Princeton's Creative Writing Problem?

During my last few years at Fort Dix Federal Correctional Institution the prison (begrudgingly from our perspective) began a college program run by Princeton University and  Mercer County Community College. Covid shut down the program. What I heard this past Summer from friends still institutionalized was the program remained comatose with them having little hope of resurrection. I took advantage of the program to take a couple of creative writing classes. My "Volonel Tom" came out of this clasd. So when I saw the link Gaslight, gatekeep: Creative writing at Princeton, I had to take a look.

Brittani Telfair writes for The Princetonian, the university's student newspaper and here writes of her experience with the school's crrative writing classes.

This has been my experience in most creative writing classrooms and extracurricular spaces on campus. There is a veneer of “wokeness” and inclusivity: the proud proclamation that everyone is welcome in the space, no matter their background. Yet underneath this veneer, there is continued exclusivity. The Program in Creative Writing still requires applications for all of its classes, including introductory ones, and most of the literary publications on campus require applications as well. There is also this stark white reality, both figuratively and often demographically: creative writing at Princeton is pretentious and centered on ways of writing that descend from Western “high art” traditions construed as objectively superior to all other forms.

And then she invokes Viet Thanh Nguyen whom I have  mentioned here and here and here. 

More telling than a soundbite from my own experience is the fact that the Creative Writing program still prides itself on its long history of exclusivity. It effectively operates as a zero sum game: students are in direct competition with each other for spots, and one student’s acceptance means another’s rejection. The application guidelines are vague, and the process as a whole is incredibly opaque. The Creative Writing program’s website cites the program’s “large impact,” but how much of an impact can it have when it excludes many who apply? When it dismisses “genre” writing, like science fiction, fantasy, and romance, despite their current cultural visibility and dominance? How many students feel unwelcome and uncomfortable in the department, if they’re able to enter the space at all?  

The pedagogy of the creative writing department comes from white, Western traditions. As novelist and professor Viet Thanh Nguyen writes, “As an institution, the workshop reproduces its ideology, which pretends that ‘Show, don’t tell’ is universal when it is, in fact, the expression of a particular population, the white majority, typically at least middle-class and often, but not exclusively, male.” (Links omitted.)

And out of such classes comes future Masters of Fine Arts out of which comes what seems to be the backbone of modern American literature. And it seems Princeton would ban Kurt Vonnegut and Cormac McCarthy and Colson Whitehead as acceptable examples of literature. 

I did not get such a feeling from our teachers, but we were a different class of people.

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12/6/21