Creative Writing Program Outcomes

Students in the Chatham MFA program will:

• Develop and hone skills in writing, editing, and revision in the student’s primary literary genre.
• Recognize and write within the literary genres of nature, environmental, or travel writing.
• Develop a nuanced sense of place and the ways in which place is important to the student’s work.
• Demonstrate a good reading knowledge of modern and contemporary literature and how the student’s own work fits within a literary tradition.
• Analyze and write with care about literary texts of considerable difficulty.
• Recognize critical positions and literary arguments, including the student’s own critical and aesthetic position.
• Demonstrate the ability to read and respond thoughtfully and critically to work by other MFA students.
• Demonstrate knowledge of how to effectively perform in both online classroom and residential workshop settings.
• Demonstrate understanding of the theory and practice of literary publishing, including the practice of submitting work to literary journals and/or to quality trade book publishers.
• Cultivate a professional identity in terms of self-presentation in both written and oral forms to include reading their work aloud at public venues, interviewing other writers, attending outside readings, writing book reviews, and organizing literary events.
• Write a polished creative manuscript of marketable quality and to publically present (orally) and excerpt from it.