The Creative Writing Program

The Creative Writing program

Literary writing has a long and distinguished history at Swarthmore College. Visiting writers on our faculty in the past have included poets W.H. Auden, Adrienne Rich, Ireland’s Brendan Kennelly, South African Denis Brutus, and Kofi Anyidoho of Ghana; and such novelists as Hilma Wolitzer, Elizabeth Benedict, and Jonathan Franzen.

The Creative Writing program has grown over the past forty years from single yearly workshops in fiction, poetry, and playwriting, to more comprehensive offerings – thirteen courses in the English Department, four in other college departments, and the possibility of Directed Creative Writing Projects pursued by advanced students under faculty guidance and offered regularly as a preparation in the Honors Program.

Courses that combine critical analysis with creative exercises

The literary expertise of our creative writing faculty permeates all of our creative writing workshops, and is especially evident in four specialized courses that combine critical analysis with creative exercises based in literary models. These courses are ideal for students with little prior experience in creative writing and are excellent  as well for experienced writers who wish to contextualize their creative work and hone their skills through focused exercises.

These courses are:

Grendel’s Workshop (009R) Taught by poet and Medievalist Craig Williamson—examines the ways writers throughout history have reclaimed and re-envisioned prior existing texts, from the use Shakespeare made of his sources, to John Gardner’s re-conception of Beowulf from the monster’s point of view in Grendel, and Tom Stoppard’s decentering of Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The course offers students the opportunity to devise their own poems and fictions based in culturally familiar materials. It is offered currently as a First Year Seminar.

Writing Nature (070G) Taught by poet, fiction writer, and Romanticist Betsy Bolton—draws both on the historical conventions of the Sublime and the more physically grounded depictions of the natural world in biological and ecological writing to introduce students to the skills supporting poetry and non-fiction prose, and to the skills that combine the visual and the verbal in digital pieces. 

Poetry and Fiction Workshops

The English Literature department offers intensive workshops in fiction and in poetry. These workshops engage students in exercises designed to develop an awareness of the multiplicitous narrative and lyric choices implicit in the writer’s craft. So more students will have the opportunity to participate, we permit individuals to take only one workshop in a single semester.

►  Playwriting is taught by the Theater department and screenwriting by Film and Media Studies.

Examples of recent Fiction and Poetry Workshops 

 Fiction and Poetry Workshop (070E) In this introduction to creative writing workshop, we will explore both fiction and poetry, through readings, discussions, guest lectures and, centrally, through workshops of original student work in both genres. In the first section of the class, we will delve into fiction, focusing on craft elements including dialogue, plot, character development, point of view, and more, and students will workshop original short stories or novel chapters. In the second section of the class, we will focus on poetry, exploring both various modes of formal poetry, and free verse, and students will workshop original poem sets. The final section of the class will be focused on hybrid forms that draw from both genres (novels in verse, prose poems, persona poems, etc.), and students’ final projects will draw from both genres, with an eye toward writing that both acknowledges and breaks down genre borders.

Fiction : Writing Fantasy and Other Worlds (070Q) This class will introduce students to the art and craft of writing fantastical worlds. We will engage in close readings of selected fantasy/Sci-Fi published texts by well-known writers such as Octavia Butler, Adam Johnson, N.K. Jemisin, James Tiptree, Jr., and many more. Students will be required to participate in class discussions and creative writing assignments, to be completed both in and outside of our class sessions. Students will also be required to workshop two full-length pieces of their own. Basic craft elements such as plot, setting, character development, dialogue, scenes, imagery, voice, figurative language, point of view, clarity of thought, and sociocultural significance of theme(s) will be discussed during workshops. But more importantly, the course will focus on intricate world building techniques (The Magic and Its Rules, The Goal/Quest and the Obstacle in Its Way, The Unique Inhabitants, Naming Names, Movement of Time & Age, and Defining the Landscape).

Fiction Workshop: Breaking the Egoic Trance (070I) We are wired - at least in some parts of our brains - to view ourselves as the center of the world; stuck in what some mindfulness teachers call “the egoic trance,” we see our pain as the most painful, our shame as the most shameful, our life and life-story as the most vivid, detailed, complicated and real. At some point, of course, or at many points, each of us recognizes the deep absurdity of such delusions, and yet, again and again, we are lulled back into the trance, both by internal mechanisms, and by a culture that hallows and sanctifies notions of hyper-individualism, capitalist accumulation, fixed national borders, private property, et cetera. How, then, can reading and writing fiction serve as path toward awakening, again and again, from the fiction of the separate Self? In this class, we will turn both to teachers of mindfulness and practitioners of fiction writing -Ruth Ozeki, Thich Nhat Hanh, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jalaluddin Rumi, Toni Morrison, Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Marilynne Robinson, Ram Dass, the Dalai Lama, George Saunders, Tara Brach, and more- to grapple with these questions, and will incorporate practices of mindfulness into our fiction writing and reading; the course will also center around workshopping one another’s fiction, in a method and manner that uplifts both mindfulness and self- and other-compassion, and seeks, in itself, to break the egoic trance.

Course offerings from other departments

A number of Swarthmore faculty in departments other than English Literature are also published writers, offering students models of the literary life throughout our curriculum. Students have the opportunity to take courses in children’s writing with Donna Jo Napoli (Ling 054), in literary translation with Sibelan Forrester (Litr 070R), and in playwriting with visiting faculty in the Theater department (Thea 006 and 016). With Educational Studies, we cross-list the community-based course Creative Writing Outreach (Engl 070L/ Educ 073), a course in teaching creative writing to elementary school students, taught by visiting instructor and poet Laynie Browne.

Our students have taken courses in writing at Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and the University of Pennsylvania, as well, including courses in screen-writing and in non-fiction prose.

Literary Community

The Department of English Literature is frequently able to bring poets and writers to campus to read their work, judge our student writing competitions, and talk with students about their strategies as writers. Typically we tie these readings to literary courses as well, to involve a larger audience. Visitors to the campus have included Nobel Prize winners, Poet Laureates, and novelists.

In addition to the William Plumer Potter Prizes in Fiction and the Lois Morrell and John Russell Hayes Prizes in Poetry, the department also awards the Morrell-Potter Summer Stipend in Creative Writing, which enables a particularly accomplished student writer, chosen by the writing faculty, to pursue an independent project in the summer between the junior and senior years.

Students interested in creative writing are encouraged to explore the Philadelphia literary scene; to participate in workshop readings, and contribute to campus literary magazines; to engage the Spoken Word movement through the student-run, nationally-affiliated, award-winning CUPSI group, OASIS; and to support each other as informed readers of each other’s writing.

​Swarthmore’s program in creative writing has grown substantially and matured significantly over the past forty years, and we anticipate that the next decade will be similarly distinguished. Many alumni of the College have achieved prominence as fiction writers and poets.  In recent years, Swarthmore graduates have pursued advanced degrees in writing at Brooklyn, Brown, Colorado, Columbia, Cornell, Iowa, Mississippi, Oregon, San Francisco State, Syracuse, Wisconsin, and other institutions. Our offerings in creative writing, founded in scholarship and dedicated to exploration, contribute vitally to Swarthmore’s vibrant program in English Literature, and offer interested students an intriguing supplement to the English major.