The Ashland University Creative Writing major emphasizes the development of creative writing from a grounding in craft and from a study of literary genre and historical periods of literature.
The major begins with English 201: Introduction to Creative Writing. This course introduces students to a variety of poetic forms (the villanelle, the ghazal, the pantoum) and meters (blank verse, tetrameter, trimeter, dimeter), and more broadly to various strategies of organizing poems aesthetically through the repetition and variation of images, musical senses of meter, concepts, words, phrases, and other effects. It introduces students to various prose techniques, including point of view, narration, description, and dialogue. In both poetry and prose, students study examples of forms and writing techniques in the work of published writers, then attempt to shape their own writing through the use of those same forms/techniques.
English 201 is foundational for all other courses that follow in the Creative Writing sequence. Students are then required to take the following: at least three writing workshops, one each in poetry, prose and drama (any of which can be taken a second time for additional elective credit); three genre-specific courses (The Poem, The Essay, Modern Drama, The Novel, The Short Story), and four 400-level literature courses (all organized by historical period). In addition, creative writing majors are required to take a junior-level seminar, Problems in Creative Writing, in which they read and write in response to a discussion of the aesthetic development of select contemporary authors.
Finally, Creative Writing majors are required to take a senior-level, capstone course, Editing One's Own Writing, in which students work toward a polished series of stories or essays, the completion of a chapbook of poems, or the completion of one longer, or a series of shorter plays. Students include in these senior projects any earlier work that seems (in revised form) appropriate for the collection. Some students also write new work deemed necessary to complete the collection. Through a series of poems, stories, essays or plays, the attempt, on the part of creative writing seniors, is to sustain a sense of aesthetic relationship-or unity-in a larger body of work.