What We Talk about When We Talk about Creative Writing

Anna Leahy, Anna Leahy

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783096039
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Scrittura creativa

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

Part 1

Introduction

1Telling Time, Making Use, Turning Together: Conversations in Creative Writing

Anna Leahy

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

Fareed Zakaria (2015: 77)

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

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

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

The Academy as Creative Space

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

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

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

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

UK scholar Daniel Ashton examines universities as playing the primary role in supplying the creative industries with talent and skills. Importantly, he points out that, although degrees related to the creative industries are not a guarantee of a job, ‘for those trained in the arts and cultural humanities fields, having an interesting creative job is part of their social identities’ (2015: 401). I would argue that this social identity as a creative person who wants to engage in creative work with other creative people is central to creative writing as an academic discipline. Florida remains relevant to this book’s discussion because he focuses on people: ‘When people – ­especially talented and creative ones – come together, ideas flow more freely, and as a result individual and aggregate talents increase exponentially: the end result amounts to much more than the sum of the parts’ (2008: 66). That aligns with Johnson’s claim that a critical mass of creative people fuels the creativity of creative people. Ideas ‘rise in liquid networks where connection is valued more than protection’ (2010: 245). In an interview on The Daily Show, novelist John Irving captured the importance of a creative writing program to his career well when he said that it saved him time. Creative environments, like MFA programs, are both buzzing and patient. As we developed this book, we employed these principles of collaboration that make our work more than the sum of its parts and this moved us further as a group more quickly than we could manage individually.

In Patronizing the Arts, Marjorie Garber argues that the university is an ideal place for artists and other makers to flourish because ‘universities are full of experts’ (2008: 189), ‘are already accustomed to managing grants’ (2008: 188) and offer ‘space, materials, training, and assessment, as well as a tolerance of imagination, “genius,” stubborn dedication, or eccentricity’ (2008: 188). In other words, the university has the basic things writers need, just as it has the basic things scientists need. Creative writing is as integral to academia as is science, and our methodologies and creative work are as valuable as cultural contributions and growing bodies of knowledge. While this book challenges some traditional notions of what constitutes scholarship, it supports Garber’s assertion that the arts can shape and be shaped by academia. In this book, contributors take advantage of this wealth of expertise as we accommodate some expectations of scholarship, while reshaping what scholarship looks like.

In Robert Frost’s poem ‘Mending Wall,’ the speaker tells his neighbor, who is desperate to repair the stone fence, that he shouldn’t worry that the apple trees are going to invade and gobble up the pine cones. The speaker prods further, saying, ‘Before I built a wall I’d ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out,/And to whom I was likely to give offense’ (1972: 17, lines 32–34). That’s exactly the concern of creative individuals. We don’t like to wall out ideas, and we needn’t let our ideas be walled in. We welcome the collisions inherent in community as much as we seek the isolation necessary to write, and other disciplines can benefit from seeing what we’re up to. In other words, What We Talk about When We Talk about Creative Writing offers a new model for scholarship, for creative writing as a widening discipline and also for other disciplines that value the single-author model to the exclusion of other useful possibilities that take advantage of the liquid network that is academia.

Frost opposed all sorts of experimentation and the questioning of formal conventions, but Frost’s words often seem to encourage innovation and figuring out as we go: ‘And then to play. The play’s the thing. Play’s the thing. All virtue in “as if”’ (353). The creative process rests upon as if, and the highest ideals of the academy – akin to what Fareed Zakaria calls ‘the intellectual adventure’ (2015: 61) in which ‘writing makes you think’ (2015: 72) – encourage us all to contemplate as if instead of settling for as is.

As if – and the creative process it represents – makes us human. Albert Schweitzer, though he was not talking about creativity, asserted, ‘As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins’ (2008: 157). As if pushes us into thought, forces us not take ourselves or the world around us for granted. By putting ourselves into conversation, every contributor was faced with the as if presented by other voices, other perspectives, other contexts than his or her own. A single author in control of an argument can work toward a pat answer; we could not. This book is premised on notions that creative writing is stronger for its position in the academy and that creative writing teachers and scholars must be aware of the as is – the status quo – of the academy in order to create the as if that opens us up to innovation, alternatives and complementary perspectives.

Adaptations of Ethnography

What We Talk about When We Talk about Creative Writing is purposefully constructed as conversation, in large part because, as outlined in the previous section, innovation emerges from collision – from talk – and the university is full of smart people testing out interesting ideas. Creative writing, a discipline of practice, need not use exclusively the modes of more traditional academic disciplines to do its scholarly work. The conversation mode here is, in part, a challenge to and an addition to traditional academic discourse and positivistic research.

Wendy Bishop contributed to Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom shortly before she died, so it seems significant to allow her ideas to shape – and even be misshapen in – this new collection. She advocated what she called ‘I-witnessing’ in a 1992 article. In that piece, she points out that it’s especially difficult for a novice ethnographer to be taken seriously because of the ethical and emotional appeals inherent in such work but that someone who has developed standing in a field – and, I would argue in the case of creative writing, a field that has earned standing – can embark on such work. The 10th anniversary of Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom is, then, a good time to adapt a method that draws from and resembles ethnography, to take the scholarly risk that the novice cannot.

Bishop outlines numerous challenges that ethnography faces. The conversation essay negotiates these challenges. Bishop was concerned, for instance, that, in order to pass muster in a context that values positivistic research, the data should be ‘representative, reliable, whole’ (1992: 148). But she discovered that, even early in the process of deciding what to record and how to document, she was already falling short of that standard. By the time she tackled the report toward the end of the project, she was grappling with the realization that ‘all research methods and research reports are rhetorical, that is, all use the reliable triad of classical persuasion: logos, the appeal to reason, pathos, the appeal to emotion, and ethos, the appeal of personality or character’ (1992: 149). Yet creative writing is a discipline more comfortable steeped in the rich combination of logos, ethos and pathos as well as at ease with the worth of voice and point of view, or what Bishop calls ‘human subjectivity […] and author-saturated reconstructions’ (1992: 153). Despite risking postmodernist criticism, why not make meaning the way we are trained to make meaning as creative writers, as story-tellers, as teachers?

Ian Barnard is another rhetoric-composition scholar who grapples with ethnography. One of his greatest concerns with ethnographic research is that ‘power relations between ethnographer and subject(s) reinforce existing inequities’ (2006: 96). Although there may be no getting around this problem, the conversation essays here offset power inequity because all participants speak for themselves and interact with each other directly.

This book adapts notions of ethnography, rather than being ethnographic research itself. As the editor, I am the ethnographer and, thereby, responsible for the final version. Certainly, for some essays, I asked an initial set of questions to which all contributors to that essay responded; then, I recast those responses as conversation and added my own responses to the same questions. That positions co-authors of these essays ethnographic subjects of sorts. Yet I am also positioned as an ethnographic subject, for I ­participated as a contributor as well. In other essays, the conversation emerged piece by piece as the document was passed back and forth. Authors in these essays share almost equal power. No matter the starting point, all authors are experts and had opportunities to clarify and edit, a power that subjects in ethnographic research rarely have because interpretation is left entirely to the researcher. In fact, contributors often edited each other as the chapters moved along.

Perhaps, then, the reader is the real ethnographer, the one who interprets the conversation data for ultimate meaning and application in new co...