Writing - Chair's Letter to Rising Second Years
Dear School of the Arts Admitted Students,
In this time of unparalleled anxiety and threat, it’s heartening to be able to write to you about the strength and resilience of the community you are about to join.
Our entire faculty of distinguished writers—poets, novelists, nonfiction writers, memoirists and short story creators—are no less committed to sharing their knowledge of their craft with you now than they would be in “normal” times. And no less eager to provide you with an array of courses designed to expand your literary imagination and ground you as writers, including the core workshops that we hope eventually to be in-person. Here is a link to the full Fall 2019 and Spring 2020 Course books for a sense of the curriculum’s diversity and richness.
Like every responsible large institution, we are first and foremost mindful of the safety and health of those who make up Columbia’s world—our students, our faculty and our staff—and whatever plans we make will of necessity reflect the medical realities that we learn about from Columbia’s team of eminent epidemiologists and pandemic researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health, with whom we are in constant contact. We have been working hard to develop a timeline for a plan that would permit bringing students and faculty together and look forward to being able to bring students together with each other as well so they can have the conversations in hallways and throughout the campus and in post-class meetings at neighborhood cafes that are such important elements in maintaining the bonds of an artistic community. At this point, we believe that the best chance for doing this will be afforded by beginning our academic year on Zoom and keeping to the normal September-to-May academic calendar, with the usual holidays and breaks observed. Of course we hope to move into in-person classes as soon as possible. Because of the nature of the pandemic, however, the true shape of the fall semester might not be revealed until the summer.
The important question I believe every student deserves a clear answer to is: In comparing our students’ experience of understandable irritation with Zoom classes with their degree of satisfaction with the actual content and over-all experience of a class, which sentiment prevailed by the end of the semester just concluded? Naturally, there were some students who just couldn’t stand the hours they had to spend staring at their computers, but for many of them, as well as most of my colleagues—and definitely for me—the answer overall was positive. Relationships were built, writing tics and quirks identified, literary likes and dislikes solidified, the importance of specificity was frequently discussed, and the capacity to be utterly absorbed by a word, a sentence, a page or a narrative eased the onslaughts of the day-to-day.
In the meantime, while we are continuing to watch epidemiological developments and await a sharp dip in the curve that registers the direness of the virus’s effect on our—and the world’s—population, we are planning for a summer-long series of online events that will feature faculty and student readings, colloquies, visiting writers as well as videos from our archive of past Creative Writing Lectures, Nonfiction Dialogues, poetry readings and symposia, and translation events, featuring eminent guest speakers. Past participants have included Maggie Nelson, John Ashbery, Orhan Pamuk, Tracy K. Smith, George Saunders, Jo Ann Beard, Jennifer Hayashida, Mary Jo Bang and Charles Yu. It’s our hope that the summer programming will serve as a kind of trailer for our exciting semester to come, and that your sense of the depth and range of what the Writing Program offers its students (not to mention the riches of the entire university, which will be available to you as electives) will only be confirmed by what you see.
I look forward to meeting you in the fall.
All best,
Lis Harris
Chair, Writing Program
Columbia University
School of the Arts
Dodge Hall 415
2960 Broadway
New York, N.Y. 10027