Even though German is its tongue of choice, the history-rich splendor of a city like Berlin can fuel creativity in any language. And Maggie Zurawski, a graduate student in English, is Duke’s point person on helping students channel this inspiration into words.
Zurawski is a part of the German Department’s Summer in Berlin program, run in conjunction with Rutgers University. Last year, the English faculty also became involved, providing two English-language creative writing classes as a part of the Berlin curriculum.
The same two courses—a workshop in fiction led by Zurawski and a workshop in poetry led by Rutgers English professor Susan Miller—will be held again this summer, offering a rare opportunity for foreign language-challenged Duke undergrads to study in a non-English speaking country.
“You can go and do art history and creative writing,” Zurawski said of students with no German background. “And it’s good too because... almost half of the class [of five students] took German 1. They came for the creative writing, that was what brought them to Berlin, but then they decided to take German 1. So it did turn people onto this other culture.”
The decision to add fiction and poetry also served to transform the Berlin program from a language-focused experience into one more concerned with arts and culture. Zurawski was chosen as Duke’s representative due to a firm creative writing background, including a novel, The Bruise, published in 2008. There’s also her familiarity with German, a result of studying comparative literature as an undergraduate and living in Berlin from 1995 to 1997, during which she studied as a Fulbright scholar and taught English.
“I just really loved the city,” Zurawski said. “There’s a ton of art. It’s a really livable city and at the same time it’s extremely cosmopolitan. There’s just tons of art exhibits and all kinds of musicians. I saw some of the best American indie bands in Berlin—I saw a great Yo La Tengo show.”
Zurawski’s class feeds heavily on the metropolis itself. Her goal was to push students out of their comfort zone and make them explore the city, she said. By doing so, it forced her writers to use their surroundings as the raw material with which they could shape their fiction—something that Duke’s campus cannot provide.
“[Berlin] filtered into their creative process very quickly. I didn’t think it would in such a short period of time, but it did,” Zurawski said. “Which is actually really great, because when I taught creative writing on campus, I found that people write what they know, or what they see, so I would get a lot of frat boy stories, frat party stories.”
Both Duke students who participated in the fiction workshop—junior Alyssa Fung and senior Victoria Bright—spoke of similar experiences in which the city seeped into their writing. Fung came out of the summer with a story about an American girl who travels to Germany to investigate family history, drawing on both her established identity and the culture she became immersed in.
“I came out with my final piece—the main piece that I had been working on for the last couple of weeks of class—and Maggie helped me with that, polishing it and everything,” Fung said. “It ended up being about 25 pages, a little short story.”
Bright talked about the exercises Zurawski developed for the group, including a trip to Berlin’s famous zoo and one of her favorites: a piece about a 30-second experience, which allowed her to synthesize some personal observations with stories others had told her.
“It was fiction, but [Maggie] was OK with you bringing parts of your life into the story,” Bright said.
Aside from the city, the chance to study with Rutgers students in such an intimate setting—out of the fiction workshop’s five students, three were from the New Jersey university—had its own novelty.
“It was interesting to be exposed to different ways of thinking,” Bright said. “I think Duke attracts a certain type of student, and it was nice to be around others who were a little different than myself.”
Zurawski agreed that having the Rutgers students around broadened the class’ horizons, and she cited their previous experience in creative writing workshops as having positively informed the course. All three were interested in pursuing MFA programs in creative writing as postgraduates, providing a very different approach than that of Fung and Bright, who were both taking fiction for the first time.
These disparate elements—a foreign city, two different schools and a liberating academic freedom—led to a glowing evaluation from Zurawski.
“Susan and I shared an apartment in the same apartment complex as the students,” she said. “So there was this way that it almost felt like summer camp, where by the end I felt really close to my students. It was by far the best teaching experience I ever had.”
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