Creative Writing

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Lee Clay Johnson, M.F.A., Program Director

The Writer’s Foundry MFA seeks to attract writers who dedicate themselves to excellence in all areas of literary life. Students are regarded as working artists, intent upon practicing the promise of their craft. Our basic assumption is that all acts of writing are creative, a product of imagination and thought.

We recognize that rhetorical principles and forms for fiction and creative non-fiction are often the same, and that it is not unusual for a student or a faculty member working on a project in one area to discover it really belongs in another. The Writer’s Foundry seeks to accommodate such discovery, with the same spirit that an author in a previous century might write a poem, a play, or a masque, while another writer might write a poem, a novel, or a personal essay.

We favor an environment and pedagogical approach whereby competency can refine itself. Our purpose is to build inspiration relying less on correction of error, and more on the discovery and discernment of strength that any human being demonstrates.

We seek to the develop a literary citizen of skill, able to move fluidly through the world of literature, and recognize the value of keeping the classroom small and select, as a foundry is not a factory.

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