The University of Houston’s creative writing program will be denied its celebrity student this year. Actor and professional graduate student James Franco definitely won’t be enrolling at the university this fall.
James Kastely, director of UH’s creative writing program, told the Houston Chronicle‘s Maggie Galehouse that Franco informed him via email that he won’t be attending.
“His plans do not permit him to enroll in the doctoral program this fall,” Kastely said. “The problem is, he’s just very busy, so the future is uncertain.”
Franco was admitted to the program for Fall 2011, but deferred his acceptance for a year. Acceptance is very competitive, with only twenty students accepted out of four hundred applicants.
Back in December, one of Franco’s writing mentors told the TM Daily Post that Franco planned to obtain an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson low residency program instead of going to UH.
How would Franco have been as a student? According to John Williams, the actor’s advisor in Yale’s English department, Franco was a good, if overscheduled, student. Williams wrote in Slate:
He always came prepared, and at one point even followed through on our scheduled meeting from Palo Alto where he was attending his father’s funeral. That’s right—he actually did the reading and scheduled discussion the same week his father suddenly died. “I’d still like to have the discussion,” he said when I realized that he was preparing for a funeral and offered to postpone. “My dad was very proud that I was at Yale, so this is what he’d want.”
