In the face of student and faculty frustration with the high selectivity of the English Department’s creative thesis program, Department Chair James Engell has requested another full-time faculty position charged with teaching and advising creative writers.

Engell’s proposal would give his department a sixth Briggs-Copeland lectureship—a five-year appointment for professional writers that requires them to teach two creative writing courses every semester and advise two creative theses every year.

According to Briggs-Copeland Lecturer Kyoko Mori, who coordinates the English Department’s creative writing program, Engell’s push comes partly in response to an unusually high degree of dissatisfaction from students whose creative thesis applications were rejected this year. Playwrights in particular, she said, were “really upset.”

Engell and other faculty identified limited resources as the crux of the problem.

“We don’t have enough faculty to take on all of the creative writing thesis applications that we feel merit attention,” he said.

The dearth of advisors has been felt by applicants such as Jillian E. Gagnon ’06, whose application to write a novella was rejected this year. Gagnon, who has taken two semesters of creative writing, first began formulating the idea for her creative thesis “about a guy in the fifties” last December.

Engell’s proposal represents an attempt to expand the creative writing program without compromising its intimate system of advising. The program, he said, has come under two departmental reviews in the past six weeks.

Students stressed that an emphasis on workshops and one-on-one advising, along with access to esteemed faculty, have contributed to high student demand, which has routinely exceeded the resources of the department.

“The creative writing department here is small, but full of such luminaries,” Gagnon wrote in an e-mail. “I’m very disappointed that I won’t have the help of someone who’s been through the trials of writing a major work.”

While no figures on acceptance rates were available last night, students this year were particularly vocal about their frustration with the selective process.

“I personally know a few students who were extremely unhappy with the department,” said David H. Hill ’06, an English concentrator who did not apply for a creative thesis. “I know of a few students were considering dropping out of the English concentration.”

But aside from hiring further luminaries, both students and faculty were mostly at a loss for solutions that would improve the program and keep its intimate character.

“If we were to make larger changes it would require a lot of brainstorming to create something else without more resources,” said Elisa New, an English professor and director of undergraduate studies for the department. “It will probably mean a kind of creative writing course that doesn’t depend upon absolutely individual attention.”

This year, in order to accommodate the high number of promising applicants without sacrificing individual attention, Engell asked creative writing faculty to supervise more creative theses than the two their contracts call for.

“We have a situation basically in which I am asking faculty in my department to do extra work,” Engell said.