“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” Joan Didion writes in “Why I Write.” James Baldwin suggests in an interview: “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.” This course, exclusively for first-year students, aims to help students cultivate their creative writing skills as tools for finding out what they think, for undertaking adventures in self-examination, and for confronting the complexities of language and of the world. Students will read the works of writers composing in various genres and styles, and practice their own writing in those genres and styles too, ranging across fictional short stories, poetry, and personal essays. They will also learn how to participate in the workshopping of their own and other students’ writing, and thereby develop their captivates for offering attention, constructive feedback, and generous counsel to other emerging writers.