Teaching creative writing the essential guide

—ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPERAY Trang 8 ContentsPreface Stephanie Vanderslice ixAcknowledgments xx1 How We Got Here: The History of Creative Writing in Higher Education 12 Research and the T

Teaching

Creative Writing

Teaching

Creative Writing

The Essential Guide

Stephanie Vanderslice

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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.

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

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

Creative 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

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

Preface xi

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

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

Preface xiii

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

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

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

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

Preface xvii

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

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

Preface xix

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

I 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, Lillian-Yvonne 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

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

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

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

How We Got Here 3

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

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

How We Got Here 5

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

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

How We Got Here 7

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

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

How We Got Here 9

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-English-speaking 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

● 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

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?

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

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,

Research and the Teaching of Creative Writing 13

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

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 research-based scholarship, as she was trained in ethnographic research (and

Research and the Teaching of Creative Writing 15

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

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

Research and the Teaching of Creative Writing 17

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