Key Issues in Creative Writing

By Dianne Donnelly, Graeme Harper

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2013 Dianne Donnelly, Graeme Harper and the authors of individual chapters
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84769-846-9

Contents

Acknowledgements,
Contributors,
Introduction: Key Issues and Global Perspectives in Creative Writing Dianne Donnelly and Graeme Harper,
Part 1,
1 Reshaping Creative Writing: Power and Agency in the Academy Dianne Donnelly,
2 Hey Babe, Take a Walk on the Wild Side – Creative Writing in Universities Mimi Thebo,
3 Creative Writing Habitats Graeme Harper,
4 Beyond the Literary: Why Creative Literacy Matters Steve Healey,
5 To Fill with Milk: or, The Thing and Itself Katharine Haake,
6 Creative Writing Research Graeme Harper,
7 Creative Writing Knowledge Dianne Donnelly,
Part 2,
8 Teaching Toward the Future Stephanie Vanderslice,
9 Holding On and Letting Go Indigo Perry,
10 Programme Design and the Making of Successful Programmes Building a Better Elephant Machine: A Case Study in Creative Writing Programme Design Nigel McLoughlin,
The Future of Graduate Studies in Creative Writing: Institutionalizing Literary Writing Patrick Bizzaro,
Conclusion: Investigating Key Issues in Creative Writing Dianne Donnelly and Graeme Harper,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

Reshaping Creative Writing: Power and Agency in the Academy

Dianne Donnelly

Terry Threadgold urges that 'the future success of higher education institutions depends on universities learning to re-imagine themselves regularly'. This chapter interrogates what this 're-imagining' might mean for creative writing in the academy, noting that the future success of creative writing depends on the discipline's agency – on the ways in which creative writing goes forward, on the ways in which its practitioners intentionally design their coursework and programs and the ways in which creative writing programs stay attuned to their students' needs, to the modern economic critical academy and to their community coalitions. This chapter urges the ways in which creative writing (administrators/teachers) can visibly impact their students and the academy through (1) hybridization and cross-pollination, (2) new teaching formations and directions, (3) more flexible and appropriate career pathways for graduate students, and (4) through the building of stronger public and academic communities to include a stronger relationship with government bodies as well as more fully-integrated international partnerships and associations.

Everything we do is embedded in time, and time changes not only us, but our point of view as well Margaret Atwood, 2005: xiii–xiv

Looking back on some of the essays she's written, Margaret Atwood (2005: vii) reflects on whether she'd write them differently today or whether she'd write them at all. She says, 'One year's prophecy becomes the next year's certainty, and the year after that, it's history ... We're always looking over our shoulders, wondering why we missed the clues that seem so obvious to us in retrospect'. Creative writing's story in the academy tends to mimic this reflective cycling. For years, the discipline promoted literature for its own sake in the US until its intersection with postwar program expansion and rising enrollment. Patrons of university subsidies and National Endowment for the Arts (NEA, n.d.) funding made available hiring opportunities that tripled what is available in today's job market. In the eighties, the road traveled by creative writing promoted the production of writers and teachers until the 1990s, when once again, creative writing situated at a crossroad; this new position no longer in sync with a favorable marketplace. Looking over our shoulders, we can see that as a discipline, creative writing had been part of a fractured community signaled by its long history of subordination to literary studies, its lack of academic status and sustaining lore, and its own resistance to reform. These factions had kept creative writing from achieving any central core in the academy.

Still, Allan Tate predicted back in 1964 that the discipline 'is here to stay, at least for a long time' (p. 181), and part of the catalyst that not only sustains creative writing today but also propels it forward, is its mobility and its transferrable and generative properties that intercross disciplinary boundaries. Yet, perceptions of creative writing as a significant contributor to the academy waiver even in light of the discipline's growing student enrollment and degreed programs in the US, UK and Australia and even in view of its competence as a substantiated site of knowledge. With the perspectives we've gained by considering the past and the crossroads we've encountered, we can (1) shed new light on the history that informs our pedagogies and writing practices, (2) reshape, as needed, the space of creative writing, (3) move the discipline forward within the modern economy and critical academy, and (4) respond as champions for the discipline as proactive rather than reactive agents of change. Responding as champions of our discipline means that although we may have fewer choices given the direction of the economy and the inevitable changes that impact the academy, we can also focus our attention on the opportunities that exist for creative writing to succeed in our many different academic environments and administrations.

Terry Threadgold (2011) reminds us that 'The levels of government scrutiny we are facing, along with the funding crisis, will be drivers for change'. He suggests that 'future success of higher education institutions will depend on universities learning to re-imagine themselves regularly'. This chapter suggests that we can visibly impact our students and our academy through (1) hybridization and cross-pollination, (2) new teaching formations and directions, (3) more flexible and appropriate career pathways for graduate students, and (4) through the building of stronger public and academic communities to include a stronger relationship with government bodies as well as more fully-integrated international partnerships and associations.

Hybridization and Cross-Pollination

Foucault (1980: 112) sets up a dichotomy related to the conditions of space when he says that space can be a theater of operation for power dynamics because of competing ideologies, but it can also be a sector of freedom which is unconstrained by barriers. Power dynamics come into play in the academic environment when research monies and employability factors influence administrative priorities. Although creative writing enrollment numbers may prove favorable to administrators, low teacher-student ratios and other associated overheads impact operational costs. Moreover, the discipline's effective practice and academic value has been somewhat dissociated from the university and less understood by administrative leaders who focus more attention on programs that achieve critical mass.

However – as research universities begin to respond more flexibly to the changes in the economy's and society's demand for certain skills and knowledge, as they react to the growth in the media-related sector, and become more aware of the 'seismic shift now underway in much of the advanced world from the logical, linear, computerlike capabilities of the Information Age' to the kind of creativity associated with the 'inventive, empathic, big-picture capabilities ... of the Conceptual Age' (Pink, 2006: 1–2) – the cross-disciplinary activities of creative writing will become even more productive and meaningful to the academy, its profession, its creative economy and critically – to its student body.

Joseph Moxley (1989: 25) reminds us that 'the general segregation of creative writing from literature and composition [or cultural studies, for that matter] corrodes the development of a literacy culture'. More specifically, Moxley wonders if 'our passion for specialization within writing departments has caused us to divide and subdivide (potentially) consolidating processes of discovering and shaping meaning' (p. 25).

With this in mind, Foucault's concept of unfettered space seems reasonable to apply to creative writing's cross-pollination in the academy, for as Foucault (1980: 112) relates space, knowledge and power as that which is necessarily related, he notes 'it is somewhat arbitrary to try to dissociate the effective practice of freedom by people, the practice of social relations, and the spatial distributions in which they find themselves.' Consequently, if we are to renegotiate the space of creative writing, its boundaries and its power, while considering the shifting nature of students' skills with technology and various art forms, the rapidly changing university environment, and the impetus of community as the prime mover of discourse, then there exists such potential for the discipline to connect with its relations within departmental and university systems and within the global network as a way to lead to a wider field of vision. Creative writing's strong constructionist base, social and cultural agencies, close reading skills and growing repository of knowledge establish a common ground that transcends academic boundaries.

What are some of the crossover possibilities for creative writing? At a departmental level, Paul Dawson (2005) sees the common goal between creative writing and literary studies as one based on a vision of social agency rather than a theory of generic form or of the creative process. He collapses the writer and critic into the figure of the public intellectual and argues for a particular 'mode of literary research within the academy', one which would entail 'literary and critical writing as complementary practices' (pp. 178–9). Additionally, creative writing and cultural studies are tied to the idea of an all-round aesthetic education for our students. Such integration with cultural studies leads Kevin Brophy (2000: 203) to conclude this synthesis is critical 'if creative writing students are to maintain a level of sophistication and security important to resisting rigidity in their approaches to writing'.

Consider as well the blurring of lines between creative writing and composition studies that began with the early scholarship of Joseph Moxley (1989) and Wendy Bishop (1994), and forged ahead by Tim Mayers (2005) and most recently by Douglas Hesse (2010) and I have also addressed this intersection as well (Donnelly, 2011). Many of us who attend the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference are creative writers who also teach composition. As such, our teaching pedagogy is informed by both disciplines as research methods mix with observation – experiential skills with bibliographic – inquiry with pedagogical scholarship. We represent a fused model of a collective identity that naturally invites the blurring of disciplinary boundaries.

Spatial distributions such as the ones described above demonstrate how creative writing can negotiate a space of freedom and still integrate with its departmental relations. Creative writing is already at work shaping a new era through its cross-pollination efforts into other interdisciplinary areas. As a practice, the new creative writing follows what David Starkey (1998: xiv) certifies as a 'polyculturalist' approach to writing instruction, which is constructed by 'teacher theorists who, over the years, have actively cross-pollinated areas of writing that had once been isolated from each other'. Such interfaces propel creative writing into new and interesting spaces, spaces that position the discipline as a pedagogically and programmatically sound entity fully empowered in its own identity and scholarship. Today, writing is less bound by genre and instead has been liberated by recent efforts to adapt the course in creative writing to the interests of our students who come into our classroom increasingly savvy about creativity as a product of experience in the cyber community. In an effort to broaden the expanse of writing, teachers partner with those in such fields as creative arts, media, film and technology studies. As such, creative writing teachers are changing the shape of the workshop model and hybridizing the classroom by introducing more outlets for expression, more venues for creativity and more activity and demonstration. The kinds of writing that emerge as a result often challenge mainstream genres.

We witness creative writing's mobility as teachers embrace and incorporate more technological literacy skills (e.g. literary hypertext, digital narratives, podcasts) into their design. We see creativity and technology merge in ways that transcend the digital cultures of universities and consider – for our students as creative artists now more than a decade into the 21st century – new audiences as well as relative skills and practical opportunities in writing in digital environments. As students engage in digital media, they are building new literacies that are more complex than conventional literacies.

Creative writing also uses space theory in interesting ways (i.e. hypertext, photos, maps, vlogs, wikis, music) that interfaces with textual dimensions, digital tangibles and online platforms. While digitalization invites readers in at a new level, it also invites students to bring together constructions from other disciplines, welcomes disciplines to partner in unexpected ways, and positions writers to consider how the visual arts might enhance the hybridity of stories and essays through manipulations and juxtapositions of photos/videos and text. When it comes to visual methodologies, Gillian Rose (2005: 68) asks, 'Why split things apart when they are almost always found in spatial proximity?' We might apply this rationale to creative writing's hybridization and cross-pollination throughout university systems by asking, why compartmentalize creative writing when the discipline is almost always found in spatial proximity – programmatically – to our university relations? As creative writing crosses boundaries within the university system, we see more potential for new disciplinary partnerships, new relations and new ways of redefining literature. Chad Davidson and Gregory Fraser (2009: 76–77) concur that 'practicing writers embrace rather than ignore other fields of study. And a college campus provides an excellent place to facilitate connections and strengthen the imagination'. Brian Castro, 2 co-director of the J.M. Coetzee Center for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide, agrees that 'hybridity and cross-discipline collaborations are key words'. He asks 'why not write ethnography creatively, or research narrative through film and images, providing the research is vigorous?' We know that there are traditional methods associated with field methodology, yet ethnographers can be scholars and literary writers adept at weaving narratives in creative and scientific ways. We also know that the intersection of creative writing and film studies is useful to illustrate dialogue, the use of metaphor and the construction of scenes and other organizational principles.

As teachers, we respond to the shifting nature of students' reading and writing by crossing the interstices between disciplines. More universities now offer courses that transition students to write in the new digital age, and some universities now require at least one digital narrative as part of a creative writing course portfolio. Cross-pollination between creative writing and other university relations exposes our students to more performative arts in an effort to broaden their expanse of writing. Students write dialogue that is acted by drama students, action that is produced on stage, and/or poems expressed in music, sculpture, dance. Teachers combine creative writing with 'dance studio sessions or visual arts life drawing classes' (Indigo Perry, Deakin University). Other teachers address the teaching of fiction as a method for creating games. James Paul Gee (2003: 207–212), author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, suggests that students of the gaming generation become insiders, teachers and producers when they create environments, interactive stories, characters and animation. The self-knowledge principles inherent in such a learning environment allow students to 'take risks in a space where real-world consequences are lowered', to master 'semiotic domains', to appreciate 'interrelations within and across multiple sign systems', to 'understand texts as a family ("genre") of related texts', and to develop active and critical thinking skills.

Mehrdad Massoudi (2003) asks if scientific writing can be creative. Neuroscience journals call for creative writing stories related to the field. Studies indicate that physicians and nurses who write descriptive narratives (in addition to clinical notes) are more compassionate, observant and engaged with their patients. At Cornell, writers are paired with scientists, musicians, dancers and visual arts (J. Robert Lennon). There are opportunities for creative writing to intersect with business and communications faculty, to invite corporate recruiters to class, to encourage internships that would support such creativity in the business world. Karen Bender (University of North Carolina Wilmington – UNCW) appreciates that 'more interdisciplinary work – with English, theater, film, history departments – would enhance all university learning experiences'. These paradigm shifts give us the courage to envision the teaching of creative writing skills beyond the creative writing classroom, beyond the 'either-or logic – where creativewriters cordon themselves off from their peers in other disciplines'. Rather, creative writers 'increasingly adopt a "both-and" mentality that encourages border crossing and cultural exchanges' (Davidson & Fraser, 2009: 78).

(Continues...)Excerpted from Key Issues in Creative Writing by Dianne Donnelly, Graeme Harper. Copyright © 2013 Dianne Donnelly, Graeme Harper and the authors of individual chapters. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.