University of Arizona - Desert Yearbook (Tucson, AZ)

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The University of Arizona ' s Creative Writing Department served an important function on campus and in the surrounding community. Both the poetry and the fiction aspects of the field have impacted the public strongly in the past decade. It has also served in attracting famous authors of poetry and fiction to the university. Successful poetry and fiction readings by well- known authors are held, for the public, during the year. Poetry serves an important function in everyday life, said Jane Miller, a professor in the Creative Writing Department. There have always been poets, poetry has always existed and there will always be a place for it. Even some of the best fiction has been written in prose. Poetry has beauty and grace and it is and always has been free, she continued. Poetry, how- ever, is not as popular as fiction is with the stu- dents. Miller said. Works of fiction are often pub- licized more and receive the greater amount of attention from the average person. The Department of English has a variety of writing courses that teach undergraduates and those aspir- ing to an M.F.A. degree how to write for their particular area. Creative writing draws quite a few students, but the requirements for any area are strict, especially for those who intend to get the M.F.A. degree. Students must take fourteen to eighteen courses on the graduate level, in addition to writing a work of fiction or prose that is as long as a book. The courses are not easy, requiring each student to work his or her hardest, but the rewards last a lifetime, not only to those who struggled through the courses, but to those people whose lives were enrichened by that work. • Maria Altimirano t

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J rr; fl5 A=t?i-s ,».„ Producing Sounds and Sights of Tommorrow There are three different types of studetns who take a beginnning, intermediate and ad- vanced video production class. Professor Ter- ry Thure teaches both beginning and advanced classes and he says that in the time that he has been teaching there have been specific types of students he has taught. One type of student is the one who is interested in entering a field of television or news production. A second type of student is one who is interested in video art. And finally the third type of student uses the skills learned as a basis for going into business or other types of media art careers. Since the class is required for media arts majors they automatically learn what they should. They grasp the main idea of production techniques, Thure said. In the beginning half of the video production class the students learn how to draw a skeleton of their production and get a general idea of what they want to produce. They also learn how to put their production together and how to pro- Advances in technical and computer equipment have caused a lot of changes to take place in the department. But the department has been able to advance at pretty much the same pace. Thure said that there are workshops offered in the department that teach advanced study and report on the cur- rent events on production and management, film is also included. The changes, however have not dissuaded students from continuing their studies in Media Arts. • Maria Altamirano Media Arts 25

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CREATIVE WRITING 27