Washington College: A Top-Tier Maryland Liberal Arts College

Opening Scene: The O'Neill Literary House

This old Victorian hosts the literary community at Washington College.

Why is the Rose O'Neill Literary House a mecca for student writers? Perhaps Colman McCarthy, writing in The Washington Post, explains it best:

"What keeps the creative energy at full flow is the Literary House, the campus hangout for writers. It is a dayspring, a place of refuge from the ups and downs where for a stretch it can be only the ups and ups needed to write well. The spacious house, a three-story bulk with too many rooms for anyone to bother counting, has a couple of roofline garrets where students can hole up to finish their final drafts and suffer in revisionary peace.

The backyard plays outdoor reading room in the warm Maryland weather.

In a back-wing printing room, letter-presses run off literary reviews, magazines, monographs and scrolls in such profusion that no one is counting. Does all this add up to an education? Let's hope not. It's much better than that. It adds up to a thirst for an education, which is the truest service a teacher or a school can provide. The faculty stokers of writing are showing that a small country college can excite students about filling up blank pages, which is where the hunt for truth begins."

- Colman McCarthy

The Setting: A House Where Writers Rule

Students often gather to chat on the Lit House deck.

A bottomless coffee pot and comfortable overstuffed furniture welcome student writers into the Lit House, where ideas are shared as freely as the oatmeal raisin cookies left over from last night's poetry reading. Students make themselves at home here—preparing dinners for visiting novelists, popping in to speak with a professor about a work in progress or to borrow a book, or gathering with friends to marvel over Mavis Gallant's short stories and argue whether poets who write freeform verse are stylistically lazy, all while editing, designing, and printing the latest edition of Broadsides, a series of student art, poetry and photography distributed on campus.

"The student in my office wants to be a writer. That's a problem. She already is a writer. She wants me to be her teacher. She might one day be a better writer than I am. What I have to do is figure out how to let her learn. I have to create what Henry Adams called an 'atmosphere of learning.'"

- Robert Day, The Zen of Teaching

The Plot: Students Publish and Write

Creative writing faculty and students share ideas at the Literary House.

At the O'Neill Literary House you will find encouragement and incentive to publish in many forms—readings and workshops with visiting writers and editors, late night coffee sessions with their peers, the Veryan Beacham Prize, the Sophie Kerr Prize, and a new challenge two Writers Union members dreamed up last year: The Rejection Slip Contest. It's a ploy to get you to submit your work to publishers.

Authors, poets, and other literary professionals work with students.

All the necessary tools for writing and publishing are here. Books, pens, and paper. Computers, the latest software, and laserprinters. And, oddly enough, antique letterpresses, cases of metal type, and cans of ink. You learn the history of the printed word almost by osmosis. In the the Literary House Pressroom, you can marbleize or stamp rag-rich paper for bookbinding by hand, or work as a printer's devil, handfeeding sheets of paper onto which images of poems appears. You can sample generously examples of good writing from the bookshelves in the Mary Wood Reading Room—novels, poetry, essays, literary criticism. In the computer workstations scattered around the sprawling house, you can write, revise, design, and print your work electronically.

The Plot Thickens: Students Write and Publish

Publishing on the Literary House Press.

In this creative environment, you'll see your work in print long before graduation. Students publish essays, poetry, and short stories in The Washington College Review. The Writers Union provides grants to student editors who want to publish their own "little" magazines, and supports the Broadside Series of Poetry, and the Poetry Postcard Series. Heartened by these literary successes, students launch their publishing careers off-campus in national magazines and undergraduate literary journals.

Washington College is the kind of place that can spark your creativity and help you find your place in the literary world after graduation. William C. Bowie '75, whose collection of poems, The Conservator's Song, won the 1992 Arkansas Poetry Award, was editor of the Washington College Review. Peter Turchi '82, published novelist and short story writer wrote the first draft of his published novel, The Girls Next Door, while at Washington College. Sue DePasquale '87, editor of The Johns Hopkins Magazine, got her start in magazines by launching The Collegian, a WC literary magazine. Mike Hammer '93, editor of the Plum Review literary magazine, wrote poetry on the Lit House porch. Whether you write sonnets or free verse, literary criticism or short stories, children's novels or hard news, the Lit House is a great place to start.

"Framed lecture posters cram the walls of the O'Neill Literary House and tell the story that this is the Carnegie Hall of literary readings. They've all been here: Porter, Styron, Morrison, Brodsky, Paley, Albee, Wilbur, Barth, Stafford, Ginsberg."

- Colman McCarthy, The Washington Post

And Last: Denouement

What can you expect of yourself after hanging out at the Literary House for four years? You'll undoubtedly be well-read, well-versed in writing, and well-prepared for grad school or a career in the literary arts. But more importantly, you'll be enlightened.

As Robert Day tells his new students "If you think you need to be something by the time you graduate, tell yourself you want to be enlightened. If you don't know what enlightened means (exactly), look it up (do that now to get in practice for those term papers). You might also want to keep the idea of enlightenment (or the 18th-century European philosophy of the same name) in mind: It's a good North Star for any student lost in a sea of academic requirements."

"As a student, lecturer and parent of four kids with bachelor's degrees, I've been around the higher education track—the south, the west, the Ivies, and the service academies. Among these institutions, the O'Neill Literary House at Washington College is unique. It is part learning laboratory, part coffee house debating society, but mainly a place where creative batteries are recharged and where 'the inarticulated premises' of young lives are constantly reexamined."

- Richard Harwood, The Washington Post

19 Good Reasons to Study Creative Writing

1. Freshman creative writing workshops for full college credit
2. Sophie Kerr four-year scholarships
3. The Washington College Review
4. The O'Neill Literary House center for student writers
5. Advanced seminars in creative writing for full college credit
6. The student Writers' Union
7. 24-hour Literary House coffee pot
8. The Broadsides poetry series
9. Visiting writers, including dozens of Pulitzer Prize winners and three Nobel
   Laureates in Literature
10. Workshops in letterpress printing and bookmaking
11. The Beacham Prize
12. Literary House Fellowship rooms
13. The Writers' Theatre
14. Counseling in graduate school placement and literary careers
15. Independent student literary magazines and underground newspapers
16. Work-study appointments at the Literary House and the Literary House Press
17. Student readings and colloquies
18. The Sophie Kerr Prize, the largest undergraduate literary prize in the world
19. Edith Wharton (the literary house cat)