Writing and Creative Writing

All Hampshire students are writers, as courses require substantial writing in many varied forms. Through workshop courses in fiction, literary journalism, and poetry that couple intensive writing with active reading, students practice elementary techniques, receiving detailed critiques from professors and peers. Our students discover and develop their own voices, and learn to read as writers. Our faculty also believe that each student's journey to writing is unique.

Students are encouraged to develop their curiosities, and to discover their own ways of telling stories, all the while paying close attention to others' voices. Our faculty also know the power of art to change lives. Today's dramatically changing world requires writers to be deft, informed thinkers whose vision is broad and clear.

Hampshire's robust writing culture extends across the curriculum, as students are invited to produce voiced, lyrical, vigorous writing in every discipline. Hampshire's committee system facilitates the cross-disciplinary faculty supervision of students exploring unexpected combinations of form and content: plays about mountain top removal, poems about atom bomb testing, novels exploring theoretical linguistics, and histories as narrative.

Student Project Titles

• The Book of Options: Short Stories about War and Women in Sri Lanka
• Milk: A Poetry Collection
• Encountering Israel and the Unknown Through Text and Image
• Fetus in Fetu: A Poetry Collection Inspired by the Lives of the Bunker Family
• Exploring the Early Testing of Nuclear Weapons Through Poetry
• Poems from the Ambulance Bay
• Stories and a Letter Forged by the Daughter Putting on her Scarf in the Masjid Parking Lot
• Set the Garden on Fire, Poetry Collection

Sample First-Year Course

Plate by Plate: A Poem's Tectonics

In this course, we will practice methods of reading and writing the poem. We will study the poem as a built and living body-structure whose parts (syntax, line, image, syllabics, etc.) work to shape the poem's scape and our experiences of it. This class will be both reading- and writing-intensive, as we will study poems and prose written by poets. Class members will write written responses to readings, and will produce poems based on a series of writing experiments designed to encourage a close consideration of the tectonics of the poem's words, lines, and body. In this class, we will follow the college workshop model (intensive peer critique) to develop and further develop our skills as poetry readers and practitioners. There are no prerequisites for this course, but students should be ready to engage deeply and wholeheartedly with their work and the work of other poets. Among our guides will be: Audre Lorde, Denise Levertov, Camille Paglia, Gwendolyn Brooks, W.H. Auden, William Carlos Williams, Cesar Vallejo, Anna Akhmatova (tr. Kunitz), and Robert Hayden.

Sample Courses at Hampshire

• Advanced Fiction Workshop
• Advanced Poetry Workshop
• The Axe and the Sewing Machine: Re-Membering (as Activism) in the Face of Dismemberment
• Camelot in Crisis: Writing About the Kennedy Era
• Feminist Fictions
• Freedom of Expression
• The Good Life: Reading and Writing About Pleasures
• High Spirits: Reading and Writing About Spiritual Experience
• Introduction to Writing
• Literary Journalism
• Mystery and Imagination: Fiction Workshop
• The Past Recaptured: Photographs, Facts and Fictions, 1890-1910
• Performance and Poetry
• Plate by Plate: A Poem's Tectonics
• Poetry of the "Political Imagination"
• Style and Sensibility: Strategies for Fiction Writers
• The Practice of Literary Journalism
• Who's Telling This Story: Point of View for Fiction Writers
• Writing World Families: making inclusive fiction
• Who's Telling This Story
• Writing About the Outdoors
• Writing a Child's Voice for Theatre
• Writing Fiction About Families
• Writing the Urban Experience
• Writing World War II

Through the Consortium

• Creative Writing Fiction (UMass)
• Creative Writing Poetry (UMass)
• Expository Writing (UMass)
• Fiction Writing I and II (AC)
• Screenwriting (AC)
• Short Story I (MHC)
• Writing Across Cultures (MHC)
• Writing Poetry I and II (AC)

Facilities and Resources

Writing Center
Hampshire campus has a Writing Center that is open to all students at the college. The center is available to help students with writing skills—from brainstorming to drafting cohesive paragraphs to writing a final paper. Students can use the center for one-time only assistance or on a regular basis. The Writing Center also offers classes and workshops in writing and writing skills.

Creative Writing Program
The Creative Writing Program maintains an alcove in Emily Dickinson Hall where students can swap books, post found poems as well as their own writing and announcements, and find the creative writing faculty. The Creative Writing Program hosts writers' coffeehouses at least once per semester, where students and faculty gather informally to talk about and hear each others' work.

Visiting Writer in Residence
The Visiting Writer in Residence Program brings to campus a working writer who meets with students and presents her work to the community. Past visiting writers have included Grace Paley, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Jennifer Tseng, and Marilyn Nelson.

Student Publications
​The Hampshire campus has many opportunities for students interested in writing for a larger audience, such as: The Climax (a student newspaper), The Omen (a student magazine), and The Reader (literary/photo magazine). The Pioneer Valley is also home to many media outlets at which Hampshire students have interned, including the local National Public Radio Affiliate, WFCR; The Advocate, a progressive weekly newspaper with a special interest in the arts; The Daily Republican, the Springfield newspaper; and The Hampshire Gazette, a local newspaper based in Northampton.

Writing Community
In addition, the Hampshire writing community is energized by students themselves, who organize readings and critiques of student work and actively share information about Valley events, contests, and calls for submissions. The Hampshire Slam Collective organizes trips to Boston and weekly open mics, and our nationally recognized slam team actively welcomes the participation of new students.

Throughout the year, the Five College consortium hosts a diverse and vibrant literary community. Students can attend readings, signings, and lectures by visiting and resident literary lights, such as Eleni Sikelianos, Patricia MackLachlan, Mart'n Espada, Wally Lamb, Mark Costello, and Aleida Rodriguez. The annual Five College Student Poetry Fest features outstanding poets from each of the schools, and the WORD! Festival offers a particular platform for student-written plays that take up questions of identity and diversity.

With the help of our alums, many of whom are professional, well-established writers and literary folk, many students participate in internships at magazines and journals, publishing houses, and literary agencies.