Master of Fine Arts in the field of Creative Writing in English

Semester 1
ENGL7507. Creative Foundations I: Macro Structure and History (9 credits)
This foundations course offers special focus on the intercultural histories and practices of creative discourse, structure and impact. Students will explore the macro fluid histories and structures of creativity and construction in genre and expectation. This macro course will include emphasis on the legacies of creative discourse and practice in English and monolingual contexts. Included will be the urgent history and contemporary architecture and structure for creativity in evolving and international frames and contexts.
Assessment: 100% Coursework, including group discussion seminars

ENGL7508. Creative Foundations II: Microscope on the Given and the Made (9 credits)
This course will offer a look into the micro scale of creativity, architectural sentences and discourse. Comparative creative practices and histories will be explored, whether working primarily in English, itself a daily and ever-changing amalgam of many languages and histories, or working as a multilingual writer through English language instruments at this moment in time. Students will also focus at a micro scale on what is called in creative studies the “given and the made,” a look into the balance of safety and risk that the field of creativity
depends upon deeply in any developing individual project or collective.
Assessment: 100% Coursework, including group discussion seminars

ENGL7514. The History of Practice (9 Credits)
This is a two-semester course. The History of Practice course, rooted in the history of and directed by the HKU Guild & HKU Black Box, foregrounds students’ own creativity, handson practice and production in the environment of an ongoing and successful project or programme: offering intense studies of creativity, communications, discourse and expertise for top production to artists, directors, app designers, and many more, already at work on creative content but ready for next steps of development, publication, competition and presentation.
The History of Practice course thus responds to a 21st century growing demand for every
individual to explore creativity and reinvent a first-rate profile for top competitive positions
and collaborative leadership, locally and internationally.

The History of Practice course brings together a 21st century interdisciplinary vision and design from around the world, offering students a contemporary and fertile environment of knowledge acquisition, skill-based experiential learning, and networking with potential colleagues and employers in their chosen field of creative communications and writing.

Further, as proven through the longstanding experiences at the HKU Black Box & Guild: top designers, writers, CEOs and professional leaders, across the boards, recognize the 21st century key of Creativity, including flexibility and interdisciplinary imagination, to their own
success stories.
Assessment: 100% coursework (graded on a distinction/pass/fail basis)

ENGL7996. Capstone Experience: The Classic and Experimental Writers’ Workshop and Advising (18 credits)
This is a two-semester course. This intensive workshop experience will offer 21st century creative writers, including monolingual and multilingual creative writers, a unique forum, a writer’s space at the HKU Black Box in which to discuss every week innovative and contemporary creative writing practices, rooted in close readings, literary legacy, and experimental innovation, in the kinship of fellow writers.

The classic workshop for creative writers will equally focus on excerpts from writers’ often multilingual work in new global contexts of emerging craft each week. Through close and guided revisions, the workshop will encourage insight and excellence in the fluid elements of craft, including questions of genre in intercultural contexts. This course includes advising on manuscripts, whether a novel, a play, CNF, a collection of stories, or screenplay while building a creative writer’s own professional profile in the age of the internet and social media. During this part of the course, therefore, students under individual supervision and workshop practice will write and edit multiple and guided drafts. The course offers professional guidance to creative writers, of different preferences and genres, in submitting to literary journals, agents, theatres, and publishers with a revised manuscript; disseminating a work of writing in the early stages of a writer’s career.

The original body of work of the Creative Thesis is the culmination for every creative writer in the course: a manuscript for submission after the close of the course for international circulation and potential publication. This capstone course, therefore, develops the essential skills and craft toward developing the Creative Writing Thesis, a primary and essential work representing the writer’s voice, and potentially a key calling card in the writer’s career: a major submission for potential publication after completion.
Assessment: 100% Coursework, including small group workshop

Semester 2
ENGL7509. Creative Life Stories: Narrating the Life Story of a Project, Person or Dream (9 credits)
In this course, students will study, and frame with increasing accuracy, their own creativesignatures of history, practice, and voice within their chosen field. In particular, students will focus on the history and practice of creatively “telling” the life story of a project, person, or dream that pertains to the Creative Thesis. In this course of creative “authorship,” whether creatively authoring a novel, a project, class materials, a film or presentation, students will learn how to cast creative light on what is otherwise left unseen and unfelt without their illumination. Students will study the discipline of creative impact in telling and constructing the life narrative, especially in relation to the creator’s own decisions for “what is at stake” on creative perspective. The course therefore can also pave the way, for exploring, generation to
generation, what constitutes an ‘experimental’ work, from both individual and intercultural perspectives.
Assessment: 100% Coursework, including group discussion seminars

ENGL7510. Workshopping Your Creative Vision (9 credits)
This studio course in the Black Box will open the frames of creative writing to wider and communal contexts of practice and reception. It will explore the many “built environments” of creative contexts: forging new communities and building excitement around staging powerful new creative perspectives on a growing creative thesis. In innovative and direct practice and study, students will be given opportunities communally to stage and share excerpts from their own developing work, guided in workshop by creative professionals. No matter what the project or genre, students will receive mentorship in-house at the Black Box Studio with creative professionals to help understand the totality of a writer’s creative invitation, integration, and “environment.”
Assessment: 100% Coursework, including small group practice

ENGL7511. Ritual, Habit and Creative Practice (6 credits)
Maya Angelou writes, “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Creative communications positions as foundational that any project, whether of writing, video, architecture, teaching materials or rhetorical presentation, needs a deep understanding and infusion of creative values, rooted in creative studies, to let it move its audience into an unforgettable and powerful emotional impact. Creative communications, after all, does not take for granted the beauty -- and thus, the urgent study and practice -- of connecting with those we do not know, across cultures and languages, ages and tastes, and even connecting better with those we do know well.

This course takes a special angle of connection, construction, and creative communications as an act of creative “happiness.” Happiness offers a 21st century field of inquiry; new interdisciplinary approaches are important for studying closely and at length how our creative projects become communicatively “memorable,” that is, of lasting and felt impact for our audiences.

This course will culminate in the production of a powerful and creative perspective in communications and narration for the life story of your own project or design, through small guided tutorial and workshop groups. Students will learn to build a higher register of “happiness” in audiences, across languages and cultures. This capstone course, therefore, will bring your own project new frames of creative communications and development, exploring questions of ideals, rituals, and play with regard to human relationships and societies. In the capstone process, students are invited to explore their personal vulnerability or resistance to certain “master plots” and conventions of their field, to challenge familiar and often unchallenged ideologies, and to become powerful players in their own acts of building and constructing creative communication that lasts through time.
Assessment: 100% Coursework, including small group workshop