difficult art of salubrious critique of evolving work. They learn from their fellows as much as from their teachers and take their literature seminars from one of the strongest graduate faculties in the country.
Department of English
4008 Turlington Hall
P.O. Box 117310
Gainesville, FL 32611-7310
P: (352) 392-6650
F: (352) 392-0860
