Tim Brookes

Program Director: Professional Writing

Graduate school: M.A. (Oxon) from Pembroke College, Oxford

Priming America's next generation of writers

Tim Brookes is on a mission to take the mystery out of being a writer. To Professor Brookes, you don't have to be James Joyce to write a screenplay, a book review, or a travel piece. Nor do you need to be Ernest Hemingway to write feature magazine articles, creative non-fiction, or TV commercials. Yet, young writers often feel paralyzed by the writing process and the publishing world.

"Many students feel this huge stigma because they're not yet a published writer," Tim says, "but I've realized this is a mirage. There's plenty of writing that gets published that's appallingly mediocre. My students can write more interesting stuff. My job is to work with them so that getting published is no longer this albatross around their necks."

In the Professional Writing program, students do just that: they write feature articles for their favorite magazines, poems for poetry jams, letters to the editor, and essays to be read on public radio. "No writer knows from the beginning what his or her most congenial form of expression is," Tim says, "but we are going to expose you to a variety of genres. By the time you graduate, you will have a sense of who you are and will have discovered what you enjoy writing about. And most likely you'll already be published."

Graduate school: M.A. (Oxon) from Pembroke College, Oxford
Published in: Harper's, the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Outside, The Boston Globe, American History and some 50 other publications as well as a contributing essayist for National Public Radio

Books:
A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow: an American Hitchhiking Odyssey
Guitar: An American Life
The Driveway Diaries: A Dirt Road Almanac
Catching My Breath: An Asthmatic Explores His Illness
A Warning Shot: Influenza and the 2004 Flu Vaccine Shortage

TAGS: Profile, Professional Writing