A New Chapter for Creative Writing Students

Every semester, hundreds of students at the College of William and Mary rank Intro to Creative Writing in their carts. Motivations vary; some genuinely want to improve as writers, while others just want to fulfill their ARTS proficiency. Whatever the reason, Intro to Creative Writing certainly seems to be one of the hardest-to-get courses at the College. Yet despite the popularity of its flagship course, the English Department’s Creative Writing Program currently only offers a minor. Thanks to demand from students and professors, this may soon change.

Director of the Creative Writing Program Brian Castleberry has been an advocate for offering a major since he arrived at the College 16 years ago.

“[The College] is one of the oldest liberal arts colleges, so it was strange to me when I first got here that there wasn’t a creative writing major here,” Castleberry said. “Of all places, this seemed like a place where that would happen, especially given that so many of our students are just incredibly driven and creative.”

At the moment, many students at the College who are interested in pursuing careers as writers choose to major in English. Indeed, the English department’s website has glowing testimonials from journalists, literary agents, and producers. However, Castleberry emphasized the difference between the two disciplines in his thought process behind offering a separate creative writing major.

“The fields share a lot, but they have this kind of dividing line where literature students love theory and argument and meaning, whereas creative writing students often are more interested in the craft, the techniques being used, and how they can learn from it as writers.”

Meghan Allmond ’26 experienced this gap between the two fields firsthand; she was initially an English minor, but switched to creative writing because of the greater freedom in literary focus it offered. She emphasized how the skills she has gained from her creative writing classes have translated to her government major.

“I think that [the creative writing minor] has allowed me to get a lot more creative and to broaden my horizon when thinking about mundane topics. Because I've had this experience where I've been able to broaden my horizon and broaden my thinking, I've been able to put more thought and push the limits of my government assignments.”

Allmond also mentioned how the workshop format of the College’s creative writing classes, which centers around discussion of student work, has helped her to become more adept at incorporating peer feedback.

“I truly do think that being able to articulate your words and articulate things about yourself and putting it onto a piece of paper is a huge life skill. And [in creative writing classes] you're reading in front of people, you’re workshopping with other people, and you're getting comfortable with respectful criticism. I think those skills are really important to any workplace that you’re going to.”

Virginia Cheung ’26 gave insight into some of the other benefits of taking creative writing. Many English classes tend to be focused on specific genres or writers, so voices from similar perspectives are often placed together. The comparative variety of voices one hears in creative writing workshops, both from classmates and from assigned readings, makes for a wider breadth of stories told.

“In CRWR465, we've been reading this memoir called Speak Okinawa... Even though I was dabbling as a Japanese studies minor. I'd never really heard about Okinawa's history at all. In fact, it's pretty much erased in Japan’s culture today as well. I feel like in this culture in creative writing, I've been learning a lot about important social justice issues and experiencing a lot of empathy.”

Cheung also expressed that the future major should require at least one course centered around the history of writing and how marginalized people have expressed their voices over time. The current English major requires at least one course that fulfills Constructions of Race, so there is a framework in place from which the Creative Writing Program could take inspiration.

“A lot of the beauty in creative writing readings is that they’re a lot more experimental and contemporary, and a lot more diverse in subject matter, who the writer is, and what the writer is writing about,” Cheung said. “If you’re reading about these things anyways, which I really hope every course reads about, then you kind of have to acknowledge it.”

In addition to professional skills and increased empathy, the study of creative writing also offers less quantifiable benefits. Jon Pineda is an associate professor of English and has been the intermittent head of the Creative Writing Department. Rather than tying creative writing to specific professional skills, Pineda offered a more poetic perspective regarding the value of the major.

“We, as writers, sometimes just have to be willing to situate ourselves in the temporal spaces of unknowing. It’s not easy, I know. That said, the world sometimes seems to be hellbent on reducing a great deal of our thinking into quantifiable efficiency. I can see how that is useful in some disciplines. I can also see how that inherently limits how we understand the complexity of humanity.”

Indeed, literature has long been a lens through which people understand each other. For most of human history, stories were passed down through recitations without ever being written down. While written stories existed as early as ancient Sumer, access to written material increased dramatically after the advent of the printing press. As literacy rates have grown around the world, reading has brought countless children and adults to greater understanding of the perspectives of others.

Despite its profound impact on the world, creative writing as an academic field has only arisen relatively recently. In his book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, Mark McGurl cited the temperamental gap between “scholars” and “writers” that was perceived by members of both fields up until World War II. While creative writing’s recognition as an academic discipline has had to overcome more barriers than other courses of study, it is certainly an established field today. According to McGurl, the number of creative writing programs in the United States has gone from 52 in 1975 to over 350 today.

To suit its relative newness, the current minor at the College is structured with a great amount of flexibility. Students must take two 300 or 400 level literature courses, and can fulfill the remaining credits needed with any offered creative writing courses. In addition to designing the major, the creative writing department has been considering how a larger department might allow for a change in the requirements for the minor.

“Originally, we were so kind of threadbare that the initial idea was ‘We better just let them take whichever classes so that we can guarantee they'll get to take the classes,’” Castleberry said. “One of the things we're working on now is to give the minor just a little more structure — to say something like ‘You have to take two of the 300-level genre courses’ — just to broaden your sense of things, and to learn from that other genre about the genre you want to work in.”

In her experience with the creative writing minor, Allmond found that taking mid-level courses in poetry and fiction allowed her to hone her writing skills outside of her creative non-fiction comfort zone.

“Taking fiction allowed me to have so much more appreciation for fiction writers, because that is really hard. I'm not that creative, but everybody else in my class was making these beautiful stories. And poetry allowed me to write about a situation that I had gone through in a way that was less intimidating to face.”

Cheung also commented that increased focus on multidisciplinary writing would improve the College’s current class offerings.

“Right now, you don’t really get to explore a lot of the multi-genre-ing. It’s very black and white. Some of the professors have been trying to experiment a little with this, where, like, you examine, like, what one aspect of the craft is actually doing, or like looking at a piece of creative writing and analyzing what it’s doing. But I would like more of that.”

It can be hard to pin down creative writing. Some people consider it a form of art that cannot be taught, whereas others view it as an academic pursuit with clear rules. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, and the mix of these two ideas is part of what makes creative writing uniquely enchanting both as a growing program at the College and as a broader field.

“We can study craft — and I strongly encourage those to do so — but there’s also something about the mystery of the writing process that brings each of us to the empty page,” Pineda said. “I suppose I’m just trying to take care that I don’t extinguish that in myself and in others.”