Response to Doug Hesse’s “The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies” Clyde Moneyhun Response to Clyde Moneyhun Doug Hesse

In a 2002 article in College English, Peter Elbow argued that writing pedagogy would benefit by “[m]ore honoring of style, playfulness, fun, pleasure, humor” (543). Although Elbow was referring specifically to the need for cross-fertilization between the disciplines of literature and composition, his call for attention to playfulness in writing pedagogy is equally relevant to the teaching of creative nonfiction. The question he fails to consider is how playfulness can become an essential part of writing pedagogy without undermining the seriousness of the endeavor. My experience teaching an upper-level creative nonfiction class devoted to humor writing suggests that while incorporating playfulness into nonfiction-writing pedagogy poses serious challenges, it also provides significant rewards and develops skills transferable to other writing tasks.

For different reasons, composition studies and creative writing have resisted one another. Despite a historically thin discourse about creative writing within College Compositionand Communication, the relationship now merits attention. The two fields’ common interest should link them in a richer, more coherent view of writing for each other, forstudents, and for policymakers. As digital tools and media expand the nature and circulation of texts, composition studies should pay more attention to craft and to composingtexts not created in response to rhetorical situations or for scholars.

Responses to Rosalie’ Morales Kearns’s “Voice of Authority: Theorizing Creative Writing Pedagogy” and Johnathan Alexander’s “Gaming Student Literacies and the Composition Classroom: Some Possibilities for Transformation.”

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.

The article examines the significance of lore in creative writing pedagogy discourse, the problem posed by the historical distinction between teaching craft and drawing out talent in workshops, and the role of social identity as it is rejected, theorized, or ignored in discussions on teaching creative writing. Taking into account students' subjectivity as also constituted by the dynamics of collective identities such as those suggested by the terms gender, race, ethnicity, and so forth, the essay offers examples of workshop strategies that encourage dialogic voicing.

This article characterizes the first ten volume years of From the Classroom (FTC), one of three featured columns in Pedagogy. FTC articles, like other Pedagogy articles, showcase the work of scholars representing different ranks, subdisciplines, and institutional levels; unlike regular articles, FTC articles tend to be just 500 to 3,000 words. FTC authors, then, are challenged to raise a specific question or phenomenon by placing it momentarily within a larger theoretical, historical, and conceptual framework. Brockman groups most FTC articles into nine categories: Minding the Margins; Honoring Creative Nonfiction; Understanding Class, Culture, Gender, and Race; Mentoring Preservice Teachers; Incorporating Technology; Constructing Academic Arguments; Teaching Non-English Majors; Highlighting Effective Methods; and Showcasing Subdisciplines.

This historical exploration tracks changes in rules concerning figurative language in nineteenth-century composition-rhetoric textbooks. The century’s lessening of millennium-long restriction of the poetic allowed not only creative writing into academia but composition as well, as composition at its beginning was intertwined with creative writing. In order to advance as a discipline, creative writing needs to investigate its history in addition to developing its theory and practice. Understanding the initial but largely overlooked union of creative writing and composition can help reconfigure English studies.

At universities, scholars in English studies manage what Gieryn (1999) called disciplinary boundary work (the rhetorical making and policing of boundaries that construct the discipline and its institutional formations as different from other disciplines and social formations) through categorical contrasts, including: literary criticism vs. writing studies/rhetoric; scholarship vs. creative writing; quantitative vs. qualitative research; university vs. K–12 schooling; university vs. workplace; and, of course, that most basic border of disciplinarity”disciplinary knowledge vs. everyday belief and culture. The two research reports in this issue of RTE both address college-level work in the field and both highlight interesting ways in which current theoretical and methodological developments are putting pressure on disciplinary boundaries in English studies.

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Creative writing workshops typically feature a gag rule and emphasize purported flaws. This structure limits students’ meaningful engagement with each other’s work; positions the author as inherently flawed; and positions other participants as authority figures, passing judgment without articulating their aesthetic standards. I propose an alternative structure in which authors lead discussion; the work is treated not as inherently flawed but as “in process”; and discussants articulate their expectations about “good” writing rather than allowing them to function as unspoken norms.

This article explores the impact of a memoir about the Iraq War, written by a student in a creative writing class, on a teacher and students.

The literary genres of creative nonfiction have tremendous potential to create a new kind of process-centered textbook—and perhaps a rocess-centered pedagogy that has finally reached maturity.

While disciplines such as law, journalism and medicine have ethics classes embedded into their degree structures, fiction writing has escaped this administrative scrutiny. This paper argues that an `ethics of representation' should be raised within the prose fiction classroom if creative writing teachers are serious about training future writers. Drawing on work by Michael Riffaterre and Seymour Chatman, this paper argues that due to the historic privileging of realism and ensuing reader assumptions, writing students need to understand the importance of research and representation. After a brief discussion of how creative writing is situated within the tertiary administrative context, this paper then cites a critical teaching pedagogy (as articulated by Rochelle Harris) and practical strategies that teachers can use to bring discussions of representation into the prose fiction classroom. Inspired by the work of creative writing academics such as George Kalamaras and Sandra Young, these strategies include using the workshop session, classroom readings and formal assignments to foreground matters of representation.

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.

After creating a taxonomy of classroom approaches to the teaching of creative writing, the authors discuss a current practice they have employed, the writing community. The authors detail its success, place it within current pedagogical research into small-group and team-based learning, and suggest possible applications to allied fields.

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.”

Research Article| October 01 2007 Creative Writing as a Site of Pedagogic Identity and Pedagogic Learning Rebecca O'Rourke Rebecca O'Rourke Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2007) 7 (3): 501–512. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2007-010 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Rebecca O'Rourke; Creative Writing as a Site of Pedagogic Identity and Pedagogic Learning. Pedagogy 1 October 2007; 7 (3): 501–512. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2007-010 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| October 01 2007 Taking the Imaginative Leap: Creative Writing and Inquiry-Based Learning Duco van Oostrum; Duco van Oostrum Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Richard Steadman-Jones; Richard Steadman-Jones Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Zoe Carson Zoe Carson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2007) 7 (3): 556–566. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2007-015 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Duco van Oostrum, Richard Steadman-Jones, Zoe Carson; Taking the Imaginative Leap: Creative Writing and Inquiry-Based Learning. Pedagogy 1 October 2007; 7 (3): 556–566. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2007-015 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: From the Classroom You do not currently have access to this content.

TETYC publishes articles for two-year college teachers and those teaching the first two years of English in four-year institutions. We seek articles in all areas of composition (basic, first-year, and advanced); business, technical, and creative writing; and the teaching of literature in the first two college years. We also publish articles on topics such as staffing, assessment, technology, writing program administration, speech, journalism, reading, ESL, and other areas of interest.

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.

This article describes a combination of a research essay and a creative writing assignment that encourages rigorous academic research while allowing students to get “outside the box” of traditional academic research papers.

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.

Research Article| October 01 2005 Teaching and Learning as Improvisational Performance in the Creative Writing Classroom Shady Cosgrove Shady Cosgrove Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2005) 5 (3): 471–482. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-5-3-471 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Shady Cosgrove; Teaching and Learning as Improvisational Performance in the Creative Writing Classroom. Pedagogy 1 October 2005; 5 (3): 471–482. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-5-3-471 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2005 Duke University Press2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: From the Classroom You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| January 01 2005 The Teacher as Hostess: Celebrating the Ordinary in Creative Nonfiction Workshops Mary Elizabeth Pope Mary Elizabeth Pope Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2005) 5 (1): 105–107. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-5-1-105 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mary Elizabeth Pope; The Teacher as Hostess: Celebrating the Ordinary in Creative Nonfiction Workshops. Pedagogy 1 January 2005; 5 (1): 105–107. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-5-1-105 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2005 Duke University Press2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Particular places have long intrigued writers. Henry David Thoreau (1995) wrote about Walden Pond; Jon Krakauer (1996) wrote about Alaska; Eddy Harris (1998) wrote about the Mississippi River. Building on the idea of place, I designed a creative nonfiction course that centers on the Boise River, which flows alongside my campus. During the spring semester of 2002, students made four observations of the river and read Mary Clearman Blew’s Written on Water (2001), a collection of essays on Idaho rivers. Using local natural phenomena and writing on other regions, this course could be adapted to other geographical locations and themes. The river project offered several advantages. Students catalogued the rivers themselves: their locations, directions of flow, and drainages. They were introduced to eighteen regional writers and began to feel part of this community. They noticed how authors crossed boundaries, often incorporating description, narrative, and memoir with history, fact, and argument; and they reveled in the rich metaphorical meanings of rivers. This project also provided a specific focus in what was otherwise a loosely constructed class based on journal keeping, memoir, personal essays, and segmented essays, with flexible topics. The river project provided a meeting place within that varied writing. During the first class session in January, the students and I hiked down to the river to make notes. This sensory observation became the first journal entry. It was 4:45 p.m. when I began writing in a rough script with numb hands. My notes include ducks at rest, immobile; barren bushes and trees; white rounded rocks; dry leaves and twigs; geese honking; seven male runners wearing brightly colored sweats, hats, and gloves talking and laughing; stagnant water with leaves moving beneath the surface; a fast moving stream with white caps across a rock median, but closer to me, still water. I often walk to work, and to enter campus I cross a footbridge that spans the river. Doing so, I notice day-to-day changes: the occasional dusting of snow on riverbanks, winter streambed dredging for flood control, the slow return of life as spring approaches, the lush, green leafiness of early summer. As the term continued, I reminded students to make additional river observations.

Research Article| April 01 2004 When “Macaroni and Cheese Is Good” Enough: Revelation in Creative Nonfiction Jenny Spinner Jenny Spinner Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2004) 4 (2): 316–322. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-4-2-316 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jenny Spinner; When “Macaroni and Cheese Is Good” Enough: Revelation in Creative Nonfiction. Pedagogy 1 April 2004; 4 (2): 316–322. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-4-2-316 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2004 Duke University Press2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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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Commentary| April 01 2003 The Strangeness of Creative Writing: An Institutional Query Shirley Geok-lin Lim Shirley Geok-lin Lim Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2003) 3 (2): 151–170. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-2-151 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Shirley Geok-lin Lim; The Strangeness of Creative Writing: An Institutional Query. Pedagogy 1 April 2003; 3 (2): 151–170. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-2-151 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2003 Duke University Press2003 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Commentaries You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| January 01 2003 Literary Legacies and Critical Transformations: Teaching Creative Writing in the Public Urban University Nicole Cooley Nicole Cooley Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2003) 3 (1): 99–103. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-1-99 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Nicole Cooley; Literary Legacies and Critical Transformations: Teaching Creative Writing in the Public Urban University. Pedagogy 1 January 2003; 3 (1): 99–103. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-1-99 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2003 Duke University Press2003 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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.

Waggoner interviews for 2-year college creative writing instructors to find out about the present and future state of creative writing education.

Research Article| January 01 2001 English-Language Creative Writing in Hong Kong: Colonial Stereotype and Process Shirley Geok-lin Lim Shirley Geok-lin Lim Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2001) 1 (1): 178–184. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-1-178 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Shirley Geok-lin Lim; English-Language Creative Writing in Hong Kong: Colonial Stereotype and Process. Pedagogy 1 January 2001; 1 (1): 178–184. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-1-178 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2001 Duke University Press2001 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.