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The publication of the three works reviewed here relating to creative writing theory and pedagogy mark a point of critical mass for the field of creative writing studies that has been building for decades. This review looks at those books and discusses how they help point the way forward for the discipline.

This article examines how creative writing pedagogy and composition pedagogy can be put into productive conversation by using expressivism and social constructionism as a shared frequency, allowing for a deepening of the pedagogical options available to teachers. The end result of this analysis is a proposal for a dual course pairing of composition and creative writing. Within this proposed arrangement, creative writing, on the one hand, would emphasize expressivist pedagogies that grant students centrality in the classroom while still exploring the ideological implications of the writing act. Composition, on the other hand, would focus on scholarship, research, and theory, while still employing creative writing activities that keep student writers from feeling utterly marginalized.

This article identifies and examines a digital arm of creative writing studies and organizes that proposal into four categories through which to theorize the “craft” of creative production, each borrowed from Tim Mayers’s (Re)Writing Craft: Composition, Creative Writing, and the Future of English Studies: process, genre, author, and institutionality. Using research from composition studies and literary studies, the article examines the concerns each of these categories is beginning to confront as more and more creative texts recruit digital technologies. As such, the argument outlines four tiers that each work as a line of inquiry regarding the valuable—indeed necessary—ways to imagine concerns regarding craft in twenty-first- century creative writing studies.

Reviewed are Composition and Cornel West: Notes toward a Deep Democracy by Keith Gilyard and The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl.

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Reading for creative writers must be viewed as a critical practice, one informed and complicated by context, history, and theory, in part so that they can actively participate in the intellectual community of English studies.

As a field, creative writing must reject its traditional image of “uselessness” and realize its anticapitalist, antiprivatizing potential as a creator of public space. In part, this move would involve teaching students to question traditional notions of influence, as well as the modernist concept of the author as a lone,autonomous individual.

English departments must work harder to include creative and critical courses, in part through experiments with pairing them.

Defining Our Terms - Elizabeth Hodges: Reviewed are Keywords in Creative Writing, by Wendy Bishop and David Starkey, and Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom: The Authority Project, edited by Anna Leahy. The “Sticking” Problem: Locating Creative Writing at Home and Abroad - Sarah E. Harris: Reviewed are Creative Writing Studies: Practice, Research, and Pedagogy, edited by Graeme Harper and Jeri Kroll; Teaching Poetry Writing: A Five-Canon Approach, by Tom C. Hunley; and The Author Is Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Reconceived by Michelene Wandor. Creative Writing for Everyone - Megan Fulwiler: Reviewed is The Practice of Creative Writing: A Guide for Students by Heather Sellers.

Creative writing programs should transform into creative writing studies, a field of scholarly inquiry and research that would have three main strands: pedagogical, historical, and advocacy-oriented. This move would help bridge the gap between literary studies and composition.

Although writers of personal essays and autobiographies must often rely on vulnerable memory, they should not engage in sheer invention if they want to call their work “nonfiction.”

Many graduate creative writing programs depend on “star” faculty who have been hired more because of their professional reputation as writers than because of their commitment to teaching. As a result, such programs often fail to provide reflection on teaching that would truly serve their students. One step toward alleviating this problem is to offer undergraduate courses that enable creative writing graduate students to team-teach with regular faculty.

The author uses the example of a text a student was not allowed to display on his course website to explore how and why institutional ideologies particular to the historical development of composition and creative writing—especially when viewed in conjunction with current copyright law—render students’ multimedia compositions illegitimate. He suggests that the ideological apparatuses of writing instruction and the legal statutes of U.S. culture at large combine to radically restrict the production and circulation of students’ multimedia texts and inhibit students’ power as writers.

This essay considers why some subjects associated with English studies achieve disciplinary status while others, such as theory and multicultural literature, fail to do so, suggesting that what is required for such status is the establishment of epistemological difference from other areas in the field. The author uses the example of creative writing’s emergence as a model of what it means to achieve disciplinary status, what benefits accrue to a field that does, and who stands to gain from that emergence.

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Discusses the complexity of naming nonfiction as a class of written works. Struggles with many different possible definitions of nonfiction and considers the problems with many of the definitions. Suggests the use of the term "creative nonfiction" as an umbrella to cover the widest range of nonfiction literary production. Argues that categorizing and compartmentalizing limits vision.

Discusses the topic of creative nonfiction and how it is addressed throughout this special issue. Suggests that how creative nonfiction is placed does have implications for literature and writing, both creative and non.

Offers a presentation of creative nonfiction addressing the author’s personal family experiences. Addresses ethical issues involved in creative nonfiction. Describes how she decided to narrate her history and contemplates in depth the artistic choices she made.

Suggests that there is a real chance right now for letting the possibilities of creative nonfiction infuse, improve, and invigorate the teaching of composition. Concludes that when allowed to explore literary nonfiction, writing students will develop a substantial set of strengths from which to undertake other disciplinary writing challenges as they explore past and present with an eye to the future.

reative writers exist as a group both inside and outside the academic community. Inside academia, the pursuit of creative writing as a graduate degree specialization is typically associated with the M.FA. However, another option, the Ph.D., also exists. I am the recipient of a Ph.D. in English with emphasis in creative writing, alternatively called the Ph.D. in English with creative dissertation. Like many of my colleagues who hold this degree, I also have an M.FA. in creative writing. I entered graduate school as a master's student to become a better writer, and a better scholar. While I was there, I also developed the desire to become a teacher. Told that the M.EA. was not sufficient for a university teaching position (without the all-important multiple books that many positions require), and without significant training or opportunity from my M.EA. program in teaching, let alone in the teaching of creative writing, I entered into a Ph.D. program in English/creative writing with hopes that this program would teach me how to teach in my field. But as a graduate student who did not know which way she might turn (teacher or writer? could I be both?), I was puzzled by the lack of attention on the part of my university to the pedagogy of my field. I took seminars, completed language and oral and written comprehensive examinations, and defended my dissertation-a booklength collection of poems-but heard little about what it might mean to enter a university teaching position, or what teaching creative writing as a professional writer/ teacher might involve. I consider myself to be one of the lucky ones: I took a graduate course in the teaching of composition and then taught composition, feeling well-prepared; I then taught creative writing, feeling less prepared, as a graduate student and postgraduate lecturer. This valuable experience allowed me to recently secure a tenure-track position teaching composition and co-directing a composition

Seeks to add another vocabulary to the pedagogy of the creative writing workshop: the language of use and action, of practice and implementation. Investigates how to reform the discursive walls between creativity and theory and ends by suggesting how educators might bring classrooms and communities together.

Suggests that the teaching of both composition and creative writing would benefit from focusing less exclusively on the writing process and products and more on the writing subject. Claims that focusing on the writing subject through the lens of psychoanalysis provides several potential benefits. Concludes psychoanalysis can be a filtrate for the creative writing or composition teacher.

Examines (1) job opportunities available for PhDs in creative writing as contextualized within the larger English Studies job market; (2) arguments for and against training such candidates to be university teaching professionals; and (3) training that might better prepare these candidates for both more productive, successful university teaching careers as well as more productive, successful undergraduate creative writing classrooms.

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