Teaching Creative Writing: The Essential Guide 9781350276499, 1350276499

Table of contents :
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: How We Got Here: The History of Creative Writing in Higher Education
Chapter 2: Research and the Teaching of Creative Writing: Why It Matters
Chapter 3: Reading and Writing: Helping Students Make the Connection
Chapter 4: Processes of Composing: Teaching and Modeling Generative Processes
Chapter 5: Creating an Inclusive Creative Writing Classroom
Chapter 6: “Literary” Writing, “Genre” Writing: Teaching Beyond the False Dichotomy
Chapter 7: The Creative Writing Workshop
Chapter 8: Revision, Responding, Assessing
Chapter 9: Digital Creative Writing
Chapter 10: Special Issues in Creative Writing: Trauma-Informed Teaching, Mental Health, Disability-Informed Pedagogy
Chapter 11: Teaching Creative Writing in General Education and Across the Curriculum
Chapter 12: Literary Citizenship and Professional Issues
Chapter 13: The Sustainable College Teaching-Writing Career
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Bibliography
Contributors
Suggestions for Teaching This Book
Index

Citation preview

Teaching Creative Writing

Teaching Creative Writing The Essential Guide Stephanie Vanderslice

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2024 Copyright © Stephanie Vanderslice, 2024 Stephanie Vanderslice has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xx constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Rebecca Heselton Cover image: marekuliasz/iStock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Vanderslice, Stephanie, author. Title: Teaching creative writing : the essential guide / Stephanie Vanderslice. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023030919 (print) | LCCN 2023030920 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350276482 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350276499 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350276505 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781350276512 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Creative writing (Higher education) Classification: LCC PE1404 .V37 2024 (print) | LCC PE1404 (ebook) | DDC 808/.0420711–dc23/eng/20231024 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023030919 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023030920 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-7648-2 PB: 978-1-3502-7649-9 ePDF: 978-1-3502-7650-5 eBook: 978-1-3502-7651-2 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Your task is not to see the future, but to enable it. —ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPERAY

To generations of writers and creative writing teachers to come.

Contents Preface  Stephanie Vanderslice  ix Acknowledgments  xx

1 How We Got Here: The History of Creative Writing in Higher Education 1 2 Research and the Teaching of Creative Writing: Why It Matters 11 3 Reading and Writing: Helping Students Make the Connection 27 4 Processes of Composing: Teaching and Modeling Generative Processes 35 5 Creating an Inclusive Creative Writing Classroom 41 6 “Literary” Writing, “Genre” Writing: Teaching Beyond the False Dichotomy 57 7 The Creative Writing Workshop 63 8 Revision, Responding, Assessing 73 9 Digital Creative Writing 85 10 Special Issues in Creative Writing: Trauma-Informed Teaching, Mental Health, Disability-Informed Pedagogy 91 11 Teaching Creative Writing in General Education and Across the Curriculum 107

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12 Literary Citizenship and Professional Issues 113 13 The Sustainable College Teaching-Writing Career 119 Appendix A: Further Resources 129 Appendix B: Your Teaching Statement 133 Appendix C: Your Syllabus 141 Bibliography 156 Note on Contributors 161 Suggestions for Teaching This Book 163 Index 168

Preface Stephanie Vanderslice

C

reative writing has been taught in higher education for over a century; however, only in the last few decades has it been

accepted as a teachable subject. Indeed, there are still some holdovers from the “Old School” Creative Writing establishment who cling to the belief that creative writing cannot be taught, that community is all a creative writing classroom can provide, that all they can do is wave a magic “guiding” wand over their classes or send their students home to slide Proust under their pillows. Fortunately, that establishment is on their way out. Moving right along. If creative writing is a teachable subject, it is worth our time and reflection as creative writing instructors to study and think about how to teach it well. I have designed this book to help you in that goal, to give you a starting point for thinking about what it means to teach creative writing effectively, a starting point that I hope will inspire you to keep learning about it for the rest of your career.

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Early Teaching Guides In 1990, Wendy Bishop, a leading figure of the creative writing studies movement, published Released Into Language, a slim but powerful guide to teaching creative writing that continues to inform the field. In 2002, when I taught the first Teaching Creative Writing course on my campus, Released into Language was already out of print but I was able to purchase twenty copies from Bishop’s own stock for my future classes. Now it is available in full on the ERIC clearinghouse website and worth a look to get a sense of Bishop’s influential method of fully interrogating a subject as well as to understand how much the field has changed since then. In 2007, after we published the first edition of our edited collection Can It Really Be Taught? Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy, Kelly Ritter and I decided our next step should be to write a quick, accessible guide to actually teaching the subject. This book, Teaching Creative Writing, was eventually published by Fountainhead Press and once name-checked by Roxane Gay as the best guide in the field. Whenever I remember that little factoid, I always feel a little giddy, but then I also remember that it was the only guide in the field. It was a fine basic guide but also slim, slimmer even than Released into Language, and every time I teach with it, I am reminded how much more content is needed in order to truly capture creative writing as a teaching subject as we peer out from the dawn of the third decade of the twenty-first century. Much, much more. Truth be told, Dr. Ritter and I put that guide together rapidly, to fill a need. It was more of a placeholder than anything else, for a larger, more comprehensive work. It was a good start. Comprehensive work takes time, of course, and a certain amount of desk and calendar clearing before you can begin it. Creative writing pedagogy also isn’t the only kind of writing I do—I also write fiction

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and nonfiction—and like most of my colleagues, I’m always juggling a number of projects. But as I taught year after year with that same slim guide and the field of creative writing itself exploded (more about that in the next chapter), it began to feel more urgent to clear that space and time in my writing life, to try and make sense of this ever-expanding field for those just starting out in it.

The Reflective Creative Writing Teacher When I started out in creative writing pedagogy, the field was relatively small, small enough that I could figuratively get my arms all the way around it and stay current on what had been written on the subject, at least in the United States. Fortunately, the field quickly grew out of my embrace and continues to expand, almost exponentially, around the globe. Nonetheless, this kind of growth can be intimidating, and can, as it continues apace, result in teachers throwing up their hands and doubling down on the practices they’re comfortable with instead of exploring new ones. I’m asking you not to do this, not to give up in the face of new research and scholarship, when it’s tempting to say, “what I’ve been doing works pretty well; I don’t need to think about anything else.” I’m not saying you need to abandon what’s working in your teaching; but I do think it’s important to stay abreast of the theories and practices of teaching your subject, bearing in mind what you can use to build upon and tweak what’s working for you. I’ve been teaching creative writing for thirty years—experience I bring to this book— and I am continually, though pleasantly, daunted by the growth of the field. But I try to keep up because I care so much about it, about giving my students the best learning experience I can. I know I can’t read every single book, every single journal about the creative writing classroom, but I can certainly read the ones I’m most interested in, or

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the ones I think are the most important right now. Fortunately, most teachers have varying teaching interests, so if we each stay abreast of our own, I think we can keep developments covered. Another way of looking at staying up to date on an exponentially growing field is to look at it the way bibliophiles look at reading. I’m going to assume that if you’re a writer, you’re also a passionate reader. At a certain point in every passionate reader’s life, we realize that we are never going to be able to read all the books we want to read in our lifetimes. If you’re like me, once you have this realization, it taunts you on a regular basis. But it doesn’t mean we give up reading. It means we keep going forward; we keep doing the best we can. What’s most important, then, about teaching, is also the most important thing about anything we care about, that we approach it with a growth mindset: that is, as something we will be learning about for the rest of our lives. I ask you, then, to be open to new theories and practices today and ten and twenty years from now, to continually revisit your courses and to consider, especially, what you can learn from other instructors and from your students themselves. One of the things that makes teaching an exciting field is that it is never static; in fact, it is a living, breathing entity, one we can become a part of by pledging to remain reflective and open to change. Not change for the sake of change’s sake but change that makes sense to our teaching philosophies and our classrooms. The best part: I promise that if you accept this approach, if you use this book to become a reflective creative writing teacher, you’ll never be bored and you’ll know that you’re doing your best work for generations of writers and, in fact, for the future of literary culture. I’ve planned this text to serve as the foundation for a course in teaching creative writing. But I’m also hoping you will keep it and dip in and out of it over the years, to refamiliarize yourself with the many topics related to this subject and to give yourself a springboard

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for further reading and reflection. At least until the revised edition comes out. With that in mind, here’s what to expect from the rest of this book.

Chapter 1: How We Got Here: The History of Creative Writing in Higher Education From the first classes taught in Verse-making at the universities of Iowa and Harvard in the late 1890s to the current explosion of the field, I happen to think the journey creative writing took to establish itself in higher education, with all its twists and turns, is pretty interesting. I think you will, too, especially if you ever wonder how American writing culture came to be what it is. This chapter will give you some idea, as well as factoids to regale people with at cocktail parties. After all, where else do the G.I. Bill, communism, and the Open Admissions movement waltz together through history?

Chapter 2: Research and the Teaching of Creative Writing: Why It Matters Chapter 2 will examine the reasons why the knowledge and the practice of research in creative writing are important for teaching it, with specific emphasis on how research into the development of the creative writer might influence the classroom. It will also discuss the phenomenon of lore (knowledge shared by word of mouth) and teaching creative writing as well as how teachers can use research to support their own practices. Because it is related to research, this chapter will also explore and debunk a number of myths that swirl around the practice of writing in our culture, myths like, “great writers are born, not made” or “great

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writers never need to revise,” that can seriously limit your students’ development as writers. From there, it will suggest how and why the first step of teaching creative writing is often freeing students from these untested myths that actually inhibit their writing development because they’re not based in fact.

Chapter 3: Reading and Creative Writing: Helping Students Make the Connection We all know how critical reading is to a writer’s development. The trick is communicating that to our students. In our increasingly visual society, moreover, nascent writers often come to us with wildly different reading backgrounds. Many are relatively well read; however, some may not understand the importance of reading at all. This chapter will consider the role of reading in the development of writers and will also suggest ways teachers can cultivate readerly writers and help students understand where reading fits in their twenty-first-century digital lives.

Chapter 4: Processes of Composing: Teaching and Modeling Generative Processes Beginning and experienced writers alike often find it challenging to face the blank page; experienced writers have usually developed ways of composing that get them out of this situation. This chapter will look at how and why to teach the many processes writers use to generate material, including how to teach students who may be resistant to generative practices at all.

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Chapter 5: Creating an Inclusive Creative Writing Classroom In order to ensure that the literary world reflects the world we live in, in all its diversity, and because teachers of creative writing create the next generation of writers, editors, publishers, and teachers, we must ensure that the creative writing classroom is an inclusive space for all students. How do teachers create that space? This chapter will describe the basic assumptions and practices that support an inclusive creative writing classroom and, by extension, an inclusive creative writing program.

Chapter 6: “Literary” Writing, “Genre” Writing: Teaching Beyond the False Dichotomy Fiction writing has long divided itself between “literary” writing and “genre” writing. In recent years, however, the lines between these two types of writing have increasingly blurred. Students, moreover, come to us with interests in both, but often with more of a background in genre fiction. How do we teach in ways that honor both forms of storytelling and in ways that can encourage students to explore the porosity of the boundaries between them to make new art that transcends them both?

Chapter 7: The Creative Writing Workshop Anna Leahy has defined “the workshop” as the signature pedagogy of creative writing. What does that mean and how can we look at the ways the workshop has evolved to think about how best to structure the workshop for our students? This chapter will also suggest new

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forms of workshopping and consider when and how much the workshop should feature in an undergraduate creative writing class.

Chapter 8: Revision, Responding, Assessing Even though most writers agree that revision is a critical part of writing, teaching students why and how to revise can be challenging. This chapter will describe various ways to teach students the uses of revision and its importance in the writer’s practice. In addition, it will also look at the ways in which creative writing teachers can respond to student writing in ways that foster revision without inadvertently creating for themselves an untenable paper load. Finally, it will consider the best ways to assess student creative writing that will also drive learning.

Chapter 9: Digital Creative Writing Teaching students to work multimodally and to compose in ways that take the digital landscape into account is essential in the twenty-first century. How do we adapt creative writing classrooms to give students experience in these kinds of writing? This chapter will also feature remarks from novelist and screenwriter Dr. M. Shelly Conner, who centers multimodal/digital composing in her creative writing classroom.

Chapter 10: Special Issues in the Creative Writing: Trauma-Informed Teaching, Mental Health, Disability-Informed Pedagogy The education landscape is complicated these days and creative writing is no different. In fact, because creative writing teachers are

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often aware of personal issues students share in their work, such as trauma, mental health, and disability, it is incumbent upon us to recognize and address these challenges in our courses. This chapter will talk about how we can address these challenges in ways that support and foster our students’ development as people and writers. It will feature suggestions by Dr. Jennie Case, who has studied and written about trauma-informed teaching.

Chapter 11: Teaching Creative Writing in General Education and Across the Curriculum Introductory creative writing courses are increasingly becoming a part of general education and are used to teach other subjects across the curriculum. What does this mean for how we teach these subjects? How do we teach both serious beginning writers and students who may be encountering creative writing for the first time to fulfill a distribution requirement? How can we use creative writing to help students learn other subjects more intimately? Finally, how do we capitalize on the opportunities both of these situations present to reintroduce the idea that everyone should have access to creativity in a society that devalues it?

Chapter 12: Literary Citizenship and Professional Issues Lori May, author of The Write Crowd: Literary Citizenship and The Writing Life, defines Literary Citizenship as, “engaging in the [literary] community with the intent of giving as much, if not more

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so, than we take.” How do we teach students to find ways to engage in this community? Moreover, how do we build literary communities on our own campuses as creative writing program administrators, through literary magazines, reading series, and other programs. This chapter will suggest a range of ways to introduce students to the literary community.

Chapter 13: The Sustainable College Teaching-Writing Career If you’ve read this far, you might be feeling a little overwhelmed. You might be wondering if a life teaching creative writing at the college level is even possible without burning out. It’s certainly a full life and one that attempts to merge two careers—that of a writer and a writing teacher. This chapter will look at how the creative writing teacher can manage those careers productively to avoid burnout.

Special Features of This Book But wait, there’s more. This book will also feature two appendixes designed to provide sample creative writing syllabi and sample teaching philosophies as well as an appendix with lists of further resources. Finally, each chapter will end with a summary of takeaways as well as a series of questions for you to reflect upon as you consider the kinds of teaching you experienced related to that chapter’s content and the kind of teacher you want to be. Understand, however, that this is just the beginning. Throughout this book I endorse kindness as a teaching philosophy. It’s also a philosophy I recommend you train on yourself. Becoming the

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teacher you want to be is a lifelong process. With this book, you already have more of a head start than your teachers did, most of whom had to learn on the job. Stay humble, keep learning, and be patient—with yourself as much as with your students—and you’re off to a good start.

Acknowledgments

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crowdsourced some of the contents of this book by asking members of a Facebook group, Creative Writing Pedagogy,

what they would like to see in a book about teaching the subject. I am grateful to the following members who made suggestions: Julie Babcock, Jessica Johnson, Deborah Hall, David Wright, Chris Drew, Jennifer Pullen, Kenzie Allen, Michael Kardos, Amy Sage Webb Baza, Sandra Giles, Meg Cass, Ian Wilson, Pamela Herron, Leanna James Blackwell, Trent Hergrenrader, Dain Edward, John Gallaher, LillianYvonne Bertram, James Rovira, Brigitte Natalie McCray, Devon Branca, Rebecca Manery, TaraShea Nesbit, Gemma Cooper Novack, Brent Newsom, Valery Vogrine, Zein El-Amine, and Michelle Levy. I couldn’t include all of your wonderful suggestions, but I sure tried. Special thanks to Dr. Jennifer Case, Dr. M. Shelly Conner, Dr. Taine Duncan, Dr. Joanna Fuhrman, and Dr. Anna Leahy for sharing advice from their particular areas of strength. I am also deeply appreciative of my peers in teaching at UCA and around the world for a steady stream of new ideas to bring to the classroom. Thanks also to Marshall Moore for his wisdom, support, and humor, which encouraged me more than he’ll ever know. Lucy Brown at Bloomsbury is a dream editor. Much appreciation for her wisdom, vision, and diplomacy, always. Let’s hope that Boris Trump never becomes a reality. Thanks, as well, to the anonymous readers of this manuscript at Bloomsbury who made extremely

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helpful suggestions, and to Dr. Aanchal Vij who communicated with me so kindly. Much of this book was written during a spring 2022 sabbatical from my teaching at the University of Central Arkansas and would not have happened without it. Moreover, from October 2021 through May 2022, between a family health emergency and the sabbatical, my husband and I were necessarily absent from teaching. Our colleagues stepped up and stepped into the gap for us in ways we could not have even imagined and for which we will always be deeply grateful. Thanks also to our community, friends, and family who also supported us so generously during the difficult time that unfolded between when I embarked on this book and when I finished it. Finally, thanks to my husband, John Vanderslice, for being my person and bringing such joy to my life, to my sons, Jackson and Wil, for supporting my work and for so beautifully pursuing their own fulfillment, and to our dogs, Asuna and, especially, Mario. This was the last book Mario accompanied me on. The half-empty mason jar of treats sits on my desk waiting, forever now.

1 How We Got Here The History of Creative Writing in Higher Education

I happen to think the journey creative writing took to become established as a teaching subject in higher education, with all its twists and turns, is pretty interesting. That’s probably because I’m also a bit of a history geek. But I think you’ll find it interesting too, especially if you ever wonder how American writing culture, as well as Anglophile writing culture, came to be what it is. After all, where else do the G.I. Bill, communism, and the Open Admissions movement waltz together through history? The bottom line is, if you care about creative writing in higher education, it’s important to care about where we came from and how we got here. The beauty of history writ large, including cultural history, educational history, literary history, you name it, is the ways in which it contains and reflects societal movements and trends. The history of creative writing in higher education is no different. Although

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creative theses had been permitted in the Iowa English Master’s Program some years before, the founding of the first MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa in 1941 has arguably been established as the seed that grew into the multi-limbed tree that became creative writing in higher education for the rest of the twentieth century through today. But the truth is, the path that led to the planting and flourishing of that seed began long before that and represents the merging of several strands of history: universal literacy and compulsory education, class history, racial history, women’s rights, and the history of literature itself. To illustrate, let’s take a moment to imagine a friends’ group of college undergraduates in 1800 at, say, Harvard. I chose Harvard because it was America’s first college, founded in 1636, remained America’s only college for another half century, and because as America’s first college, Harvard influences trends in US higher education to this day. It will also be reappearing in our creative writing history in another hundred years, so look for it. Are you imagining this friends’ group? If we were imagining a picture, it would have to be a sketch or a painting, since the technology of photographs would not emerge for another fifty years. No matter, these guys could probably afford to have a group portrait painted because the only people attending Harvard, or most of the American colleges and universities that existed in 1800 (after a fallow period, a number were founded from 1790 to 1800), were rich. And they were guys. White guys. Moreover, as rich, white guys, most of them went to college for very specific reasons: usually to become pastors, or lawyers, or to gain enough advanced education to assume the helm of the family estate someday as a “Gentleman Farmer.” This particular context meant that the curriculum at Harvard or the other institutions that followed in Harvard’s footsteps was limited to subjects that were thought to be of use to these kinds of students, mainly the

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subjects taught at the older British and European universities, aka the “Classics.” These included Latin, Greek, Hebrew Rhetoric and Logic, Ethics and Politics, Arithmetic and Geometry, and later, Algebra, Astronomy, Physics, Metaphysics and, of course, Theology (“Research Guides: Harvard in the 17th and 18th Centuries: Harvard College Curriculum, 1640-1800: Overview and Research Sources” 2018). Let’s compare that list to the majors available in the university curriculum today. Notice anything missing? What about Economics, for example, or Business, Medicine, Chemistry, Biology, Psychology, or, of special interest to creative writing, Literature? Well, some of these majors, like Psychology, didn’t exist as disciplines yet and wouldn’t until the next century. And many of them, Literature in particular, didn’t exist as disciplines taught in higher education. After all, while poetry had a lengthy tradition, fiction as written and the novel itself were only a few hundred years old depending who you reference. As a result, these subjects were addressed, if they were addressed at all, by public lectures given by scholars or writers on the public lecture circuit, like Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, or Oscar Wilde, or explored through independent groups of scholars and artists, such as scholarly societies and salons in Europe. Business and Medicine, moreover, were considered solely vocational at this time and thus the purviews of the middle class, whose numbers were growing but for whom college wasn’t deemed appropriate. Yet. This context is not surprising when you consider that overall literacy rates themselves had only just begun a slow rise and compulsory education (along with concomitant child labor laws) did not exist in the United States until the early 1900s (and even then, only through elementary school). For people to have access to studying writing, rather than just reading it or doing it on their own (as people had been doing since before Homer), a primordial soup of rising literacy rates, a rising middle class, and compulsory

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education had to reach a boiling point in order to bubble over in a way that would influence the university curriculum. With a push from the first and second Industrial Revolutions (1750–1850 and 1850–1914, respectively), however, most of these ingredients did finally come together during the nineteenth century. As literacy rates strengthened, groups of men and women also formed literary societies that celebrated creative writing, some of which even began to take hold on college campuses (again, mostly men though— women were still in the minority in higher education). It wasn’t a big leap from these societies to the nascent “Verse-making” courses that both Harvard and the University of Iowa founded in 1896 and 1897, respectively, giving creative writing its first firm, curricular foot in the university door. While academies and more informal salons concentrated in cities across Europe were able to grow and nourish the arts there, the United States, with its cities spread out over a much larger area and significant rural populations in between, had always struggled to find a way to support its artists and writers in any formalized way. This struggle explains why some writers and artists in the United States, like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Baldwin, went abroad to round out their literary educations and others emerged through related professions, such as journalism or book publishing. It’s not surprising, then, that when Norman Foerster, Wilbur Schramm, and Paul Engle at the University of Iowa decided that creative writing as a program of study was worthy of their support and founded that first MFA program, their vision would have a ripple effect as graduates, trained in what would become the “Iowa Workshop Method,” fanned out across the United States to found programs of their own (Vanderslice 2011). Graduates of the Iowa MFA also rapidly found literary success and provided a steady source of writing talent to the American literary

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scene that has never really abated, a phenomenon abundantly documented in Mark McGurl’s 2011 The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Indeed, the influence of the Iowa MFA grew only after the Second World War and the activation of the G.I. Bill, which paid college tuition (among a host of other benefits, including low-cost mortgages), to white veterans returning from the war (most non-white soldiers were excluded from the benefits on the G.I. Bill). Not only did Iowa MFA students have a capacious subject to write about—world war—but they were also generously supported by the US government, as well as Iowa scholarships, to do it. Moreover, the influx of students spurred on by the G.I. Bill spread to programs founded by subsequent Iowa MFA graduates at other institutions. If you snapped a photo of a friends’ group attending university at this time, you’d still see a lot of white male faces, but further investigation might reveal that higher education was shifting from an “upper-class only” endeavor to one that was starting to include people from the middle- and even working-class in larger and larger numbers. By 1967, thirteen member programs providing creative writing study in higher education formed the Associated Writing Programs (now, to recognize independent writers, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs). In another twenty years, there would be hundreds of creative writing programs, from MFA programs to undergraduate and associate degree programs in creative writing. What led to this explosion? Arguably the most important influence was the “Open Admissions” movement, which gained critical mass in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. “Open Admissions” individually refers to a nonselective university whose only requirements for admission are a high school diploma or a GED (General Education Diploma). The “Open Admissions Movement” writ large, however, rose with a tide of cultural movements in the 1960s such as the civil

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rights movement, the women’s rights movement, and the war on poverty, all of which advocated making higher education accessible to everyone. This meant creating or designating institutions of higher education that were not governed by the admissions requirements and the prohibitive tuition costs that discriminated against the underprivileged. At the same time, in 1965, as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s domestic agenda toward what he called the “Great Society,” Congress passed the Higher Education Act, designed to increase funding to colleges and universities as well as grants and low-cost loans to students. The goal was to make a college education something everyone could attain. At last, a post- “Open Admissions” friends’ group photo from this time period might finally show the demographics of the subjects really starting to change to include women and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) people as well as the economically disadvantaged and the disabled, to whom the gates of higher education had long been shuttered. The numbers of people enrolled in higher education during this time expanded at a breathtaking rate, swelling just about every program, including creative writing. With these changes came the slow (some might call it glacial) democratization of literary education, a trend that is still ongoing. Although there have always been, and will continue to be, people who will argue against the democratization of anything, including education and creative writing—something we will talk about more in later chapters—it was this very democratization, centered on the idea that study in creative writing should also be available to everyone, that firmly established creative writing in the higher education curriculum. The increase in students of all backgrounds brought about by open admissions and the 1965 Higher Education Act meant that students of all backgrounds were introduced to the arts, literature, and writing in college and some decided they wanted

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to continue to study and practice it, beginning with community and two-year college, to undergraduate and master’s programs, and even PhD programs in creative writing. From the 1970s through the 2000s, creative writing programs were unequivocally a “growth industry.” Such growth has contracted in recent years in the face of decreases in student populations, the emergence of the college debt crisis, and the steady decrease in funding for public college and universities from state legislatures, but the fact remains that students are still drawn to creative writing courses in college and as long as they are, they will demand them. In English-speaking countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia, creative writing has also long had a presence in higher education, starting with the founding of the first creative writing MA in the United Kingdom at the University of East Anglia in 1970, in the style of the Iowa model, by Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson, both of whom had spent some time in American universities where creative writing was taught. According to poet, dramatist, and scholar Michelene Wandor in her book, The Author is not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else; Creative Writing Reconceived, which features her own take on the history of creative writing in Britain, moreover, Bradbury was also concerned about the state of British fiction and thought an MA where future British authors could be incubated would help improve it (Wandor 2008). In terms of undergraduate creative writing, The University of Middlesex was a pioneer, led by Susanna Gladwin, who created courses in writing and publishing beginning in the 1980s and eventually founded the first undergraduate degree course in creative writing there in 1991 (Wandor 2008). Currently, according to the United Kingdom’s National Association of Writers in Education, there are 83 undergraduate programs in creative writing in the United Kingdom, 200 MA programs, and 50 PhD programs.

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Paul Dawson’s Creative Writing in the New Humanities gives us one perspective on the different reasons why creative writing found its way into higher education in the United States, the United Kingdom, and in Australia. He suggests that creative writing first began to shimmer in the Australian university when A. D. Hope, who had also observed creative writing courses being taught at US institutions, began teaching creative writing courses at Sydney Teachers’ College in the 1940s (2005). Creative Writing in Australia, then, according to Dawson, actually entered higher education initially through the doors of teachers’ colleges. Creative Writing was emerging “in Australasian schools as a direct result of the influence of British ‘personal writing’” (Dawson 2005), a result of the “world-wide explosion of interest in creativity” (Walshe qtd in Dawson 2005) that was starting in elementary and secondary schools. The reasoning was that if teachers were to foster creativity in children, they needed to be taught to do so and encouraged in their own creativity. At the same time, during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the Australian publishing scene was exploding. Australia itself was examining its systems of higher education and seeing an additional need for an expansion of “technical education” or “colleges of advanced education” (Dawson 2005) that would add another more vocational element to higher education. This resulted in a triad of types of higher education in Australia: universities, teachers’ colleges, and colleges of advanced education (technical colleges). Conditions at all three of these combined to help “generate student demand” for creative writing courses in Australian higher education (Dawson). As a result, “the Canberra College of Advanced Education (now the University of Canberra), and the NSW Institute of Technology pioneered degrees or majors in writing,” and thus, “have claimed at some stage to be the first” institutions of higher education to establish writing programs in Australia (Dawson). According to John Dale in “The Rise and

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Rise of Creative Writing,” “creative writing has gradually emerged as one of the leading disciplines in the humanities and one that encourages students to think and create with integrity” (2011). As well, Creative Writing outranked literary studies and cultural studies in the Australian Government’s Excellence in Research report. By 2011, there were over seventy postgraduate writing degrees in Australian universities and an equal or slightly higher number of undergraduate courses. Currently, creative writing in higher education is experiencing significant growth around the world, especially in non-Englishspeaking countries. Due to language limitations, this growth is more difficult for English scholars to track—we really need a United Nations of creative writing, complete with translators—but if the multinational program at the annual Great Writing creative conference in London or the work of scholars like Weidong Liu in China or Marco Angel in Mexico is any indication, these countries are seeing exciting levels of expansion as creative writing programs really begin to flourish globally.

Takeaways ●

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The history of creative writing in higher education is intimately linked to cultural history as well as the history of higher education in general in Anglophile countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The founding of the MFA Program at the University of Iowa in the 1930s, where the Iowa Workshop Model originated, had a critical impact on creative writing in higher education in the United States and beyond as graduates of the program went on to teach at and found their own programs at other universities.

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Questions for Reflection and Discussion 1. When did you first encounter creative writing as a subject of study in your educational career? How do you think your first encounter with creative writing as a subject of study might be related to its history in higher education? 2. What prior knowledge did you have about the Iowa MFA Program or the Iowa Workshop Method before you read this chapter? How did your prior knowledge align with what you read? 3. What do you think the history of creative writing in higher education might look like ten years from now?

2 Research and the Teaching of Creative Writing Why It Matters

Even though creative writing has been taught in higher education for well over one hundred years, it wasn’t until the mid- to late 1990s that textbooks for these courses began to appear in any significant number. To wit, for most of the twentieth century, the text for creative writing courses was the student’s work itself. In my own early workshop courses, both undergraduate and graduate, for example, it wasn’t unusual for the teacher to read to us from examples of published work at the beginning of the semester, until we had time to develop our own stories and poems, which would then be photocopied and passed out in class to serve as the topic of the following week’s workshop. You know the drill: the instructor would lead discussion on the text and use it as a sort of ad hoc cadaver to dissect as an example of what worked and what didn’t in creative writing.

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Arguably, student work belongs at the center of any creative writing class. Research in composition studies, moreover, which we’ll discuss at length in a bit, has shown that teaching students how to write in the context of their own writing offers a powerful learning experience. But it shouldn’t be the only experience. Being taught solely on the basis of one writer’s philosophy of what a poem or story is or can do, in the absence of any general guidelines, is highly subjective, for one thing. For another, focusing only on dissecting the student work at hand leaves out a great deal. Even medical students have their Gray’s Anatomy to refer to as they do their dissections and don’t rely solely on the course instructor’s view of anatomy as they proceed with their study of anatomy. One reason for this absence of textbooks, however, is that knowledge about how students learned to write creatively had been almost nonexistent until the last twenty years. In the absence of this knowledge, early workshop pedagogy, which was basically hundreds of classroom-sized kingdoms in which one “sovereign” ruled and taught, operated on the basis that creative writing really couldn’t even be taught at all, but merely talked about and gestured at. This idea, that creative writing could not be taught, persists as a robust remnant of the “romantic ideal” of literary art, which insisted that writers were born, not made. It also conveniently rendered any kind of investigation into how writers learned and developed moot— they didn’t. Young writers could only be encouraged and guided, not taught. It took about fifty years for some intrepid writers and scholars to begin to question the domination of the workshop model in the creative writing classroom and to actively explore whether there might not be other effective methods of teaching creative writing that could be introduced alongside the workshop, especially methods that could be used to teach the growing number of undergraduates,

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who were much newer to creative writing than the more experienced adults around whom the graduate-level Iowa workshop model had been built. In the late 1980s through the late 1990s, early texts—like Released Into Language and Colors of a Different Horse, from writers and scholars like Wendy Bishop, Patrick Bizzaro, Kate Haake, Hans Ostrum, and Joseph Moxley—began to wonder whether, in fact, the workshop really fit undergraduate creative writers at all. These scholars reflected about their own creative writing classrooms as well as their own experiences as creative writing students. They explored literary theory and feminist theory and applied it to the teaching of creative writing. Although these writers and scholars were in the minority, they were pioneers in, for the first time, truly taking creative writing seriously in the academy. As the teaching of creative writing began to be taken more seriously, teachers began to talk and share more about how they were doing it. This kind of knowledge is known as lore, which was first identified and defined by composition scholar Stephen North. Lore is the accumulation of teacher talk and reflection about what works and what doesn’t in the classroom. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, that is: of course, it’s good when people are talking and sharing what is effective in their classrooms. But it can be unproductive when lore is taken as fact, facts not supported by research, and when it becomes calcified and goes unchallenged in a discipline. This has happened a great deal in creative writing. The “gag” rule is one example of lore in the creative writing workshop. For a number of reasons, years ago (we can only guess at what they intended, although Matthew Salesses has made some interesting speculations in his book Craft in the Real World), it was decided that the person whose work was being discussed was not allowed to speak while their work was being workshopped. It’s not hard to see why the practice began—the idea of encouraging writers to listen to

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a discussion of their work rather than feeling compelled to defend it makes sense. But a “gag” rule is arguably a rather extreme way to do this. Moreover, there remains no data to show that silencing the writer whose work is being discussed is effective. In the past few decades, as the workshop has expanded beyond the original circle of mostly older white men in the graduate program at Iowa, and more recently, as creative writing programs have sought to address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, many teachers and students have pointed out that the “gag” rule is highly problematic. Silencing the author in the workshop, for example, further marginalizes already marginalized students. These students are then forced to listen to unconstructive discussions of their work by peers and instructors who do not understand or share the life experiences the author brings to it and may easily misinterpret it in ways that can send the workshop unnecessarily off the rails—a situation that the author could easily rectify if they were allowed to speak. Yet, because it was deeply inscribed lore, the “gag rule” persisted unchallenged for decades. Bishop, Bizzaro, Haake, Moxley, and Ostrum did important work in finally turning an interrogative lens on the teaching of creative writing. Although all were broadly influential and many remain so, it was Wendy Bishop who was most influential and most productive during her lifetime (tragically cut short due to cancer at age fifty in 2003), authoring or editing numerous books and articles on the subject and mentoring dozens of nascent writer-teachers, including the author of this book. Bishop also wrote what can be considered the first “textbook” on teaching creative writing in the early 1990s, Released Into Language: Some Options for Teaching Creative Writing, a book whose ideas and philosophies are still relevant today. Of these scholars, Bishop’s work also often came closest to researchbased scholarship, as she was trained in ethnographic research (and

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wrote a book about it) and often deeply mined her classroom for her research. Wendy Bishop was also one of the first creative writing scholars who used her broad knowledge of composition studies to inform her work in the creative writing classroom. A practicing poet with a Master’s in creative writing and copious experience in creative writing workshops, as well as a PhD in English with a specialization in Composition and Rhetoric from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, she had a foot firmly planted in both fields. In fact, at separate times she served on the Board of Directors for AWP and as Chair of the Conference of College Composition and Communication. She saw the dangers of lore and of what could happen when people relied too much on interviews with famous writers about their work to learn how writers write—for example, writers exaggerate about their processes, to say the least. Especially back then (and still today), writers didn’t always want to admit that writing was hard, that they sometimes had writer’s block or that revision was a difficult but significant part of their work. Wendy Bishop pointed out that writers could be unreliable narrators and that this led to a lot of misinformation and mythmaking. More on that later. Composition scholars, however, like Janet Emig, Mina Shaughnessey, Linda Flower, and John Hayes, to name just a few, were starting to do serious research that yielded actual data about how writers composed, the problems that plagued beginning writers, and how the writing process worked. Bishop and others realized that some of this research could be applied to the creative writing classroom and to the development of creative writers. At the same time, researchers in the United Kingdom like Greg Light (now based in the US), began to study the development of creative writers in creative writing classes themselves.

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Wendy Bishop’s death in 2003 hit hard and it was difficult to imagine at first what directions the field might take without her at the helm, leaving a lot of us wondering who would step in to take the lead next. Soon the answer became clear—no one person would step in Bishop’s footsteps but a group of scholars would come together to steer the field forward, a group that would expand with each generation of scholars and result in a robust discipline now called Creative Writing Studies. A handful of books emerged in this post-Bishop period, some of which even featured articles from Bishop herself (she left a lot of work in the publishing pipeline when she died). Two of them, Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom: The Authority Project edited by Anna Leahy (2005) and Can It Really Be Taught?: Resisting Lore in the Creative Writing Classroom, edited by Kelly Ritter and myself (2007), looked thematically at the ways teaching creative writing could be better understood through the lenses of power and identity, which included gender and race, and lore. Timothy Mayers also published (Re)Writing Craft: Composition, Creative Writing and the Future of English Studies (2005), which looked at how Composition, Creative Writing, and Literary Studies fit under the larger umbrella of English Studies, scrutinizing their relationships to one another and making predictions for what might come, including the suggestion that if Creative Writing and Composition were to begin to work together, they could revolutionize English departments. Due to changes in both fields, as well as Creative Writing’s natural reluctance to be Composition’s handmaiden, this has never really happened. But for a long time, the potential was there. Additional important work was happening around this time in the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2004, Graeme Harper founded New Writing: The International Journal of Creative Writing Theory and Pedagogy, the first ever print journal dedicated to the field and one which continues to publish important work today. Graeme

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Harper also published the first of his numerous books on creative writing theory and pedagogy with Teaching Creative Writing in 2006. In Australia, Paul Dawson had published his expansive look on the different ways in which creative writing rose in higher education in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Moreover, Nigel Krauth and Tess Brady are current and former editors of TEXT, a critical online journal of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs that has been continuously published since 1997. By 2009, when Mark McGurl published The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, a watershed publication that offered a capacious history of creative writing in America and also seemed to validate the field, the discipline really started to take off. Book publications were so numerous that there are too many to list here. Graeme Harper corralled a number of key scholars in publishing important books through the Multilingual Matters New Writing Viewpoints series that he continues to edit, including those by Dianne Donnelly, Dominique Hecq, Jeri Kroll, Nigel Krauth, and many others. Soon after, Bloomsbury Academic Publishing also began publishing a robust creative writing series that included the next wave of creative writing researchers, such as Janelle Adsit, Trent Hergenrader, Michael Clark, and many others (including this book), and shows no sign of slowing down. Critically, moreover, in 2016, many of the scholars I just listed came together during the annual AWP Conference in Minnesota to form the Creative Writing Studies Organization to solidify the discipline, make it more visible, and support exploration and scholarship in the field. Concurrently, they also founded an online journal, the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, and a small but mighty conference annually bringing together people to talk about creative writing studies. Creative Writing Studies, research into the theory and teaching of creative writing, had become an established field with an exciting future.

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So why does all this matter? Why is it important that teaching creative writing has found its scholarly footing in higher education? Most importantly, what does it mean to you as a teacher? Essentially it means that you have a growing range of resources available to you in fulfilling your responsibilities to your students: helping them develop as creative writers. Creative writing teachers have always had these responsibilities, but for a long time, in the absence of resources, they had a tendency to wing it and hope for the best. Sometimes that worked and sometimes it didn’t. When it didn’t, it rattled the place of creative writing in higher education, giving credence to the naysayers who periodically protested that the subject really couldn’t—and thus shouldn’t—be taught. The more the field of creative writing pedagogy/ creative writing studies grows, the more data creative writers have to prove that it can. Understanding research in creative writing pedagogy gives you power in your classroom. For example, if another teacher, department chair, or, God forbid, parent (unfortunately, this is happening more and more on the college level) questions one of your research-based practices, you have a professional leg to stand on. You can explain, “Well, studies show that students learn [insert creative writing subgenre here] best this way.” It can also give you credibility with your students. One of the best ways to achieve buy-in on anything you want to do in class is to explain to your students why you’re doing it. Knowing your practice is supported by research empowers you and your students. A little data can go a long way.

Research Combats Myth Research also moves the field away from unsubstantiated lore and from the myths that perpetuate in our Western culture about how

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creative writing is best learned and taught, something you also have a responsibility to do in your classroom, as these myths tend to discourage people from writing (and contrary to what Flannery O’Connor once said, your job is to encourage, not discourage writers). Arguably, these two myths are the worst offenders in the creative writing classroom:

1. The idea that creative writers are “born,” not made, and that we must be rigorous in our gatekeeping because our society can support only a very few of these “born” creative writers.



2. Good creative writing just naturally springs from the pen of these “born” writers.

Be prepared; dismantling these myths will not be easy. After twelve years of education and immersion in a culture that inscribes these myths over and over, students may cling to them pretty tightly. But you have a chance to break the cycle with a little judicious mythbusting in your classroom. And research will help you do it. Mythbusting 1—Writers are “born,” not made. Every creative writing class has those students who have been burned somehow along the way, by teachers who told them they didn’t belong in a creative writing classroom, that they weren’t writers. Perhaps someday, when creative writing pedagogy and research reaches critical mass, we’ll have eliminated these burners, those who feel moved to be “deciders” determining who can and cannot write, but right now we still have to deal with them. In my decades of teaching, I have encountered dozens of people who felt they were “not” writers, and many who were actually (and undeservedly) ashamed of their writing. Most were victims of a cultural conception that a writer either “has it or they don’t,” and either they didn’t believe they had “it,” or, often, they had actually

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been shamed by another gatekeeper along the way, often early in their education. Some of these people have even gone on to become gatekeepers themselves, eager to pronounce who among their students had the elusive “it” and who did not, as if discovering writers was their cultural responsibility. If you teach long enough, however, you learn the truth: people are not actually “born” writers. Writers progress at different rates over the course of their development. One writer who appears to have “it” in your classroom may simply be someone who has read extensively and written for pleasure for many years and so they have more experience than the student at the desk next to them who did not have those advantages and has never considered writing much before, but is interested in it now. Our culture loves to “anoint” writers and artists, to proclaim one person among a group or class as the “one,” but the fact is, most beginning creative writing classes are simply collections of people at different stages of practice and experience. Some writers who may end up being very successful are only getting started and are making the same mistakes that the more practiced reader and writer got to make in the privacy of their own home years before, when they read under the covers with a flashlight and wrote page after page in their journals. As Vickie Spandel notes in The 9 Rights of Every Writer, none of us are born walking, yet when we watch a toddler practice cruising, stumbling, and falling, we don’t say, “he’s no walker” (2005). We all learn to walk at different rates, but eventually most of us learn to walk. Likewise, when my younger son walked a month earlier than my older son did (partly because he was extremely motivated to catch up with his brother), I didn’t say, “Look at that kid. He’s a natural. He’s going to be a great walker someday.” That’s because walking is something we assume that most of us—at least those who don’t have a condition affecting their mobility—will be able to achieve with

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practice. But because creative writing is considered one of the arts, Westerners view it differently. We think we should limit the number of people who can see themselves as artists. We gatekeep. And that gatekeeping starts as early as elementary school. Each year when I teach creative writing pedagogy, a course I have been teaching for two decades, I usually get a variation on the following question from one of my students: “What if I have a student who just doesn’t have ‘it’ as a writer? When should I tell them? What’s the best way to break it to them?” The scary thing about this question and the fact that it keeps occurring is that some of the students who ask it will be teaching either elementary or secondary language arts. Even they assume that they should identify a few writers out of a group of, say, ten-year-olds or fifteen-year-olds, who they believe has “it” and encourage them and that it is their responsibility as teachers to gently discourage the rest. They also assume that they are the ones who should be making this distinction, and that they will simply “know” creative writing talent when they see it—a dubious assessment method if ever I saw one, especially when you consider that over time, making it as a writer is just as much about persistence and drive as anything else. So where did this particular myth come from? It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact origin but the European Romantic movement (around 1790–1850) has a lot to answer for. As scholar Joshua Wolf Shenk explains, in the eighteenth century, “as the feudal and agrarian gave way to the capitalist and industrial, artists needed to be more than entertaining; they needed to be original, [in order] to profit from the sale of their work.” It became more important for artists to set themselves apart, to be seen as “geniuses,” “lit up by an inner light” and during the Romantic era, “the true cult of the natural genius emerged” (Garner quoted in Shenk 2014). Shakespeare was a “signal example; so little biographical material existed that his story could

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be made up” (Shenk). While the story of Shakespeare according to the Romantics dominates—that one individual genius gave birth to dozens of brilliant plays with a talent that sets him light years apart from anyone else—the actual history is somewhat different. Playwriting in the Renaissance was very much a collaborative effort, where dramatists, according to Shenk, made “compelling work from familiar materials. Shakespeare, for example, did not typically dream up new ideas for plays whole cloth but rewrote, adapted and borrowed from the plots, characters and language of previous works.” In fact, “Romeo and Juliet,” is an “episode-by-episode dramatization of a poem by Arthur Brooke” (Shenk). Fast forward to today and the Romantic genius myth continues to suffuse our culture, as Shenk points out, where posters paying homage to the individual genius—think Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Feynman, Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, Walt Disney, and so forth—decorate classrooms around the country, failing to mention that most of these individuals collaborated with others or, at the very least, like Shakespeare, drew from the context of their time and the work that preceded it. So while the genius myth can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution and the Romantic era, artists in the three hundred years since have done much to perpetuate it, often because it serves them as well. If there are actual steps to developing as a writer—reading, studying, practicing—the individual artist might become less important than the process. Less unique. Less saleable. Less competitive. Coexisting with the myth of the genius, then, is myth number two, the myth that the best creative writing arrives close to fully formed, borne on the wings of angels to these lucky few and requires little revision. Let’s remember what we talked about previously, however: writers are notoriously unreliable narrators of their own

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writing processes—often misremembering their process in ways that make them appear (surprise!) special, unique, or chosen. Writer Annie Dillard, for example, once described her writing process as akin to “taking dictation from angels.” Of course, there are times when writers do experience a kind of “flow”—the mental state that psychologist Mihayli Csikzentmihayli named and describes “as a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation” (2018) where their writing feels divinely inspired. But what writers often leave out are all the times they struggle to put words on the page, as well as all the different prewriting strategies they develop, through time and experience, in order to achieve any writing at all. As a result, when beginning writers sit down to write and discover, “wow, this is really hard, where are my angels?” their next step is often to assume: “If there are no angels, I must not be a real writer.” Likewise, if their teacher also believes that “real” writers get it right more or less the first time, with only a little editing, they will fail to teach the writing process or teach it in such a way that implies that “process” is really only for those who struggle with writing, not those who, you guessed it, have received the elusive “it”—the golden “congratulations, you are a real writer” ticket from the literary Mount Olympus. At this point, it’s worth connecting the rise of creative writing as a teachable subject to the ways in which, even as a teachable subject, it has resisted theory and research to ultimately explain why a lot of these myths continue to persist in creative writing classrooms at all levels. Although the workshop method can work well for the kind of experienced writers that were recruited into Iowa and who are selected to pursue graduate study in creative writing today, it does not always work well for less experienced writers who don’t already know about different strategies for composing and who don’t already

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understand that writing is a challenging, recursive process. In a word, the workshop doesn’t work as well or as efficiently for people who are not well along the path to considering themselves writers. It took a long time for people to figure this out, however, because of the kind of inverted, trickle-down way creative writing grew in higher education—from more experienced, advanced learners in graduate school at Iowa in the 1940s through the 1970s to those who were less experienced and advanced as undergraduate programs multiplied in the 1980s. In part, creative writing teachers didn’t pay much attention to creative writing theory and pedagogy—to how people actually learn to write—because for a long time, they just didn’t have to. They were already working with more fluent, experienced writers. During this time, creative writers also developed a defensive stance that was, to an extent, anti-theory and anti-pedagogy, clinging to the idea that to examine how creative writing happened was to take away the magic and mystique of the work itself. To counter this belief, it’s important that writing classes include a lot more than workshopping, such as scaffolding writing assignments with exercises done in class. It’s also important to encourage willing students to share writing exercises done on the spot because it’s good for the class as a whole to hear a range of voices and styles and to learn, over time, that our first efforts are really just the beginning. Invariably, even as students gain the confidence to read out loud, they often qualify their work with, “it’s not very good,” or “it’s kind of rough.” Even if you sound like a broken record after a while, students can never hear, “of course it is, it’s a draft,” from their teachers often enough. Giving students plenty of time and opportunities to write in class also demonstrates that creativity often flourishes within the limits set by creative writing exercises. Practices like these break down the myth that writers just sit before the blank page and pull a great poem

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or story out of their heads. Instead, even the most successful writers may use strategies to enhance their creativity and productivity, just like the rest of us do.

Research and Being a Creative Writer Before we end this chapter, let me briefly address the idea that research and reflection in teaching creative writing is incompatible with creative writing itself. The many pioneers of the field, the dozens of publishing creative writers who also do research in creative writing (myself included) and who publish books and essays in creative writing pedagogy demonstrate that this simply isn’t so. As a creative writer, you may not necessarily be interested in doing original research in the field and this is fine. However, if you teach the subject, it is your responsibility to reflect on your teaching and stay abreast of current research. But perhaps a problem or issue in your own classroom or in your writing life has inspired you to do some research-based exploration as you search for a solution. Don’t hesitate to follow your inquiry and then write up what you’ve learned for presentation at an academic conference or publication for other teachers and writers. Since I’ve been teaching creative writing pedagogy, several of my students have presented their work at conferences like the Creative Writing Studies Conference and gone on to publish articles and even, in a few cases, books. It’s never too early to think about joining the community of scholars and writers who support and expand our field. We’re a pretty congenial group. We will welcome you and mentor you along the way. Toni Morrison famously wrote, “The function of freedom is to free someone else” (Barnard commencement speech 1979). Teaching creative writing in a reflective, research-based way can help you free

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your own students from the creative writing myths that prevent them from being confident, open-minded, teachable writers, the kind of writer you already are or are on the way to becoming. You have a lot of power and influence in the classroom. Use it for good!

Takeaways ●

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●

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Research in creative writing began to emerge in the late 1980s through the late 1990s, led by Wendy Bishop, Pat Bizzaro, Kate Haake, Joseph Moxley, and Hans Ostrum. They began to question the “workshop” as a one-size-fits-all method of teaching creative writing. Many of these scholars applied some of the research from the field of Composition about how writers composed and how the writing process worked, to the creative writing classroom. Creative writing scholarship flourished from 2004 onward with the founding of New Writing: The International Journal of Creative Writing Theory and Pedagogy and the Multilingual Matters Creative Writing book series, both edited by Graeme Harper. Other key moments included the founding of the Creative Writing Studies Organization in 2016 and the attention of Bloomsbury Academic to Creative Writing Studies. Understanding scholarship in creative writing theory and pedagogy gives you power as a classroom teacher in forming research-based practices.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion 1. Did you believe any myths about creative writing when you began studying it? How did you come to those beliefs? 2. After reading this chapter, are there any areas of creative writing research that you would like to further explore and build upon?

3 Reading and Writing Helping Students Make the Connection

If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. The above Stephen King quote is so ubiquitous I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read it. It’s from his equally ubiquitous book, On Writing, which certainly qualifies as a writer’s report, as most books by writers “on writing” do (before you knock me for dissing writing life books, know that I actually love them and have written one myself but I still consider them one writer’s reflections). But King’s not wrong. Most creative writing teachers understand the connection between writing and reading instinctively and if you’re reading this book right now, you probably do, too, but the research bears it out: people who read a lot are more fluent writers (National Council of Teachers of English 2016). Reading voraciously gives writers an almost unending array of tools, words, phrases, and structures to draw upon as they write themselves, and reading often, though not always, also gives

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them the desire to do it. This is why most of the time when you’re preaching the importance of reading to an audience of student writers, you’re pretty much preaching to the converted. This has not always been the case. When I first started teaching and asked students to list their favorite books, I often got a list of books they had read as part of their high school curriculum, with Where the Red Fern Grows usually coming in at the top. Not that there’s anything wrong, necessarily, with enjoying what you read in high school, but if that’s all that’s on your list, you’re probably not a big reader. How things have changed! Asking students to list their seven most influential books, with a paragraph explaining why, has been an icebreaker for my classes for the past several years, especially in online courses. And it’s an icebreaker I enjoy more and more with each passing year because, damn, these developing writers are well read. I almost always come away from the experience with books to add to my own TBR (to be read) list. Reading my students’ lists also gives me a better sense of who they are as people because for the most part, these are highly individualized lists. Right now we’re in another golden age of reading, due largely in part to the runaway success of the Harry Potter series in the mid2000s, a success that made reading books the size and heft of a VCR cool again. (How much longer am I going to be able to use the VCR reference? It’s a fair question.) Prior to the current controversies with J. K. Rowling, in the early 2000s especially, the Harry Potter series was a gateway drug for new readers, showing them how exciting reading could be and leading them well beyond the series to countless other books, something I saw happen with my own children, who grew up during the same period. My husband and I are voracious readers who read to our children as instinctively as breathing, and surrounded them with books. But until my eight-year-old and I started a readaloud of the first in the Harry Potter series together, he was somewhat

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suspicious of this whole “reading” thing. It seemed like a lot of work to him and he wasn’t sure about the payoff. But after a few chapters in the world of Hogwarts, he practically grabbed the book out of my hands because I wasn’t reading fast enough and told me thanks, but he’d continue on his own. Before long he was walking into walls rather than putting his book down. So lucky you, you don’t necessarily have to convince your students of the importance of reading. But you still have to help direct your students by opening new paths to them on their reading journey. Just as a roomful of creative writing students will have a wide range of experiences with writing, they will have a wide range of experiences with reading. Some of my students—I am thinking of a few I’ve had over the years who must never sleep—will be better read than I am, at least when it comes to current literature. Some students are interested in reading but have never been exposed to many books for one reason or another. This is your chance to change that. And a few are still mysteriously far more interested in writing than actually reading. I’m not sure what to tell you about them except that they are usually outliers you can hope to reach with peer pressure. Remind them that admitting you are a writer who doesn’t read is only admitting you don’t want to educate yourself on what else is out there. Otherwise, I wouldn’t worry about these students too much. Most either get with the program or switch majors, bringing along some enhanced writing skills, which never hurt anyone. The first step in opening new reading paths for your students is creating a culture of reading in the classroom, one which means talking about what everyone is reading every chance you get. One way I build classroom community is by taking attendance using a “question of the day.” “What are you reading right now?” or “What’s something great you read recently?” makes a great question of the day. By not specifying genre, you leave open the possibility of learning

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about terrific new poems, plays, essays, or short stories your students have read, not just books. And don’t forget to answer this question yourself. You’re modeling reading in the classroom, as well as creating a culture for it. Another step is expanding your students’ idea of reading to draw their attention to aspects of literary culture they might not be aware of. It’s rare for undergraduates to know much about literary magazines, for example. But before teaching our students to submit to literary journals and magazines, we need to show them that these exist first to be read and enjoyed. Spend a day showing students how to explore online literary magazines through NewPages, for example. Take a field trip to the campus library, show students where the literary magazines are housed and encourage them to visit these stacks during study breaks. In both cases, you can explain that literary magazines help give us a sense of the latest trends in literary publishing. Beyond that, you could even create a semester assignment that involved analyzing several issues of one literary magazine. But it’s important to introduce students to the culture of literary magazines because they do highlight the cutting edge of publishing, and they need our support. Creating a culture of reading also means assigning it in your courses. Certainly, creative writing courses should focus on the work of the students. But they should also focus on effective, diverse examples of what’s being written today (we will talk extensively about what it means to assign diverse readings in a later chapter). While some students stay up on the latest literary trends through social media and can be remarkably current—far more so than when I relied on a “hip” lit teacher who turned me on to Ann Beattie back in the day—there are others who may need a little more guidance. Creative writing courses are always an opportunity to assign a few good books—three to five at least, for an undergraduate course, more for graduate students—and to talk about how they work, what

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went into creating them. In fact, this should be the primary topic of conversation, because in our thumbs up/thumbs down culture, it will be easy for students to slip into criticizing what they read rather than examining it for how the writer achieved certain effects. This leads me to a discussion of how to ensure students are actually doing the reading. In spite of everything I just said about how well read this generation can be, when it comes to the actual classroom reading assignments, that assumption goes out the window. Let me be the first to break the news that, whether it’s because they have been tested out the wazoo or because they are juggling too many other distractions and demands,—work, family, pressures to be online—a large number of students will not do the readings you assign unless you do something to ensure it. From the time they have been in kindergarten, these students have lived in a world where what is prioritized is what is assessed or tested, and in their own college workload, that is what remains their fallback focus. Unless you build in some accountability, you may be staring out at a sea of blank faces on the day a reading assignment is due. Here’s the good news: accountability does not necessarily mean tests and quizzes. Accountability means devising a creative way to ensure that students have not only read the material but reflected on it as well. For me, that has always meant assigning “talking points,” with each reading, that is, depending on the length of the assignment, asking students to write a list of “points” (between five and ten depending on the length of the reading) that they might refer to in a discussion. This could mean questions they have, quotes or passages that stood out to them, or things they learned. These days, students turn in their talking points in their online course shell for cumulative participation points—which means I keep track of them, especially the questions students have, but don’t respond to them or read them in depth. More often, I bring them up on the smartboard for the whole

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class to see and use them to start class discussions. Other teachers have assigned reading responses—brief written responses to the reading. You might think of something even more creative. Something that gets students reflecting in online spaces they already use is always good. But know that these assignments are what is known in teaching circles as “writing to learn” assignments that get students reflecting and thinking as they are doing the reading (drawn from the Writing Across the Curriculum lexicon we will discuss in detail in a later chapter). They are not “writing to assess” assignments, that is, they are not, as in tests and quizzes, a way for you to “catch them” showing a lack of knowledge on a quiz or shame them for making a grammar error. “Writing to learn” exercises graded on a participation scale help the students to learn on the page without increasing the paper load for you or requiring you to create tests and quizzes, which can be a great deal of work with little learning payoff. Finally, even though we are helping students to improve their own writing by reading to reflect on how a writer might have created a compelling piece, lower-stakes writing to learn assignments are also a way to help students who have spent years in an educational system that was all about “reading for the test,” rediscover their love of reading—for pleasure. Another great way to get student buy-in on the joy of reading as well as the importance of reading-to-write is to empower them with choice whenever possible. That is, whenever you can, give students the option of choosing from a predetermined list of reading material (books or shorter assignments) what attracts them the most and then asking them to present on or talk about it informally to the class. In virtually every class I teach, we might have some common books or reading assignments but there is also a “free choice” book list that encourages students to select what fits their own needs best. Class books or assignments won’t appeal to every single student—they can’t and they shouldn’t, really—so this is a way to allow students to connect

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with the course material in a way that they choose and that relates to their own ideas and interests. I create the lists beforehand, often adding (and subtracting) from them each semester. I allow students to select a book that’s not on the list, but I must approve it first (and I don’t, always) as something that fits the course and the topic. This gives both the student and me control over the subject matter.

Takeaways ●

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It’s important to highlight the connection of reading to writing and to continue a culture of reading as a through-line in all creative writing classes. In a time of competing interests for students’ time, accountability must be built into reading assignments to ensure that they do them. Assignments that allow some choice in reading (within limits determined by the teacher) are a great way to honor and empower students’ interests.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion 1. What is your literacy autobiography? That is, how did you become a reader? Who and what encouraged you? 2. Were you ever discouraged from or turned off reading during your school career? Why do you think that happened? How can you ensure you don’t replicate these practices in your own classroom?

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4 Processes of Composing Teaching and Modeling Generative Processes

The thing to remember throughout this book, as you consider ways to help your students develop as creative writers, is that most of them are starting right at the beginning and there is a lot they just plain don’t know. They might learn it on their own but it could take years of trial and error, and they signed up for creative writing classes hoping to avoid some of that. Sure, some of them may have been filling notebooks with poems and stories since they were in grade school, but that is still a kind of instinctual writing that can only take them so far. Others may have a desire to write and ideas to get out of their heads and onto the page, but their methods of accomplishing this are hit or miss. You want to give them the tools to go further, to sustain themselves as writers, and that means showing them all the ways they can purposely generate material even when they feel stuck; when they’ve shown up to work but their mind isn’t cooperating. It’s important not to be too prescriptive here—students can be very resistant to overdetermined exercises designed to get them

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to write—but to offer an array of opportunities in class to practice generating material, tools to turn to when they are stuck, and to present these opportunities as such: simply ways to prime the pump. It’s also important to offer choice whenever you’re leading the class in generative exercises. Choice means a list of possible ideas to choose from as well as the option, always, to modify the ideas they have been given or to write something else. The only way to fail at a generative exercise is to not write anything. Unfortunately, there will still be some students who will not want to write in class, for a number of reasons. They might think it’s beneath them. They might think any time for quiet, independent work in class is code for goofing off and watching TikTok. It’s important to make it clear that these activities are not an option but an essential part of class. One way to show that you take in-class writing seriously is to consistently do it yourself, along with your students. Tempted as you might be to do some class housekeeping (taking attendance, etc.) while the students are writing, it is critically important for you to write along with them. This shows them, first of all, that in-class writing is not busy work that is beneath them, because you take this kind of writing seriously enough to do it yourself. It also shows students that you will not ask them to do anything that you wouldn’t ask of yourself. Another plus is that this practice gives you more writing time—my husband has actually published a few novels started while writing with his students and besides, no time spent writing, even just a few minutes, is ever wasted. Finally, writing with students gives you something to share at the end of the exercise. While it’s important not to force any students to share after any in-class exercise, inviting them to do so builds class community and lets them in on what their classmates are up to. Sharing yourself—especially something that’s particularly rough, as work written on the fly tends to be—shows

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them that your first efforts are as far from finished as anyone else’s and that is, in fact, the point of first drafts. In-class writing is also a good way to scaffold writing assignments. That is, if the class has a major writing project due in a month, it’s a good idea to practice, in the weeks before, to provide some inclass exercises geared toward giving them material they might draw from in creating that assignment. This routine will also give them an idea of what you expect for the project and/or what you’re building toward—that is, it takes some of the mystery out of what students are being asked to do and breaks down the “myth” that effective creative writing just emerges effortlessly from the pens of naturally talented writers. Rather, good writing is something that builds over time, often through assignments that are directed toward a final product, a process that students can then replicate themselves. Certainly, people have different gifts: some of us are drawn to STEM, some toward language, some toward the Humanities. But scratch any young writer hailed as a “natural” and you’ll often find someone who wrote on their own, consistently, from an early age, and who was read to and who has read a great deal in their lives. There’s no mystery to this. It’s something most people can do if they want to. In-class writing is also an ideal opportunity to introduce students to the idea of journaling. Students will come into college creative writing courses with vastly different experiences of what a journal is—from a daily diary that merely recites the events of the day, to a medium through which their teachers read about their lives and graded their grammar and spelling (journals, like any other form of expressive writing geared toward fluency, should never be graded in this way) or a place where they wrote about specific subjects, like math or history. But as you know, most writers consider journals as an umbrella term for an idea receptacle. Whether you keep lists of ideas or favorite words, write down snatches of interesting conversation you hear in the wild, explore

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writing prompts or self-assignments or use a journal as a place to explore your process or create a backstory—just a few possible uses of journals—you know that whether you keep your journal in a notebook, a phone, a tablet, or a napkin, if you want to preserve your best ideas, you must write them down and you must write them down in a place that you can then refer to later when you are looking for material. One way or another, most writers journal like this but this is not a reality that nascent writers understand yet. Like free-writing and in-class writing, then, journaling is something you need to model for your students, especially in beginning creative writing classes. It’s a good idea to put a journal on the syllabus right along with the books for the course—it’s that important—and then to talk about what makes a good journal in terms of size, portability, and so forth, although the truth is, a good journal is often specific to the writer. I have gone so far, in some courses, to spend a day talking about how to make journals and reserving a day for bringing in basic supplies— blank paper and cardstock for covers—and leading students through the process, which I’ve googled many times for updates. I also bring in a small pile of my own journals to demonstrate how varied they are and how I use them. You may have some students who prefer to journal digitally, either on their phone, on a computer, or on a tablet. This is perfectly acceptable—lots of students write this way—although I would still encourage them to at least try writing by hand. However, if you tell students they can journal digitally upfront, you may end up with more open computer screens during class (What?! I was journaling!) than you might have otherwise. For this reason, I would wait until a student approached me about it and then approve it, rather than issuing blanket consent at the beginning. The bottom line here is that you want to teach your students that they need to find some sort of holding place to honor and

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explore their good ideas. This is one of the not so mysterious ways that writing ultimately comes into being—from the ubiquitous notebook, whatever form that takes. Doing in-class writing in these “receptacles” (writer Alice Mattison, in her wonderful book about writing, The Kite and the String, calls them “quarries”) will show them just how useful they—and in-class writing or the selfassignments they will give themselves later when they are on their own—can be. At this point, I should probably address the fact that there are still some writers out there that firmly believe that writing “exercises” or writing to a “prompt” is a total waste of time. It should be clear by now that I don’t agree. Research has shown that assignments with some limitations—that is, focused free-writing that asks students to choose from among several prompts or go off on their own if they really feel compelled—is often the most optimal situation for creation. That doesn’t mean that a writer who is working on a series of poems about gun violence should suddenly try a self-assignment about wildflowers (though come to think of it, the effects could be interesting). Of course, the more focused a writer is becoming about a piece, the more focused their self-assignments might become (my self-assignment for this chapter is a list of ideas on the topic on graph paper I keep beside me as I write). But the ultimate point is, it really is difficult to go from zero to sixty in a writing session without some way of priming the pump. That is what we’re trying to teach our students— less about writing as “mystery” and more about our processes and those of other writers as we encourage them to go on and develop their own, because that’s what writers do. I’ve always subscribed to the idea that so much about writing is filling a sandbox at first (thank you, middle grade author extraordinaire Shannon Hale). We need to show our students how to amass that volume of sand to start filling in the first place.

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We also need to show students that no act of writing is ever wasted. As anyone who has attempted to learn a skill knows, and as one of my mentors, the late Allan Cheuse used to say, it takes hundreds of thousands of words to approach dexterity as a writer. Any kind of art, they say, is 95 percent failure and 5 percent success. Teaching students to ABW—always be writing—in class or out—through selfassignments, journaling, throwaway pages or focused free writes— gives them the foundation from which their best work will flow. Your classroom is one of the ideal places for them to discover this.

Takeaways ●

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Many undergraduate students are right at the beginning of their development as writers. There is a lot about their own process and the writing process in general that they haven’t experienced and need to be introduced to through generative in-class work and writing constraints. One of the most powerful ways to show students the importance of writing constraints and generative in-class work is to make sure to write them with your students.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion 1. How did you feel about in-class writing as a student? Did your feelings about it change over time? What practices were most effective in incorporating generative assignments in the classroom? 2. What did you know about your own creative writing process when you were an undergraduate? What have you learned about it since then?

5 Creating an Inclusive Creative Writing Classroom

The time for change is now. We can’t wait it out in hopes of a better tomorrow, because today’s creative writing cohort hires tomorrow’s teachers, edits tomorrow’s magazines, produces tomorrow’s places and acquires tomorrow’s manuscripts. —FELICIA ROSE CHAVEZ, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop

Diversity and Inclusion: An Urgent Challenge When I published Rethinking Creative Writing in 2011, a monograph calling for creative writing programs to reflect more critically on the work they were doing and the changes they could make to optimize the development of future writers, I specifically asked programs to think “whose voices are we listening to? Whose voices are not being heard?” “Are we merely reproducing ourselves in class, gender, race, or are we widening our reach, looking for ways to make a life in

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words possible for those who don’t look like us, who haven’t had our advantages?” (122). The diversity problem in publishing has been decried for over a decade, but as recently as 2020, many industry analysts admit, change has been slow to come (Flood 2020). Not surprisingly, although the topic has gained attention recently with renewed interest in the Black Lives Matter and LGBTQIA+ rights movements, work still needs to happen in making creative writing programs themselves more inclusive, changes that would directly affect the publishing industry since students that leave these programs often proceed directly to working in the industry. The need has only become more urgent. In her book, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom, Felicia Rose Chavez underscores this urgency when she summarizes this assessment from Roxane Gay: “As of 2012, full time professors were nearly 90 percent white. The publishing industry was 90 percent white. The books reviewed in the New York Times were written by nearly 90 percent white authors” (quoted in Chavez 2020). Certainly, much can be done to address this problem in the industry itself, especially in hiring and publishing practices. But we must first recognize that how we conduct undergraduate and graduate programs and the courses within them, programs and courses that have become a prerequisite for publishing careers, matters. It’s all well and good that we’re working to make curricula in publishing available for all students. But these courses must also be welcome spaces in which diverse populations can thrive and graduate to become forces for change in the industry. Finally, the professional curriculum of these publishing courses themselves, now that they are finally, increasingly, on the books in many programs, must be radically reorganized to promote diversity and inclusion so that the next generation to take the helm of the publishing industry will not be satisfied to support and promote a white-dominant status quo.

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From a Diverse, Inclusive Curriculum to Industry and Societal Change Authors like David Mura, Matthew Salesses, Claudia Rankine, Beth Bich Nguyen, Janelle Adsit, Felicia Rose Chavez, and others have been at the forefront in advocating for change. Poets and Writers magazine recently underscored efforts to overhaul the MFA with pointed essays that underscore this next major hurdle for creative writing programs in higher education. In her essay, “Return to the MFA: A Call for Systemic Change in the Literary Arts,” Namrata Poddar reminds us: “In recent years, the US literary world has established what a traditional MFA—seen as a white nationalist, Judeo-Christian, hetero, patriarchal space in its aesthetic ideology— does to Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC); women, LGBTQIA or immigrant writers or those with disabilities” (2020). In the same issue, Rachelle Cruz’s essay “We Need New Metaphors” elaborates, telling us: “The writing workshop and the creative writing classroom suffer from a lack of imagination. They suffer from cyclical trauma, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and classism. It’s our job, alongside our students, to change this” (2020). Only with such change can we hope for a diverse, inclusive publishing industry and, ultimately, a similar literary landscape. There is a lot of work to be done and the first order of the day is to admit that the work exists, albeit in different forms. Poddar highlights Claudia Rankine’s 2016 AWP keynote, in which Rankine reminds us that “the insistence that white supremacy doesn’t continue to be our dominant frame takes work. The belief that white lives are not political lives with political privilege and protections takes work. The failure to push back against systems that subjugate others takes work.

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The constant unwillingness or inability to retain diverse faculty takes work” (Rankine quoted in Poddar 2020). Throughout her essay, Poddar pauses to affirm her intersectional identity and privilege, “because it is through a denial of one’s racial identity and position within the system, denial often practiced in favor of an allegedly universal humanity, that systems of oppression perpetuate the status quo” (2020). Writing as a white, middle-aged, middle-class woman, I acknowledge my own privilege. It is also with this privilege that I write this chapter, articulating that creative writing teachers must teach with an awareness of bias and privilege itself, within the overarching structure of institutional bias, and how it affects their students. For example, the majority of the students I teach live economically precarious lives, whether they are white students from the Ozarks or Black students from the Mississippi Delta, although Black students from the Mississippi Delta contend with additional institutional and conscious and unconscious challenges white students from the Ozarks simply do not. It is my responsibility to contribute to creating programs and curricula at my own institution that can open those doors for them, so that they don’t need to have graduated from Sarah Lawrence to get in on the bottom rung of publishing (although there are other factors, such as the unsustainable wages of that rung, that also make pursuing those careers difficult and that must be addressed). It is also why I believe that teaching these students the craft of writing without also mentoring them in the steps necessary for navigating a career in that field that will support them almost criminally negligent. Fortunately, others in publishing, notably the initiative Inkluded, whose mission, through publishing workshops like Inkluded Academy, is “to train and place young people from underrepresented groups into their first publishing jobs” (https://www​.getinkluded​.com), have taken this issue seriously and are acting to address it. The rest of us, in publishing and in teaching creative writing, must follow suit.

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If they are to survive as fully representative of our diverse culture, creative writing programs must also change. Poddar argues: “It is time to rethink the MFA because the US literary world seems to be on the precipice of change once again (81),” citing the cultural moment that is the intensification and globalization of the Black Lives Matter movement. “I return to the MFA,” she notes, “because it’s a key incubator for current citizens of the US literary world, including winners of several prestigious awards. The MFA is the degree writers use as their calling card for the publishing world.” Many have asserted that some of these problems rest with creative writing’s signature pedagogy, the creative writing workshop, something we will focus on in a later chapter. Poddar points to Viet Than Nguyen’s 2017 New York Times article where the Pulitzer Prizewinning author of The Sympathizer asserts, “the US writing workshop . . . is a form of empire spreading globally to legitimize good storytelling . . . . an object lesson in how power propagates and conceals itself ” (Nguyen quoted in Poddar 81). Nguyen further cites Eric Bennett’s Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle and American Creative Writing as evidence that “the traditional US writing workshop originates from the country’s mid-century fear of communism, a historic moment that promoted creative writing as a ‘defense of the individual and his humanistic expression’” (quoted in Poddar). In the workshop, Poddar suggests, Thanh contends, “individual freedom of expression is defended at the detriment of collective responsibility; it is defended in order to dismiss politics in general and the so-called ‘identity politics’ of BIPOC in general.” As someone who came of age as a writer in the MFA and PhD programs of the 1990s, my experience underscores the truth of this statement. Any writing that gave off the slightest whiff of politics was roundly denounced, as was writing that did not honor the individual. Good art was art that was deemed “apolitical.” During

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these years, I absorbed the impression that to present a story in a workshop that was seen as even remotely “female” was risky: women who did this were uniformly ridiculed, sometimes by the teacher and always by classmates. Young and impressionable, I did not write in any other point of view than male until I had been out of these programs for over a decade. I had fully internalized the white male gaze. In his Guardian essay, “‘Good-looking for an Asian’: how I shed white ideals of masculinity,” Matthew Salesses poignantly elaborates on the effect of the white male gaze: “To be the model minority is to fulfill the desire of the other. That is, you perform the stereotype because it is the performance that whiteness wants from you [in my own case, male whiteness]. We internalize the other’s gaze whether the other is our beloved or society, and soon enough the desire seems like our own” (2020). If you had asked me then why I wrote in the male point of view, I would have told you that that was the point of view that called to me, that I could not have imagined writing any other way. Some of my professors who privileged what they saw as “apolitical” writing back then now despair at our current political situation, with authoritarianism on the rise worldwide. What might have happened if workshops at that time had accepted political writing as a part of the spectrum instead of accepting “an ahistorical, apolitical ideology and pedagogy of storytelling” that “exempts whiteness in any way”(83)? What if instead of “apolitical” pedagogy, we’d had twenty years of writing workshops that accepted that, as Salesses writes in his important book, Craft and the Real World, “to be a writer is to wield and be wielded by culture. There is no story separate from that” (2020). What if students of the creative writing workshop had been allowed to explore and interrogate the cultural and political landscape that we lived in, instead of being advised to ignore it and hope for the best?

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Writing this chapter in 2022, in a country still rife with a raging pandemic driven by alternative facts and the continuing influence of an ex-president fueled by and fueling white supremacy, clearly hoping for the best does not work out. Neither did it work out for the publishing industry, as the generations that moved from creative writing programs to the industry during this time only reinscribed the craft they had been taught and internalized. It is important to emphasize here the ways in which craft, along with other signature elements of creative writing classrooms is a through-line. That is, “What we call craft,” Salesses writes, “is nothing more than a set of expectations. Those expectations are shaped by workshop, by reading, by awards and gatekeepers, by biases about whose stories matter and how they could be told. How we engage with craft expectations is what we can control as writers. The more we know about the content of those expectations, the more consciously we can engage with them.” Additionally, I would argue that the more consciously we engage with the politics of craft in the creative writing curriculum, the more we can ultimately effect long-term change in the publishing industry as well as the literary landscape and, ultimately, participatory democracy. We must act forcefully to shake up the power structure in creative writing programs and classrooms in lasting ways. We must, as Felicia Rose Chavez writes, pursue nothing less than an “anti-racist writing pedagogy that is aggressive activism. It’s immediate, tangible action that disrupts the legacy of white supremacy by changing organizational structures, policies, practices and attitudes so that power is redistributed equitably” (2020).That means hiring many more BIPOC faculty, not just tokens, who can broaden the gaze of creative writing classrooms and pursuing many more scholarships that make it possible for BIPOC students to choose to study creative writing, for, as Salesses notes, “in order to become a writer at all, writing has to seem possible as a career path” (2020). That means

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a radical revision of our creative writing classrooms as welcoming spaces for BIPOC, not as “gauntlet(s) through which they much earn their literacy” (Chavez 2020).

Ok But How? Inclusive Pedagogy So what do we mean, specifically, when we talk about anti-racist creative writing pedagogy? Felicia Rose Chavez’s The Antiracist Writing Workshop and Salesses’ Craft in the Real World offer the most practical, actionable guides for revising our creative writing spaces to not only include BIPOC students but also to support them and their success, to not only engage the politics of craft but also to do so in a way that has long-lasting effects as the students in our classes move into the publishing industry. For deep dives into inclusive pedagogy, I recommend starting with these two books as well as some of the other resources suggested here and doing so with an open mind toward the idea that you may find your very concept of the classroom and curriculum challenged. That’s what reflective teaching is all about. It’s an opportunity to interrogate and change. I’ve spent the last several years revising my courses to make them more inclusive spaces by rethinking “craft and the teaching of it to better serve writers with increasingly diverse backgrounds, which means diverse ways of telling stories” (Salesses 2020). I must create classrooms that promote “humility and empathy over control and domination, freeing educators to deconstruct bias . . . recruit, nourish and fortify students of color to best empower them to exercise voice . . . [and] embolden every student to self-advocate as a responsible citizen in a global community” (Chavez 2020). It takes work, as Claudia Rankine reminds us, to completely reenvision my courses and my pedagogy, work that is continuous. But no work

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is more essential or more critical because we simply do not have another ten years for these changes to take effect. If we ever want the publishing industry to truly reflect the diverse world we live in, if we ever want our literary landscape to encompass everyone, creative writing programs must not only reflect but also actively support this diverse world, and we must do it now. Fortunately, as someone who is likely at the beginning of their career and just starting to shape their teaching and their classrooms, you have the opportunity to start on the right track and make a difference right from the beginning. It doesn’t mean that you can just set your course and forget it—reflective teaching means that is never really an option—but it does mean, at least, that later you won’t have to dismantle what you’ve already been doing. Full disclosure: I thought I was an inclusive professor. For example, I included work by BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ writers on my syllabi when it suggested itself but never really took the trouble to seek out that representation. Then, one day several years ago, a BIPOC student in a graduate creative writing course asked this simple question: “How do you choose the books for this class?” How, indeed? The implications of what they were asking became abundantly clear as I struggled to answer the question because the truth was, I had never given much thought to how I chose books for the course. I thought of myself as someone who was relatively current in my field, someone who worked hard to stay aware of the most upto-date scholarship on creative writing pedagogy and the most recent critically acclaimed books, stories, and essays being written to share with my students. What I was not aware of was my own unconscious bias and the bias of the culture I wrote, taught, and read in, a bias that meant that, beginning with the reading list and the syllabus, which was populated by mostly white, cisgendered authors with a few perfunctory BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ representatives, my courses

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were not as inclusive as I thought they were. Because I wasn’t really working that hard to make them so. I admire Roxane Gay’s writing so I taught Bad Feminist, same for Ta-Nehisi Coates and Between The World and Me. Two great writers who just happened to bubble up in the feed of my reading and writing, so I taught them. But I didn’t actively seek them out. I had begun to notice the difference it made to marginalized students when I taught these writers, however. The African American student who waved his book in recognition and, I think, vindication, throughout our discussion of Between the World and Me. The BIPOC students who wrote how much it meant to them that our visiting writer’s series centered writers who looked like them. So, when this graduate student asked this pointed question about how I chose my books, I knew I had to make some changes, not only in my reading lists but also in what I read and how I approached inclusivity in my courses. What I’m about to describe is how I approach inclusivity as a middle-aged white woman who had a lot of catching up to do. This is not to say my past teaching was anti-inclusive. I like to think that my classroom has always been a welcoming space. The difference is, it was not intentionally so. Here is how I am changing that. I want my students to feel like they belong in my class. Students who feel like they belong, who feel safe and supported and able to express their needs, will learn better. Again, I have always wanted that for my students, but now I know that I must purposely examine every teaching practice against the extent it encourages them to feel, as Brene Brown explains in Atlas of the Heart, “seen heard and valued, when they can give and receive without judgement; and when they derive sustenance and strength,” from the connective energy they feel in my classroom (2021). Some practices that I have found critical to this connective energy include the following:

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1. Getting to know my students At the beginning of the semester, I use the following inventory, created by my colleague in Philosophy at UCA, Dr. Taine Duncan, to get a better sense of who my students are as individuals in a way that supports the identification of their self-worth. Encouraging Students to Identify Self-Worth: Activity for Inclusive Classroom ●

What is your favorite subject? Why?

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Describe a school assignment you did especially well on. What did you do to make it so successful?

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If you could take a class on anything in college, what would you take? Why?

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Describe something, not school-related, that you are really proud of.

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What is your family most proud of you for?

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If you could invite anyone to dinner—living, dead, or imaginary—who would you want to eat with? Why?

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Is there anything I should be aware of that might be a difficulty or impediment for your success in this course? (Duncan 2019)

In addition, in the first day or two of my creative writing courses I ask my students to write me a letter describing what they want to get out of the course. These letters and the answers to these questions provide me critical information, not only in understanding who my students are as people but also where they are as writers and what they need. They also focus on strengths. As a side bonus, questions like this help students focus on what their needs as writers actually

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are, sparking a metacognitive awareness that supports their literary development. Finally, I usually start my classes with a 5- to 10-minute check-in, loosely based on Felicia Rose Chavez’s “check-in” practice. Check-ins like this not only build class community, but they also give every student the chance to be heard and they give me the chance to take the class’s temperature that day. It sounds like such an exercise might take too much time, but in my experience, it rarely takes more than five minutes and it’s five minutes well spent if it tells me: the whole class is feeling stressed by upcoming mid-terms, or someone is really excited they got an A on their first psychology exam, or someone else is caring for her younger siblings who live an hour away, because both her parents have Covid-19, again. Believe me, if there’s nothing new and they’re fine, most students will tell you, leaving more space for the few students who want to share the extremes, which I, as their professor, am grateful to know. When necessary, I share with my students, too, without going into too much detail, explaining that I’m worried about one of my kids or I’m excited that a well-known writer followed me on Twitter. 2. Striving for clarity in all course materials I don’t want my students to have to “figure” me and my course out like a puzzle. As a result, I am upfront with them about my expectations: what they are and what they are not. I am clear about what I value in the class: sincere effort put toward thinking and learning and what I don’t pay attention to—such as how well an essay fits MLA format. I tell them, “if you do x, y and z, you will do well on this assignment.” I reassure them I am not trying to psych them out or catch them doing something wrong on an assignment. In revealing this, moreover, I try to teach them that it is important to understand a professor’s expectations and how to meet them. Just because I do not pay attention to MLA format doesn’t mean that their literature

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professor won’t. But as I assure my students I am not trying to catch them out, I am trying to be clear on my standards and expectations and that if they don’t understand something, I hope they feel free to ask. 3. Setting group guidelines At the beginning of class, we also strive to come up with “group guidelines,” established by the class in one or two sessions, that help guide class discussion and workshops. Once established, these guidelines can live on electronic course spaces—websites, course shells, and the like—so students can refer back to them. As a professor, it’s helpful to refer to them in class as well, to remind students that these guidelines exist and that they wrote them (i.e., “Remember we decided we wanted to start the workshop with a question.”). Finally, establishing “group guidelines” with a class can also help in getting to know them and what’s important to them. One early class that brainstormed guidelines with all agreed enthusiastically that questioning the intelligence of a class member (in other words, calling someone stupid) should be discouraged. This guideline told me everything I needed to know about where these students’ strengths—and insecurities—lay. 4. Preparing for difficult moments Over the course of my thirty years of teaching, there have been a number of cringeworthy moments, moments when someone said something either overtly or covertly offensive. Unfortunately, it happens. Until recently, my response to these moments was a nonresponse. That is, I was usually so flummoxed by these situations as to be speechless, which led me to ignore these micro- or even, sometimes, macro-aggressions. I have no excuses for myself, just that I try to do better now. I have worked at being able to stop at a

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difficult moment, pause, and try to understand what is happening. For example, let’s say that in response to an African American student talking about the fact that she was a second-generation college student and that education was important in her family, another white student exclaims, “Good for you! That’s so unusual!” An effective response to this micro-aggression would be to stop for a moment and ask the student what they meant by that, and to then help them unpack the assumptions behind their statement. Although certainly an awkward conversation, a discussion like this can challenge assumptions without being alienating or accusatory, and in a way that will ultimately make all students feel understood and supported. 5. Intentionality in course materials I hope from my aforementioned discussion, it’s clear that I’ve learned it’s no longer enough for me to just see what bubbles up on my “need to read” feed, gathered from book reviews, journals, word of mouth, and social media. I have to seek out more inclusive material, in such a way that diverse readings represent the majority of my course readings. Some helpful guides in accomplishing this include the websites De​-Canon​.​com (recommended to me by the graduate student I mentioned) and diversespines​.co​m, as well as simply googling: “how to find diverse books for” adults, young adults, children, and so forth. What I’ve described here summarizes my own attempts to foreground inclusivity in my creative writing courses. The commonality in all of them is that they have emerged from my own purposeful exploration of ways to foster a sense of belonging in my classroom, an exploration that will continue until I close the door on the last class of my career. In characterizing what has worked for me, I have mentioned the names of many experienced writers and teachers who have done deep dives into this issue and who have much more to say about it than I do. I have also characterized these issues from

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a largely American perspective. Globally, issues of inclusion can be similar but the issues you face may be more culturally specific. In creating a welcoming classroom of your own, I encourage you to do your own exploration of these resources or the resources affecting your own teaching context and to stay, throughout your career, open to reflection on ways you can do better. This book is all about reflective teaching, about thinking our pedagogy, how it’s working, and how we can make it better. Nowhere is reflective teaching more important than when it comes to our ongoing pursuit of inclusion in the classroom.

Takeaways ●

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●

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Inclusive pedagogy and curriculum is one of the ways creative writing teachers and programs can contribute to a more socially just literary landscape. Inclusive pedagogy involves creating an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect in the classroom. Difficult moments, such as micro- and macro-aggressions, must be addressed when they happen in the classroom. Intentionality in diverse reading materials is a critical part of creating an inclusive classroom.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion 1. What are some ways teachers have created an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust in classrooms you experienced? How might you replicate their methods? 2. How much did you see yourself and your experiences reflected in the reading assignments in your undergraduate courses? Do you think all your classmates were able to see themselves reflected in the course reading assignments? What do you think it means for all students to see themselves reflected in course reading assignments?

6 “Literary” Writing, “Genre” Writing Teaching Beyond the False Dichotomy

It took me years to unteach myself all the crap that was poured into my head: How only literature was worth writing. That horror, sci-fi, insert your genre here, were wastes of time and not “real writing.” —NIKKI NELSON-HICKS

To reiterate, our culture loves to gatekeep, especially in the arts. We love to say, “this” is art and “that” is NOT art, or “This” art is better than “that” art. This practice stems in part from the Romantic idea of the artist mentioned in Chapter 3 to which a majority of Western culture still clings, the idea that certain people are just “born” artists, who can’t be taught, only identified—and that whatever they create defines literary art. Unfortunately, this belief tends to overlook the fact that many great artists were not recognized as such in their

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lifetimes (Kafka, Dickinson, Van Gogh, to name a few). It also stems from the fact that some people are simply more prone than others to see life as a competition, and thus to enjoy the idea of anointing some art as better than other art and thus some artists as better than others. Not coincidentally, they usually see the kind of art they produce as better art, and feel they are among the anointed. I have often described a common situation in my creative writing classroom whereby a student will take me aside and ask me what should be done when someone is just a “bad” writer. How does the teacher let them down easily about this fact? I don’t need to say that the assumption is that the student who has taken me aside never considers himself or herself one of these challenged writers. You already know that. What they do not realize is that by its very nature, any classroom is full of writers who have a lot to learn, including the aforementioned student. Otherwise, why would they be there? Certainly, competition is a feature of the arts and has been going back centuries, as it has in Western society in general. It’s where we get the Nobel Prize and all invitation/election only academies and the Oscars and the Emmys and well, you get the drift. Human beings seem to love a top ten list—after all, we are a species that seems drawn to categorizing “winners” and “losers.” In disdaining “popular” or “genre” writing and slotting it into the latter category, we’ve leaned heavily on the trope that “art and the marketplace are held to be mutually exclusive” (Wilkins 2012). Whether or not competition is a useful feature of the arts or whether competition favors certain artists from majority cultures over others is a discussion for another book. The fact is, hierarchies exist and some people lean into them more than others. But hierarchies don’t belong in a classroom. In a classroom, the teacher’s goal is to teach everyone how to get better at their art, in this case their writing, not to anoint one or two

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people and leave the rest to fend for themselves. It means finding out what kinds of knowledge about genre students already bring into the classroom and building on that and then exposing them to more genres. It does not mean narrowing the definition of what constitutes literature with a capital “L.” One way to expose students to more genres is to simply value genres for what they can bring to a writer’s work rather than discounting them out of hand. Kevin Nance, writing in Poets and Writers, observed as far back as 2009 an “increasing porosity of the boundary between genre and literary fiction.” Indeed, as many of us have already recognized, some of these categories are just labels used by publishing as a marketing tool. For example, when one of my novels was on submission, one well-known publisher rejected it as “too literary,” (something I was getting a lot) and then the very next week, another equally well-known publisher rejected it as “not literary enough.” Talk about a head-scratcher. As my agent explained at the time, “you’re finding out how subjective this whole process can be.” Subjective? Yes. That’s why the least appropriate time to bring in this subjective labeling process is in a creative writing classroom with students who are just beginning to develop. Students who are just beginning to develop need to be encouraged to read broadly across genres for inspiration. In fact, as someone who has taught for a couple of decades now, I have seen reading trends that influence what students write about come and go (although I’m always grateful for any trend that gets people reading)—from schools of magic to vampires to royal romance to K-mart realism. What matters is that students are writing, often first by imitating literature that inspires them, as they begin experimenting and making moves as writers. And let’s not forget the popularity of fan fiction. Writing fan fiction is often how students get started writing. And fan fiction websites

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have a lot to teach students about meeting their audience for the first time—learning what readers do and do not respond to. The rise in fan fiction is nothing to sneer at; it has given us developing writers who have already written a great deal when they come to our classrooms by cutting their teeth with fan fiction—both writing and reading it. By welcoming genres that influenced our students, rather than dismissing them, and then exposing them to lots of other kinds of genres in this great literary world—especially work that depicts the benefits of hybrid genres, we encourage them to stay open to all the genres that will come their way in the years to come. After all, these days arguably the most successful writing is writing that “makes it new” (thanks, Ezra), and making it “new” often involves weaving together more than one genre or subverting the elements of a genre. Of course, subverting anything requires first understanding it. Another reason to broaden the canopy of genres we accept and teach in creative writing classes, beyond enriching the repertoire from which our students can choose, is that doing so allows us, in our own field, to combat the elitism and Western hegemony that has kept a broad range of non-Western literature out of the classroom and the canon as well as the elitism that, until recent decades, has tried to keep creative writing out of the academy itself. In rejecting an elitist tendency to gatekeep in creative writing, we have the chance to prepare students for a literary landscape we can’t even imagine yet— and to set them on a path to creating a world of writing in which writers simply support each other rather than competing against each other for the title of “real artist.” At this point, you may be thinking, “this is all well and good but how am I going to accomplish this in sixteen weeks?” The answer to this question is to teach with the underlying aim of widening a student’s knowledge of literature rather than narrowing it. It may sound obvious, but try not to criticize or make fun of anything a

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student is reading. I once brought a book of stories I was reading by an emerging writer to a class I in my MFA program only to have my professor pick it up and sneer, “you should be reading Chekov or Tolstoy, not this nonsense.” Needless to say, the comment really stung—never mind that I was also reading Chekov and Tolstoy. Another professor, after I told him how much I had been influenced by the work of Chaim Potok, wryly commented, “you know some people call him the ‘Stephen King of the Jews.’” This was before the publication of King’s book On Writing, which prompted a rise in his literary stock. In the early 1990s, comparing anyone to Stephen King was shorthand for calling them a hack. Way to crush a young writer’s inspiration. Undeterred, I will always have a soft spot for Potok—my youngest son’s middle name is not Asher for nothing. The thing is, this kind of derisive behavior simply isn’t necessary. Some of it arises, I’m convinced, out of jealousy, some of it out of a writer’s own insecurities, and some of it is just the lack of a filter. My first instinct when my students come to my classroom with a book is simply to ask them about it. I want to know what drew them to it, what they like about it. Most readers love to tell anyone who will listen what they’re enjoying about their current read. As a teacher, I’d rather geek out about reading with a student than whether a book or writer they’re reading is “literary” or not. In addition to engaging with students about their current reads, it’s also a good idea, early on, to get a sense of what reading strengths students bring to the classroom so that you can widen and build upon them. As I mentioned in a previous chapter, asking students to list their current favorite reads is not only a great icebreaker but also, at least in my own experience, a good way to establish a healthy respect for my students and the breadth and diversity of what they’re reading—and writing. Call it the Harry Potter effect, call it the effect of social media, call it whatever you want, over the course of my career,

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the amount my students have read has only increased. In addition to broadening my own reading knowledge—from Sister Souljah to Casey McQuiston—asking my students about their reading gives me a place to start from and to build upon in talking about genre. Teaching for genre inclusivity varies depending on the course. In any introduction to a creative writing course, the goal is to acquaint students with a wide variety of examples of the genres. Any strong undergraduate (not to mention graduate) creative writing program should also have “Forms” courses in which a range of different subgenres are taught—such as ghost stories, detective stories, historical fiction, and speculative fiction, just to name a few, all under one umbrella. And even workshop courses can benefit from a smattering of readings to engage the students. But what matters most is creating a big enough table to accommodate the smorgasbord that is the range of literary genres today and encourage students to fill their plates.

Takeaways ●

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Students bring a knowledge of and an interest in many genres to the classroom. Divisions between literary and genre fiction have long prevailed in creative writing in higher education. However, in recent years there has been a blurring of these divisions in the literary landscape.

Questions for Reflections and Discussion 1. What are your thoughts about divisions between “literary” and “genre” prose in academia? 2. How might you teach creative writing in such a way that honors both forms of prose?

7 The Creative Writing Workshop

Because it is so closely allied to the creative writing course itself, and aptly designated by poet and scholar Anna Leahy as its signature pedagogy (2016), the history of the creative writing workshop has proceeded alongside the history of creative writing in academia. Initially a sacrosanct activity originating at the University of Iowa whereby a mentor teacher led graduate students in the group critique of a student manuscript, the workshop changed little as Iowa graduates brought it to other universities across the United States. With creative writing in its infancy on the American campus, the most generous assessment we can make is that creative writers teaching at colleges and universities were too busy trying to stake a claim for their presence in academia at all to really interrogate the usefulness of the workshop. And the workshop probably was useful for its audience at the time: graduate students, white, mostly male adults with varied life experiences, including soldiering in the Second World War. Even as it went on to include undergraduates—that is, far less experienced writers—starting in the 1950s and 1960s, the creative writing establishment didn’t see much reason to change an approach that seemed effective. Higher education, after all, was a relatively conventional, conformist place

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that, despite small inroads made by veterans on the G.I. bill, mostly catered to middle- and upper-class students. That was about to change. The 1960s are known for a rise in countercultural movements in the West, as the Anti-war movement, the Civil Rights movement, the Hispanic and Chicano Rights movement, the Feminist movement, and the Gay Rights movement all dovetailed in major efforts to create a more just, egalitarian society. Education did not escape the scrutiny of these movements, which not only questioned long-held beliefs about teaching and learning but also and importantly, called for significantly increasing educational opportunity in America. In higher education, one of the results of this call was the Open Admissions movement, promoted in the 1960s and 1970s with the intention of opening access to higher education for the underprivileged. Broadly defined, Open Admissions refers to the fact that public colleges adopting these policies changed their admissions requirements so that anyone with a GED or a high school diploma could attend regardless of their GPA or test scores. Overall, the Open Admissions movement significantly increased the number of students who went to community college and public colleges and universities in the late 1960s and 1970s. No longer was higher education the end of a pipeline for the predominantly middleand, especially, upper-classes who tended to take the same kinds of “college prep” courses and enter as a relatively homogenous group. Suddenly, the pipeline became a water hydrant and colleges and universities had to adapt to a large, more heterogeneous population of students whose preparation, needs, and challenges varied much more dramatically. It is one thing to say, “anyone who wants to go to college can go” and quite another to actually support those challenged by poverty and racism in accessing higher education, by providing the infrastructure to help them succeed.

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This democratization of the college classroom likewise democratized who had access to the workshop—at least, in the beginning, at the undergraduate level—over time. Undergraduates, moreover, had drastically different needs from graduate students, who were usually far more seasoned writers. Even so, change was slow. When I was an undergraduate in the mid-1980s, the standard workshop still ruled. As I mentioned in a previous chapter, even textbooks for creative writing classes were few and far between. Later, when I started teaching creative writing myself in the late 1990s, there were still only a handful of textbooks available to support the undergraduate creative writing course. This lack of textbooks is key to understanding that as late as the end of the last century, creative writing was still almost exclusively taught via the standard workshop, the same way it had been taught for decades. Textbooks support a kind of pedagogy that assumes a taught subject, that is, particular concepts that need to be communicated. Creative writing workshops, however, still operated on the same basic “mentor-class workdiscussion structure” for which a textbook was relatively extraneous. By the beginning of this century, however, led by the scholars we have already discussed in Chapter 1, professors began to interrogate the creative writing workshop, especially in terms of its ability to address the needs of less experienced writers or those who were challenged in other ways, that is, those that didn’t enjoy white privilege. This interrogation finally coalesced in Dianne Donnelly’s 2010 Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? a groundbreaking and still highly relevant collection of essays reconsidering the creative writing workshop from an array of perspectives, including the twoyear college classroom, the college composition classroom, and the hybrid classroom. Suddenly, the workshop wasn’t so sacred anymore. Other writers who have done interesting work on the creative writing workshop, moreover, include Mary Ann Cain in Revisioning Writers’

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Talk: Gender and Culture in Acts of Composing and Composing Public Space; and Mike Theune and Bob Broad in We Need to Talk: A New Method for Evaluating Poetry, which also encompasses earlier works like Patrick Bizzaro’s Responding to Student Poetry. With increasing attention to the lack of diversity in writing programs, moreover, BIPOC writers such as Felicia Rose Chavez, Junot Diaz, Matthew Salesses, Beth Bich Nguyen, and Joy Castro have recently begun, in books and in essays in the New Yorker, Lit Hub, Pleaides, and Gulf Coast, to describe the ways in which the writing workshop had failed them and to offer detailed, nuanced alternatives. These alternatives, as well as two books, Felicia Rose Chavez’ The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop and Matthew Salesses Craft in the Real World, form the bases of this chapter. Anna Leahy’s description of the workshop as “signature pedaogy,” means that it “defines ‘how [a professions] knowledge is analyzed, criticized accepted, or discarded’ (2010) so that its structures are recognizable.” Another way to think of the workshop is as a framework or a “methodology that allows students to learn and deeply understand the theories behind and practices of the writing process” in a way that teaches them how to revise their own work and grow as writers. As a framework, then, the how of enacting the workshop can be interpreted in many different ways, beyond the traditional class discussion of a selection of student work led by the instructor. It can also be interpreted in terms of the extent to which you might use the workshop itself in the creative writing classroom, depending on your students’ needs. You might go light on the workshop, for example, in early undergraduate creative writing courses, and heavy on the “process and composition” aspect of writing—showing students how to produce writing and talking about form and genre, before focusing on writing as a product. This harks back to the hundreds of thousands of words a writer needs to produce before he or she reaches a threshold of fluency. As a result,

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whenever I have to choose between getting and keeping students’ writing and pivoting to judging the product of that writing, in the early years, I tend to come down on the side of whatever gets them and keeps them writing. Workshops, then, in first-, second- or even third- year courses, might come much later in the semester or not at all. I’m going to assume that you have experienced enough variations on the traditional creative writing workshop that you don’t need me to say much about them. What I am going to do is provide three ways of doing the creative writing workshop in your classroom that you might not have thought or read about or experienced yet, in the hope that you consider these alternative methods. Try them. You could even explain these options and give students a choice of the kind of workshop they would like to experience. But don’t see these examples, even, as set in stone. See the workshop as a living, breathing being that can evolve with the kinds of students it serves. What the workshop styles I’m about to present to you have in common is that they decenter the authority of the workshop, and in doing so, decenter whiteness, empowering “the exercise of voice from marginalized voices that we don’t often get to hear.” This, Felicia Rose Chavez tells us in her LitHub essay, “But I Will Write Anyway,” is known as the, “pedagogy of deep listening” (2021). The first kind of workshop I want to talk about is the, “unsilenced” workshop, advocated by Beth Bich Nguyen in her LitHub essay, “Unsilencing the Creative Writing Workshop” (2019). Referring to the practice of silencing the writer being workshopped, a practice that went uninterrogated for decades, Nguyen points out that “a system that relies on silence and skewed power and endurance is a terrible system.” Silencing the writer, she explains, leads to misunderstandings in the workshop, especially when a marginalized writer is being workshopped, misunderstandings that could be easily amended if the writer was just allowed to explain. Nguyen describes

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an incident where a workshop she experienced as a young writer went completely off the rails because the rest of the students did not know what dim sum was and she was not allowed to clarify. The workshop that ensued was, as you can imagine, virtually useless to the writer, an exercise in confusion that arises when the majority in the workshop make assumptions about what is and what isn’t assumed knowledge. In Nguyen’s workshops, allowing the writer to speak means the workshop does not need to be an “endurance event, a bootcamp.” Instead, “when the writer gets to talk about what they’re trying to do, they discover more about what they are actually doing and about their own process.” Workshops like these, that offer more give-and-take between writer and readers, often feature “less prescribing and more questioning.” By allowing students to “participate in the discussion of their own work, everything changes . . . the writer becomes who they should be: the creators and narrators of their own work.” Another style of workshopping that allows for more give-andtake between writer and audience is Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process. Lerman, a renowned choreographer, describes her process as “a method of giving and getting feedback on a work in progress designed to leave the maker eager and motivated to get back to work.” Described in much more detail on her website, lizlerman​.co​m, this process has been adopted by other arts, including creative writing, and is designed to leave the artist enthusiastic about continuing on their work (the keeping part of getting and keeping students writing) rather than demoralized. Below are the basic steps to this response process, as described on lizlerman​.co​m: Step 1. Statements of Meaning Responders state what was meaningful, evocative, interesting, exciting, and/or striking in the work they have just witnessed (or, in this case, read).

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Step 2. The Artist as Questioner The artist asks questions about the work. In answering, responders stay on topic with the question and may express opinions in direct response to the artist’s questions. Step 3. Neutral Questions Responders ask neutral questions about the work, and the artist responds. Questions are neutral when they do not have an opinion couched in them. This step is one of the most fundamental, challenging, and misunderstood steps of the Critical Response Process. Step 4. Opinion time Responders state opinions, given permission from the artist; the artist has the option to say no. You can see how Lerman’s method provides an in-depth consideration of a work that can be helpful for the artist and at the same time, circumvents the more antagonistic, value-judgment kinds of response to which more traditional workshops can fall victim. Finally, in her essay, “Racial and Ethnic Justice in the Creative Writing Course,” which beautifully contextualizes and validates the inclusive workshop in a number of ways, Joy Castro describes a method of workshop feedback called “pointing” in which “the writer reads aloud the revised piece while all the rest of us listen and jot down lists of striking words and phrases—perhaps those with particular emotional gravity, or linguistic freshness, or great sonic effects. When the writer is finished, we go one by one around the room, reading aloud our own lists without commentary of any sort—no “I really liked x” or “Y didn’t work for me.” Based on a method of response advocated by compositionists Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff, “pointing,” is an evocative way of giving the author important knowledge about what

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is working in their piece. It also helps to eliminate “peacocking,” that is, the familiar situation whereby some students use their critique to establish themselves as the dominant critics or “experts” among their peers. “Pointing,” Castro advocates, can be a vital “equalizer” in the workshop: “It focuses our attention, not on the clever critic, but on the text and on what’s working. It builds respect for all the writers in the room, laying a positive groundwork for the traditional workshopmethod critiques that will follow.” In offering these three varying workshop structures, the purpose of this chapter is to help you to think of the creative writing workshop as an organizing idea or signature pedagogy that is as open to revision as writing itself, something that you can reflect on and revisit throughout your career with the ultimate goals of respecting and centering the writer and helping them to approach their work and their revision process in a way that develops them as writers and as readers. Regardless of context, that is, whether in a creative writing classroom or in the workplace, the ability to provide meaningful, solicitous feedback is a critical skill to have and one in which the creative writing teacher can play an important role in developing in the workshop. A final word of caution. Some students may resist these kinds of workshops, insisting that they want “brutal honesty” on their work. There may be a number of reasons why this is so (it’s a great topic for research): some students want to perform their resilience by aligning with unkindness, some students actually align with brutality because that is the only method of critique they know via their own adverse childhood experiences and/or because aligning with brutality can make them feel more powerful (abuse and the alignment of the powerless to authoritarianism is worth exploring if you’re curious). But this resistance is just that, it’s generally in the minority, and certainly shouldn’t drive our pedagogy. The more students receive

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sensitive criticism, the more they will learn to learn from it and the more they will learn how to understand it, rather than depending upon feedback that is callous or harsh. It’s a problem if students can understand criticism only if it’s delivered without a filter. Moreover, in my experience, students who say they can “take” brutal honesty are often really saying they can take others experiencing it, not themselves. You have probably noticed by now a central theme of this book: that callousness and cruelty have no place in teaching. Anyone who is attracted to this field by the opportunity to demonstrate their superiority, their experience, and their knowledge, over those who seek it, through cruelty and humiliation, does not belong in front of a classroom. As Chapter 10, on Trauma-Informed Teaching, will elaborate, helping students learn and develop as writers requires sensitivity. Despite what we see every day in reality TV (You’re fired!) or in politics (Boris Johnson’s many slurs and insults) that continues to degrade levels of discourse, humiliation is not an effective teaching technique. Teaching well requires tact. It requires a filter. Developing that filter, moreover, is, like reflective pedagogy itself, a lifelong process but a process that always deserves our time and attention.

Takeaways ●

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The traditional creative writing workshop has evolved from a static, sacrosanct teaching practice to more of a signature pedagogy that organizes methods of talking about creative work that both helps students develop as writers and encourages them to keep writing. Current more culturally responsive writing workshops are oriented around centering the writer. It is important to consider the extent of workshopping that occurs depending on the level of the creative writing course. Lower-division undergraduate courses might focus less on workshopping and more on generative processes, especially in the first half of the semester.

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Questions for Reflection and Discussion 1. What were your best workshop experiences as an undergraduate, the ones you learned the most from and that left you excited to return to your draft? What elements of this experience worked so well? 2. Have you ever experienced workshop protocols like the ones described in this chapter? How did they work? Now that you’ve read about them, which ones would you like to try? Why?

8 Revision, Responding, Assessing

Revision By now you’ve probably noticed a theme emerging in this book: most of the elements of creative writing are not intuitive. They have to be taught or modeled or learned through many years of experience. Arguably, nowhere is this more true than when it comes to revision. “They don’t revise,” teachers lament of their students. Or, “They think changing a few words is revision!” The truth is, most beginning writers don’t know how important revision is to writing. Truly, where would they learn this information unless they had been reading the Paris Review interviews since grade school? Thus, it falls on all of us to teach them, in my courses, in your courses, in all of our courses, because we know revision is a critical element of the creative writing process and because learning happens through repetition, whether it’s three times or fourteen times or what’s known in marketing as the “magic seven.” How do we do this? Well, first, it’s a good idea to think about setting your course up in such a way as to support revision. Questions to ask yourself might be: Do I have due dates for drafts or do I consider the student work that crosses my desk the final product? At what point in

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the process do I respond to student work? At the beginning? Middle? End? Although we will be discussing responding to student writing more in the assessment and responding section, at this point in the book it’s worth mentioning that it’s much more important to respond to student work at the beginning and the middle of the process than at the end. Specifically, responding to a student work in the middle of the drafting process—not coincidentally, perhaps, when the workshop might be happening, and when the author is ideally expecting and open to that response is an ideal time. It’s an ideal time also because it really underscores the fact that the workshop piece is by no means the final product, not even close. Old school creative writing workshops tended to reward students seeking accolades who submitted work that was close to finished, hoping the instructor and the class would just sign off with praise and minimal suggestions. Conversely, the workshops we discussed in the previous chapters honor the author’s autonomy and imagination in such a way as to make the workshop itself all about helping them achieve their goal by encouraging the submission of work that will benefit from deep revision, revision that will stem from their engagement in the process. In this way, revision becomes a central feature of the creative writing class. Other ways to center revision in the creative writing course include featuring the revision practices of published authors and building revision into the course by emphasizing it in the grading process.

Drawing Back the Curtain: Revision Practices of Published Authors There are a number of ways to feature the revision practices of published authors in your classroom. One of these begins with you. Share your revision process with your students often—how many times

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you revised a work, how you went about it—or, better yet, bring a draft to class for their feedback early in the semester, then revise and share the revised version later. Whenever I have shared a draft in class, the feedback has been extraordinarily detailed and helpful. I make sure to let my students know at the beginning of this process that I have gone on to publish almost everything I shared with my classes and that their feedback has been instrumental to my revision. Because it has. Another way to feature the revision practices of published authors is to bring other writers on your faculty into your class to speak specifically about how they revise, an especially effective practice if you also have students read some of the work the author is planning to discuss. This offers the opportunity to talk about revision and the publishing process and how, sometimes, they intertwine in later stages. Moreover, whenever visiting writers come to campus to share their work, make it a point to ask them about their revision process with that work as well as how they approach revision in general. Even if you don’t have access to other authors to talk about revision, there are a lot of supplemental opportunities to highlight the revision processes of published authors in class. In addition to the resources on revision, including some great books, at the end of this text, you can also find numerous examples of multiple drafts of a piece of published writing online. Better yet, ask students to research the revision processes of various writers themselves via online resources and digital archives and to present what they’ve found in class, giving them ownership of their exploration.

Building Revision into Your Course In addition to emphasizing process over product in the workshop, there are also a number of ways to build revision into your course.

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One of these is to reward it by focusing your commentary on inprocess drafts and commenting very little on final drafts, which doesn’t really help students revise. Another is to require them to write about their revision processes in process letters or memos that accompany their creative work and then to weight that writing highly in the course. Process memos and letters are actually a significant part of my creative writing courses. I actually grade the process letter instead of the creative work itself, which I, nonetheless, respond to carefully. This allows the students to take the risks that follow when they don’t have to worry about getting a C the first time they ever try to write a poem. While I originally discovered the process memo in the work of Wendy Bishop years ago, the practice squared with what I knew about metacognition from my study of developmental psychology in college. I have used it consistently from my earliest days of teaching. Defined as being aware of how you think and learn, ‘metacognition’ in the process of writing encourages students to think about the decisions they are making as writers, in composing, in revising, in assessing their strengths and weaknesses, and in asking for feedback, and is well known to enhance writing development (Erkan 2019). Although supported by research, many longtime creative writing teachers have also anecdotally observed that student process writing about their own writing and about that of other students in the form of questions and critiques does help accelerate student writing development. This is especially relevant to revision. Revision requires writers to think about their work and whether it’s doing what they want it to do, which is the first step to thinking about writing that creates an experience for the reader. By prioritizing and rewarding such writing in the classroom, you draw attention to the idea of writing as a process, which includes revision. Process writing such as letters and memos that accompany their creative writing may seem unfamiliar to students at first, but in

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my experience, students acclimate to it quickly and appreciate the opportunity to explore on the page what kind of feedback they would like, how they responded to feedback, how they plan to revise, and what changes they plan to make going forward.

Grading Responding to and Assessing Creative Writing As creative writing professors, it is important to think of ourselves as first readers, first responders to student creative writing, responders who want to help students learn on a macro-scale to become better writers and, on a micro-scale, to realize their goals on a particular draft. To achieve this, it helps to think of ourselves not as “graders of,” but as “responders to,” our students’ work. The idea of “grading” student work immediately assumes fault finding, comparing student work to an imagined, “ideal text” described by Cy Knoblauch and Lil Brannon (1982). Comments soon begin to feel as if their sole purpose is to justify a grade. And, as Luckert and McCormick remind us in their article, “Grading What We Value,” “none of us got into creative writing to grade it.” (2021) Creative writing teachers can be most informed about responding to creative writing by the work of composition scholar Nancy Sommers, who made research about effective written commentary on student writing her life’s work. Sommers points out, in a gem of a monograph, Responding to Student Writers, something many experienced writing teachers understand about the development of writers: that it “can be slow and methodical” and that it doesn’t happen in just one semester and certainly not in the course of one assignment. Writing development, like writing itself, is a process. As a result, in responding to student writing, especially that of undergraduates, it is critical to think in terms

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of the central lesson you can teach about writing in your commentary on a particular piece of work (2013) that can help them as they progress to their next project. Commenting on student work, Sommers reminds us, is an “enduring form of communication” between student and teacher, which also serves to “dramat[ize ]the reader,” often for the first time. “What,” she asks, “will students learn from our written comments? And how will our comments teach these lessons?” No pressure, right? Still, it’s good to remember that while teacher commentary carries a lot of power, and with great power comes great responsibility, it is also not the last word the student will ever receive on their writing, but a signpost along a path. The important thing is to keep the students moving forward in their development and not send them back. In this sense, the tone of commenting is important. Sommers puts it this way: “how we phrase a response is as important as what we say. The same comment can be phrased in different tones and often makes the difference between students feeling dismissed and insulted and students feeling respected and taken seriously” (2013). Taking a student seriously also means avoiding offhand comments like, “awk” or “So what” in favor of comments like, “what if you phrased this more succinctly,” or “perhaps you could make the relevance of this experience more clear by developing it in more detail,” comments that reflect the fact that all writers are looking for opportunities to revise. In fact, Sommers also suggests reading through the whole draft before making any comments because issues that surface mid-draft may be resolved or have changed by the end of the draft. Time taken to read the whole manuscript first will save time in the end because you won’t have to scratch out comments that have become irrelevant. Once you’ve read the whole draft, then go back and make any necessary comments, especially noting specifically where students might have done well (i.e., vivid, specific detail), but avoid overcommenting, as “research on responding confirms that over-commenting does more

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harm than good. Students become overwhelmed and discouraged; teachers get exhausted” (Sommers 2013). Along these “less is more” lines, in your end notes be sure to point out, first, what is working in the piece, specifically. Of course, starting with praise is generally a good idea—any time we first receive sincere praise for our work, we tend to be more receptive to subsequent suggestions—but in particular, it is important to point out what students are doing well because they may not know and without guidance, may actually stop doing what’s working because no one has encouraged them to continue it. After that, it’s best, with the work of less experienced writers especially, to discuss any global issues in the writing that they can work on in this piece and in others. Perhaps a nascent poet doesn’t know that poems don’t always have to rhyme. Here you might take the time to say, “I see that you like to rhyme and you’re good at it, but sometimes it can really limit your poetry, especially in terms of word choice. What would happen if you tried a few of these poems without worrying about rhyme, but instead attending more closely to image and line breaks?” (Can you tell I am experienced at this kind of comment in particular?) It’s also rarely a good idea to talk about grammar at this stage of drafting. If the writer takes your comments and those of their classmates to heart in their revision, the piece is likely to change dramatically enough that line-by-line surface errors will no longer be relevant. This doesn’t mean, however, ignoring patterns of error that might occur. If the writer has difficulty punctuating dialogue or tends toward comma splices, for example, it’s a good idea to point a few of these issues out in the draft and suggest they refresh their understanding of these grammatical rules to improve their work in general. If a large number of students in the class seem to have misunderstood a grammatical rule, like semi-colon use or writing dialogue, a fifteen-minute mini-lesson after the first round of drafts

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have been read will also be effective, especially if you point out that several students seem to be making this error and understanding this particular rule can help their work. Finally, in your end notes, which again, I would limit to about a paragraph or two for beginning writers, it’s also good to use what Sommers calls the “common language of the classroom,” that is, reference class discussions about writing and issues that have been discussed in their textbook. If the class has been learning about concrete versus abstract description or how enjambment works on a line, point out how those techniques are operating in their own work. Besides reiterating these concepts in ways that can help students learn, using the language of the classroom models for students how to use this discourse in their own work. A substitute who once had to take over a fiction class of mine due to a family emergency noted how well the students seemed to be able to employ sophisticated craft language to talk about their own work and that of others. I would venture that this ability comes from the fact that my colleagues and myself really focus on that classroom language in our creative writing program. Just as a French language teacher might start introducing several French words and grammatical constructions at the beginning of a course, speaking partly in English and partly in French, by the middle of the semester she hopes to be speaking mostly French. In the same way, by introducing and using specific craft terms from the textbooks that support our courses, we hope that we will all be using craft terms by mid-semester.

Assessing Creative Writing: Grading What We Value If we focus on giving students the kinds of responses to their work that most help them learn, it follows that we should do the same

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with grading. That is, we should grade what we value. Perhaps the most valuable things a writer can learn in a creative writing course, the things that will most help her develop as a writer and learn to revise her own work, are her metacognitive reflections on her own work, on her experience of workshops, on her plans for revision, and on her written reflections on her classmates’ work. As I have noted in previous chapters, in my lower-division undergraduate courses, I do not grade my student’s creative work. However, I do grade: their critique letters (which must accompany every piece of their creative work), their written responses to their peers, their portfolio introductions (like a critique letter, just longer and encompassing the whole semester), and the revisions they made or plan to make. This is a lot to grade, just as it’s a lot for the student to write, but because I wholeheartedly believe this is where the learning happens, this is where I will derive my students’ grades. Not only are these pieces of writing hothouses of learning, moreover, they can also, if we teach our students to write them well and support them in doing so, guide us in how to respond to their work in ways that will best help them to progress as writers. Here, in writing about their process and their draft, we can also teach them to tell us what their strengths and weaknesses are and what kind of feedback from us can be most helpful. This kind of writing does require some intensive guidance. For example, early on instead of telling me what kind of feedback would be most helpful, students tend to ask me, “is it good?” “What could I be doing better?” I have to teach them to get into the weeds, to tell me, “How are my line breaks working in the Wheelbarrow poem?” or “I’m worried my poem about my brother is too sentimental. Do you think it is? How can I make it less so? Or to tell me, “I was just playing with language on that haiku about the diet coke. I’m not looking for a lot of feedback on that one.” This echoes what Matthew Salesses suggests in his chapter “Four

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Things to Grade,” in Craft and the Real World : (1) the critique letter as a form, (2) workshop self-reflections, (3) revision and revision plans, and (4) self-analyses of elements of fiction. All of these kinds of writing, done well, will improve students’ development as writers. And, as Felicia Rose Chavez points out in her recommendations on responding to student work, rather than puzzling out the intentions and needs of the student writers and their work before us, why don’t we just ask them to tell us: What kind of feedback do they prefer? What does their draft need? What are some specific questions that can guide our reading? Focusing on this kind of writing, moreover, along with enhancing the writers’ knowledge about their own writing and processes, frees us up to take some of the pressure off the creative work itself and give our students the freedom to experiment, to take risks, to get messy, as Ms. Frizzle used to say when leading her students off on an adventure on the Magic School Bus. Giving them the freedom to try and to miss the mark spectacularly and then learn from that failure and try again without the fear of losing their scholarship because they took a chance on a poem or the fear that they might never write again because one teacher stamped a glaring D on a personal essay draft that they were struggling to get a handle on. Giving them the freedom to fail.

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You can encourage revision by building it into the course with due dates for drafts and other practices. Learning to revise takes time, however. Students may develop their revision processes over several classes. Process memos support revision and the metacognition that leads to writing development.

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Overcommenting on student work can overwhelm students and wear out the instructor. Choose the most impactful suggestions that can be made. Grade what you value in a creative writing course. Art is about taking risk. Grade in a way that supports students taking risks with their writing.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion 1. What kinds of responses to your own work help you best as a writer? 2. When did you begin to understand that revision was as important as composing in the writing process?

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9 Digital Creative Writing

In his book Composition, Creative Writing Studies and the Digital Humanities, Adam Koehler writes that “on the one hand, examining Creative Writing pedagogy in light of technological mediation means simply admitting that we have always been technologically-mediated . . . and on the other hand, it means reinventing the classroom space in order to account for new forms and processes as they emerge across digital spaces” (2017). And yet, Koehler believes, as do I, that this dialect enriches creative writing, with a great potential to empower our students for future success. Full disclosure: As a Gen Xer, I am not a digital native. I was an early adopter of the personal computer, that is true, and started using one in college in the mid-1980s (yes, I am dating myself in a big way, but I don’t hide my, ahem, maturity, given that I know that it is a status denied to many). But in my early days of teaching, integrating technology in the classroom meant little more than requiring that my students knew how to use email and turned in their assignments Wordprocessed. Still, even in the late and early 2000s, before Web 2.0 had truly reconfigured the literary landscape, I began to understand that

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technology could do a great deal more than revolutionize composing and editing. At the same time, I didn’t want to teach technology or software. I wanted to teach writing. Web 2.0, however, changed everything. Just as I was recognizing that I had to wrestle digital technology into my creative courses, the field was moving so quickly I didn’t even know what technology to include or how to include it. Since then the pace has only quickened. Digital trends morph at breathtaking speed. Any well-meaning but overburdened professor would despair of keeping up. And if we can’t keep up with current digital technology, how do we prepare our students to do it? The most obvious answer is, we can’t. It might be a cliché that we are preparing our students for a future we cannot even imagine, but that doesn’t make it any less true. In my own teaching, I take my cues from a collection titled Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st Century edited by Anne Herrington, Kevin Hodgson and Charles Moran (2009). They point out that it is easy to be overwhelmed by the vocabulary of “catastrophic change” especially “ceci tuera cela”—this will kill that: the book will kill the cathedral, the computer will kill the book, television will kill film, and let’s not forget video killing the radio star (Horn et al. 1979). The truth is, however, that that hasn’t exactly happened. For example, the e-book exists alongside the hardcover. As Harrington et al remind us, “the cathedral, the book and the film are all still alive and well. Technologies do not supercede one another but coexist, combine and overlap in ways that futurists can’t predict” (2009). It rests with us to teach our students creative writing within this digital context by teaching them that they work in a changing digital world whose tools they must be aware of and adapt to. How do I do this as a digital non-native? Well, I try to stay abreast of what’s going on in the world of digital media—although I could not hope to master

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most of it—in order to require that my students use it in their course assignments. While it’s likely that you are a digital native, it’s also just as likely that someday, as the technology proceeds at breathtaking speed, you will also despair of knowing enough of it to teach it to your students. What’s important is that you require at least one digital assignment and let your students choose their media from the modes available to them. A common task is to require students to translate a “nondigital” assignment into a digital form. That way, students will already have some familiarity with the work in its analog form, and will also be able to observe the ways the context changes with the remediation into digital form. Some students may be resistant at first to being given this kind of freedom in an assignment. Indeed, as Amy Letter notes in “Creative Writing in the Digital Age,”: “there is a powerful temptation . . . to teach the technology, to simply sit down with the group of students and teach them step by step, ‘here’s how you build a web page, here’s how you create an animated gif ’ . . . there are some students who would greatly prefer to be led through their projects step by step” (2015). Moreover, some students may already be light years ahead in their digital creative experiences and would find such instruction boring. It is best, Letter, suggests, to “focus on assignments, on form and function and perhaps theme.” Letter herself, for example, gives her students an assignment to create a digital persona online. Students can choose any social media form—Facebook, Instagram, insert the digital flavor of the moment—and adapt the persona to its function. In this way, instead of focusing on the technology itself, with a limited shelf life, the assignment focuses on how the form of the technology affects the persona they are creating. How to settle on a digital assignment in the creative writing classroom? First, know that just like our students, it is important

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for you, as a creative writing instructor, to stay abreast of the kinds of digital skills students will be required when they graduate. Periodically—I would suggest on a yearly basis—update your knowledge about the kinds of digital skills a college graduate needs and think about whether you can integrate any of these into a creative writing assignment. Digital presentation skills and social media content skills remain basic necessities for college graduates, for example, so I make sure that at least one assignment in my class includes one or both. Depending on the course, I either ask students to make a digital presentation of an assignment—in my course, it’s usually a free choice of a book they’ve read on a designated topic—or I ask them to translate some of the course content into a social media format of their choice. Another more open option, as mentioned earlier, is simply to assign students to remediate a text-based assignment into a digital form of their choice. The possibilities here are as endless as current digital media allows. Moreover, students are usually the best judges of the kind of technology they feel comfortable with, largely because they may even think of digital possibilities I don’t even know about. I don’t want to limit them. Finally, these projects are generally graded on a completion basis. I don’t pretend to be an adequate assessor of digital design (maybe you are; in that case go for it) but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the students complete the assignment to the best of their abilities. It’s the process of choosing the best form for their project and actually doing it that will teach them the most. Here the burden is on you to emphasize that in their future world of work, the most successful will be those who can identify a technology that might be useful to them and take the initiative to teach it to themselves. After all, while their formal schooling is finite, against the digital landscape that will form the backdrop of their working lives, informal learning will be a constant.

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Dr. M. Shelly Conner, author of the novel Everyman, screenwriter of the web series Quare Life, podcaster, and frequent essayist, makes a point of centering digital writing assignments in her creative writing courses. Here she explains why these assignments are important: The rise in social media journalism and transition from print to online publication has created a large market for digital fiction and creative nonfiction. This presents many benefits for both emerging and experienced writers. Digital media moves faster from pitching, publishing and (ideally) payment for writers. Many editors post their calls for submissions directly to their social media feeds; and often, the entire pitching and acceptance process occurs within social media interactions or emails resulting from them. Typically, digital media fiction and creative nonfiction pieces are shorter in length than their print counterparts. However, especially for creative nonfiction, the use of hyperlinks allows the writer and reader to directly place the work within larger contexts without sacrificing word count. When I wrote “Flies in the Buttermilk,” an essay inspired by Kiese Laymon’s essay “You Are The Second Person,” I hyperlinked to Laymon’s essay published in Guernica. Hyperlinks perform the same function as footnotes and endnotes but they also provide the reader with immediate access to the referenced material. Digital media publishing also allows the emerging writer to build a portfolio that can be quickly and easily shared on websites and resumes with links. These links to published work can be added to bios in email signatures and also sent to editors as previously published work samples. As I write the end of this chapter, open artificial intelligence (AI) language-processing programs like ChatGPT have exploded onto the

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cultural landscape in general and writing and education in particular, with their ability to write everything from essays to resumes to code and more. The repercussions are so monumental that over 1,000 scientists worldwide have signed a letter calling for a six-month pause in AI development in order to ensure that the technology will not be harmful and that society will be able to control and minimize hazards. Certainly, educators and content providers will be dealing with the benefits and repercussions of ChatGPT for a long time. But this only proves my point. We live in a digital world, with the next paradigm shift just around the corner. We need to be ready for it, to reflect on how it affects our classroom and how we can address it in our pedagogy to best prepare our students for the future.

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It’s important to stay up to date on the digital skills required of college graduates and to incorporate at least one assignment into your classroom that integrates these skills. It’s not necessarily important that you teach your students digital skills but that you ask them to choose the digital skills they want to integrate into an assignment and then teach them to themselves.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion 1. To what extent did your creative writing courses incorporate digital assignments? 2. What are some ways you can think of to incorporate digital skills into creative writing?

10 Special Issues in Creative Writing Trauma-Informed Teaching, Mental Health, Disability-Informed Pedagogy

Trauma-Informed Teaching I like to think that kindness has always been a foundation for my teaching but I have to admit that even I have felt myself striving to become a more sensitive teacher in light of many of the challenges of the last decade. Even before then, however, I was aware of the struggles my students faced; after all, reading our students’ writing often gives us a front row seat to their personal lives. Indeed, when I heard a news story a few years ago that “Adverse Childhood Experiences [are] More Common for Arkansas Kids than [the]

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National Average,” in the state where I teach, I was completely unsurprised (ACHI 2019). From the earliest days of my career, I have taught students who have written about their parents’ drug addictions, incarcerations, physical and emotional abuse, their own homelessness, being abandoned, being raised by their grandparents (this is extremely common), and students whose parents were dying or had just died, as well as students whose parents had expelled them from their family due to their sexual orientation. This is just a sample of the challenges our students face. The day after the US 2016 presidential election, which has been historically viewed as a vindication of conservative values, two different LGBTQIA+ students in the same class were thrown out of their homes and so the discussion veered from the usual workshopping to, “how do I find a place to live?” So for most writing teachers, the maxim “Be kind, for everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about,” is often particularly resonant because we usually do know about these battles. And this was before a worldwide pandemic resulted in over one million deaths in the United States, at the time of this writing, and effectively traumatized the entire population. As a result, we can assume that “trauma-informed teaching” applies to most classrooms today. But what is “trauma-informed teaching?” In fact, “trauma-informed teaching,” is a complicated, nuanced subject that has been explored in numerous books and resulted in a number of suggested practices that are worth studying (Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score and Bruce Perry’s What Happened To You: Conversations On Trauma, Resilience and Healing make good texts to start with). I cannot stress enough that in addressing some of the mental health challenges our students face, it is not possible to contain in one chapter all that can be contained. Mental health and trauma are not only vast fields of knowledge, but they are also only

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constantly changing as society changes. Nonetheless, that does not excuse us from seeking to make our classrooms more trauma-sensitive. For our purposes as creative writing teachers, however, I want to focus on two overarching practices that all teachers can embrace in “increasing safety cues and building supportive relationships to reduce the mobilization of the stress response and empower individuals affected by trauma” (Tayles 2022). Some may ask, “Why enact these practices? No one gave me such accommodations when I was a student.” True, based on my own past experiences as a student, they probably didn’t and our learning probably suffered as a result, whether we realized this or not, because research shows that “trauma and traumatic stress responses” do affect students’ “ability to think, learn, and behave as forms of neurodivergence that deserve pedagogical approaches,” which take these neurodivergences into account. It’s the same reason why I try to make my teaching engaging and interesting even though I have occasionally been told, “learning isn’t always fun and interesting and students shouldn’t expect it to be.” Beyond believing that kindness is a beneficial overall modus operandi in life, I really want my students to learn the material I am teaching them. If making my teaching interesting and engaging and trauma-sensitive accomplishes that, then sign me up. The two initial steps I want to discuss in making teaching creative writing more trauma-informed are: (1) the teacher’s role as a buffering role model, and (2) the teacher’s role in creating a psychologically safer classroom space. Both steps take the responsibility off teachers as healers and therapists, which they’re not trained for, but still encourages them to create learning experiences that are safe and trauma-informed. As buffering role models, it’s important for teachers to keep the fact that students will take their cues from us and our behavior at the forefront of our mind. Being aware that our body language and

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facial expressions send messages, before entering our classrooms we can collect ourselves in such a way that we send out signals that telegraph calm and connection. Moreover, we already know we serve as exemplars for our students in so many ways: we can also serve as models for them by talking about how we handle stress and adversity, especially the stress of writing, in neutral terms that are not retraumatizing. I’m not suggesting sharing our own traumas with our students but, rather, talking openly about overcoming uncomfortable challenges, especially around creating art. We’ve spent most of this book talking about the fact that writing does not necessarily come easily to most people, especially those who want to do it well, and that it can be a stressful experience. We have the opportunity as writers, then, to show our students how we deal with those stressors: the temptation of procrastination, the struggles to take risks, make a mess, and fail. By doing this, we will also be modeling how to approach struggles in general, how to be kind to oneself, to practice self-care, and to persist. In terms of creating a psychologically safe classroom, the United States’ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) offers two definitions of “safety” that are relevant to writing instructors’ work in the classroom: “establishing environmental safety and preventing recurrence of trauma, or re-traumatization” (Tayles 2021). Some techniques for establishing this safety are “asking students what they need to feel safer” and then using their answers to “inform classroom decisions” (Tayles), and turning “a traumainformed lens on syllabi, course documents, assignments, classroom routines, feedback and instructor comments, and conferencing strategies” in order to decrease authoritarian language and increase more inviting and inclusive language. This is especially useful when discussing rules for a workshop. As I mentioned earlier, once, in creating ground rules for workshopping, a class unanimously agreed

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there should be “no name calling, especially calling anyone stupid.” Their insistence on this rule pretty much told me all I needed to know about the ways these students had been traumatized by group interactions in the past, and the ways they wanted to ensure workshop discussions would not be re-traumatizing. Trauma-informed teaching can also be aligned with sensitive teaching. As writing teachers with smaller classes, we can take the time to check in with our students on a regular basis. As I mentioned earlier, following Felicia Rose Chavez’s check-in practice at the beginning of class has made a palpable difference in the course climate. First of all, students know from the start that they do not have to share anything if they don’t want to, or they can just say, “I’m fine,” a response many students elect. But students often do have things they want to share that can substantially increase class community and sensitivity: they just had to put their dog to sleep; they just got an A on their French test; they are really anxious about the presentation they have to make in the next class. These are all things I appreciate knowing and opportunities for me to encourage my students in areas they’re doing well and perhaps not so well, and to “read the room” as well. For example, after listening to a number of students report they were “tired’ or “anxious” repeatedly during check-in, I started ending class with a five-minute meditation for a couple of weeks (which I played via YouTube on the computer), just to give us all a chance to reset. If this kind of interaction makes you uncomfortable, don’t worry about it; it’s not required. But it is a nice way to encourage the class to treat one another more kindly in general, as they commiserate with and root for each other. The easiest way to encourage kindness remains modeling, which is something I assume anyone reading this book is capable of. There’s simply no reason to make your creative writing class or workshop a gauntlet students must endure. Even though it’s not brain surgery, developing and succeeding as a creative writer is

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difficult in its own way and requires resilience and persistence for the long haul. Making the creative writing classroom a contest in and of itself only impedes this development and success. In general, if you collect yourself before you enter, try to leave your own personal issues at the door, and treat your students with sensitivity and respect, they will return the favor and everyone will benefit, including you.

Teaching Creative Writing and Student Mental Health According to the Healthy Minds Study, which collects data from 373 campuses nationwide, “By nearly every metric, student mental health is worsening. During the 2020–2021 school year, more than 60 percent of college students met the criteria for at least one mental health problem”(Abrams 2022). In another national survey of college student mental health, almost three-quarters of students reported moderate or severe psychological distress (ACHA-NCHA III 2022). Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, college student mental health had reached a crisis point, a trend dovetailing with an increased awareness of mental health conditions that lead more students to self-disclose diagnoses like anxiety and depression. I believe the latter increase is a good thing, as students become better at seeking care and teachers become better at reading warning signs in students. However, it has led to a sharp increase in the demands for university counseling services that are outstripping what these centers are able to provide, leading many institutions to change the ways in which they configure and offer services. These include offering more short-term emergency therapy as well as counseling groups focused on certain issues, such as relationships, homesickness, and test anxiety, and wellness

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workshops. Moreover, like many others, my own university, where faculty and staff long had access to the university counseling center, has recently determined that in order to meet the overwhelming mental health needs of students, faculty, and staff would be redirected to an Employee Assistance Program for the foreseeable future. What does this mean? It means that you will be teaching students living with mental health issues in every classroom, whether they disclose these issues or not, or who know people with mental health issues, and/or who may encounter mental health issues later in life. It does not mean that you are a mental health provider, a role that requires years of training that you do not possess and crosses all kinds of boundaries. However, it may mean that as a teacher, you act as a mental health first responder according to the guidelines of the university where you teach, guidelines with which you should be familiar. Being a first responder means recognizing signs of mental illness in students and referring them to the counseling center, even if it means walking them there. It also means that just as it is important for you to practice trauma-informed teaching, it is also important for you to practice mental health-informed teaching. This requires accepting mental health issues for what they are: health challenges that need to be addressed just like physical health challenges. It goes without saying that mental-health-informed teaching also means not mocking anyone with mental health issues or mental health issues in general, in class discussion in any way, just as you wouldn’t mock someone who was diabetic or epileptic, or mock physical disease sufferers in general. Hopefully your institution’s counseling center will have clear-cut guidelines for recognizing signs of mental illness in students. My own university, like most others, for example, has a number of online resources for recognizing and responding to signs of mental illness in students, such as the guidelines in what follows:

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Responding to the Distressed Student Your care, concern, and assistance will often be enough to help the student. At other times, you can play a critical role in referring a student for appropriate assistance and in motivating him/her to seek such help. A few guidelines for responding to distressed students are summarized in what follows. You can also view the attached pdf: Helping a Distressed Student—Decision Tree

Observe The first important step in assisting distressed students is to be familiar with the signs of distress and notice their occurrence. An attentive observer will pay close attention to direct communications as well as implied or hidden feelings.

Initiate Contact Don’t ignore strange, inappropriate, or unusual behavior—respond to it! Talk to the student privately, in a direct and matter-of-fact manner, indicating concern. Be specific with the student about the behavior or observations that have caused you concern. Early feedback, intervention, and/or referral can prevent more serious problems from developing.

Listen Objectively To listen to someone is to refrain from imposing your own point of view, to withhold advice unless it is requested, and to concentrate on the feelings and thoughts of the person you are trying to help, instead of your own. Listening is probably the most important skill used in helping and can be facilitated by allowing the student enough

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time and latitude to express his/her thoughts and feelings as fully as possible. Some things to listen for include a student’s view of him/ herself, view of his/her current situation or environment, and his/her view of the future. Negative comments about these issues indicate a student may be in trouble.

Offer Support and Assistance Among the most important helping tools are interest, concern, and attentive listening. Avoid criticism or judgmental comments. Summarize the essence of what the student has told you as a way to clarify the situation. Encourage positive action by helping the student define the problem and generate coping strategies. Suggest resources that the student can access: friends, family, clergy, or professionals on campus.

Know Your Limits As a help-giver, only go as far as your expertise, training, and resources allow. If you are uncertain about your ability to help a student, it is best to be honest about it. Trust your feelings when you think an individual’s problem is more than you can handle. When a student needs more help than you are able or willing to give, it is time to make a referral to a professional. Below are some signs to look for in your feelings that may suggest the assistance of a professional is warranted. You feel yourself feeling responsible for the student: ●

You feel pressure to solve their problems

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You feel you are overextending yourself in helping the student

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You feel stressed out by the student’s issue(s) or behavior

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You see a behavioral pattern repeating itself in your interaction with the student

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You feel that the problems a student brings to you are more than you can handle

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You feel anxious when the student approaches you.

(https://uca​.edu​/counseling​/resources​/responding​-to​-the​-distressed​ -student/accessed December 2, 2022) Notice, once again, that while you are asked to respond to students in distress, you are not expected to take on a professional therapist role, nor should you. As teachers, students will react to you as a role model and mentor, not only in writing but also in life. It’s a fact of the job— but you can also see it as another chance to make a difference. You can model for students how to recognize mental health issues and how to get help from people who are trained to provide it. In modeling this for them, moreover, you are demonstrating that someone does care about them and the signs of distress they are showing, and you can also model that it is by no means a sign of weakness to seek professional help. As someone who got their education, both undergraduate and graduate, when disclosing any mental health issue involved a great deal of stigma and silent suffering, and as someone who has coped with an anxiety disorder since my early twenties and who has supported many friends and family members on their own mental health journeys, I am glad the world has become so much more accepting of these challenges. I am open in class, as appropriate, about the issues myself and friends and family have struggled with so that students will not feel alone and so that they will understand it’s no more a stigma for them to see a therapist for their depression than it is to go to the health center for their sore throat. In a recent workshop, for

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example, a student disclosed in a short story that they were dealing with symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The students were sympathetic—these symptoms are not foreign to them—and so was I, mentioning casually, without dwelling on it, that one of my sons has dealt with OCD and sought treatment for it successfully (he is comfortable with this disclosure). One issue I have avoided here is exploring the connection between writing and healing, both mental and physical. This is an enormous area of research with a corresponding number of beliefs about the utility of writing for therapeutic purposes. While I believe writing about a trauma can be restorative, I also believe that it is never a good idea to push students toward confession with the idea that it will help their writing or their psyche. Students disclose naturally in the writing classroom because writing is so close to the heart. If anything, we need to help them recognize when it may be helpful for them to write about a difficult subject for class consumption and when it may not be. For example, if a student seems drawn to writing about a difficult life event for class but then seems to be re-traumatizing himself/herself in the process, it might be helpful to suggest that they could write about this subject privately, for themselves, until they feel ready to address it publicly. If the student is truly distressed by a topic they have chosen to write about, it would also be a sign they need to be referred to the counseling center. This is not to say that a student should not be allowed to write about a difficult life event; it just means that students shouldn’t feel like the self-disclosure of trauma is necessary for authentic writing. Moreover, while you are not a counselor or therapist, do know that in responding to student writing about difficult subjects in respectful, sensitive ways can be healing for them. Indeed, it may be the first time anyone has responded in this way. Issues of mental health and creative writing are complex, and have been the subject of a great deal of fascinating research, worth exploring

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if you’re interested. As one facet of all the issues you will deal with in the classroom, however, keep in mind that you are not responsible for healing, but for recognizing, responding when needed, and treating mental health issues in the classroom with the sensitivity and respect our students deserve.

Disability Academic institutions are not constructed to inherently accommodate disabled and ill students, defaulting instead to a normative ideal (namely, abled and healthy students). Understanding students’ experiences and how one’s own pedagogy contributes to them is a skill that must be nurtured throughout a career in education. —AUDREY HEFFERS, “In The Room Where It Happens: Access, Equity and the Creative Writing Classroom”

Teaching with a disability-aware pedagogy is also a matter of equity and inclusion that encompasses but goes far beyond an institution’s own policies on accommodations and adherence to the Americans with Disabilities Act, although these can be a start. It also includes making disability visible by diversifying our curriculum to include works by disabled authors, both broadening all students’ understanding of the experience through text and offering disabled students the opportunity to see themselves reflected in literature and as writers. Most important, however, in teaching with a disabilityaware pedagogy is understanding the principles of Universal Design for Learning and applying them to your own course design. These principles can be found here, https://udlguidelines​.cast​.org, and are worth exploring in ensuring your courses are inclusive for all learners.

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The issues we have discussed in this chapter—trauma-informed teaching, mental health, and disability-informed pedagogy—are probably close to our own hearts, as they are somewhat ubiquitous in society. If we haven’t experienced them, we probably care about someone who has. But even more importantly, they may be issues we experience, one way or another, ourselves as we move through this life. This isn’t the only reason why we should teach with sensitivity to these concerns. Ideally, we would do so anyway. But it is, in a sense, a way to practice the “golden rule” in the classroom, by teaching in ways that include everyone in learning, and in ways that we would like to be taught, with grace and intention. Dr. Jennie Case, author of the memoir Searching for Sawbill and many other essays, who has made a study of trauma-informed teaching in calibrating her creative nonfiction classes, has this to say:

The Need for Trauma-Informed Teaching Because I teach creative nonfiction—a genre that openly invites students to explore their own lives (not that other genres don’t)—I inevitably encounter student writing about trauma. Although one should never coerce students to write about trauma, the truth is students often will feel compelled to explore such topics. Some students approach their work from a place of empowerment: they are ready to share a story they have never shared before. Others are so transfixed by a recent death, suicide attempt, or personal crisis, that they can think of nothing else worth writing about—even if you gently suggest the material might be too fresh. Still others elect to explore a seemingly innocuous childhood memory, only to discover halfway through the drafting process that they have stumbled on an emotional minefield. Regardless of the students’ intentions and

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approaches, trauma and posttraumatic stress will inevitably show up in our classrooms. When I was in graduate school, none of my coursework prepared me to work with students experiencing trauma or distress. I can still remember the first semester I taught an introductory creative writing course and my shock when I opened a student writing journal, expecting a poetry exercise, only to find a desperate cry for help instead. The research I have done since then on trauma-informed pedagogy has been out of necessity—the deep desire to do my job well and to better navigate the situations that arise in the creative writing classroom. Now, when I present trauma-informed pedagogy to university instructors, I am struck by our continued collective discomfort. Some instructors tend to distance themselves emotionally and create rigid boundaries. They imply, directly or indirectly, that unprocessed material has no place in the classroom. Other instructors tend to feel overwhelmed with responsibility to students. They emotionally invest in student healing to the point of burnout and then resent students for their emotional needs. Neither outcome is necessarily ideal (or necessarily serves students). The good news is that traumainformed teaching and other inclusive pedagogies offer guidelines and approaches that can keep students and instructors safe as we delve into the often joyous, but sometimes aching heart of our field.

Takeaways ●

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Trauma is a recognized facet of modern society. Several behaviors support trauma-informed teaching. In terms of mental health issues, teachers can be seen as first responders in the classroom. Students should familiarize themselves with their institution’s policies on students in mental distress.

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Creative writing courses should be inclusive of students with disabilities by embracing Universal Design and modifying the course to accommodate students with disabilities according to the Americans with Disabilities Act, institutional policies, and individual student needs.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion 1. Do you recognize trauma-informed teaching practices in your own educational experiences? What were they? 2. Have you been in courses with students with disabilities? How did the teacher accommodate these students? What are some ways you can make your course accessible to all students?

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11 Teaching Creative Writing in General Education and Across the Curriculum

Creative Writing in General Education Introduction to Creative Writing became a part of the lower-division core curriculum at my university, as an arts appreciation course (literary appreciation), about a decade ago, following a nationwide trend to incorporate creative writing into the general education curriculum. This change altered the way I envisioned and taught the course—something I hope you will consider if Introduction to Creative Writing or any creative writing course you teach becomes a part of the general curriculum at your institution. Of course, over the years, Introduction to Creative Writing had already become “many courses to many people,” that is, a course occasionally sought out by nonmajors because they thought it would be an “easy A” or just wanted to try something different. As a result,

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there were always some students in every class who had no intention of continuing on in the degree. However, once the course entered the core curriculum, those percentages shifted. Many more students sought the course as a way to fulfill a core requirement, requiring extra sections, and the percentage of nonmajors shifted from the minority to the majority of students. Working with students who are exploring creative writing as a subject versus students who are somewhere along the continuum of dedicating themselves to becoming writers are two very different propositions. The challenge is to teach them both. A cautionary note here. If you’ve read this far in this chapter and you work in the context of creative writing in higher education outside the United States, you may have begun to suspect that this chapter is not for you. General education is a relatively unique feature to US institutions of higher education. Often occupying the first one or two years of the student’s education, general education courses in an array of core subjects are an effort to make sure that US students have a broad foundation in an array of skills and subjects— science, mathematics, history, communication, and writing—that will prepare them for specializing in their majors and also prepare them as citizens and for the workforce. Outside the United States, most higher education institutions assume secondary institutions have this foundation covered. As a result, outside the United States, most degree programs are three years, with university students beginning in their major areas straightaway. As a result, outside US higher education, there are few to no first-year composition courses. Inside US higher education, there are at least one to two such courses in most institutions and, in fact, an entire discipline, Composition Studies, has grown up around them. So should you skip this chapter if your higher education experience lies outside the United States? Perhaps, if you’re pressed for time. But if you’re not, or if you can return at another time, I encourage you

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to read on, first, to gain an understanding of how writing might be positioned in other national higher education contexts, but second and perhaps more importantly, to give you a sense of how creative writing-focused courses and degrees in your own university contexts might be positioned as suitable preparation for careers not only in writing, education, and publishing but also in any career that benefits from well-refined research, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication skills. In order to position introductory creative writing as an “innovative force,” for nonmajors and majors alike, as well as for those outside the field who don’t recognize the field’s contributions, it is important to foreground the course as one in critical thinking and problemsolving in ways that the students may not have experienced before. To lay the groundwork, at the beginning of the course, I introduce them to the work of British author and educational scholar Sir Ken Robinson via his Ted Talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” (2006) to demonstrate the ways in which the traditional education they have received, designed to minimally educate large groups of students with negligible fuss and resource outlay, may not have best prepared them for the challenges of the 21st-century workplace, one which demands problem-solving, collaboration, and critical thinking skills. I invite students to talk about the creative courses they have taken in the past. The Introductory Creative Writing course in the US general education curriculum, then, focuses on creativity with a capital “C” but also on the ways in which writing for a reader is, in many ways, a process of solving problems and working collaboratively, both valued skills in the twenty-first-century workplace. Writing for a reader, for example, involves considering their reading experience and solving problems, such as “How do I write a poem that engages the reader and draws them from line to line?” or “How do I create a narrative that communicates my theme with nuance and clarity

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at the same time?” The skills involved in posing and answering these questions are critical to succeeding in any workplace today and, especially, in the workplaces of the future, which we cannot imagine yet. Moreover, functioning collaboratively to give another person feedback on their work in a way that improves the outcome is a feature of the introductory creative writing class that can easily transfer to many upper-division courses and, ultimately, to future occupational situations. Finally, any course that increases student writing experience and fluency will augment their value in the communication-centered workplace. While the transfer of these skills may seem obvious to us as instructors, they are not obvious for first-or second-year students who may need to be reminded of the tools they take away from the introductory creative writing course, tools that define their college preparation and that will serve them for their entire lives. In Appendix C, Your Syllabus, you will see a sample syllabus that does this. It goes without saying that this kind of teaching also benefits creative writing majors for all the reasons just stated—to understand that dedicating themselves to developing as creative writers will help them in the university and beyond.

Creative Writing Across the Curriculum As Alexandria Peary notes in her essay, The Pedagogy of Creative Writing Across the Curriculum (CWAC), Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) was a “pedagogy established in the United States in the 1970s . . . that takes the best practices . . . from over a century of writing instruction and relays them to academic disciplines that are primarily focused on bodies of knowledge rather than composition . . . . Creative Writing Across the Curriculum helps individual faculty from different disciplines increase and improve the writing assigned

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in their courses specifically through the genres associated with creative writing” (2015). Creative Writing Across the Curriculum, therefore, takes its WAC predecessor a step further, pointing out the field’s “enormous potential as an interdisciplinary pedagogy” (Peary) that can be further, according to Elizabeth Thomas and Anne Mulvey, who teach health psychology courses, utilized to assist students by activating “imagination—the ability to form mental images that are independent of present perceptions and the ability to create new images through reorganization of previous experiences” (quoted in Peary 2015). Born of the realization that “a one-or-two semester composition course offering general writing skills instruction doesn’t suffice for the complexities of the contemporary university or workplace” (Petraglia quoted in Peary 2015), Creative Writing Across the Curriculum can enhance students’ writing fluency beyond firstyear composition. Just as WAC experience can be, moreover, CWAC knowledge and experiences can help students in obtaining teaching positions by “differentiating” (Peary) you on the job market as someone who can work in interdisciplinary modes across campus to benefit all students. So what kinds of writing assignments are we talking about here? Essentially, any assignment that “ask(s) students to demonstrate course concepts by embedding them” in genre-based tasks, such as “a fictional account or a poetic form” (Peary) that explores a scientific concept or a historical period, for example. Such exercises can not only “strengthen students’ personal understanding of course material” (otherwise known as writing to learn) but they can also “draw students’ attention to larger social forces and issues and the perspectives of others” (Peary). Moreover, they can be employed through a range of “formal and informal” tasks, such as a short story illustrating a sociological concept (high-stakes), or creating a

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metaphor about something they learned in class that day, such as “if X concept were a car, what kind of car would it be?” (low-stakes) (2015). Ultimately, creative writing in general education courses and Creative Writing Across the Curriculum powerfully illustrate the importance of writing and creative writing in the university curriculum in general, an important skill at a time when many financially strapped universities are looking for ways to emphasize courses that offer general as well as niche competencies. Fortunately, in this sense, creative writing courses have plenty to offer the rest of the disciplines.

Takeaways ●

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Creative writing courses taught as General Education requirements may have some different goals and objectives from creative writing courses taught primarily to creative writing majors and minors. Creative Writing Across the Curriculum assignments in subjectbased courses have the opportunity to demonstrate the contribution of creative writing to student learning. Creative writing courses develop several skills, including critical thinking, audience awareness, and collaborative learning that are useful in the workplace.

Questions for Reflection and Revision 1. Where does Introduction to Creative Writing fit in the curriculum at your institution? How do you think this affects the way it is taught? 2. What are some creative-writing-to-learn assignments you might use to help students learn in a subject-based course like History or Mathematics?

12 Literary Citizenship and Professional Issues

Lori May, author of The Write Crowd: Literary Citizenship and The Writing Life, defines Literary Citizenship as, “engaging in the [literary] community with the intent of giving as much, if not more so, than we take.” There is some debate about how early students of creative writing should be introduced to their literary community issues, that familiarizing them with the literary world of which they hope to become a part somehow poisons the well of making art with the introduction of the “marketplace”(2014). I would argue that to deny students a scaffolded introduction to the rich literary community that populates the writing arts is to deny them knowledge of the world of like-minded souls and creative industries which can provide sustenance and joy, second only to the pleasure of writing itself. And I say this as an avowed introvert who also knows that the literary community is far from perfect. There’s real relief and satisfaction in finding one’s people. Humor me with a brief story. My son is a cellist. When he was fifteen, he was accepted into a cello “boot camp” in Michigan with two other students and the camp’s founders, string musicians Will and Jo Preece, which happened over the Christmas break. For ten days, he

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ate and breathed music, learned what it meant to really practice and how to do that, listened to important musical pieces and, in general, got to experience what the life of the musician was like. He seemed to be having a good time but we weren’t sure how good until we picked him up at the airport after it was over. Walking silently to the parking lot, he seemed dazed and at a loss for words. Once he got into our car and closed the door, he burst into tears, sobbing the entire thirtyminute car ride home. To be clear, he was sobbing because he wanted to go BACK. Because he had found his joy, tasted the life he wanted to live. Now that he’d experienced color, the rest of the music-less world— homework and high school—seemed black and white. Fortunately, as artists ourselves, even though we were a little saddened our own son wasn’t initially happy to be home, we also understood well enough not to be offended and to comfort him. We commiserated and tried to bolster him by telling him that now that he had discovered the life he wanted, we could all make sure he was pointed in the right direction from then on, that he would get there, if he wanted to and worked hard enough. Seven years later, having just graduated from a conservatory, he’s well on his way. I tell this story because, by introducing your students to the literary community, to their “people,” and to the concept of “literary citizenship,” and a professional life, you can have the same effect. Our son came from a family of writers, not classical musicians, people who listened to James Taylor, not Jaqueline duPre. While we could support him as artists, we didn’t know the first thing about what citizenship in the classical community entailed or how to connect with it. Chances are, your students are in the same boat. In twentyfive years of teaching, I’ve been able to count on one hand the number of students whose parents were also artists or who even understood what an artistic career entailed. Some writers will tell you that when

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they were young, they didn’t even understand that books were written by actual people, that “author” was something they could even be. At the opposite end of the spectrum, you have students who think that after a few creative writing courses, they’ll be raking in the money like Amy Tan or Stephen King. It’s our obligation—and our privilege—to show our students that somewhere in between these two places, they can carve out satisfying literary lives. To work most effectively, our efforts are best scaffolded throughout undergraduate creative writing classes, to avoid information overload. Another way to look at this scaffolding is to consider teaching literary citizenship, first on a local basis, then on a regional basis, and, finally, on a national basis.

Local Literary Citizenship Local literary citizenship is community- and campus-based. It means teaching students that literary citizenship is first defined as giving back as much or more to the literary community than one takes from it. Being a good literary citizen at this level, then, means: ●

Reading and commenting on the work of your classmates, not just expecting them to read yours without returning the favor

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Taking advantage of local opportunities, especially those on campus, to attend literary events and writers’ presentations and readings. This is not only how young writers show their appreciation for local and visiting authors but also where they begin to learn about the world of writing and what it entails. Students in my creative writing classes are required to attend author events as part of their grade, because these events have been carefully curated by the faculty as part of the curriculum.

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I recently visited a literary festival on a college campus where the student attendance was absolutely pitiful. Clearly students weren’t required to attend events. What a lost opportunity for them! ●

Volunteering and interning for local literary organizations and/or especially the campus literary magazine and writer’s group. These are great opportunities for students to gain work experience in the literary world and to meet other, likeminded people who value writing the way they do. Of course, internships are key to helping students getting their first jobs in the literary world.

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Beginning to learn about publishing their work, especially in local and regional venues.

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Familiarity with both the local library and the campus library and all of their literary resources and events. Do they have a local authors’ group? A reading series? What are their digital and physical holdings like? You might think all students are familiar with local and campus libraries, but often that’s not the case.

On a regional level, introduced in mid-level courses, literary citizenship might feature: ●

Introducing students to state-wide or regional writers’ festivals and conferences, either attending, volunteering/interning for them, or both. The same for larger regional writers’ groups and organizations.

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Assignments that involve students researching and presenting on opportunities in the regional literary scene. For example, what are some well-known publications and publishers within a one- to three-hour radius? What are some good

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reading series to attend in order to learn about and reach out to other writers in the state or region? What are the state libraries and archives like and what resources do they offer for writers? Finally, advanced literary citizenship might be taught in upper-level workshops or, increasingly, happens in its own stand-alone course. Here students learn that not only is there a rich virtual and face-toface national network of organizations that can help them in their literary endeavors, but also that becoming a part of these movements is part of their literary birthright and their artistic obligation. Writing and reading does not happen in a vacuum. In order for the literary arts to continue from generation to generation, those who love it must be willing to proclaim it, to spread the word, to work for it. This includes joining organizations like the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and looking for ways to meet and support the work of other writers nationally. It may also include introducing students to all the different kinds of careers that are available to creative writing majors, from editing and publishing to content creation, technical writing, and social media promotion. Additionally, it may include introducing students to graduate programs in creative writing, and it certainly means teaching them more about the mechanisms of publishing their work.

Takeaways ●

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Literary Citizenship is an important part of undergraduate creative writing courses, which is best integrated across the curriculum in stages. In the upper-division creative writing curriculum, Literary Citizenship is increasingly taught as a stand-alone course.

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Questions for Reflection and Discussion 1. What are the ways in which you participated in your campus literary community as an undergraduate? How can you integrate events in the local and campus literary community into your own course?

13 The Sustainable College Teaching-Writing Career

Many years ago, I boldly proclaimed that people who taught creative writing but didn’t want to spend time learning to teach it well should find another job. I still feel that way, but higher education was a little different back then. While it wasn’t exactly easy to write well, teach well, and stay up to date on pedagogy, it was definitely possible. Work–life balance in higher education has changed since that time, and while I still think those three things are possible, I also think writers entering academia now need to be much more strategic about how they pace themselves so that they don’t burn out too soon, so that making a life as a writer and a teacher remains feasible. In the last ten years or so, I’ve also gone from a mid- to later career writer and teacher, with the concomitant experience that gives me some perspective and advice to share. So, here goes.

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You Have to Really Want to Do This I sometimes encounter students who see teaching writing in academia as a fallback career. I’m not sure where they got the idea that finding and sustaining a full-time job teaching college is something to do only if the best-selling author gig doesn’t work out, but let me tell you now, the whole fallback idea is untenable for several reasons. First, it’s quite competitive to get a job teaching writing in the current climate, and second, teaching creative writing is as much work as any other full-time job, sometimes more, and pays less than many. The first step in avoiding burnout is making teaching a first choice in tandem with writing, not a second, third, or fourth choice, if other gigs don’t work. If you’re as fortunate as I have been, someone who always wanted to do this, you continue to realize that the joy of spending time with the next generation of writers and passing the ball of light that is the literary arts gently on to them is, along with writing itself, continually motivating. It is motivating even against some formidable challenges, including increasing teaching and service workloads, university politics, and remaining financially solvent in a sector for which cost-of-living increases of even a mere 1 to 2 percent, are off the table more years than not. In short, you have to love the students and the act of sharing something you also love. Mercifully the students make it worthwhile, most of the time. If I had a dollar for every time I heard an academic marvel that they can be having a totally crappy day until they walk into the classroom only to have it turned completely around by the students, well, I’d be making at least some headway toward supplementing the lack of a cost-of-living increase. That said, I repeat, this only works if teaching creative writing is not a contingency plan but part of your life’s goal. If you think you might be happy combining a career other than teaching with writing, please fully explore that option.

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If you’re still reading, I do have some guidelines for pacing yourself across your career.

Do Your Own Writing First, and Especially Before Clerical and Service Tasks and Even Teacher Prep I said what I said. Teaching, and everything that goes along with it, can be exhausting and it’s extremely hard to go from class prep, responding to student work, and the classroom itself to drafting your own work. Even if it means a weirdly convoluted schedule that involves writing at 6:00 a.m., or writing for only an hour or two before setting off on the rest of your tasks, teaching a night class, or responding to papers at 9:00 p.m., that’s what you need to do. Give your first best few professional hours to your writing. You don’t need to feel guilty about this: you’ll still have a good four to six hours to put in toward your teaching and class preparation. And if you teach at a university, publishing creative work is part of your workload. Being creative on the page takes energy and courage, which is the reason I also suggest especially doing your writing before clerical and service tasks. That’s because these tasks, while they can be numbingly boring, are notoriously easy to do and thus it’s tempting to do them first and, in fact, to fill our days with them. Who hasn’t felt the satisfaction of checking off another box on our to-do list even if it’s something like the following: write that memo, create a doodle for that meeting, create the guidelines for the annual department Secret Santa (that last one being a morale booster that your institution is only too happy to pass on to you). The problem is when that satisfaction becomes too tempting, so much so that you’d rather fill your schedule with clerical and service work and boxes to check off rather than doing the work

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that you’re really there for: teaching writing and doing the writing itself (you can’t practice the first well without the second). I’ve seen this problem happen among my colleagues often and felt the pull of the easy check mark myself many times. Be forewarned about this temptation; don’t succumb.

Continually Advocate for a Blocked Rather than Scattered Schedule Say you have a four/four teaching load (four classes per semester). My sympathies, but this is what I have and what has been on the rise in higher education. Try to advocate for batching those classes in such a way that you have some stretches for writing, such as 4 classes MWF— an exhausting schedule that at least leaves Tuesdays and Thursdays for blocks of writing. Or try two or three classes MWF and one longer one weekly at night. Or two classes each day later in the morning so you can get a chunk of writing time in before your school day starts. This way even someone with a heavier teaching and administrative schedule (raises hand) can get in some longer stretches for writing. The same goes for meetings. If you can convince your colleagues and the members of the committees you sit on to plan their meetings on a regular (hopefully not too frequent) basis, then you can at least plan your schedule around them to block out times for writing. I used to work with people who loved to end meetings with “let’s meet to continue this discussion tomorrow?” even though no one had planned for it. It took me getting tenure before I could finally say, “I plan my teaching and writing and meeting time, so I need to avoid unplanned meetings unless it’s an emergency.” Fortunately, I work exclusively with other teaching writers now. We meet to make sure the work of our program gets done every other week at a specified

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time so that we can all plan the rest of our writing and teaching time around that.

Service Work: Leave Some Breathing Room If You Can Early in my career I took part in far too many service initiatives because they were so interesting to me. I wanted to do it all! The problem with this was that, in addition to doing all the things that seemed interesting to me, I was also, as a new junior faculty, assigned a lot of other service work that needed doing and that I found it hard to say no to because I was untenured. Knowing this now, I would tell my past self to dial it way back on doing anything only because it seemed interesting and worthwhile because, given what I would be required or tasked with doing that I wasn’t necessarily interested in (I think I’ve sat on more than a dozen assessment committees in the last twenty-five years), I was going to end up overloaded with service work. I know this sounds a little harsh, but I promise you, if my experience bears out, you are going to be assigned plenty of service work to do, without signing up for extra. The other benefit to this plan is that if your schedule suddenly gets particularly rough—a colleague falls ill and needs back-up, a parent or child needs extra attention—you’ll have that extra breathing room. When choosing service work, when you do have a choice, it’s also a good idea to align yourself with work that fits your specialty—that is, the literary arts and teaching writing. Institutions are famous for asking faculty to bake cookies for student study sessions or help first-year families unload their cars. This is all well and good, but years ago, a colleague told me they rarely sign up for anything that their graduate study didn’t prepare them for and that seemed like an

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excellent barometer to me. Your MFA or PhD is not preparing you to scoop ice cream at a student party or carry a first-year student’s vintage album collection up three flights of stairs in 95-degree heat. There are plenty of upper-class student leaders and student services staff for whom this kind of activity is better aligned to their training. There will be enough appropriate opportunities for you to serve your institution, say, planning curriculum or starting a reading series or advising the student literary club, that your graduate work did prepare you for and that’s where you should put your limited time. Finally, if you do choose to skip the more nebulous service work, don’t make a fuss about it. Just don’t respond to that email asking for volunteers— and do respond to the ones asking for help with something that fits your carefully cultivated skill sets.

Be a Good Colleague You can still do all the things I have just mentioned—specifically, try to avoid unnecessary meetings and meaningless service work—and be a good colleague. You can participate in department events, like student readings, colleague readings, visiting author events, and so on, as much as possible, and make sure you are pitching in on the planning and execution of these events. You can try to make sure that you are adding your efforts to the important work of the department and showing up to all the important meetings, doing your part, without overdoing it. You can try to be aware when another faculty member seems to be shouldering more work than they should and offer to take something off their plate. If everyone works this way, the important, necessary ancillary work of a higher education institution will get done. People who don’t do these things, who don’t take on their fair share of this work stand out pretty quickly. You don’t want to be one of them.

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It goes without saying that if you can, you want to conduct yourself professionally. Avoid gossip and speaking ill about colleagues if at all possible. Listen more than you speak. Read the room. Try not to be the first person to speak in a meeting or respond to an email, especially a contentious one. Let an issue unfold somewhat, so you can get a full sense of it, before you chime in. I can’t say that I’ve always done this, especially when I was a junior faculty, but I have tried. Treat colleagues—all colleagues, whether they are famous writers or scholars, term faculty, secretaries, janitors, or junior faculty—with the same respect and decorum that you hope they would accord you and you will contribute to a kind, collegial environment that everyone will enjoy being a part of, and that will go a long way toward creating the kind of working situation everyone can thrive in. Professionalism is also important because, like just about any other special-interest vocation, the literary arts world is a small one, and, with the advent of social media, gossip or even negative information that’s true, moves at the speed of light. It’s hard to repair reputations that have been damaged by inappropriate behavior, rumor mongering, or pot-stirring, in these small worlds, because over time, everyone really does know each other. The person you insult today may end up working on a national board with your future boss or being on the selection committee for a grant you’re applying for. There used to be a professional baseball player, Roberto Alomar, who spit in the face of an umpire over what he felt was a bad call. You can say what you want about acting in the heat of the moment, but I promise you that Alomar’s action affected umpires’ attitudes toward him—and calls against him—for the rest of his career. Don’t be Roberto Alomar. Be someone known for their kindness and fair disposition—not the other way around. Parting words: it’s easy to let “university professor” become your total identity. In an ideal world, though, it’s only part of your identity.

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In an ideal world, you’re professionally a writer and teacher and personally, you’re whatever else you want to be: a family member; a parent, son, daughter, partner, sister, or brother; a best friend; a knitter, a marathoner, a champion nap taker, a hard-core bath taker, a hiker, an environmental volunteer, a book club member. Cultivate friendships at work, sure, but also and especially, be sure to cultivate them outside of work. You get the picture. All of these elements, whichever ones you choose, all of them, are as or more important than your professional identity. I say this with the voice of experience. Your institution will never love you back because it’s not a human being with the potential for love. It’s a collection of different human beings all scrambling to keep the institution together with duct tape and doing so with varying degrees of success, under less than ideal conditions. Strive to be an active writer and a good teacher, because you deserve it and your students deserve it and because both those goals are why you chose this career. Strive to be a good enough colleague because your colleagues deserve it. Beyond that, take care of yourself and cultivate a rich life and identity—however that looks for you—outside teaching and your institution. This advice isn’t 100 percent burnout proof, especially since conditions and cultures change, but it’ll go a long way toward keeping you sane and make it harder for you to gaslight, since your workplace will only be one part of your life. It will help, if you end up in a toxic work situation, if you can walk away at the end of the day and leave work at work. And if the situation becomes too toxic, you can look for an exit without feeling as if you’re destroying your whole identity. Stay true to yourself. At the end of the day, you’re all you’ve got.

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Takeaways ●

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Teaching creative writing is not a fallback career but should only be considered by those who really want go through the steps—graduate school and publication—so they can to teach others. It’s important to maintain an identity outside of your teaching/ institutional identity. Serving students and maintaining workload boundaries to protect writing time as well as time for rest and restoration requires planning and intentionality.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion What is your “why”? I am a third-generation teacher who, when not writing, feels most fulfilled when helping others develop as writers and even as people. Watching my students’ lives unfold in astonishing ways, as so many of them have, is one of my greatest joys. While I think there are a few other writingrelated careers I might have succeeded at, I can’t imagine any as being as fulfilling for me as teaching, encouraging, and inspiring other writers. That is my “why.” What do you want to do by teaching creative writing that you can’t do any other way? How do you think doing this will give meaning and purpose to your life?

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Appendix A Further Resources

Organizations (starred organizations also have conferences, many of which are currently virtual or have virtual strands)   Australasian Association of Writing Programs* https://aawp​.org​.au   Association of Writers and Writing Programs* https://www​.awpwriter​.org   Creative Writing Studies Organization* https://cre​ativ​ewri​ting​studies​.com   De-canon https://www​.de​-canon​.com   European Association of Creative Writing Programs* https://eacwp​.org  

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National Association of Writers in Education (UK)* https://www​.nawe​.co​.uk   Teachers and Writers Collaborative https://twc​.org

Journals Assay Journal: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies http://assayjournal​.wordpress​.com   Journal of Creative Writing Research https://www​.nawe​.co​.uk​/writing​-in​-education​/writing​-at​ -university​/writing​-in​-practice​.html   Journal of Creative Writing Studies https://scholarworks​.rit​.edu​/jcws/   New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing https://www​.tandfonline​.com​/journals​/rmnw20   TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses https://textjournal​.scholasticahq​.com   Whale Road Review: A Journal of Short Poetry and Prose. (Pedagogy Articles) https://www​.whaleroadreview​.com   Writing in Education https://www​.nawe​.co​.uk​/writing​-in​-education​.html

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Essential Reading Lists Creative Writing Studies Reading Lists https://cre​ativ​ewri​ting​studies​.com​/reading​-lists/ Critical Creative Writing—Compiled by Janelle Adsit https://www​.cri​tica​lcre​ativ​ewriting​.org​/reading​-list​.html   Writers of Color Discussing Craft: An Invisible Archive https://www​.de​-canon​.com​/blog​/2017​/5​/5​/writers​-of​-color​ -discussing​-craft​-an​-invisible​-archive

Creative Writing Textbooks—A Selected List Burroway, Janet. Imaginative Writing Dunkelberg, Kendall. A Writer’s Craft: Multigenre Creative Writing Morely, David. The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing Moktari, Tara. The Bloomsbury Introduction to Creative Writing Roney, Lisa Claire. Serious Daring: Creative Writing in Four Genres Sellers, Heather. The Practice of Creative Writing: A Guide for Students Starkey, David. Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief

Multimedia Decolonize Your Syllabus—Felicia Rose Chavez https://www​.antiracistworkshop​.com​/resources  

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City of Literature Documentary about the founding of the University of Iowa MFA Program https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=b1n44tJQLXg​&t​=116s   Race, Craft and Creative Writing: A Conversation with David Mura https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=9mfScWnxXwQ​&t​=38s

AWP Virtual Pedagogy Series Diversity and Inclusion in the Creative Writing Program (with Felicia Rose Chavez, Caleb Gonzalez, and Matthew Salesses) https://www​.youtube​.com​/results​?search​_query​=awp​+panel​ +stephanie​+vanderslice   Reclaiming Genre for the Creative Writing Classroom (DeMisty Bellinger, Tara Campbell, and Julie Iromuyana) https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=J3DP3o5P5EE   Supporting LGBTQ Students in the Creative Writing Classroom https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=i2mE0qPtRKQ   Moving the Creative Writing Classroom Online https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=HbQxbyCfCcI Tamara Girardi, Lucy Biederman, and Lex Williford (editor and contributors to the volume Teaching Creative Writing Online)

Appendix B Your Teaching Statement

A Teaching Statement or Teaching Philosophy is often requested as part of job applications or as part of applications for promotion. In these statements, you should discuss: what your goals for your teaching are, supported by some research, along with specific examples of what you do to achieve those goals in the classroom. Here, creative writing professors Joanna Fuhrman and Anna Leahy generously share their statements with you to give you an idea of what is possible.

Teaching Statement—Joanna Fuhrman I teach a variety of creative writing classes: Introduction to Creative Writing, Poetry Writing, Advanced Poetry Writing, and Introduction to Multimedia Composition. In all of my workshops, I encourage my students to take risks and adopt a playful attitude toward their work, but also to view their own work (and the work of their peers) analytically and critically. Because I have more than one goal as a teacher, I tend to break my creative writing workshops into three parts. During most sessions there will

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be a short writing game and a period when we share what we have written, a discussion of student work, and a period to discuss work by published writers. My workshops involve more reading than a traditional workshop because I believe that when one writes, one is having a conversation with one’s contemporaries as well as with writers of the past. Following is a breakdown of the three sections of my creative writing classes. The order of the activities varies depending on the day and the class. 1) The Workshop While I think my classes have a relaxed and fun atmosphere, I usually work within a fairly rigorous structure. This often means assigning students written critiques of one another’s work. The structure of the critiques is clearly defined. It is important that students write about one another’s work in a descriptive way before they are critical of it. Through this structure, the tone of the class can remain supportive while the critiques can be candid. I give them a list of formal terms I expect them to use in their critiques. The emphasis on descriptive as opposed to evaluative discussions helps make the classroom a community. It also draws attention away from the instructor (myself) as the voice of authority, which I think is important for students who are trying to develop their own aesthetic perspectives and individual voices. In most of my classes, I have both large-group and small-group workshops. Increasingly, I have been asking students to write summaries and reflections of the smallgroup workshop. This allows them to respond to what was said in the workshop, and it also helps students build their own powers of self-reflection and criticism. I used to have

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students write a reflection on revision only at the end of the semester, but I think it’s more effective to have them be working on these skills throughout the semester. In my opinion, the most important thing for students to learn is that writing is a process, and that the process of revision is not about “correcting” but about continuing to develop one’s vision and ideas. Having students be self-reflective about the workshop process is a way of getting them to think critically about their own work. 2) Writing Games Many of the writing exercises I teach are inspired by Surrealist and Oulipian techniques. I try to put my students in situations that encourage them to use their subconscious minds and feel free to write things that do not necessarily make sense and might not be any good. I believe one has to be comfortable enough to risk writing badly to grow as a writer. The poetry exercises often involve writing using other people’s (or random) words, drawing, listening to poetry and music, using computer-generated language manipulation, and writing collaboratively. I try to stress that the products of such exercises are rarely good poems as such, but can be the starting place for interesting work. Often, the games relate to concepts I am trying to teach, such as the use of slant rhyme, extended metaphor, or imagistic scale. In my Introduction to Creative Writing class, the exercises focus on scene building, point of view, and character objectives. 3) Reading Published Work For me, there is nothing more important to the teaching of writing than reading. I often will assign focused close reading of passages so that students can develop their skills

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before they evaluate one another’s work. I want them to see the relationship between the music of words and the meaning, and to see how the connotative meaning of a phrase can be as important as the denotative. I want them not only to look at a work’s overall meaning, but to develop an understanding of how each word a writer chooses subtly changes the work as a whole. In my poetry class, I will ask students to evaluate different translations of the same poem to examine how different word choices change a poem’s tone, music, and meaning. I also assign students statements of poetics to read, so they can start thinking about their own idea of what they want poetry to be. In some classes, I give students individual assignments—I may assign certain poets to certain students to build on what I see as their particular strengths, interests, and personalities. Sometimes I will assign each student a list of eight poets to research and then let them pick one poet to read and respond to. Each student’s list is different so that they are able to introduce the chosen poet to the rest of the class without duplicating another student’s choice. This assignment helps each student develop their own sense of aesthetics and taste, which is one of my main objectives when I teach creative writing. I also often assign one book for everyone to read and discuss as a class. In all of my classes, I make sure to teach literature by writers of a wide range of ethnicities and backgrounds. Last spring, my poetry class read Heaven Is All Goodbyes by Tongo EisenMartin, an African American surrealist political poet who is the Poet Laureate of San Francisco. After the students read the book and wrote an imitation of his style, he visited the class Zoom, read some poems for my students, and talked about his process.

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For the multimedia class, my theme is “Making it New: Rewriting and Remixing.” The students write poems or short stories that use elements from pop culture, myths, fairy tales, or visual art, and then they transform their writing into audio and video pieces. When we were meeting in person, I also had them create Neo-Benshi performance pieces that juxtapose their original texts with found music and existing films. A couple of years ago I taught myself to make poetry videos and to use the audio mixing program Audacity, so I feel more confident and excited about teaching video-making than I did when I first started teaching multimedia classes. The underlying theme of “rewriting and remixing” fits both the writing elements and the audio and video elements, so the students are able to leave the class with a clear understanding of the concept. There is also a lot of room for playfulness, which is always at the heart of my teaching. My students have enjoyed visits with Sharon Mesmer, who talked to them about the Flarf movement, and Janice Lowe, who talked about audio mixing. Moving online has changed my teaching in interesting ways. I enjoy being able to have students annotate shared Google documents, write collaboratively, and share their work and thoughts all at once in the chat. I often give them a question to free-write about for one minute, and then have them type their responses in the chat. This allows me to get responses from a greater number of students than I would in a face-to-face class. In larger classes, I sometimes use the fishbowl method of workshopping. During the workshop, five or six students are unmuted. Everyone else is muted but is asked to write their thoughts in the chat box. The students in the fishbowl rotate each class. There are two advantages. It allows students to talk freely without needing to be called on or unmuted (which can slow things down), and it also ensures that the students who are prone to dominate every session are not able to. It’s important to me that all students participate, not just those who are used to talking in class,

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so I make an effort to create a space where the less assertive students have room to speak.

Sample Teaching Statement—Anna Leahy (Dr. Leahy would like to note that this is an earlier statement from a few years ago that she has updated.) Many creative writers, myself included, use the term workshop to encompass an overarching pedagogical approach or instructional worldview. In my classroom, workshopping is both the learning environment and the method we use to approach everything as writers—every poem we read, every conversation we have, every sentence we type, every sentence we retype, the tree we see out the window, and the biology textbook that explains why its leaves are turning because maybe chlorophyll is just the metaphor we didn’t know we were looking for. Workshopping is a specialized approach—what Lee Shulman, former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, might call a “signature pedagogy” that is steeped in instruction, critique, interaction, and uncertainty. Workshopping is discipline-specific but also pervasive and recognizable, akin to the Socratic law school classroom or the medical residency. The workshop model also embodies a kind of relationship among students, who can discover that they can work better in tandem than in competition because creativity is both individual and communal. Workshopping, as with studio art or engineering pedagogy, is about doing, about process as much as product, about uncertainty as much as mastery, and about both creating and analyzing from a creator’s perspective. When I discuss a published story or poem with my students, we don’t focus on what it means but, rather, on how it means. We learn to

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trust that theme and meaning emerge, but that is the focus for literary scholars. Instead, creative writing focuses on craft: How exactly does a writer avoid exposition (telling) to build a scene (showing)—and why might a writer choose exposition over scene? How does a line break change emphasis and therefore shades of meaning—and why might a poet write a paragraph instead? How can a poem suffer under the weight of clichés even though we use them in casual conversation? Writers read to figure out how we can do that, not just say something about that. Whether or not a student continues to write stories or poems, writerly reading—understanding how—is a valuable cognitive skill central both to the workshop and to students’ lifelong learning. My primary goal as a teacher is for my students to learn. In creative writing courses, that learning and also students’ awareness of it is represented by the portfolio of revised creative work and a reflective essay. My goal is for students to be aware of what they have learned, even when they aren’t yet fully able to apply the craft. If, in glimpsing a slice of someone else’s work, we learn about our own, we must address that projection/reflection as part of learning in an inclusive classroom. While I want all students to meet course learning outcomes, I also want each student to claim the course material and assignments, to individualize learning in ways meaningful to them. Workshop pedagogy, then, depends upon individual risk-taking and trust among fellow writers that missteps are opportunities. As Matthew Salesses writes in Craft in the Real World: “Since the weaknesses we perceive in a manuscript are weaknesses we perceive, our solutions might be most helpful to the problems we face in our own work.” Nothing is ever really mastered in creative work. In fact, for many creative writers, proximity to mastery compels us to seek new challenges. Students are sometimes more comfortable seeking mastery, but the workshop introduces them to a different, invigorating approach to learning.

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Teaching, for me, is creative work in this same sense. I find meaning as each class unfolds, using my expertise to leave myself open to the surprise—perhaps the misstep—that pushes all of us forward. As a teacher, I am responsible for balancing expertise and the creative unexpected in ways that continue to expand rather than merely confirm. I am responsible for asking of myself what I ask of my students: What am I learning, and what’s next?

Appendix C Your Syllabus

What Should You Include and How to Write One When you’re first creating a syllabus, it’s a good idea to ask around for some sample syllabi from instructors you admire, especially at your current institution, and model yours after the ones you most appreciate. I’m going to include one of my syllabi below and suggest that for even more examples, take a look at the syllabi bank at Assay: a journal of nonfiction studies. Assay is a journal well worth reading from cover to cover whenever it comes out—free and online. The website is a virtual extravaganza of info on teaching creative writing, not only creative nonfiction. For their syllabi bank, which includes syllabi for many different kinds of writing classes, go to their “In the Classroom” section here: https://www​.assayjournal​.com​/in​-the​-classroom​.html. Read as many examples as you can and take notes on what aspects of these syllabi you definitely want to include. Also, be sure you understand what your institution requires of your syllabi, which usually includes course name, number, time it meets, room number, instructor name,

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office number, office hours, and course or instructor website. Online course shell information as well. All of this information, including other institutional policies such as attendance polices, behavior policies, emergency policies, and so forth should all be available in one place on your institution’s website. For example, I find these requirements for my institution at the academic affairs section of the university website. Beyond these requirements, think about those elements you wanted to bring in from other syllabi you appreciate and those you want to add yourself. How do you want to explain your philosophy for the course? How do you want students to feel welcome in it? Importantly, what you want them to learn and how you will design the course activities around those objectives, working backward. You’ll want to list the required books and resources and you’ll want to provide a schedule of classes as well. Some instructors provide a relatively detailed schedule of classes—I lean in that direction because, even after twenty-five years in the classroom, I still don’t like to wing it—and some just want to provide due dates to allow for more freedom in between. The good thing about syllabi is that they can and will change as your teaching experience evolves. Early in my career, my syllabi were serviceable, but I had a lot to learn. I still do, that is, I feel better about my syllabi now but I’m always interested in what I can learn from the syllabi of my colleagues. That said, here’s an example of one of my syllabi, from an online Introduction to Creative Writing course (note: normally I do not arrange my semester weeks in modules, but I do that to make assignments more clearly delineated for an online course).

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INTRO CREATIVE WRITING—2310-24961 Dr. Stephanie Vanderslice Office Hours: Thursday 3 to 5 (online), Zoom link available on Blackboard. Otherwise by appointment. Email: [email protected] (Email is the best way to reach me. If we need to talk on the phone or through Zoom, we can arrange it through email). www​.ste​phan​ieva​nderslice​.com (author website if you want to know more about me).

LD Diversity This course is part of the Diversity component of the UCA LowerDivision Core. Diversity courses promote the ability to analyze familiar cultural assumptions in the context of the world’s diverse values, traditions, and belief systems as well as to analyze the major ideas, techniques, and processes that inform creative works within different cultural and historical contexts. For more information, go to http://uca​.edu​/core.

Creative Writing and Creative Thinking Creative writing is a kind of problem-solving. What would be the most appropriate title for this poem? How do I use repetition to create lyricism in this essay? What kind of plot twist will keep this reader at the edge of her seat? That’s what we’ll be doing in this class as well, looking at how you can use creative writing to make you not only a better writer but also a more creative thinker. Someone who can access that creative thinking more easily than the average adult whose creativity and problem-solving skills have been shut down by the memorization and rote learning that have dominated education in the last twenty years. This class is all about rediscovering your

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creative self, whether you want to do so in order to write a brilliant screenplay or come up with a solution to a problem that no one has considered before. The most creative organizations in the world, such as the design firm IDEO, spend massive amounts of time studying people or immersing themselves in real-world situations, so they can learn about problems that are out there waiting to be tackled. Creative companies such as Disney view problems as opportunities; hence, the problem of long lines at Disney World becomes an opportunity to use costumed characters to interact with people in line. The author and futurist Bob Johansen refers to this as “dilemma flipping”; you find a problem and flip it to your advantage. Creative individuals can do this, as well: If you’re a solo entrepreneur, you find a problem that the big guys don’t want to be bothered with, that no one else is tackling because it’s too hard or too narrow or too controversial. The problem is the opportunity. No matter what field you ultimately choose, being able to solve problems sets you apart from everyone else.

When CEOs were asked, “What is the skill you most value in your people?”, they said creativity, the ability to solve problems, come up with new solutions, and use brainpower to figure things out. —SHANNON MCGOVERN, US News and World Reports

How will we do this in this class? Well, first we’ll look at creativity and the different ways we can express that over the course of our lives. Then we’ll look at creative writing and the different ways we can use creative writing to tell more powerful stories about the world we live in and to pay closer attention to the stories that the world is telling us. We’ll look at the universal elements common to strong creative writing (all good writing, really) as explained by Heather Sellers in your textbook, The Practice of Creative Writing. And then

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we’ll spend time in online full class workshops helping one another to learn how to talk about the creative work we’ve done in a way that will improve it.

Texts Gilbert, Elizabeth. Big Magic. Sellers, Heather. The Practice of Creative Writing. Microsoft Word—for your writing projects (here is how you can download Microsoft Office Free https://uca​.edu​/it​/knowledgebase​/ installing​-office/)

Assignments Writing Project I

100

Writing Project II

100

Full Class Workshop

100

Peer Workshop Discussions

200

Reading Journal

200

PCW, GILBERT TalkingPoints

200

Core Assignment

100

(A=1000–900, B=899–800, C=799–700, D=699–500, F=499 or below)

Workshops Self-Critiques Each piece of creative writing you turn in to me (Writing Projects 1 and II, Full Class Workshop) will have a cover sheet that will serve as a self-critique. In this one- to two-page critique, you will introduce the piece by describing the process of writing it, discussing the piece’s

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strengths and weaknesses and describing the kind of feedback from me that would most benefit you. ****The grade you receive on your creative writing will be based entirely on how thoughtful and considered your self-critique is, not on the contents of the creative writing itself. I will respond extensively to your creative writing but will grade only the critique. My goal is that not worrying about a grade will give you the freedom to take risks with your writing. As you will learn in class, art and writing is 90 percent failure—you need to feel the freedom to take risks and fail. Also, being able to think and talk about something you’ve written is also proven to enhance your development as a writer. While we’re on that subject. . .

Writing Projects I and II AND Full Class Workshop Piece (3 Projects) These are the creative pieces that you will hand in during the semester. They can be in any genre (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, drama) that you wish to write in. However, it is important for you to experiment, so the only requirement of these pieces is that they each be a different genre (including the full class workshop piece). General guidelines: Poetry: Minimum of 5 poems, typed. Fiction, Creative nonfiction, Drama: Minimum of 5 pages, typed and double spaced. NOTE: WRITING PROJECTS MUST BE SUBMITTED IN BLACKBOARD AS MS WORD DOCUMENTS, NOT PDFs OR SHARED ON GOOGLE DRIVE. See here for how to download Microsoft office: https://uca​.edu​/it​/knowledgebase​/installing​-office/. REMEMBER: NO SELF-CRITIQUE? NO GRADE.

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A Note on How I Comment on Your Work When I read your work, I’ll read it once holistically, to get a sense of it, and then again to develop my comments and suggestions. At the end, I will comment on what is working in a piece and make suggestions for the most important changes that will help you take the piece to the next level. I may not comment on every single thing that could be improved in a piece, but only those elements that seem most important as you proceed to the next draft. This is because research tells us that evolving writers are easily overwhelmed by too many comments, so it’s more helpful to focus on what’s most important. Keep revising (this IS critical) and writing and paying attention to your writing and to the suggestions of others (especially those suggestions that you hear a lot) and you will evolve as a writer.

Full Class Workshop In the last month of the semester, each student will have a chance to have a full class workshop of her or his work. You’ll sign up for a date to post your work on a discussion page online, and the class will discuss it online. You’ll be able to sign up for the date for this workshop at the beginning of the semester and choose any piece you want to bring before the whole class (as long as it’s different and a different genre from Writing Project I and II). For more about the full class workshop, see the Peer Response section in what follows. Try not to sweat the full class workshops too much. Many of my students tell me they really worry about getting raked over the coals during full class workshops and then discover the experience is really more helpful and encouraging than harmful. However, if you do not turn in your full class workshop on time, you will lose two letter grades on the final assignment.

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What NOT to Submit:

1. Work from more than six months ago unless it has been hugely revised (i.e., “I wrote this in tenth grade and my teacher always liked it”).



2. Work that has been published or feels finished to you, to the extent that, if you’re honest with yourself, you don’t really want feedback on it.



3. Song lyrics. It’s not that I don’t like them. But song lyrics are an art form and, in contrast to popular belief, one that is quite different from poetry. It is also a form I know nothing about. So I can’t really critique them and that does neither of us any good.

Peer Responses—Full Class Workshop Within three days of each workshop date and each student work posted, you will post at least two paragraphs in response. After that, you will have two days to post three responses to the student work posted. As you can see from the assignment list, your responses are a significant part of your grade. Take them seriously. Learning to examine and respond to another writer’s work is crucial to developing the ability to read and evaluate your own. In fact, what you learn from writing these responses may be the most important part of this course. Also, stay on top of your responses; if you get behind you will end up responding to too many pieces at once. You may be wondering, “How am I going to think of enough to write two paragraphs? I’ve never done anything like this before?” The Practice of Creative Writing is a good place to look for guidance— Heather Sellers provides lists of questions that can help you think about your peer’s work.

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Talking Points During the module, you will need to submit ten talking points reflecting on both the chapter and the literary works at the end of each chapter. Talking points are a list of important points, questions, observations, the readings inspired by you.

Late Papers Work is considered late if it is not posted by the due date. Late papers will lose one full grade for each day late. However, if you have serious obstacles that keep you from turning an assignment in on time, please reach out by email.

Your Journal Even the most experienced writers do a lot of low-stakes writing to give themselves material to draw from. To explore ideas and practice what you’re learning, it’s important to do this kind of writing in this class. Fortunately, each chapter of The Practice of Creative Writing has many exercises to get you started. During Modules 2 to 9 you will choose one exercise from each chapter to write in your online journal. This journal will just be between you and me and I will be mostly just checking to see that you are doing the work. If you complete every exercise, you will get full credit for this important part of the course. Who knows, maybe you’ll even create something you can draw on for one of your writing projects or full class workshop.

More About Storytelling: Critical to Life in the Twenty-first Century Have you ever: ●

Made a new friend?

●

Applied for a job?

●

Negotiated a schedule change or raise at work?

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●

Resolved a conflict?

●

Worked through a difficult personal experience?

Each of these tasks, along with countless others in our lives, requires us to be storytellers. The better we are at telling stories, the more others are able to see and understand our point of view. As we improve our own storytelling skills, we also learn to look more closely at the stories that others tell, improving understanding and increasing empathy and tolerance. Storytelling allows us to process our own emotions. We learn about ourselves by working our way through our own personal and family stories, and by listening to the stories of those around us.

Creativity is rapidly shifting from a “nice to have” to a “must have” quality for all types of successful organizations—from delicatessens to design firms. A firm’s embrace of creativity in their workplace culture requires a disciplined approach to unleash the chaos of inventive ideas. —BARBARA DYER, Fortune Magazine

Fall 2022 Due Dates Appear with Each Module on Blackboard Weekly Schedule   August 25 Class Begins Module 0 Online Become familiar with the course Start Big Magic to get ahead

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August 29–September 2 Module 1 Part 1 Big Magic   September 6–September 9 September 5 is Labor Day Module 1 Part 2 Big Magic   September 12–September 16 Module 2 Practice of Creative Writing (PCW), Intro, Finding Focus, Creative Reading Literary Examples: Jarod Rosello, The Neighbor; A. Van Jordan, af*ter*glow; Marco Ramirez, I am not Batman.   September 19–September 23 Module 3 PCW Building Blocks Literary Examples: Kim Addonizio, First Poem for You; Jericho Brown, Hustle; Terrance Hayes, Liner Notes for an Imaginary Playlist; Brenda Miller, Swerve; Raymond Carver, Cathedral.   September 26–September 30 Writing Project 1 Due Module 4 PCW Image Literary Examples: Katie Ford, Still-Life; Natalie Diaz, My Brother at 3 a.m.; Mary Robison, Pretty Ice; Akhil Sharma, Surrounded by Sleep.  

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October 3–October 7 Module 5 PCW Energy Rick Moody, Boys; Brian Arundel, The Things I’ve Lost; Brian Turner, What Every Soldier Should Know.   October 10–October 14 Module 6 PCW Tension. Literary Examples: Rod Kessler, How to Touch a Bleeding Dog; Marisa Silver, What I Saw From Where I Stood; Jessica Shattuck, Bodies.   October 17–October 21 Fall Break and Catch-Up Week—this is to give you time to catch up on anything you might have gotten behind on and work on Writing Project 2.   October 24–October 28 Writing Project 2 Due October 19 Module 7 PCW Pattern Literary Examples: Dinty W. Moore, Son of Mr. Green Jeans: An Essay on Fatherhood, Alphabetically Arranged; Gregory Orr, The River; Randall Mann, Pantoum; Laura Anne Bosselaar, Stillbirth.   October 31–November 4 Module 8 PCW Insight Literary Examples: Jessica Greenbaum, A Poem for S.; Naomi Shihab Nye, Wedding Cake; Brian Doyle, Two Hearts; Michael Cunningham, White Angel.   November 7–November 11 Module 9 PCW Revision, Forms

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SIGN UP FOR A FULL CLASS WORKSHOP There will be a discussion page where you can sign up with instructions.   November 14–November 18 Module 10 Full Class Workshop 1   November 21–25 Thanksgiving Break Reflect, Rest, and Catch Up   November 28–December 2 Module 11 Full Class Workshop 2   December 5–December 9 Module 12 Full Class Workshop 3   December 12–December 16 Finals Week Complete Core Assignment by midnight December

University Policies (and really useful information) Food Pantry: UCA has a food pantry in the rear of the Physical Plant Building for your use. You need to eat to learn well. If you need food and don’t have the resources, visit the food pantry. Special Situations: Illness—If you become ill during the semester, please contact me and keep me posted. I want to help you stay in and finish the course.

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Also: ●

Health: The Student Health Center is provided as part of your tuition and can serve as your GP; it’s a place where you can get medical attention, medicines—over the counter and prescription, shots, etc. Take advantage. You can also get Covid-19 shots and Covid-19 tests here.

●

If, during any point of the semester, you find that personal challenges are keeping you from completing your course work, seeking counseling may help. All students are entitled to free, confidential, professional counseling. Please contact the University Counseling Center at 450-3138. They are located in the Student Health Center, suite 327.

Americans with Disabilities Act The University of Central Arkansas adheres to the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. If you need an accommodation under this Act due to a disability, please contact the Office of Accessibility Resources and Services (OARS), 450-3613.

Academic Integrity The University of Central Arkansas affirms its commitment to academic integrity and expects all members of the university community to accept shared responsibility for maintaining academic integrity. Students in this course are subject to the provisions of the university’s Academic Integrity Policy, approved by the Board of Trustees as Board Policy No. 709 on February 10, 2010, and published in the Student Handbook. Penalties for academic misconduct in this course may include a failing grade on an assignment, a failing grade in the course, or any other course-related sanction the instructor

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determines to be appropriate. Continued enrollment in this course affirms a student’s acceptance of this university policy.

Title IX Disclosure/Sexual Harassment If a student discloses an act of sexual harassment, discrimination, assault, or other sexual misconduct to a faculty member (as it relates to “student-on-student” or “employee-on-student”), the faculty member is encouraged to report the act to the Title IX Coordinator, deputy coordinator, or employee with the authority to institute corrective measures on behalf of the University. An investigation of a formal complaint of Title IX Sexual Harassment will only be initiated when the Complainant (individual who suffers actual harm from the violation of the Title IX Sexual Harassment Policy) or the Title IX Coordinator signs a complaint. For further information, please visit https://uca​.edu​/titleix/. *Disclosure of sexual misconduct by a third party who is not a student and/or employee is also encouraged if the misconduct occurs when the third party is a participant in a university-sponsored program, event, or activity.

Bibliography Abrams, Zara. “Student Mental Health Is in Crisis. Campuses Are Rethinking Their Approach.” Apa​.org​, October 1, 2022. https://www​.apa​.org​/monitor​ /2022​/10​/mental​-health​-campus​-care. ACHA-NCHA. “Publications and Reports: ACHA-NCHA III.” www.acha.org, 2022. https://www.acha.org/NCHA/ACHA-NCHA_Data/Publications_and_ Reports/NCHA/Data/Reports_ACHA-NCHAIII.aspx. ACHI, Webmaster. “Adverse Childhood Experiences More Common for Arkansas Kids than National Average.” ACHI, August 7, 2019. https://achi​.net​ /newsroom​/adverse​-childhood​-events​-more​-common​-for​-arkansas​-kids/. Bishop, Wendy. Released into Language. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1990. Bishop, Wendy and Hans A. Ostrom. Colors of a Different Horse: Rethinking Creative Writing Theory and Pedagogy. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1994. Brannon, Lil and C. H. Knoblauch. “On Students’ Rights to Their Own Texts: A Model of Teacher Response.” College Composition and Communication 33, no. 2 (1982): 157. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/357623. Brown, Brené. Atlas of the Heart. New York: Random House, 2021. Cain, Mary Ann. Revisioning Writers’ Talk: Gender and Culture in Acts of Composing. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995. CAST. “The UDL Guidelines.” Udlguidelines​.cast​.org​. CAST, 2018. https:// udlguidelines​.cast​.org/. Castro, Joy. “Racial and Ethnic Justice in the Creative Writing Course.” Gulfcoastmag​.org​, n.d. Accessed January 6, 2023. https://gulfcoastmag​.org​/ online​/fall​-2015​/racial​-and​-ethnic​-justice​-in​-the​-creative​-writing​-course/. Cer, Erkan. “The Instruction of Writing Strategies: The Effect of the Metacognitive Strategy on the Writing Skills of Pupils in Secondary Education.” SAGE Open 9, no. 2 (2019): 215824401984268. https://doi​.org​ /10​.1177​/2158244019842681. Chavez, Felicia Rose. The Antiracist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2020.

 Bibliography 157 Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Random House US, 2015. Cruz, Rachelle. “We Need New Metaphors: Reimagining Power in the Creative Writing Workshop.” Poets & Writers, August 12, 2020. https://www​.pw​.org​ /content​/we​_need​_new​_metaphors​_reimagining​_power​_in​_the​_creative​ _writing​_workshop. Dale, John. “The Rise and Rise of Creative Writing.” Theconversation​.com, 2011. https://theconversation​.com​/amp​/the​-rise​-and​-rise​-of​-creative​ -writing​-730. Dawson, Paul. Creative Writing and the New Humanities. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2005. Deal, Rachel. “Why Publishing Is so White.” PublishersWeekly​.com​, 2016. https://www​.publishersweekly​.com​/pw​/by​-topic​/industry​-news​/publisher​ -news​/article​/69653​-why​-publishing​-is​-so​-white​.html. Donnelly, Dianne. Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? Bristol: Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications, 2010. Duncan, Taine. “Embracing the Pedagogy of Hope: Moving beyond Tolerance to Inclusivity.” Presented at the Center for Teaching Excellence Conference, University of Central Arkansas, August 14, 2019. Editors, ZORA. “Toni Morrison: ‘I Am Alarmed by the Willingness of Women to Enslave Other Women’.” ZORA, June 22, 2020. https://zora​.medium​.com​/ toni​-morrison​-in​-her​-own​-words​-562b14e0effa. Flood, Allison. “US Publishing Remains ‘As White Today as It Was Four Years Ago’.” The Guardian, January 30, 2020. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/ books​/2020​/jan​/30​/us​-publishing​-american​-dirt​-survey​-diversity​-cultural​ -appropriation. Gay, Roxane. Bad Feminist. New York: Harpercollins USA, 2014. Harper, Graeme. Teaching Creative Writing. London: Continuum, 2006. Heffers, Audrey. “In the Room Where It Happens: Accessibility, Equity, and the Creative Writing Classroom.” Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, 2022. https://www​.assayjournal​.com​/audrey​-t​-heffers​-in​-the​-room​-where​-it​ -happens​-accessibility​-equity​-and​-the​-creative​-writing​-classroom​-82​.html. Herrington, Anne, Kevin Hodgson, Charles Moran, and Elyse Eidman-Aadahl. Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21stCentury Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press, 2009. Horn, Trevor, Geoff Downes, and Bruce Woolley. “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Island Records, 1979. “Inkluded.” Inkluded, n.d. Accessed January 6, 2023. https://inkluded​.org. King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. London: Hodder, [2000] 2012. Koehler, Adam. Composition, Creative Writing Studies and the Digital Humanities. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

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Contributors Jennifer Case: Jennifer Case’s writing explores issues related to place, environment, home, family, and motherhood. Her work has appeared in journals such as Orion, Sycamore Review, Zone 3, Fourth River, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She is the recipient of a Bread Loaf Bakeless Scholarship and Stone Canoe’s 2014 Allen and Nirelle Galson Prize in Fiction. Her first book, a memoir, was published in 2018. Jennifer earned a master’s degree in poetry from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a PhD in creative writing from Binghamton University. She teaches creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas, serves as an assistant nonfiction editor at Terrain​.org​, and is the supervising editor of Arkana. She lives in central Arkansas with her family. M. Shelly Conner: Chicago native M. Shelly Conner spent her summers bouncing between her grandmother in Memphis and relatives in Los Angeles, reveling in the sprawl of the Great Migration. She received her PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago. A multigenre writer, she is the creator of the Quare Life web series and has published essays on dapper queer aesthetics, Black womanhood, self-sustainable living, and their intersections in various publications including the A.V. Club; the Grio; Playboy Magazine; and Crisis Magazine. An excerpt of everyman appears in the Obsidian Journal of Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora.

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Contributors

Conner is assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas and lives with her wife and their dog Whiskey on their Arkansas homestead. Joanna Fuhrman: Joanna Fuhrman is Assistant Teaching Professor in Creative Writing at Rutgers University, and the author of six books of poetry, most recently To a New Era (2021). Her next book, Data Mind, is forthcoming in 2024. After publishing her poetry with them since she was a teenager, she became a co-editor at Hanging Loose Press in 2022. Anna Leahy: Anna Leahy is an American poet and nonfiction writer. The author of numerous books of poetry, essays, and creative writing pedagogy, Leahy directs the Tabula Poetica Center for Poetry and MFA in the Creative Writing program at Chapman University in Orange, California. In 2013, she was named editor of TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics. Stephanie Vanderslice: Stephanie Vanderslice is Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Arkansas Writer’s MFA Workshop at the University of Central Arkansas, USA and was the Chairperson of the Creative Writing Studies Organization from 2016-2019. Her column, The Geek’s Guide to the Writing Life appears regularly in the Huffington Post and formed the foundations for a book of the same name published by Bloomsbury. She publishes fiction, nonfiction and creative writing criticism with notable works including Can Creative Writing Really Be Taught?: Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy, Teaching Creative Writing to Undergraduates: A Guide and Sourcebook and Rethinking Creative Writing: Programs and Practices that Work.

Suggestions for Teaching This Book

Suggestions for Teaching I’ve been teaching a course in Creative Writing Pedagogy since 2002, a course which has changed and evolved over the years in all the many ways that my teaching has evolved and changed, and will continue to do so. This book emerged from that course and all the research I have read and written over the years, in teaching it. Just as a craft book or writing memoir is just one writer’s narrative, my suggestions here in this guide are just one teacher’s suggestions. Whenever I hear about the teaching of my colleagues, at my own institution and beyond, I practically salivate at all the new ideas. Since 2002, the number of people teaching Creative Writing Pedagogy has grown exponentially, so in teaching this book, I also encourage you to seek out others whom you may find in the resources section, places like the Creative Writing Pedagogy Facebook page. While a few methods will be more specific, many speak to a general philosophy toward teaching the course that focuses on two issues. One is trying to remember that if you are teaching this book in a course about teaching, everything you do is something you can be modeling for your students. Remind them of this throughout the syllabus—give them the rationale for everything you’re teaching (a

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good practice in general) and encourage them to unpack the reasons why you are using a certain method whenever they can. My second teaching philosophy is driven by choice and engagement. Throughout my career, I spent a lot of time with the National Writing Project, first as a teacher-consultant with the Acadiana Writing Project and then leading a site at the University of Central Arkansas. Through these experiences, I was mentored by Professor Ann B. Dobie and others to give students ways to make what they studied their own, largely through choice and I encourage you to do the same. Engaging and interesting students in a subject is a way to help them tailor their learning to what they want to know and what they want to learn about. For example, the questions at the end of each chapter are designed to encourage students to reflect on how the chapter might be relevant to their own lives and their own educational experiences. One way to enhance that engagement might be to ask them to keep a learning journal in the course and to choose one question from each chapter to write about—the one most interesting and relevant to them. Another way to foreground choice and engagement is to use one common book in the course and then to assign an edited collection of articles about creative writing pedagogy from which students choose an article to read and lead the class discussion on. By choosing an article from an assigned collection or perhaps an online journal like Assay, the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, or TEXT, the students are able, within the umbrella of the course topic, to tailor the reading and discussion to issues in creative writing pedagogy that interest them most. By encouraging students to choose an article and lead class discussion, you are also giving them an opportunity to teach the subject of their article. As we know as teachers ourselves, teaching a subject allows you to learn it twice, engaging students even more

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in the subject matter. Finally, in the weeks before students started leading discussions, I modeled several different methods for leading the discussion of this book. When I set them loose on their own articles and they asked, “How should I lead the discussion?” I told them to do it in whatever way seemed most effective for them and for the article and to make the discussion their own. My examples showed them there are all kinds of ways to get students to engage with a text and gave them ideas to select from, but often, they got even more creative in their discussion leadership than I did. So far my most memorable example of this leadership is a student standing on a chair at the front of the room directing the rest of the class: “If you agree with this point, stand on this side of the room. If you disagree with it, stand on the other.” Talk about a way to physically engage students in their learning. This kind of choice also speaks to the value of collaborative learning and to giving students the freedom to own and interpret what they are learning. Admittedly, Creative Writing Pedagogy is comprised of juniors, seniors, and graduate students, but whenever possible, I follow my students’ good ideas, because they have a lot of them and they are often more creative than I am. I also encourage them to reinterpret what they’re learning whenever possible. This leads me to my favorite assignment, which comes early on in the course. After the students have read about the history of creative writing in higher education and the history of creative writing pedagogy in the first two chapters, and have also watched the documentary City of Literature, which is about the history of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and which underscores much of what they’re learning, I put the students in groups of 3 to 4. I give each group a large posterboard and access to crayons and markers and tell them their task is to create a visual representation of the history of creative writing that they will then present to the class.

Suggestions for Teaching This Book

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Although now any search of Google Scholar with the keywords, “drawing” and “learning” will yield lots of research supporting this connection, the roots of this assignment are largely experiential— when I was in graduate school and trying to understand a complex topic, it often helped me to try to sketch it out. I knew history— especially educational history—might be dry to some but I really wanted my students to “know” the history of creative writing and creative writing research in higher education before we moved on to anything else—the history of “how we got here.” As usual, the students rose to the task, especially since after a few years I was able to give them some past examples of the assignment, like the group who made the history into a “concert t-shirt” with “tour dates” on the back, such as “Harvard, 1898” and “Iowa City, 1937” or the group who translated it into a board game. This assignment takes about two hours, an hour and a half for the group to come up with the idea and draw a large visual (as you might suspect, some groups get bogged down in drawing details, within reason, I try to give them as much time as they need) and another half hour to present their posters to the class. Since I tend to teach this class either one night a week for three hours or two days a week for one hour and fifteen minutes each, it occupies about one night class or two day classes. It’s a great community builder to do early in the semester, giving students a chance to work together and start getting to know one another. Possible examples for written assignments accompanying this book could include: ●

A creative writing literacy biography that draws from their reflective journal and cites sources read in the course. If students want to translate this assignment into another media, like a video or a digital story, I encourage them to do so.

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●

A reflection on their experiences in the creative writing workshop, how those experiences may or may not reflect or include their own cultures, and how they might plan more inclusive workshops of their own.

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A weekly blog post written by a different member of the class each time, serving as class “notes.”

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For graduate students especially: − a sample syllabus for their own course or a sample teaching philosophy. − An essay exploring an issue in creative writing that intrigues them that they might publish or present at a conference. Many of my students have gone on to do this.

The suggestions in this guide are just meant to be starting points. I’d love to hear your teaching ideas, exercises, and assignments for publication in future editions of this Teacher’s Guide. Email me with them at stephv​@uca​.e​du.

Index The 9 Rights of Every Writer (Spandel)  20 abuse, physical and emotional  92 Academic Integrity Policy  154 Adsit, Janelle  17, 43 Alomar, Roberto  125 Americans with Disabilities Act  102, 105, 154 The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom (Chavez)  42, 48, 66 anti-war movement  64 artificial intelligence (AI)  89 Assay  141, 164 assessing creative writing commentary writing  77 common language of the classroom, use of  80 grading (see grading) grammar  79–80 ideal text, description  77 language of the classroom, use of  80 overcommenting  77–8 responding to and  77–80 Association of Writers and Writing Programs  5, 117 Atlas of the Heart (Brown)  50

The Author is not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Reconceived (Wandor)  7 Bad Feminist (Gay)  50 Baldwin, James  4 Belanoff, Pat  69 Bennett, Eric  45 Between The World and Me (Coates)  50 BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color)  6, 43, 45, 47–50, 66 identity politics of  45 Bishop, Wendy  x, 13–16, 76 Bizzaro, Patrick  13–14, 66 Black Lives Matter movement  42, 45 Bradbury, Malcolm  7 Brady, Tess  17 Brannon, Lil  77 Broad, Bob  66 Brown, Brene  50 Cain, Mary Ann  65 Can It Really Be Taught?: Resisting Lore in the Creative Writing Classroom (Ritter)  x, 16 Case, Jennie  xvii, 103 Castro, Joy  66, 69–70

 Index 169 ChatGPT  89–90 Chavez, Felicia Rose  42–3, 47–8, 52, 56–7, 66–7, 82, 95 Cheuse, Alan  40 Civil Rights movement  64 Clark, Michael  17 classism  43 Coates, Ta-Nehisi  50 Colors of a Different Horse (Bishop)  13 communism xiii, 1, 45 Composition, Creative Writing Studies and the Digital Humanities (Koehler)  85 composition, field of  12, 15–16, 26, 108, 110–11 connection, helping students for accountability  31 assignments  31–2 culture of reading in the classroom  29–30 empower students with choice  32–3 latest trends through social media  30 literary culture  30 new reading paths  28 writing and reading, connection  27–8 Conner, M. Shelly  xvi, 89 Covid-19 pandemic  96 Craft in the Real World (Salesses)  46, 66, 82, 139 creative thinking and creative writing  143–4 creative writing across the curriculum  110–12 Creative Writing in the Digital Age (Letter)  87 Creative Writing in the New Humanities (Dawson)  8

creative writing pedagogy  x–xi, 18–19, 21, 25, 48–9, 85, 163–5 Creative writing scholarship  26 Creative Writing Studies Conference  25 Journal  164 Organization  17, 26 Cruz, Rachelle  43 Csikzentmihayli, Mihayli  23 Curie, Marie  22 cyclical trauma  43 Dale, John  8 Dawson, Paul  8, 17 detective stories  62 Diaz, Junot  66 Dickens, Charles  3 digital creative writing artificial intelligence (AI)  89 ChatGPT  89–90 digital assignment  87 digital media publishing  89 digital presentation skills  88 e-book  86 social media  87 Web 2.0  85 dilemma flipping  144 Dillard, Annie  23 Disabilities Act  102, 105, 154 disability-aware pedagogy  102 Disney, Walt  22 distressed student, see mental health and creative writing Dobie, Ann B.  164 Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? (Donnelly)  65 Donnelly, Dianne  17, 65 drug addictions  92 Duncan, Taine  51

170 early teaching guides  x–xi e-book  86 Edison, Thomas  22 educational history  1, 166 Elbow, Peter  69 Emig, Janet  15 Engle, Paul  4 European Romantic movement  21 Everyman (Shelly)  89 Feminist movement  64 Feynman, Richard  22 Fitzgerald, F. Scott  4 Flower, Linda  15 Foerster, Norman  4 Fuhrman, Joanna activities  134–8 reading published work  135–7 teaching statement  133–8 workshop  134–5 writing games  135 Gay, Roxane  x, 42, 50 Gay Rights movement  64 general education, creative writing in  107–10 Introductory Creative Writing course  109–10 skills and subjects, US higher education  108 generative processes, teaching and modeling choice  36 exercises or writing to a prompt  39–40 free-writing  38–9 generative exercises  36 good writing  37 idea of journaling  37–8 in-class writing  36–7 scaffold writing assignments  37

Index genre inclusivity, teaching for competition  57–8 elitism and Western hegemony  60 fan fiction, writing  59–60 hierarchies  58 hybrid genres, benefits  60 literary  57–8 reading strengths  61 valuing genres  59 ghost stories  62 G.I. Bill  xiii, 1, 5, 64 Gladwin, Susanna  7 grading  80–2 Great Writing creative conference in London  9 Haake, Kate  13–14 Harper, Graeme  16–17 Harrington  86 Harry Potter (Rowling, J. K.) effect  61 series  28 Hayes, John  15 Healthy Minds Study  96 Hecq, Dominique  17 Hemingway, Ernest  4 Hergenrader, Trent  17 Herrington, Anne  86 Higher education  63 Hispanic and Chicano Rights movement  64 historical fiction  62 history of creative writing, higher education academies and informal salons  4 Australia  8–9 BIPOC  6 Classics  3 compulsory education  3

 Index 171 courses in Australian higher education  8 creative writing MA  7 democratization  6 disciplines taught in higher education  3 G.I. Bill, activation of  5 Harvard influence, trends in US higher education  2 Higher Education Act, 1965  6–7 high school diploma or a GED (General Education Diploma)  5 Industrial Revolutions  4 Iowa Workshop Method  4 literacy  3 Open Admissions movement  5–6 technical education or colleges of advanced education  8 thirteen member programs  5 verse-making courses  4 world-wide explosion of interest in creativity  8 Hodgson, Kevin  86 homophobia  43 Hope, A. D.  8 incarcerations  92 inclusive creative writing classroom activity for  51–2 apolitical writing  45–6 diversity and inclusion  41–2 inclusive pedagogy  48–55 individual freedom of expression  43, 45 industry and societal change  43–8 participatory democracy  47 racial identity and position  43 inclusive pedagogy  48–55

check-in practice  52 getting to know students  51–2 group guidelines  53 intentionality in course materials  54–5 micro-aggression  54 practices  50–5 preparing for difficult moments  53–4 reflective teaching  49 setting group guidelines  53 striving for clarity in course materials  52–3 Industrial Revolution  22 Inkluded Academy  44 Introduction to Creative Writing course (Vanderslice)  143–6 Johansen, Bob  144 Johnson, Lyndon  6 Journal of Creative Writing Studies  17, 164 King, Jr., Martin Luther  22 King, Stephen  13, 27, 61, 115 K-mart realism  59 Knoblauch, C. H.  77 Koehler, Adam  85 Krauth, Nigel  17 Kroll, Jeri  17 Leahy, Anna  xv, xx, 16, 63, 66, 133, 138–40 Lerman, Liz  68–9 LGBTQIA+  42–3, 49, 92 Light, Greg  15 literary citizenship advanced  117 community- and campusbased  115

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definition  113–14 local and campus library, familiarity  116 local literary citizenship  115–17 in mid-level courses, regional level  116–17 reading and commenting on the work  115 volunteering and interning  116 literary history  1 lore xiii, 13–16, 18 Luckert, Erika  77 McCormick, Jason  77 McGur, Mark  5, 17 McQuiston, Casey  62 mental health and creative writing  96–7 counseling  96 Employee Assistance Program  97 responding to signs of mental illness  97 feeling responsible  99–100 initiate contact  98 know the limits  99–102 listen objectively  98–9 observe  98 offer support and assistance  98–9 self-disclosure of trauma  101 writing and healing, connection  101 short-term emergency therapy  96 wellness workshops  96–7 Moran, Charles  86 Morrison, Toni  25 Moxley, Joseph  13–14 Mulvey, Anne  111 Mura, David  43

Nance, Kevin  59 National Writing Project  164 New Writing: The International Journal of Creative Writing Theory and Pedagogy (Harper)  16 Nguyen, Beth Bich  43, 66–8 Nguyen, Viet Than  45 North, Stephen  13 Obsessive Compulsive Disorder  101 Old School Creative Writing  ix, 74 Open Admissions movement  xviii, 1, 5–6, 64 Ostrum, Hans  13–14 overcommenting  78 peacocking  70 Peary, Alexandria  110–11 The Pedagogy of Creative Writing Across the Curriculum (CWAC) (Peary)  110 pedagogy of deep listening (Chavez)  67 Playwriting in the Renaissance  22 Poddar, Namrata  43–5 Poets and Writers (Nance)  43, 59 pointing  69–70, 111 pointing, workshop feedback method  69–70 Potok, Chaim  61 Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom: The Authority Project (Leahy)  16 The Practice of Creative Writing (Sellers)  144–5, 148, 149, 151

 Index 173 process memos and letters  76 The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (McGurl)  5, 17 Racial and Ethnic Justice in the Creative Writing Course (Lerman)  69 racism  43, 64 Rankine, Claudia  43–4, 48 reflective creative writing teacher  x open to new theories and practices today  xii staying up to date  xii Released Into Language: Some Options for Teaching Creative Writing  x, 13–14 research and teaching of creative writing being a creative writer  25–6 Creative Writing Studies  16 gag rule  13–14 lore, description and example  13 myths  19–22 pedagogy with Teaching Creative Writing  17 prewriting strategies  23 research in composition studies  12 romantic genius myth  22 scaffolding writing assignments  24 text for creative writing courses  11 workshop model/method  12–13, 23 writing exercises on the spot  24–5 writing process, description  23

Responding to Student Poetry (Bizzaro)  66 Responding to Student Writers (Sommers)  77 Rethinking Creative Writing in Higher Education (Vanderslice)  41 revision  73–4 access to authors to talk about revision  75 building revision into course  75–7 drafts and writing the process  76 metacognition in process of writing  76 practices of published authors  74–5 process memos and letters  76 process writing  76–7 questions and critiques form of writing  76 setting up course to support revision  74–5 speak about effective practice  75 Revisioning Writers’ Talk: Gender and Culture in Acts of Composing and Composing Public Space (Cain)  65–6 Ritter, Kelly  x, 16 Robinson, Sir Ken  109 Romantic era  21–2 Rowling, J. K.  28 Salesses, Matthew  13, 43, 46–8, 66, 81, 132, 139 sample creative writing syllabi  141–55 sample teaching philosophies  133–40 Schramm, Wilbur  4

174 Searching for Sawbill (Case)  103 sexism  43 Shakespeare  21–2 Shaughnessey, Mina  15 Shenk, Joshua Wolf  21–2 Shulman, Lee  138 signature pedagogy  xv, 45, 63, 70, 138 Sommers, Nancy  77–80 Spandel, Vickie  20 speculative fiction  62 sustainable college teaching-writing career, see also teaching, suggestions for guidelines being a good colleague  124–5 blocked schedule  122–3 own writing  121 professionalism  125–6 service work  123–4 teaching writing job, combining with other  120 work-life balance in higher education  119 syllabus  141–2 Tan, Amy  115 Taylor, James  114 teaching, suggestions for  163–7 choice and engagement  164 class discussion  165 collaborative learning  165 rationale  164 written assignments  167 Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st Century (Herrington, Hodgson, Moran)  86 TEXT, online journal  17, 130, 164

Index Theune, Mike  66 Thomas, Elizabeth  111 Title IX Disclosure/Sexual Harassment  155 transphobia  43 trauma-informed teaching  71, 91–6 check-in practice  95 kind treatment in classroom  95 mental health and trauma  92 need for  103–4 practices  92 safety, techniques  94–5 sensitive teaching  95 stress and adversity  94 teacher’s role  93–4 traumatic stress responses  93 Twain, Mark  3 United Kingdom’s National Association of Writers in Education  7 United States’ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)  94 University of Central Arkansas  154, 164 University of East Anglia  7 University of Iowa  63 Iowa English Master’s Program  2 Iowa Writer’s Workshop  4, 166 MFA program in Creative Writing  2, 4–5, 61 University of Middlesex  7 University of Pennsylvania  15 Vanderslice, Stephanie  143 Wandor, Michelene  7 Weidong, Liu  9

 Index 175 We Need to Talk: A New Method for Evaluating Poetry (Theune and Broad)  66 Where the Red Fern Grows (Rawls)  28 Wilde, Oscar  3 Wilson, Angus  7 workshops  63–71 allowing writer to speak, Nguyen’s workshops  68 brutal honesty on work  70 college prep courses  64 countercultural movements  64 Critical Response Process, Lerman’s  68–9 democratization of the college classroom  65 as framework or methodology  66

full class workshop  147–8 mentor-class work-discussion structure  65 Open Admissions movement  64 peacocking  70 pointing, workshop feedback method  69–70 process and composition aspect of writing  66–7 self-critiques  145–7 sensitive criticism  71 as signature pedaogy  66 styles  67 Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle and American Creative Writing (Bennett)  45 The Write Crowd: Literary Citizenship and The Writing Life (May) xvii, 113

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