Creative Writing

You do not need to be an English major or minor to take creative writing courses. Both full-time students and working adults take Creative Writing courses. ENGL 265 is open to all students and ENGL 336 is open to all senior students.

To gain permission to enroll in any 400- and 500-level Creative Writing courses, you must submit a writing portfolio, the equivalent of an audition. Because of high demand for most of these courses (they average between 60 and 100 applications for 20 places), we require a portfolio, on average 25 to 40 pages of writing, typed and double-spaced. 

The material you submit in your portfolio should match the genre of the course you are applying to. Note: the highly competitive nature of admission to Creative Writing courses means that not all students get in. If you are not accepted when you first apply, we encourage you to try again another year, and to make an appointment with the Canadian Writer-in-Residence, who is available to provide feedback on your work.

Because you cannot register in portfolio admission courses until you receive permission from the department, you should register in a second-choice course if you are an undergraduate student.

In addition to reading carefully the specific details concerning portfolio submissions for individual courses, you should keep in mind the following general advice:

• Try to demonstrate as wide a range of your writing abilities as possible. For instance, in fiction a range of narrative possibilities (even if they are fragments) will demonstrate your abilities (a good descriptive scene, a good action scene, a good scene that employs dialogue) better than one or two “complete” short stories that might fail. With poetry, instead of submitting a portfolio of 20 rhymed-stanza “hurtin’” poems about a love relationship you had that turned sour, include poems on other subjects and in other formats. Variety in the form and content of your submission alerts the instructor to the breadth and depth of your engagement with writing to date.
• Your acceptance into the class (or not) is not necessarily an absolute judgment of your writing ability at this point. We receive many more portfolios than there are places in Creative Writing classes, and if you do not get into one class, you may get into another in another year, or you may gain admission to a class in another genre. If you are not accepted, please don’t be discouraged. Just keep writing (sign up for a Continuing Education Creative Writing class, if you can) and try again.
• The questions asked on portfolio submission forms regarding your background (previous writing courses taken, which recent literary titles you have read, etc.) have no right or wrong answers. They are intended to give the instructor a sense of what level of previous writing or reading experience the members of the class possess. This is useful information for the instructor in fine-tuning their course curriculum. 
• While our Creative Writing courses encourage diverse approaches to writing, these courses are instruction in literary writing. They are not courses in how to get published. They are about how to become a better writer, with respect to language, image, structure, form and all the other elements of poetry and fiction. These courses focus on the craft of writing well in a literary context.