<p>Can someone tell me about or link me to somewhere that tells me about creative writing at Duke, please? Thanks!</p>
<p>The Distinction Program in Creative Writing
<a href=“http://english.duke.edu/ugrads/cwritprog.php[/url]”>http://english.duke.edu/ugrads/cwritprog.php</a></p>
<p>English Department Fall 2009
Creative Writing Courses</p>
<p>[Department</a> of English at Duke University](<a href=“http://english.duke.edu/ugrads/creativecourses.php]Department”>http://english.duke.edu/ugrads/creativecourses.php)</p>
<p>Dang man, thanks this has almost everything I needed!</p>
<p>Look at courses taught by this professor:</p>
<p>[Department</a> of English at Duke University](<a href=“Sorry, can't handle your request: https://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/English/faculty/ferraro]Department”>Thomas J. Ferraro, Frances Hill Fox Professor and Bass Fellow)</p>
<p>Singersmom; Why him? My D is taking a creative writing class next year at Duke.</p>
<p>He is a professor who engages with students. My D says he is the best professor she has ever had at Duke. She has been disappointed in the caliber of several of her professors. See this article:</p>
<p>Joo-Young Chang (T’10) was thinking about majoring in political science when a friend urged her to take a class in literary theory with Thomas Ferraro. “I was told he was eccentric, that I’d never have a professor like him,” Chang recalls. She took that class. Then another. Now, she’s majoring in English and considering graduate work in the field.</p>
<p>“I have to admit, the first few days were rather intimidating,” Chang says. “His was a new method I wasn’t used to. I was more used to ‘Themes in this book you should look over are A, B and C’ and I’d write down ‘A, B and C’ – that kind of thing.”</p>
<p>Ferraro, an English professor whose website describes him as “an aficionado of the great American stuff – Emily Dickinson, Edward Hopper, the Marx Brothers, and Nina Simone” – is not one to follow a generic teaching method. “It’s not a contract that I will merely teach a little,” Ferraro says. “I don’t tell them, ‘Here are some gems of knowledge and you give them back to me and we’ll pat each other on the back and agree not to get in each other’s faces.’”</p>
<p>Instead, he says, “I like to confront them, put them on the spot. I tell them, ‘If you have an idea I think is really generative, you don’t get praise for that idea, you get the next question.’”</p>
<p>Chang, an A.B. Duke Scholar from Korea, describes what it’s like to be on the other end of a close encounter with Ferraro. “When you answer a question, he’ll get really excited, come very close, and ask you another question, ask you to explain,” Chang says. “It makes you pursue the question more, instead of sitting back and feeling good, thinking, ‘Oh, I’m so smart.’ He makes us take the consequences of our ideas.”</p>
<p>Ferraro, a former winner of the Trinity College Distinguished Teaching Award, says he wants students to “own their own education.”</p>
<p>“Students love poker these days; they put on non-expressive faces and assume they’re going to score off their classmates. I say ‘You’re not! We’re going to make knowledge here, make art, make community,’” Ferraro says. “The students compartmentalize; I’m after heterogeneity and risk-taking and border crossing.”</p>
<p>Ferraro gives his students “a bill of rights,” with the first declaring his right to finish any sentence. “The second gives them the right to ask for an explanation of anything, which I promise to give by the end of the class session,” he says. “The third is they can ask me what I really think about something – and I’ll answer with full disclosure, though not necessarily in class.”</p>
<p>Chang says Ferraro’s high expectations motivate students, which prompts them to also expect a lot from Ferraro. “I feel comfortable going to his office and interrogating him about things we didn’t get to in class,” Chang says. “Sometimes I want to take it to other levels.”</p>
<p>Ferraro’s teaching philosophy is rooted in poetry; his method is Italianate. Ferraro, the author of “Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America,” says, “Gesture communicates. T.S. Eliot said, ‘Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.’ The idea of teaching is to create theatrical poetry that is mainly about ideas and the way ideas are generated and shaped, so that you ‘get it’ before you really understand it. And then,” he adds, “the ideas live in your bones.”</p>
<p>I talked to him at Blue Devil Days. He was very energetic and interesting. Seemed like he’d be a really good teacher.</p>
<p>Singersmom, where is that article from?</p>
<p>[Duke</a> University :: Student & Faculty Stories :: Professor of English Thomas J. Ferraro & Joo-Young Chang](<a href=“http://www.trinity.duke.edu/interactions/profile.php?id=4]Duke”>http://www.trinity.duke.edu/interactions/profile.php?id=4)</p>