This past week Duke announced a new minor in creative writing. The news spread with no great fanfare, and, excluding English majors, I doubt many students know about it. From what I can tell, it’s the first time Duke has ever marketed creative writing as something that warranted a credential.
Here’s my eight-word public service announcement: the minor is there if you want it.
Partly because of the newly offered minor and partly because I’m a senior beginning to make sense of my time here, I’ve spent much of this week thinking about what it has been like to be a poet at Duke. I didn’t come here in order to become a poet, and I’m not sure I would have chosen Duke had I known four years ago that I wanted to study poetry. To put it bluntly, other schools have more defined creative writing programs and have more vibrant undergraduate literary communities. At Duke, it’s rare for me to speak to people reading literature for fun outside of class or trying to publish their work. The creative writing workshops I’ve been in have often been populated by students with only a passing interest in writing. Often they’re in the classroom mostly to satisfy Trinity requirements.
That being said, I know that I’ve improved tremendously as a writer at this school, and there are ways in which to turn most of Duke’s weaknesses into advantages. I’m going to spend the rest of this editor’s note talking about those: the ways in which students can harness this school to become better writers, to build communities when they’re lacking and find the inspiration and dedication to write when we most need it.
When I came to Duke, I thought I was a terrible writer. I had gotten B’s in my English classes throughout high school. Writing was something that my other friends could do but that I didn’t seem capable of. But my Writing 20 professor liked the work I turned in for her and encouraged me to write. One day my freshman year, I remember having the urge to write a poem for the first time since 5th grade. I had just come upstairs after having picked out a book from the lowest level of Perkins. When I was down there, I was overcome by the sense that I was in a book graveyard, that real human beings had spent their lives writing books that were not being read and that these books were stuck in the innards of mechanical bookshelves. I sat down and wrote.
I submitted that poem to The Archive, Duke’s undergraduate literary magazine, and they published it. It wasn’t anything special as far as poems go, but I think that the seal of approval allowed me to think that poetry was something I could do. Without that affirmation, I doubt I’d be writing poetry today. If I had gone to a school with many more accomplished poets, I’d never have gotten it published. I might have been too intimidated to even submit it.
One of the best things about being a writer at Duke is that there is very little competition. The workshops with the superstar faculty poets and novelists have always had open spaces. Those same professors have always had time for me at their office hours. They’ll happily talk to me about their favorite contemporary writers. They’ve written me recommendations. They’ve sponsored my thesis. They’ve done all of this without much thought because there are very few people asking for their time.
There’s a small band of creative writers here, and many of them are hungry for other students to talk with, and, as a result, the few writing communities that exist tend to last. Because Duke wants to support writers and because Duke happens to have money to spend on visiting artists and lecturers, I’ve had opportunities to interact with famous authors I’d never otherwise meet. Colum McCann has bought rounds of Irish whiskey for me at the Joyce, and when it became obvious I wasn’t keeping up with him, he cut me off. I’ve introduced Amiri Baraka when he read here last year, and later spoke with him about the future of jazz and Caribbean poetry. Most of my inspiration to keep writing has come from talking to writers who have made it and who have shown me that good things can happen with some talent and a lot of dedication.
Every writer who is serious about writing has to read seriously. While at Duke, I’ve found that it was easiest for me to tell myself to read a book of poetry every single day and not go to sleep until I’d read one. That way, reading felt just as important as my homework did. Every so often I’d go to the Carpenter Reading Room in Bostock—that room where everyone works but nobody really uses the books on the shelves so that all of these major works in the history of literature sit there unused, seemingly only covers, like the books in Gatsby’s library—and I’d pick out a random book of poetry. I’m fairly confident I was the first one to read at least four or five of those books. The bookmarks had never been moved. The spines had never been cracked.
Of course, you can take as many literature classes, as many workshops as you want, but if you don’t have something that you care deeply about it’s almost impossible to write well in a place with so many different bids for your time. Becoming a poet is not like becoming an engineer or a chemist—at least not at Duke. You can’t learn poetry by taking lots of standardized creative writing courses. And the work that needs to be done can’t only happen inside a classroom. It’s something you won’t necessarily get by picking up a minor in creative writing, and no departmental program is going to fix that. But if you find professors to mentor you and students to read and write with you, you can create non-conventional spaces to grow as a writer at Duke.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.