The Institute
for Human Communication (HCOM)
Creative
Writing & Social Action Program
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Program Description:
The Creative Writing and Social Action Program is a creative and applied arts and research program in Social Action Writing. Social action writing is a form of critical inquiry and an act of social responsibility. It is writing that witnesses, that breaks silences, that transforms lives.
The Program is housed within an interdisciplinary humanities Institute, rather than a traditional English department. Creative writing students learn in a program that brings together the study of culture, communication, creative expression, and community involvement -the first of its kind in the country. Students acquire the critical, creative, and cultural research tools necessary to write their worlds in poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and life stories. The Program is also trans-disciplinary. Students can study outside the Institute and integrate into their writing, the visual and performing arts, and/or, the sciences, technology. Students do service learning and collaborate with community partners. The emphasis here is on students responding to a public issue, and adding their voices to the local and global narratives.
At the center of the Program is the CSUMB vision to "serve
the diverse peoples of California, especially the working class,
historically under-served and low income populations." Students
learn to retrieve their stories and those of the communities
around them, or as poet Adrienne Rich says, to create "the
account of our lives":
"Our lives should and shall not be trivialized, caricatured, held cheap, or erased...This is the work I see for us now: to insist in our art on the depth and complexity of our lives, to keep on creating the account of our lives, in poems and in stories and scripts and essays and memoirs that are as rich and strange as we are ourselves. Never to bend toward or consent to be rewarded for trivializing ourselves, our people, or each other."
Adrienne Rich, from an interview in Points of Departure: International Writers on Writing and Politics, ed. David Montenegro, Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1990
Students receive a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Human Communication, with a Concentration in Creative Writing and Social Action.
Examples of Student work - Syllabi - Creative Writing Faculty -
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The Institute for Human Communication
California State University Monterey Bay