This year marks the 50th anniversary of Syracuse University’s creative writing program, known for its acceptance of just 12 students.

The Syracuse University creative writing program first unofficially started in 1891 in the Delta Upsilon house, where Stephen Crane wrote in his bedroom. Since then, the program has produced New York Times authors, National Book Award winners, published authors and poets, and has evolved into a highly competitive Master of Fine Arts program.

The three-year creative writing program receives about 650 applications a year and has a global pull, attracting a high volume of candidates from around the world, according to its website. Of these applicants, six are selected for fiction writing and another six for poetry, according to the website.

The application process contains all of the standard elements, but the decision is weighed most heavily on the writing sample, said Sarah Harwell, associate director of the program.

The professors sift through hundreds of individual pieces, usually more fiction than poetry, and wait to “fall in love,” Harwell said.

Harwell, an alumna of the poetry genre, described the creative writing program’s atmosphere as “intense” but “friendly.”

“I had the most fun I’ve ever had in my life,” she said.
The program provides a stipend for each of its students, allowing them to work “without the distractions of having to find a way to make a living,” said Christopher Kennedy, director of the program.

The program stresses the importance of developing the students as artists, instead of just poets or fiction writers, Kennedy said.

The small student community and the program’s financial support helps the creative writing program act as a support system for students taking on what can be a lonely and demanding profession, Harwell said.

“It’s so hard on your ego to be a writer,” Harwell said. “You have to want to sit in a room by yourself all day and face all the fear and insecurity and sadness when you’re not as good as you want to be.”

However, she said she has not seen students burn out, noting that they come to the program “with an intense need to write.”

A faculty composed of “talented writers who love to teach” helps aid this dedication, Kennedy said.

Kennedy credited the success of the program to the diversity of talent within the program’s faculty, allowing students to test out various approaches in their writing.

But the program does not focus on publication, Harwell said, since the faculty has seen cases of writers publishing “too early.”

“When writers publish too early, they tend to focus on what the publisher wants,” Harwell said. “We want them to be free to experiment, to try out different selves, so to speak.”

Published on November 15, 2012 at 1:50 am

Contact Natsumi: najisaka@syr.edu