Writing By Degrees

Through Eileen Murphy Buckley's 360-degree approach to teaching critical literacy, students investigate texts through a full spectrum of learning modalities, harnessing the excitement of performance, imitation, creative writing, and argument/debate activities to become more powerful thinkers, readers, and writers. Youth culture is rich with poetry, from song lyrics that teens read, listen to, and write, to poetry they perform through slams and open mics. The rich, compact language of poetry both inside and outside the classroom plays a valuable role in bridging the divide between youth culture and academic culture. Whether we call it "critical literacy" or just "making meaning," being able to read and analyze with precision and judgment empowers all students, not just in their academic courses but in everyday situations that require thoughtful evaluation and response. Through Eileen Murphy Buckley's 360-degree approach to teaching critical literacy, students investigate texts through a full spectrum of learning modalities, harnessing the excitement of performance, imitation, creative writing, and argument/debate activities to become more powerful thinkers, readers, and writers.

There are so many different graduate creative writing programs out there! How do I find the right one for me? Bringing together data from both Master's and doctoral creative writing programs and interviews with program applicants, students, and faculty, this is a complete practical guide to choosing a graduate creative writing program and putting together a successful application. The Insider's Guide to Graduate Degrees in Creative Writing answers frequently asked questions on such topics as: · Application prerequisites · Program sizes and durations · Funding · Acceptance rates · Cost of living · Program curricula and demographics · Workshopping techniques · Student-faculty ratios · Residency options · Postgraduate fellowship placement · Postgraduate job placement · Programs' reputations and histories The book also includes comprehensive and up-to-date hard data on the hundreds of terminal-degree graduate creative writing programs available throughout the US, UK, and internationally, making this an essential read for anyone planning to pursue a low- or full-residency graduate creative writing degree.

George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

Whether picture book or novel, fiction or nonfiction, writing for a young audience is about establishing a connection with the young people who read your work. To create that connection with your young readers, you need an understanding of the fundamental elements of a children's story and the craft of writing. This book will show you how to create stories that will inspire and educate young readers, and meet the needs of your publishers. From learning to find their own voice to finding markets within the many genres of youth writing, this book is invaluable. Loaded with illustrative samples and helpful worksheets, this book will show you how to transform ideas into stories that will delight, intrigue, and satisfy readers - and ultimately result in a manuscript that sells.

Offering essays that consider familiar and unfamiliar narratives from Bronte's Shirley to Myra Page's Moscow Yankee, from Mozart's Prague Symphony to Mungo Park's Travels in the Interior of Africa, Understanding Narrative exemplifies the range of work that this series seeks to promote. Students and scholars of British and American literature, film, and critical theory will find this volume a welcome addition to the series.

In The Program Era, Mark McGurl offers a fundamental reinterpretation of postwar American fiction, asserting that it can be properly understood only in relation to the rise of mass higher education and the creative writing program. McGurl asks both how the patronage of the university has reorganized American literature and—even more important—how the increasing intimacy of writing and schooling can be brought to bear on a reading of this literature. McGurl argues that far from occasioning a decline in the quality or interest of American writing, the rise of the creative writing program has instead generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O’Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison. Through transformative readings of these and many other writers, The Program Era becomes a meditation on systematic creativity—an idea that until recently would have seemed a contradiction in terms, but which in our time has become central to cultural production both within and beyond the university. An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we thought we knew, The Program Era will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come.

The "World" in Robert Lee Brewer's Solving the World's Problems is a slippery world ... where chaos always hovers near, where we are (and should be) "splashing around in dark puddles." And one feels a bit dizzy reading these poems because (while always clear, always full of meaning) they come at reality slantwise so that nothing is quite the same and the reader comes away with a new way of looking at the ordinary objects and events of life. The poems are brim-full of surprises and delights, twists in the language, double-meanings of words, leaps of thought and imagination, interesting line-breaks. There are love and relationship poems, dream poems, poems of life in the modern world. And always the sense (as he writes) of "pulling the world closer to me/leaves falling to the ground/ birds flying south." I read these once, twice with great enjoyment. I will go back to them often. -Patricia Fargnoli, former Poet Laureate of New Hampshire and author of Then, Something