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From fork-admin@xent.com  Mon Aug 26 22:38:56 2002

More articles that support my fantasy that Irvine is the
center of the universe.  We've got the corner on electric
cars, fuel cells, two types of Nobel winning physics,
outside the box computer science, and lot of creative writers.
UCI's creative writing department has been in the
news a lot over the course of the last decade.  Some
quotes from the article[1]:
"In 1992, Newsweek called UCI's fiction writing workshop
'the hottest writing program in the country.' Now it's
exponentially hotter, thanks only in part to Sebold's daring
and uncannily timely novel.
The novel they are talking about is Alice Sebold's "The
Lovely Bones" which is on the way to the top of the
NY Times best-sellers list.  My uncle used to tease me
about UCI (being a USC graduate from '54) that nobody
knew who UC Irvine was just two states over.  In fact,
I used to refer to UCI as one of the lesser known UC
schools, and when I went off to college in 1985, my
relatives told everyone I was off to Cal State Irvine.
I took a class as an undergrad by one of the department's
faculty called "the art of writing fiction".   If there
was ever any two classes that helped contributed to writing
my dissertation, it was that one which taught me how to
get the writing flowing and my high school typing class
which taught me how to type really fast.
One of the advantages they cite in the article is that they
seem to take a chance on the "not-so-sure" bet, but according
to the article, the number of UCI graduates that have gone on
to write best sellers and the handful that feed the film industry
is creating a viscious cycle that lures more talent which
creates the right writing ecosystem, which churns out more
success stories which lures more talent.
Greg
[1] http://www.ocregister.com/sitearchives/2002/8/25/news/uci00825cci1.shtml
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