more articles that support my fantasy that irvine is the center of the universe we ve got the corner on electric cars fuel cells two types of nobel winning physics outside the box computer science and lot of creative writers uci s creative writing department has been in the news a lot over the course of the last decade some quotes from the article NUMBER in NUMBER newsweek called uci s fiction writing workshop the hottest writing program in the country now it s exponentially hotter thanks only in part to sebold s daring and uncannily timely novel the novel they are talking about is alice sebold s the lovely bones which is on the way to the top of the ny times best sellers list my uncle used to tease me about uci being a usc graduate from NUMBER that nobody knew who uc irvine was just two states over in fact i used to refer to uci as one of the lesser known uc schools and when i went off to college in NUMBER my relatives told everyone i was off to cal state irvine i took a class as an undergrad by one of the department s faculty called the art of writing fiction if there was ever any two classes that helped contributed to writing my dissertation it was that one which taught me how to get the writing flowing and my high school typing class which taught me how to type really fast one of the advantages they cite in the article is that they seem to take a chance on the not so sure bet but according to the article the number of uci graduates that have gone on to write best sellers and the handful that feed the film industry is creating a viscious cycle that lures more talent which creates the right writing ecosystem which churns out more success stories which lures more talent greg NUMBER URL URL 