Columbia Creative Writing Groups Join Forces

Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Nadine Gordimer, Orhan Pamuk—Columbia boasts an impressive history of student and faculty writers. Yet until the University instituted the Creative Writing major last year, the undergraduate share of that storied tradition was smaller than many writing enthusiasts would have liked.

In the last year, however, that pattern showed signs of change as many new or revitalized undergraduate groups and publications began to form close ties, laying the foundation for one of the most active and organized writing communities the University has seen in years.

Last fall, Nellie Bowles and Catherine Carberry, two CC ’10 residents of Potluck House majoring in comparative literature and society, instituted Thursday night workshops in their brownstone. They named it the Ugly Fish Salon.

Don’t let the capriciousness of the group’s name fool you—the Salon takes writing seriously, bringing together professors and students to share their work and participate in workshop-style critiques. When Bowles posted fliers in Hamilton last fall, a gaggle of students arrived for the first meeting.

Since workshops in the creative writing department are capped at 15 students, the Salon fills a need for communal activity among young writers on campus. “Kids clearly wanted it,” Bowles said, “and kids clearly need something like this.”

But it was not until the inception of monthly “lit nights” in the Postscrypt Art Gallery below St. Paul’s Chapel that the breadth of that desire became clear. “The editors of more or less every campus journal were there,” Bowles said. There is certainly no shortage of literary magazines on campus. Yet, as Bowles explained, the benefits of sharing one’s work in a group are invaluable. “After you write a poem or a story by yourself,” she said, “it’s hard to have a sense of completion with anything you do.”

That hunger for community has led a number of first-years who attended Salon meetings to create a new special interest community that will be called Writer’s House. Next year, eight aspiring writers will live on the second floor of Wein.

“As a writer, the idea of people who share a general outlook is both comforting and enlightening and exciting. It is turning what is commonly looked at as a profession into a shared lifestyle and a friend group,” said Jared Rosenfeld, CC ’12 and a future resident of Writer’s House.

Writer’s House aims both to provide a space in which writers can feel comfortable and to create a nexus for literary events. “The main goal is to bring together the disparate pockets of writing enthusiasts,” said Erica Weaver, CC ’12 and co-coordinator of Writer’s House.

Another player on the writing scene is Quarto, the creative writing department’s recently revitalized undergraduate magazine. Co-executive editor Casey Black, GS ’10, attended one Quarto meeting last fall and was “astonished that a literary magazine which has been around for 60 years was getting so little attention.”

He and Anastasia McLetchie, CC ’09, set up a series of events to promote Quarto, including a competitive reading judged by audience members whose winner (Dalton LaBarge, CC ’12) will be published in this semester’s issue. Of the magazine’s long-term goals, Black said, “We want Quarto to be a new and fresh look at what literature is.”

How does Quarto fit into the writing community promoted by Ugly Fish and Writer’s House? “We really sort of recognized that we were heading up three different groups with three different functions,” Black said. “We weren’t interested in infiltrating one another, but supporting each other’s roles, attending each other’s events, ultimately forming a community.”