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Creative Writing: Creative Writing

Resources for Creative Writing students or prospective Creative Writing students. Includes library resources, information about literary magazines, and information about the Creative Writing department.

Creative Writing LibGuide

Hello! Welcome to the Creative Writing LibGuide! This resource is designed to provide you with extra reading material, resources, and information about the Creative Writing major. 

How to Choose a Genre

In ENGL 201, you explore the three major genres: poetry, creative nonfiction and fiction. The way the class is structured, you are required to read extensively in each subject, and then write in one of the genres. But how do you choose between prose and poetry? It helps to identify each genre to understand the expectations of prose and poetry, even though occasionally the genres lapse. Below is an interactive Twine that allows you to explore samples of genre, as well as learning more about them. Check it out!

 

Publishing

SUNY Geneseo doesn't have a publishing track within the English department, but it does have the print and online literary magazine, Gandy Dancer. ENGL 426/428 is a class for people interested in the process of editing and publishing or for writers looking to get insight on the publishing aspect of writing. Professor Rachel Hall is the faculty advisor for the lit mag, but students are responsible for choosing prose/poetry submissions, laying out the magazine, and choosing art to compliment the stories and cover. Students receive a copy of the issue they created at the end of the semester. Allison Brown, Digital Publishing Services Manager at Milne, is responsible for teaching students InDesign and Wordpress and helps students with the layout of the magazine. For more information, talk to Professor Rachel Hall!
 

Outside Sources

The resources listed here are not available at Milne, but might be available through IDS (free with your Geneseo account) or at Wadsworth Library.

  • The Portable Poetry Workshop by Nigel McLoughlin
  • The Writer's Eye: Observation and Inspiration for Creative Writers by Amy E. Weldon
  • Brevity: A Journal of Concise Creative Nonfiction: www.brevitymag.com
  • Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
  • The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo
  • How Dare We! Write: A Multicultural Creative Writing Discourse by Sherry Quan Lee
  • A Stranger's Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Creative Writing by David Mura
  • De-Canon's list of texts written by writers of color discussing craft & De-Canon's 2007 survey of full-time faculty of color at graduate creative writing programs in the U.S.  
  • Wendy Bishop's Released Into Language and Katharine Haake's What Our Speech Disrupts for important late 20th and early 21st century examples of how some of the workshop-oriented commonplaces began to be challenged. There's a PDF of the Haake book available online.
  •  Journal of Creative Writing Studies, which is online and open-access
  • The CRWR-OPPS email list
  • Clayton Eshleman's craft book, Novices: A Study of Poetic Apprenticeship & Tony Hoagland's The Art of Voice
  • The Graywolf "Art of" series & the University of Michigan's Press Poets on Poetry series
  • The Creative Writing Studies Organization website: https://creativewritingstudies.com/
  • Teaching the Art of Poetry by Baron Wormser and David Cappella
  • The Practice of Creative Writing by Heather Sellers
  • The Making of a Story by Alice LaPlante
  • Creating Short Fiction by Damon Knight
  • The Story and the Situation by Vivian Gornick

​The websites below are also great tools for writers!

 

Technology for Writers

Creative Writing Resources

KnightScholar Services, Repository, and Digital Collections

Fraser Hall Library is the home of KnightScholar Services, which encourages the creation, access, curation, and preservation of scholarly, creative, and cultural works produced by the SUNY Geneseo community.

IDS Project logo

Fraser Hall Library is the home of the award winning IDS Project, a collaboration of over 100 libraries supporting and enhancing resource sharing.