Changing Creative Writing in America

Strengths, Weaknesses, Possibilities

Graeme Harper, Graeme Harper

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783098835
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this compelling collection of essays contributors critically examine Creative Writing in American Higher Education. Considering Creative Writing teaching, learning and knowledge, the book recognizes historical strengths and weaknesses. The authors cover topics ranging from the relationship between Creative Writing and Composition and Literary Studies to what it means to write and be a creative writer; from new technologies and neuroscience to the nature of written language; from job prospects and graduate study to the values of creativity; from moments of teaching to persuasive ideas and theories; from interdisciplinary studies to the qualifications needed to teach Creative Writing in contemporary Higher Education. Most of all it explores the possibilities for the future of Creative Writing as an academic subject in America.

1	Histories and Historiography in Creative Writing Studies
	Alexandria Peary

Mildewed, crumpled, rusty, disintegrated, illegible, stained, fading, landfilled, incinerated, erased, deleted, in a forgotten box, on a dusty shelf, in a filing cabinet, in a basement/attic/rented storage facility, on rapidly obsolete technology If we imagine what is lost without historical studies of creative writing in the United States, we gain a sense of what could be recovered if historical evidence were not treated as ephemeral. What might be recovered includes countless invention, revision, feedback and publication practices developed by generations of writing teachers and mentors, pieces written by decades of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as techniques used by the self-taught. What might be restored includes information about a plethora of local and national institutions of creative writing, those formal and informal sponsors of imaginative work - the journals, book shops, community writing programs, university writing programs, reading series, conferences, retreats, publishing houses, textbooks, manuals, blogs, trade articles, correspondence, marginalia - and their accounts of start-up, challenges faced, successes and evolution, and perhaps of closing doors. Certainly, what is lost are the teaching practices and craft knowledge of those writers and scholars who came before us and who were similarly committed to creative writing. Members of other academic fields, most notably Composition Studies, share an increasingly well researched history, but practitioners in Creative Writing Studies encounter a past that is largely blank. This void indicates that we continue to operate more from a creative writing position -defined by scholars such as Dianne Donnelly, Katharine Haake and Tim Mayers as disinclined toward theory or scholarship and preferring to focus on the training of individual writers - than a Creative Writing Studies position - 'an emerging field of scholarly inquiry and research' (Donnelly, 2012: 1; Haake, 2006: 188; Mayers, 2009: 217-219). As a scholarly enterprise, Donnelly adds (2012: 6), Creative Writing Studies values 'collecting, compiling and presenting data' - and surely historical research constitutes one form of this information.

In this chapter, I argue for increased historical and historiographical work in creative writing in the United States. The historical research that has an important role in the pedagogy and theory of the present and future of the field calls for studies of individual teachers and scholars, groups, communities, institutions (broadly defined) and texts related to creative writing. Critically, this historical work means expanding beyond the familiar US stories of origin (i.e. the Iowa Writers' Workshop) and examining creative writing both inside and outside of formal school settings. The research advocated for in this chapter is not disciplinary history per se (that is, it is not about the contested territory inside English departments) but rather the second strand of historical research Tim Mayers identified in 'One simple word: From creative writing to creative writing studies' (2009: 222) - that of theoretical historical research which seeks 'to place the past in a different light' in ways distinct from the hermeneutics of literary studies. Historiography - or the study of historical method that involves critical perspectives on how histories are framed, researched, narrated and distributed - has an important role in the epistemology of our field and the establishment of terministic screens that suit creative writing. Essentially, historiography addresses questions of how to write history by investigating scope, definition, the construction of categories, methods, stance, ethics, subjectivity, reflexivity and the constructed nature of discourse (including the discourse of history).

History increases disciplinary knowledge whereas historiography deepens knowledge practices while also monitoring and safeguarding those practices. Scholars of historiography have long been interested in fact and methodology, tracking how shifts between humanism, positivism, relativism, presentism and objectivism across Western thought influenced historical accounts (Clark, 2004: 17-25; Collingwood, 1946; Higham, 1965). As Elizabeth Clark says (2004: 19) in discussing historian Michael Oakeshott's contention that the past can never be fully reclaimed but only inferred, 'history is not "out there," but is something that historians create'. While a historical study might examine 20th-century correspondence courses in creative writing, veteran participation at the literary journal 0-Dark-Thirty or community creative writing groups for transgender youth, a historiographical work would explore the ways in which archival research can be conducted on university creative writing programs or examine the discourse used in historical accounts of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Historiography can serve as the subject of a publication (examining a research practice) or be used as a research method during the writing process (the scholar looking into creative writing correspondence courses would apply a historiographical awareness to her work). It's fairly commonplace for an academic discipline to practice both history and historiographic research, as evinced in publications such as the Journal of the History of Biology and Journal of the History of Dentistry, along with the Journal of Art Historiography, Historiography in Mass Communication and the Journal of Modern Art History and Historiography.

Historiography, as an epistemological and critical apparatus, is an opportunity to think carefully and collectively on how creative writers want to approach scholarly activity. Rather than a matter of placing the cart before the horse, starting conversations about historiography now in the nascent field of Creative Writing Studies makes a good deal of sense. Indeed, there are real advantages to establishing historiography during disciplinary groundbreaking moments. Chiefly, historiography entails conversations about epistemology that can be deeply impactful in the growth of a field of study, since the methods by which a field conducts its research (historical or otherwise) reveal much about the values and mission of that field. It can be beneficial to allow historiography to be more formative than corrective, to not play catch-up after methodological or epistemological problems arise. If done thoughtfully, historiography can address significant concerns, like those so cogently voiced by Anna Leahy (2016), that the emerging field of Creative Writing Studies risks severing the interplay of creative and critical activity already possible for creative writers working in academia. These conversations about historiography can help creative writers take charge of their disciplinarity - so that scholarly efforts by creative writers steer clear of the overly esoteric and avoid expending energy arguing for university legitimacy Creative writers are predisposed to the work of historical research, whether it is the close examination of language intrinsic to textual analysis, the development of a narrative in presenting a historical account, remaining open to the serendipity of discovery, or developing alternative points of view, including a more conscious role for the first person. Discussions of epistemology and method can also help creative writing stay true to its extracurricular roots and maintain what Leahy (2016: 9) calls its 'translational' ability to connect academia with the larger culture, to keep the door open to greater communities of writers.

History, Or How Much Do We Know?

The evolution of a field of academic study occurs through a crucial trio of inquiry into history (background), pedagogy (application) and theory (critical perspective on history and pedagogy). Disciplinarity is in the house when scholars develop professionalizing organizations such as conferences, associations, journals, book presses, newsletters, awards, list-servs, and MA and PhD programs. Another barometer of an academic field's vitality is the amount of historical work it sponsors. In the case of Composition Studies, the field floundered for a long stretch between 1885 until 1945, a time in which literature received more attention and 'composition teaching increasingly went on in a sort of twilit underground, taught by unwilling graduate student conscripts and badly paid non-tenured instructors' (Connors, 2003: 205). According to Connors, a gap occurred between the first great historical work of research in rhetoric, Albert R. Kitzhaber's 1953 dissertation, Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850-1900, and the emergence of historians like James Berlin and Donald Stewart in the 1970s. The rapid evolution of Composition Studies in the 1970s was not coincidental but rather a reflection of its efforts toward historical research. Recently, scholars have linked historical research to the establishment of Creative Writing Studies: for instance, Dianne Donnelly (2012: 1) has described creative writing 'unaware of the histories and theories that inform its practice' posed at a crossroads from the 'emerging field of scholarly inquiry and research' of Creative Writing Studies. Moreover, a lack of historical awareness impinges upon the other two legs of the field - theory and pedagogy - such that remaining stubbornly ahistorical is linked to lore-based teaching (Donnelly, 2012: 5) and vice versa. Failing to situate the teaching present in a larger historical and theoretical context, creative writers instead resort to the 'epistemology of individual experience' that Mayers notices pervading conferences of the American Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) (Mayers, 2016: 4). In turn, workshop pedagogy may have played a role in a lack of historical awareness, since, as a 'forum oriented exclusively to the present', the workshop model displays the 'tendency to erase the past on which its authority and practice were based' (Berry, 1994: 63). To perpetuate this cycle, for the most part, whenever historical work has been conducted, it has been to address perceived problems with the workshop model, the hegemonic Goliath frustrating those who would advance the field.

Of the disciplinary triad of history, pedagogy and theory, pedagogy to date has received the lion's share of attention in Creative Writing Studies. In the past five years, we've witnessed an uptick in the publication of several book-length collections on pedagogy after a lag since Joseph Moxley's 1989Creative Writing in America: Theory and Pedagogyand Wendy Bishop and Hans Ostrom's 1994Colors of a Different Horse: Rethinking Creative Writing Theory and Pedagogy. A short list of recent books on pedagogy include Tom C. Hunley's Teaching Poetry Writing: A Five-Canon Approach(2007) and several other books in the series 'New Writing Viewpoints' (edited by Graeme Harper and published by Multilingual Matters); Stephanie Vanderslice's Rethinking Creative Writing(2011) and Elaine Walker'sTeaching Creative Writing(2013) from the imprint Creative Writing Studies; Michael Dean Clark and Trent Hergenrader's Teaching Creative Writing in the Digital Age(2015); and my and Tom C. Hunley's Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century(Peary & Hunley, 2015).These contributions to creative writing pedagogy have sought to replace lore in the classroom - the near-sightedness that results when teachers fail to critically consider their classroom practices in light of more comprehensive, less idiosyncratic patterns of praxis (North, 1987; Ritter & Vanderslice, 2007). That myopia, however, is directly related to the extent to which teachers are aware of the history of teaching in the field. Lack of interest in pedagogy is lack of interest in history - in anything more long term or sustained than the isolated course, class meeting or individual student draft. Additionally, a peculiarity of scholarly discussions of academic creative writing, one not faced by composition, has been how creative writing is framed either as elitist - such as James Berlin's (1987: 40) early critique of belletristic writing instruction as the stuff of Yale and the Ivy League - or overly egalitarian, such as Anis Shivani's (2011) diatribe against the populace in the workshop. As a result, conversations about academic creative writing have pin-balled between what Paul Dawson (2005: 1) calls the 'Can it be taught' and 'Should it be taught' dispute. A more expansive take on subject in the historic research of Creative Writing Studies could help disband such unproductive binaries.

Historical research is a form of community building that expands rather than narrows the scope of creative writing. For one, it's an acknowledgement of practitioners who preceded us who were similarly committed to the teaching of creative writing. Designing graduate programs in Creative Writing Studies will professionalize younger scholars and burgeon the members of the discipline of the future: likewise, historical work increases the membership by retroactively including those scholars and writers from the past. Card-carrying members of Creative Writing Studies would then include the new assistant professor at a small, historically black college and people active on theory panels at the AWP as well as the 19th-century magazine editor who helped mentor female creative writers, or Brenda Ueland, teaching the classes she describes in If You Want to Write (1938). In a similar way, as will be shortly discussed, historiography, or the critical examination of how histories are researched and narrated, is not simply about 'differings in methodology alone but varying perceptions of what ought to be discovered for the good of the community' (Murphy, 1988: 5). Historical research is almost a responsibility we owe to those practitioners and teachers of creative writing who preceded us. Furthermore, a lack of interest in our disciplinary predecessors risks our own obscurity: if the theory and pedagogy of predecessors have become obsolete through lack of curiosity, that's likely the fate of our current endeavors if the next generation of practitioners is equally uninterested in the community which taught, learned and wrote before them.

Historical research in creative writing in the United States should seek to study histories of imaginative literate practice from any era or geographic location, including places and times in which the exact term 'creative writing' may not have been in currency. This research could examine pedagogy, publication and methods of circulation; genre; socioeconomic issues of class, gender and race; and cultural perceptions and reception of creative writing and writers as they have developed over time; it could also reconfigure known histories. Such research would eschew literary analysis and biographies of single authors - the purview of literary studies; it would replace questions of interpretation and meaning with questions about the conditions that made a text possible (Mayers, 2009: 222), including writing processes and social context. As will be discussed in the historiography section below, historical subjects need to include those outside of academia by considering both the extracurriculum (informal ways in which individuals learn about writing) as well as subjects who had nothing to do with teaching, not even informally, but who had writing and publishing engagements worth studying. That is, historical research needs to sidestep what Susan Jarratt (1987: 24) called the 'pedagogical imperative', or the compunction to find relevancy by connecting research to the classroom. Creative writing historians could take a cue from composition and rhetoric historians who have written about such outside-the-box-of-academia subjects, including women in the US submarine force, the letters between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scotts,Life Magazine and public libraries.

Composition Studies has defined its boundaries as an academic discipline fairly broadly, and subsequently a type of academic mission creep has overtaken histories of creative writing. Assuming names of 'composition studies', 'discipline of composition-rhetoric' or, more encroachingly 'writing studies', the various texts of Composition Studies - its policy papers, journal mission statements and association position statements - show Composition Studies pushing creative writing under its auspices. For instance, the mission statement of the flagship journal of Composition Studies,College Composition and Communication,states that it 'draws on research and theories from a broad range of humanistic disciplines', with creative writing falling under 'English studies' and the phrase 'and others', since many of the articles exploring creative writing theory, history or pedagogy in recent years have been published in this journal. Although creative writing has been claimed by the publications of composition, it's been given a marginal role. For instance, a search in College Composition and Communication for the references since 1997 to creative writing-related terms showed the following: 126 references to 'imagination', 58 to 'imaginative', 136 to 'creativity', 115 to 'creative writing', 93 to 'poet' and 29 to 'short story'. The journal has been more invested in composition-related discussions (although creative writing might be folded inside these discussions), evident in the 1345 references to 'composition', 772 to 'rhetoric' and 179 to 'rhetorician'. To date, composition researchers have included creative writing and creative writers in their scholarship, usually as acknowledgement of writing done outside required course work, self-willed writers, to tacitly make a case for the relevancy of written communication. During the first Octalog, in 1987, Susan Jarratt (1987: 9) called for composition scholars to reclaim rhetorical texts that had been claimed by other disciplines, to become 'daring usurper[s] (rather than marginalized hoarder[s])'. Taking a cue from Jarratt, one undertaking of creative writing historians could be the reclamation of creative writing texts and subjects currently explored by composition scholars. An immediate example would be the ro...