So you decided to major in creative writing. After weighing the variables, the alternatives, the various pros (you get to listen to your own voice for four years) and cons (you have to listen to other people’s voices for four years), you decided that the best course of action would be to spend large amounts of your college career cramped in seclusion, hunched over one despised Word document or another, descending from your garret only to experience the world as a distant observer. Congratulations on your decision!

Yes, it’s a hard road the creative writing major walks, one that winds treacherously through deserts of inspiration, jungles of influence, and sprawling tundras of doubt. From time to time you might ask yourself what you’re doing on a road that displays such far-flung and seemingly incompatible geographic features. Perhaps this road is in New Zealand.

But like many things (exercising, eating odd sushi) the labor of writing has a way of looking better in retrospect. That’s especially true when the work stands up to all of your soaring, stratospheric, impossible expectations. In the pieces anthologized here—poems, translations, short stories, screenplay excerpts—Oberlin’s student authors are firing on all cylinders, bringing to bear four years of specialized instruction and, as the best writing always does, the breadth of their experience. There are child athletes, YouTube superstars, and ever-expanding mounds of fuzz. There are gorillas, trash collectors, and killers from both Kansas and Connecticut. Stopping in Nebraska and corresponding from Kenya, these pieces write their way through numerous forms and several languages. They’ll shake your legs.

John Cheever once said, “Art is triumph over chaos.” Dorothy Parker said, “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” Iggy Pop said, “La la la la la-la-la-la.” We’ll keep mum and allow this extraordinary work to speak for itself.

Credits:

• Designer: Harris Bard Lapiroff
• Prose Editor: Mack Gelber
• Poetry Editor: Rosemary Bateman
• Faculty Adviser: Chelsey Johnson

Thanks to: Sylvia Watanabe, Cary Foster, Ben Jones, the Oberlin Office of Communications, the Oberlin Creative Writing Department and all writers who contributed!