About Us
So, who is "Us"? Besides being dreamers and hopeless idealists, in our day jobs we are faculty and students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In the official language of the Academy, Ninth Letter is jointly sponsored by the Department of English and the School of Art and Design; it is an interdisciplinary collaborative project that attracts people interested in the intersection of written and visual culture.
Ninth Letter is truly collaborative; a chaotic, energizing, by-the-seat-of-our-pants labor of love made possible by a small group of devoted faculty and a slightly larger group of amazing students - graduate students and advanced undergrads. There are a lot of different opinions here, so there's always a little conflict and a lot of negotiation. But the end result is usually surprising and deeply satisfying.
The faculty anchor the project, but it's the students who really make it sing. Ninth Letter provides faculty an opportunity to combine their creative practice with their teaching. And students have an opportunity to contribute to a real world project that is seen by more than just teachers and classmates.
In order to remain fresh, this endeavor requires a constant influx of new energy and ideas. The Department of English offers an MFA in Creative Writing, and the School of Art+Design offers MFA degrees in both Design and Studio Arts. Students in these programs are at the core of Ninth Letter. We're looking for people who want to invent the future with us.
Ninth Letter is intended for an audience that desires both beauty and logic, entertainment and thought, feeling and analysis. Our intent is to incite multiple activities, but to also provide some order and organization to this rapidly expanding dataspace.
Ninth Letter leads a dual life as both a print publication and a web site. We reject the notion that literature is an isolated mode of expression, or that it is encountered only as words on a page. Instead, we recognize and seek the intersections of literature and visual culture, traditional forms and new technology.
With literary tradition as our jumping off point, ninthletter.com seeks to explore how art interfaces with the electronic terrain. We explore how the material world of print can intersect and interact with the virtual networked world. Our goal is to find and feature examples of the best electronic art currently being produced by web artist/authors, focusing explicitly on work that is not supported by, and cannot be backward engineered into older cultural forms. We introduce new artists, and seek to engage them and our audience in lively conversations about contemporary art, culture, and technology.
The new inscription technologies spawn narratives that fuse text and images with art, architecture and engineering. These new cultural objects will challenge, and ultimately alter, our vocabulary. What does it mean to be an author? An artist? To create, compose or read? What kinds of narrative structures do technologies encourage? Who is working in this realm? What are they doing? How do we judge quality and where can we find it? Ninthletter.com is our way of creatively engaging these questions.
Ninth Letter, the magazine, seeks to merge literature with various fields of creative and intellectual life, such as visual arts, journalistic arts, science, history, and cultural studies. We seek these intersections not only in the creative content we accept, but also in the overall design and form of the magazine itself. In this sense, we view the magazine as an organic work of art: the overall interaction among the components is as important as the discrete objects within the content. This approach necessarily forces us, within our pages, to ask and answer the question Why? In other words, we intend to undercut the recent tradition of so-called "clever" publications by raising the aesthetic choices within the content of the magazine itself. As a result, dialogue serves a central role, acting as a bridge between the disparate aspects of the magazine. Therefore, the magazine is not a mere container for discrete, isolated objects; rather, it generates - on all levels, from its written and its visual components - a full, cohesive conversation.
In a sense, we can think of the magazine as a stage where a play is performed. If the stage merely houses a series of plays - without lighting, costumes, sets, music - then the play always looks the same. But with lighting, costumes, sets, music, etc., put into the mix, the presentation becomes a resounding and diversified piece of art in itself; the script becomes a play. We intend to take full advantage of the possibilities of our stage.
MFA - Creative Writing - Department of English
Visit the Department of English, MFA in Creative Writing Home Page
The Masters of Fine Arts degree at the University of Illinois provides students with the opportunity for graduate study and professional training in the writing of fiction and poetry. It also trains writers to become teachers of writing, supplying them with the terminal degree appropriate for university teaching and gives them experience in literary editing and publishing. The MFA program is affiliated with an English Department routinely ranked among the highest in the nation. The department's creative writing faculty features several distinguished poets and fiction writers with national and international reputations, and the program's Carr Reading Series draws writers of the highest caliber to campus each fall and spring.
The primary goal of the MFA in Creative Writing is to give literary artists time and space to work on perfecting their art. Financial support, in the form of scholarships, fellowships, or teaching assistantships, is available to each student in the program.
MFA - School of Art and Design
The School of Art and Design offers programs leading to Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degrees in Art Education, Art History, Ceramics, Metals, Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Painting, Photography, and Sculpture. Courses in video, computer imaging, digital media, printing and book arts are also offered. For more information, visit www.art.uiuc.edu
Radio Interview Download
Interview with editors Jodee Stanley, Michael Moadonick, and Phillip Graham on WILL am 580.
Ninth Letter WILL Radio Interview 4:56 / .mp3 / 4.5 MB
