URI English department offers new spin on summer courses

04/11/07 - In high school, summer school was for kids that failed a couple of classes and needed to get into gear in order to graduate. At the University of Rhode Island, participating in the 2007 summer program could mean a second chance, an opportunity to get ahead and a chance to get the real South County summer experience.

This year, some URI summer courses are offering a little bit more than in past years.

URI is offering more than 550 summer courses along with new residential accomodations. The English Department is also trying something new for the first summer session.

The department is hosting the Ocean State Summer Writing Conference on June 22 and 23, which will include workshops and discussions with professional writers from far and wide.

The conference is also intertwined with five classes being offered in the summer, including ENG 205 Creative Writing: Poetry, ENG 205 Creative Writing: Fiction, ENG 305 Advanced Creative Writing, ENG 499 Senior Seminar in Creative Writing and Publishing and ENG 601 Seminar in Creative Writing.

Three of the five courses will be offered as online courses. English Department Chairwoman Jean Walton explained that the conference will offer the chance for students enrolled in online courses to meet their instructors face-to-face, as well as learn from guest writers who have published a variety of different works.

"Our online summer courses are all at the undergraduate level, but as with the low residency [master of fine arts] programs, these students will also meet with their instructors in person for an intensive workshop situation at the conference," Walton said. "They will also, of course, get the opportunity to attend panels, round-table discussions, and readings with other writers - not only their instructors."

Though the English Department recently announced its plan to end English WebCT courses, the summer session will be the exception for now. Walton said summer WebCT courses might be a possibility in the future if the program is successful. The three creative writing courses fall in with more than 70 online courses being offered by the university during the summer.

The program is being modeled after similar programs where students can take a mixture of courses through e-mail, snail mail, or online delivery systems like WebCT, Walton said. Those courses are later combined with face-to-face workshops in the winter and during the summer.

"The reason we decided to run these creative writing courses online was that there is a wide spread precedent for studying creative writing through some form of distance learning mixed with face-to-face workshops," she said. "Many schools across the country have a low-residency MFA program in creative writing. If response to the conference is strong, we will do it again in subsequent summers, and will meanwhile be working on a plan for a low residency MFA program, or even a conventional MFA program."

The conference is also open to students who are not enrolled for the summer session, as well as writers and community members. If a student is on the fence about taking a creative writing course, Walton said this conference will give him or her a taste of what it's like.

"If students or even non-students are hesitant to enroll in a full-fledged creative writing course, instead, they can start by registering for this two-day conference, as well as one of the pre-conference workshops in which they may have a sample of their writing looked at by a professional," she said. "Aside from the formal panels, workshops, etc., there will also be an opportunity to just mix and mingle with professional writers of all genres, to hear them read, to

get signed copies of their books."

For those who will not be enrolling in the summer English courses, the fee for attending the conference is $65 for students and $100 for all others. The option of staying in a residence hall is available at $43 for a single and $60 for a double. The conference fees are covered by tuition costs for students taking summer creative writing courses.

The conference will host 28 writers, including several English and journalism professors from URI. Guests include Karen Brennan, a Pulitzer Prize nominee and professor of English at the University of Utah, and J.D. McClatchy, author of Hazmat and 10 opera libretti that have been produced at the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, the Los Angeles Opera, and several other companies.

The deadline to sign up for the first of three summer sessions is May 29. The first summer session officially begins on May 21.

For more information about the Ocean State Summer Writing Conference, visit http://www.uri.edu/artsci/eng/07_OSSummerWritingConference/index.html.

For more information on other summer courses, visit http://www.uri.edu/summer.