The Place and the Writer: International Intersections of Teacher Lore and Creative Writing Pedagogy

Description

The combined experience of authors throughout the ages offers a wealth of valuable information about the practice of creative writing. However, such lore can also be problematic for students and practitioners as it can be inherently additive, making it difficult to abandon processes that do not work. This adherence to lore also tends to be a US-centric endeavor. In order to take a nuanced approach to the uses and limitations of lore, The Place and the Writer offers a global perspective on creative writing pedagogy that has yet to be fully explored. Featuring a diverse array of cultural viewpoints from Brazil to Hong Kong, Finland to South Africa, this book explores the ongoing international debate about the best approaches for teaching and practicing creative writing. Marshall Moore and Sam Meekings challenge areas of perceived wisdom that persist in the field of creative writing, including aesthetics and politics in institutionalized creative writing; the process of workshopping; tuition and talent; anxiety in the classroom; unifying theory and lore; and teaching creative writing in languages other than English.

Marshall Moore is Course Leader and Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication at Falmouth University, UK. He is the author of several novels and collections of short fiction, the most recent being Inhospitable (2018). With Xu Xi, he is the co-editor of the anthology The Queen of Statue Square: New Short Fiction from Hong Kong (2015). He holds a PhD in creative writing from Aberystwyth University, UK, and his current research focuses on the disconnects between the publishing industry and the academy, and on the mythology and lore that surround creative practice and pedagogy. Sam Meekings is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern University in Qatar. He is the author of Under Fishbone Clouds (2011, called 'a poetic evocation of the country and its people' by the New York Times), The Book of Crows (2012), and The Afterlives of Dr Gachet (2018). He has a PhD in creative writing from Lancaster University, UK, and has taught writing at NYU (Global Campus) and the University of Chichester, UK. He researches issues of identity in grief narratives, and the practices and processes of digital storytelling.

Creative writing viewed as part of the higher education sector is often considered to be one of the newer disciplines, though those of us who work in the field trace a lineage back at least to Aristotle. It is true, though, that only in recent decades has a major corpus of writing has emerged about this discipline; and truer yet that the majority of that literature reads the creative writing discipline from a Euro-American perspective. This new volume returns to an enduring concern in the sector - that of lore - with an obvious attempt to break the patterns of colonisation, and ensure intersectionality of voice and perspective. Contributors to this volume include key scholars from across the globe, who richly evoke, engage and critique the meanings of 'lore' in their various contexts, in some cases puncturing the 'truths' that thread through our discourses, in other cases extending and enriching understandings. What they show is the diversity of tradition, thinking, language, narrative structures, and identities; while at the same time confirming what Graeme Harper terms the 'kinship in creative writing'. In all our differences, as Ross Gibson suggests, we creative writing teachers and scholars can still harmonize around the central tune being hummed by this difficult, compelling, lovely discipline. * Jen Webb, Distinguished Professor of Creative Practice, University of Canberra, Australia *