Transferable skills and travelling theory in creative writing pedagogy

ABSTRACT

A focus on skills that can be transferred and theory that can travel is shared by Creative Writing Studies (C.W.S) and a larger Writing Studies domain. I situate the Writing Studies reform movement, of which C.W.S is a part, as a response to ‘the permanent crisis of English studies’. The language of creative narrative gives C.W.S its legitimating foundation, I argue. By continuing to speak the language of creativity and resisting the ‘erotics of theory’, the emergent field can retail skills that can travel across and beyond academic disciplines. This essay draws on three years of utilising creative writing pedagogies in Puerto Rico. I sketch the emergence of C.W.S (2009–2017) as one version of the ‘disciplined interdisciplinarity’ which is characteristic of Writing Studies. I describe a self-characterisation assignment I have implemented in several writing studies courses. Within the context of the growing importance of non-academic genres, and recognition that creativity is an asset in all fields, I suggest that C.W.S is well situated to help Writing Studies fill a void produced by the crisis of English Studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative writing
• pedagogy
• creativity
• nonfiction
• writing studies
• literacies
• self-inventory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Gregory Stephens is an associate professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez. He teaches creative writing, literature and film courses, and graduate seminars in cultural studies, and literary nonfiction. Stephens has taught film, literature, and media/cultural studies at the University of South Florida, the University of West Indies, and the University of California. Before graduate school Stephens was an award-winning songwriter in Austin, Texas. He is the author of On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley (Cambridge UP, 1999).

Notes

1 Wendy Bishop (1999, 10) in a 1999 CCC special issue, voiced her view that theory-driven rhet-comp scholarship had taken the ‘joy’ out of reading. Her argument about her desire to ‘enjoy’ as well as learn from writing drew a rejoinder from Gary Olson, whose 2000 piece ‘The Death of Composition as an Intellectual Discipline’ named Bishop as the lead face of a ‘revitalized backlash against theoretical scholarship’ (Olson 2000, 34).

2 Stuart Hall believed U.S academics were fixated on theory, and insisted that theoretical work, and intellectual or cultural work, may ‘abut each other … But they are not the same thing’ (Hall 1992, 287; Ang 2016, 31).

3 All quotes from Didion and Orwell taken from the ‘Why I Write’ PDF at http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/uploadedFiles/schools/whitmanhs/academics/english/Why%20I%20Write%20Didion.pdf

4 Faulkner began The Sound and the Fury with an image of a girl’s muddy drawers in the trees (Gwynn and Blotner 1959, 1–3; Stein 1956; http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4954/the-art-of-fiction-no-12-william-faulkner).

5 Geertz’ reference to ‘author-evacuated’ prose is quoted in Hindman (2001, 89).

6 All quotes from Didion and Orwell taken from the ‘Why I Write’ PDF at http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/uploadedFiles/schools/whitmanhs/academics/english/Why%20I%20Write%20Didion.pdf

7 I also participated in a workshop during a fiction seminar taught by Clarence Major at the University of California-Davis, 1992.

8 ‘The idea of “multiliteracies” … has had an enormous impact on subsequent conversations about the meaning and conduct of literacy’ (Julie Lindquist, ‘Literacy’, in Heilker and Vandenberg 2015, 99–102).