Welcome ...

to the De Anza Creative Writing Program! 

On these webpages, you will find information about courses, instructors, campus events and the Red Wheelbarrow, our acclaimed literary magazine. 

Here is the Red Wheelbarrow Student Edition web page right here.  Read the current edition!

You will also find resources for writers, including writing prompts, instructional tools and a list of places you can submit your work.

And you will find plenty to read, in our multicultural poetry archive


A Manifesto

The Study of Literature and Creative Writing

 ... in the Composition and Rhetoric Environment

WHY CREATIVE WRITING AT THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE?

by Ken Weisner/ De Anza Community College

  • Creative writing is a conduit for passionate social and cultural constituencies
  • Voice is a wellspring of cultural power, and diversity is made most vivid through empowered voices
  • Creative writing is at the core of most activist movements, especially movements of resistance
  • Imagination is central to compassion and is kin to all worthwhile thought
  • Students and teachers of writing at the community college level may accept the need for institutional and societal emphasis on composition and rhetoric but resist dualistic thinking that would chop our poetry from our essays, our fiction from our non-fiction, our imaginative performances from our reasoned ones, or our love of the frontiers of language & voice from our more traditional academic performances.
  • Vivid, sensory detail & concrete particulars—championed in creative writing classes—also fuel powerful persuasive prose
  • Unchallenged linguistic norms & worn out expressions are at war with truth and freedom
  • All writing and thinking is “creative”
  • In creative writing, we confront ourselves: this is the essence of critical thinking
  • Creative writing means freedom—to express and explore any feeling, word, or idea
  • Creative writing allows students to address, explore, or even heal personal and sociocultural oppressions
  • Just as dreaming is essential to a stable waking life, so creative writing and the other creative arts are essential to individual and institutional health, the margins teeming with life
  • Creative writing enriches academic and multicultural community

Comments? Email Ken Weisner at weisnerken@deanza.edu 

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