What We Talk about When We Talk about Creative Writing (New Writing Viewpoints, 14) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783096004 ISBN 13: 9781783096008

Verlag: Multilingual Matters, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Marking the tenth anniversary of the New Writing Viewpoints series, this new book takes the concept of an edited collection to its extreme, pushing the possibilities of scholarship and collaboration. All authors in this book, including those who contributed to Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom, which launched the series ten years ago, are proof that creative writing matters, that it can be rewarding over the long haul and that there exist many ways to do what we do as writers and as teachers. This book captures a wide swathe of ideas on pedagogy, on programs, on the profession and on careers.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anna Leahy is Associate Professor of English, Associate Director of the MFA in Creative Writing, and Director of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity at Chapman University, USA. She has published widely on creative writing pedagogy, as well as creative non-fiction and poetry. She is the editor of TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics.

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What We Talk about When We Talk about Creative Writing

By Anna Leahy

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2016 Anna Leahy and the authors of individual chapters
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78309-600-8

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Foreword: New Writing Viewpoints: Ten Years Onward, 
Part 1: Introduction, 
1 Telling Time, Making Use, Turning Together: Conversations in Creative Writing Anna Leahy, 
Part 2: Pedagogy, 
2 Where Are We Going in Creative Writing Pedagogy? Cathy Day, Anna Leahy and Stephanie Vanderslice, 
3 Good Counsel: Creative Writing, the Imagination, and Teaching Anna Leahy and Larissa Szporluk, 
4 Writerly Reading in the Creative Writing Course Sandy Feinstein, Suzanne Greenberg, Susan Hubbard, Brent Royster and Anna Leahy, 
Part 3: Programs, 
5 Text(ure), Modeling, Collage: Creative Writing and the Visual Arts Anna Leahy, Lia Halloran and Claudine Jaenichen, 
6 More Than the Sum of Our Parts: Variety in Graduate Programs Anna Leahy, Leslie Pietrzyk, Mary Swander and Amy Sage Webb, 
7 The Bold and the Beautiful: Rethinking Undergraduate Models Katharine Haake, Anna Leahy and Argie Manolis, 
8 The Program Beyond the Program James P. Blaylock, Douglas R. Dechow, Anna Leahy and Jan Osborn, 
Part 4: The Profession, 
9 Creative Writing (Re)Defined Dianne Donnelly, Tom C. Hunley, Anna Leahy, Tim Mayers, Dinty W. Moore and Stephanie Vanderslice, 
10 Terms & Trends: Creative Writing and the Academy Rachel Haley Himmelheber, Anna Leahy, Julie Platt and James Ryan, 
Part 5: Careers, 
11 Peas in a Pod: Trajectories of Educations and Careers Mary Cantrell, Rachel Hall, Anna Leahy and Audrey Petty, 
12 The First Book Nicole Cooley, Kate Greenstreet, Nancy Kuhl and Anna Leahy, 
13 Taking the Stage, Stage Fright, Center Stage: Careers Over Time Karen Craigo and Anna Leahy, 
Part 6: Conclusions, 
14 Political, Practical and Philosophical Considerations for the Future Anna Leahy, 
About the Authors, 

CHAPTER 1

Telling Time, Making Use, Turning Together: Conversations in Creative Writing

Anna Leahy

For my part, I have found that interviewing people, exchanging views with peers and friends, and arguing at editorial meetings have been crucial to learning.

Fareed Zakaria (2015: 77)

A roundtable panel at the Associated Writing Programs Conference (now the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP)), led to the edited collection Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom: The Authority Project in which several contributors wrote about the theoretical and practical matters of teaching creative writing at college and graduate levels.

That book was a foundation for new growth in creative writing scholarship that has made our discipline stronger and more vibrant. Ten years ago, Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom (Leahy, 2005) launched the New Writing Viewpoints series, a bold and welcome move by Multilingual Matters that rode a wave of interest and discussion about creative writing, teaching and higher education. Other publishers, citing a rule of thumb that edited collections don't sell as well as single-author books, dismissed the manuscript because of its strength: a variety of perspectives and voices. Although my intention for that book was, as Stephanie Vanderslice writes in its afterword, to stake 'a vital claim for creative writing's place on the American academic landscape' (2005: 214), the book and series has spurred the emergence of what many scholars now call creative writing studies. The risk we all took 10 years ago paid off. Although that book and this new one have a clear American focus, they are both part of national and global discussions and changes in creative writing and higher education.

This new book takes the concept of an edited collection to its extreme, pushing the possibilities of scholarship and collaboration. All authors in this book are proof that creative writing matters and can be rewarding over the long haul, and that there exist many ways to do what we do as writers and as teachers. I tell my students that their critical writing should be in conversation with the existing scholarship on the topic, and the contributors to this book have put that into practice in a literal manner. What We Talk about When We Talk about Creative Writing captures a wide swathe of ideas on pedagogy, on programs, on the profession and on careers.

The Academy as Creative Space

Creative writing remains a newcomer to the academy as a separate discipline, with first distinct coursework offered in the late 19th century and distinct programs burgeoning only in the last few decades. The arts challenge day-to-day assumptions and traditions about what is academic. Too often we talk as if we, and our wild ways, still don't belong. Colleges and universities are, however, ideal environments for fostering creativity and, therefore, for practicing creative writing. Pedagogy and practice go hand in hand, reinforcing each other. To recognize and embrace academia as a creative space empowers us.

Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From (2010), argues that the coffee house of the late 17th century served a crucial role in the Enlightenment. The space itself allowed people with various interests to gather together, share their thinking and test out possibilities. Johnson calls this sort of space 'The Liquid Network', in part because the environment that nurtures creativity is one where ideas flow somewhat unpredictably and where ideas are valued. Contemporary science laboratories function this way, with smart people gathered in a physical space tossing around ideas, questions and frustrations in a seemingly willy-nilly manner. If we apply Johnson's well-researched notions to this book, the contributors to What We Talk about When We Talk about Creative Writing can be seen as a critical mass of creative people coming together to accomplish more together than we might individually. Working through topics collectively, we've spurred each other on, supporting and challenging each other into discovery.

Interestingly, Johnson's notions of creative culture sync up well with Richard Florida's arguments in The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) and Who's Your City? (2008). Some creative endeavors, such as writing, demand periods of isolation, and a given individual may be extraordinarily creative in isolation. But Florida and others argue that the myth of the writer scribbling alone in her garret is long gone. He points to communities built on weak connections, something akin to but more dispersed than Johnson's liquid network, as important for nourishing creativity in society.

Florida's ideas have influenced policies, though more recent scholarship on the creative industries has criticized Florida's loose application of the term creative 'as a single, unified entity' (Campbell, 2011: 18) and distinguished his creative class from the creative industries. Roberta Comunian and her coauthors have examined the relationship between place and creative industries, with particular attention to infrastructure and area governance policies. Our project acknowledges this scholarship in creative industries and puts into practice connectedness and individual and group interaction that Comunian et al. might consider 'soft infrastructure' (2010: 6).

UK scholar Daniel Ashton examines universities as playing the primary role in supplying the creative industries with talent and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Multilingual Matters
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783096004
• ISBN 13: 9781783096008
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 252
• Herausgeber: Leahy Anna
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland