The Kidd Tutorial

A yearlong course for undergraduates in creative writing,
intellectual inquiry, and craft-based research

Join like-minded peers in a learning community with the shared mission of deepening your intellectual lives and developing yourselves as literary artists over an entire year. Nowhere else on campus do undergraduate students receive the sustained and close attention to their creative writing that the Kidd Tutorial offers.

Each Kidd Tutorial section matches one graduate tutor—a poet or fiction writer—with at least four and no more than seven undergraduates who have identified a primary focus of poetry or fiction. In the belief that writers must explore and experiment in order to learn their craft and become better writers, all students study and write poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction.  The focus in each section is on literary work, rather than plot-driven or mainstream genre work.

Course Components

  • Workshops: Students are encouraged and challenged in their writing all year long. The Kidd Tutorial is not solely a workshop course, although workshops are a component throughout the year. Students generate work in all three genres— doing assigned exercises and their own writing— and, of course, respond to their peers’ writing.
  • Reading: Reading critically as a writer is an essential life-long skill for all writers. Just as a musician studies other musicians and visual artists study other visual artists, writers examine closely how authors have put together a story or poem or essay, what craft choices they have made and why and to what effect. Students in the Kidd Tutorial Program read widely and deeply throughout the year from the Kidd Core Texts, as well as from texts their tutor may assign, and they respond, both through reading logs and class discussion, with a rigorous and analytical mind.
  • Inquiry and Research: The process of inquiry—a close examination of a matter in a search for information and truth—is a cornerstone of the Kidd Tutorial. Asking questions, analyzing, probing, digging deeper into texts—both published and self-generated—is how writers identify and clarify issues (both thematic and craft-driven) at stake in their own work; this is what Kidd Tutorial students do throughout the year. Students submit a proposal in the fall that describes their concerns and creative preoccupations and the readings they will study to extend and investigate those concerns. Winter term focuses on reading and research and in the Spring, students present their findings to their peers and write a 15-20 page "Summary of Findings" paper that is both scholarly and craft-driven.
  • Final Creative Project: Completion of the Kidd Tutorial culminates in a significant body of work, the equivalent of an undergraduate thesis, consisting of 15-20 poems, 5-6 short stories or essays in creative nonfiction, or a novella. Many Kidd Tutorial students go on to take Advanced Workshops in their genre with University of Oregon Creative Writing faculty, in preparation to apply for graduate study.

Information for Prospective Students

The Kidd Tutorials’ twelve credit hours (4 credits per term) count toward a student’s degree as elective credits; if you are interested in the Kidd Tutorial, make sure you don’t use up all your electives prior to applying to The Kidd. For English majors, the first two Kidd courses (CRWR 417, 418) will fulfill English major upper-division elective credits; the third term (CRWR 419) may be accepted to fulfill one of the other requirements (perhaps “1789 to the present,” or a gender or race/ethnicity category). English majors should check with Professor William Rossi, Director of Undergraduate Studies, about this possibility.

Kidd Tutorial sections meet on Mondays and Wednesdays from 2:00-3:50 p.m. (all three terms).

History of the Kidd Tutorial

In 1991, with an endowment of over one million dollars from Walter and Nancy Kidd, Garrett Hongo (then Director of the Creative Writing Program) proposed creation of the Kidd Tutorials. The proposal modeled the program on the Watts Writers' Workshop in Los Angeles, the Watson Foundation of Rhode Island, the Hopwood Lecture and Contests at the University of Michigan, and the Harvard Tutorials. A pilot program was begun that same year.

The Watts Writers' Workshop was created through federal funding and by community leaders in Watts following the riots of 1965. Community leaders proposed the workshops as a way for the community to rebuild itself, and as an avenue to enhance and promote cultural life, raise morale, and provide education. The Workshop did a great deal for an emerging black literary consciousness and community and helped build the beginning of a tradition for young black artists. This kind of community as well as the focus and intensive scholarship that characterizes the Harvard Tutorials continues to inspire the Kidd Tutorials here at the University of Oregon.