MFA Writing Program

If the 20th century is the "Program Era," due to the widespread effects of writing programs, how is 21st century writing unfolding?  A Writing Program located in an Art School offers different opportunities than those found in the more traditional habitat of an English department.  Not only do writers benefit from taking courses and collaborating with others in different métiers, the pedagogical ethos of art schools is different.

While no one would today teach the visual and performative arts as if Abstraction, Surrealism, Dada, Feminist Art, Fluxus, Body Art, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Post-Colonialism, and Deconstruction had never occurred, this is precisely what happens in many writing programs; it is as if writing had simply stopped developing a century ago.  But this is not the case.  New developments in global politics and trade, family structures, working patterns, and technology--from radios, trains and machine guns to antidepressants and contraceptives--have transformed our lives and have had deep impacts on writers, prompting a desire to put the new experiences into language and inducing a "revolution of the word."  But it is not just a matter of new writing techniques. New ways of thinking are also involved.  Much of the 20th century's best poetic work would not be possible without the conceptual framework of relativity, and many new fictional modes could not be conceived without new ideas about selfhood and identity.  For this reason the CalArts Writing Program fosters a critical awareness of modern literary history and its contexts, alongside a focus on students' own writing.

As a community, the Program sponsors actively engaged learning in a supportive environment where students feel free to explore new areas of both form and content and to engage in thoughtful dialogue with both faculty and their peers, to collectively discover how writing is changing, growing and mixing with other techniques in the 21st century.

For detailed program requirements and course descriptions, see the Writing Program Website.