The Creative Writing concentration enables writers to practice their art with the intelligence and skill that the study of literature from a writer's point of view instills. This concentration differs from the others in the Graduate Program in that students are selected for their talent and their dedication to the craft of writing. Faculty on the M.A. level, the Creative Writing faculty; on the Ph.D. level, the Graduate Program Committee make these judgments on the basis of manuscripts submitted by the applicants. The University of Hawai'i confers the degrees of Master of Arts with a concentration in Creative Writing out of the conviction that disciplined attention to writing produces good writing and good teachers of writing. The faculty is composed of writers who have published in different genres prose fiction, poetry, the essay, creative non-fiction, the novel and who range through science fiction, magical realism, autobiography, nature writing, sudden fiction, language poetry, and the new formalism.

Instruction is grounded in writing workshops or seminars which meet weekly and to which students bring poems, stories, essays for criticism by their teacher and their writing peers. The assumption underlying these workshops, begun at the University of Iowa in the late thirties the first program in creative writing at an American university is that writing benefits from the responses of other writers. Biographies, the letters of writers, anecdote, literary history tell us that Elizabethan sonneteers, for example, circulated their sonnets to other poets presumably not only for admiration but also for tough critique, that Hemingway sent his first drafts to Gertrude Stein: Emily Dickinson to fellow poet and editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?" Writers have always found someone similarly driven by the craft to show their work to before embarking on publication. The concentration in creative writing aims to provide apprentice writers such a community.

In addition to writing workshops, there are seminars in how to put a book together, in writing in Hawai'ian Creole English, in the techniques of writing. Such techniques might include surrealism, or a process such as moving from the blank page through the draft to the completed work, or in writing imaginatively about scientific subjects, the combined theory and practice of studying prosody and writing formal poems. Students of creative writing also take courses in literature and work individually with writers on the faculty in directed reading and writing tutorials. They are also encouraged to take into account both practically and theoretically the exceptional situation of writing in Hawai'i. If Hawai'i is the place farther from any land mass on earth, it is also a place where the difference of cultures is immediate and close. Out of such differences of language, ethnicity, race should come, as it is coming, extraordinary writing. And there are journals here Bamboo Ridge, Manoa, Hawai'i Review, Tinfish, Rainbird, Kaimana, Hawaii Pacific Review, Biography that our students are encouraged to read and submit work to. They are also urged to attend and to participate in the many readings, colloquia, and conferences, local, national, and international in our midst.

We require that our students write a thesis which is a book-length collection of their writing so revised and finely crafted that it is on the verge of publication. The writer who graduates from our program should be, in the words of Henry James, "one of the people on whom nothing is lost," one "with the power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that they are well on the way to knowing any particular corner of it."