Get wild! Make art!

College is hard.

There are problem sets to do. Stressful timed midterms to study and prepare for. Dry readings which are either, on average, from a millennium ago and translated from Latin, or scientific papers which read like this:

The human NLRP1 (hNLRP1) protein has an N-terminal (NT) pyrin domain (PYD) and a disordered region preceding the nucleotide-binding (NACHT), leucine-rich repeat (LRR), function-to-find (FIIND), and caspase activation and recruitment domains (CARDs). CARD8 has an NT disordered stretch of ∼160 amino acids followed by a similar FIIND-CARD region. The NLRP1 and CARD8 FIINDs undergo autoproteolysis between their ZU5 (ZO-1 and UNC5) and UPA (conserved in UNC5, PIDD, and ankyrin) subdomains, generating NT and C-terminal (CT) polypeptide chains…

via CellPress

And that’s not what college should be. So—as major declaration season rears its head for all sophomores—join us here in the Creative Writing major!

What are the benefits? The workload is light, and a lot less stressful than in other classes. There’s no pressure to get something precisely right or work through all the steps of a proof when you’re making something original and new. The readings, for another—why go through the trouble of puzzling through 13 acronyms and interminable jargon in one paragraph just to understand the premise of a paper, when you can have readings that go like this:

“Me, I didn’t have a choice. Like I said, it was below freezing. I was outside. And I was wearing boxers, a leather jacket, and a pair of pink Crocs sandals that barely fit me.”

via Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

But we only get such fun readings because the classes themselves are so interesting. There are the workshops, where you get the chance to see what everyone else is writing—but the real gems are the seminars, for the sheer variety they offer.

You can take a seminar on time travel, the ways in which writers structure the fourth dimension within their books; a seminar on the apocalypse, or more accurately on multiple kinds of an apocalypse, from the darkly comic to the tragic, and conclude the class by writing your own; a seminar on how to write funny, the rule of comedy and how you too can provoke laughter with just words on a page; or a seminar, newly offered this semester, of writing and worldbuilding in VR, in which you not only get to write neat speculative fiction but get a VR headset to check out for the semester as well.

In conclusion: join us. You’ll never regret it.

(yes, even in the job market. The jokes about creative writing majors are as old as time, but every business needs people who can write for them, whether it be ad copy or editorial. Knowing how to write well is a net boon everywhere.)

Hemingway’s typewriter via Wikimedia Commons