The Creative Writing MFA program emphasizes the workshop, integrating concentrated time for writing with craft seminars and individualized reading tutorials.
The backbone of our undergraduate creative writing curriculum is a progressive sequence of writing classes and workshops, including introductory, intermediate, and advanced courses in poetry and fiction. Additional course offerings may include literature for poets and fiction writers, advanced fiction and poetry seminars, and nonfiction workshops.
Explore Creative Writing Courses
The University of Oregon course catalog offers degree plans and a complete list of courses for the Creative Writing Program.
Featured Courses
CRWR 413 Lit for Poets: Contemporary British and Irish Poetry
This course explores contemporary British and Irish poetry. We share with poets in the British Isles a history of poems written in English, though theirs exists within a longer tradition. Our goal in the course will be to learn something about this allied body of literature and to read capaciously—as writers, seeking new models and strategies—a group of poets whose work may charge our own.
CRWR 330 Intermediate Poetry: Rhapsody & Restraint
Because of its music and brevity, lyric poetry is often regarded in terms of compression: weight is placed on each individual word in a line. But lyric poems are also feelingful, even lush. In this course we investigate poems that manifest a duality: a leaning toward radiant expression, ardent music; and a seemingly paradoxical insistence on restraint, subtlety, and the unsaid.
CRWR 407 Narrative Strategies for the Short Story
The story form is nimble. A variety of writers from different backgrounds and traditions have left their mark on the form. We cannot conduct an exhaustive study of the form in one term, but we can isolate many of the main techniques story writers have used in their craft. We will model close reading of fictional texts by established writers. Our goal is to learn to read as writers, which means we learn to read from the point of view of literary craft. To this end, we will establish and utilize a literary vocabulary that will help us describe what we are reading. We will then discuss how to use what we have observed in our own stories.