Making magic out of 26 letters
Writing is a solitary process, but Bret Johnston doesn’t believe it needs to be a lonely one. “Yes, you’re alone a lot of the time, but when you find that community where people care about the same things you care about, things many people in the world don’t care about as deeply as you, you feel as though you’re being welcomed home,” said Johnston, the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser Director of the Creative Writing Program and senior lecturer on English. That collective sense of creative vibrancy is why he believes the program has blossomed by nearly every measure. Led by Johnston, it now has a faculty of 11 with the most recent announcement of food and science writer Michael Pollan joining to teach nonfiction writing next fall. He joins recent hires Jill Abramson, who teaches journalism, and Paul Yoon and Laura van den Berg as Briggs-Copeland Lecturers. Two noteworthy gifts, the Gore...