We offer a degree that requires an equal interest in writing and in literature, and assume that the intelligent embrace of one will invite intelligent appraisal of the other. The writers in our program come from many states and write in a variety of styles. We don't believe in any particular school of writing and have no wish to foster or found one. Criticism should attempt to fulfill the design of a poem or story on its own terms, not force all writing into the same set of aesthetic commonplaces. Writers are often viewed with suspicion by critics, and it is only fair that they sometimes peer suspiciously back.
Writers produce the art that critics wrangle over.
Randall Jarrell once attended a conference where critics were discussing Wordsworth. In the last decade the department has attracted one of the strongest graduate faculties in the country. It offers courses, from Beowulf to deconstruction, that encourage the necessary exercise of a writer's critical skill. What skill is most finely demanded in the workshop, where the writer offers work in an atmosphere of rigor and respect, criticism and sympathy. Writers learn as much from their fellows as they do from their teachers.