Creative Writing Studies: Practice, Research and Pedagogy

Introduction

GRAEME HARPER AND JERI KROLL

1.

The chapters in this collection range across all three areas of its subtitle – Practice, Research and Pedagogy – testifying to the integrated nature of Creative Writing as a university discipline. The writers were given the option of concentrating on any one or more of the areas. Some chose to highlight practice, some research, some pedagogy; most, ultimately, combined two or more of these in their chapters, emphasising the connection between them. This cross-fertilisation is notable and worthy of celebration.

In addition, because of the relative newness of doctoral study in Creative Writing – even in the USA where it is well preceded by study at Bachelors and Master level – one writer in each of this book’s three primary geographic locations was asked to concentrate on the nature of practice and research at doctoral level. In postgraduate study, issues emerge where students and supervisors develop notions, not only of writerly practice, but of how to undertake practice-led research in Creative Writing. The base question here is: what constitutes a research question in Creative Writing? More broadly, what various institutions, worldwide, understand as higher degree study is reflected in the types of degrees they award and what benchmarks they set in place. What kind of creative work might be produced for each? Internationally, too little has been exchanged about the variety of doctoral programs, methodologies and theories in this significant and still-expanding area, and encouraging some writers in this collection to consider it directly was seen to be important to the field.

This book, of course, concentrates on Creative Writing undertaken in English; though, naturally, this is in the manner of a case study, not in a manner of suggesting Creative Writing in universities is occurring only in English-speaking countries – far from it. In fact, throughout Europe, Asia and Africa, Creative Writing in and around universities is undertaken in a variety of languages, currently with various levels of local development. This is likewise the case within the UK, USA and Australia. Another book on Creative Writing in one or more languages other than English would be an extremely useful project.

Questions raised in various ways in the chapters of Creative Writing Studies: Practice, Research and Pedagogy include: what place should critical or theoretical discourse have in the discipline? How should critical understanding of Creative Writing be nurtured? How do we develop the best teaching methods at undergraduate and postgraduate levels? How do we develop practice-led research? How do we proceed as creative writers who are also teachers and/or students?

Because this collection offers a cross-section of Creative Writing activity in Higher Education, and a variety of approaches from a number of geographic locations, the instruction to the reader might well be to ‘read between the lines’ as well as to read the lines. Here are chapters by creative writers given a free rein to explore their field of interest, and they all have experience as creative practitioners, as critics or theorists, and as university teachers.

Those of us involved in Creative Writing in the university today are watching the discipline further invent itself, monitoring our own contribution to its construction and reflecting on how these processes affect our creative work, our research and our pedagogies. Creative writers in academia today are not deadlocked, but frequently encourage multiple meanings, as they reflect the shifting reality of their own artistic and professional lives.

2.

In Chapter 1 of Creative Writing Studies: Practice, Research and Pedagogy, the Editors explore how Creative Writing has evolved most recently as a discipline, and consider the site of knowledge that it represents. We look at where it sits in the contemporary university, and make some observations about its current, and future, role in academe. Chapter 2, ‘The Novel and the Academic Novel’, finds novelist and PhD supervisor Nigel Krauth considering how the creation of a novel for ‘new-breed, non-traditional doctorates’ affects both the process and the product. On the one hand, writers obtain support and encouragement; on the other, they might feel constrained because these benefits, flowing from a bureaucratic structure, can impact on the novelist’s freedom to create. In Chapter 3, Jake Adam York, focusing on new media teaching techniques, suggests ways in which the university Creative Writing classroom might be a place for pedagogic investigation of the nature of particular genre. In York’s case it is the role of sound in the writing of poetry that forms the basis of this investigation and, ultimately, of his innovative teaching practices.

In Chapter 4 Nessa O’Mahony, an Irish poet who has undertaken both a Creative Writing Masters degree and a Creative Writing Doctorate in the UK, considers the practical dimensions of the empirical research needed to construct a work of Creative Writing. She also considers the broader range of aesthetic, personal and career issues that form a backdrop to such study. As a useful counterpoint to Nessa O’Mahony’s chapter Inez Baranay, already a novelist before entering the academy to undertake a doctorate, considers in Chapter 5, ‘Six Texts Prefigure a Seventh’, the concept that the creation of texts never occurs in a vacuum by interrogating her own imaginative universe. Writing her PhD encouraged Baranay to re-read her previous published work, which led to insights that suggest the reflexivity of writers in the academy involves not only self-critique, but memoir (recollections of each book’s composition) and an analysis of the development of form and practice. Baranay represents the new breed of published writer who enters the academic fold seeking not only the resources of a university but structured self-knowledge.

The nature of knowledge, forming a bridge, also forms the subject for Stephanie Vanderslice in Chapter 6, ‘Sleeping with Proust vs. Tinkering Under the Bonnet’. She traces the relatively recent history of formal Creative Writing teaching in the USA and UK and notes the need for something that draws together invention and technique, a new metaphor that might resolve a long-held pedagogic tension. Investigation of elements of this tension is also evident in Chapter 7, ‘Workshopping the Workshop and Teaching the Unteachable’, where Kevin Brophy confronts one of the most pressing difficulties facing anyone involved in Creative Writing in Higher Education: how to mediate the connection between emotion, ideas and art. In so doing, he analyses workshop dynamics, a place ‘which foregrounds skill, learning, decision-making, the application of critical intelligence,’ but also, as ‘a live event,’ allows spontaneity and excitement.

In Chapters 8 and Chapter 9, respectively, Nigel McLoughlin and Nat Hardy reveal two alternate approaches to teaching Creative Writing in the university. In simple terms, the differences could be broken down into one pedagogical approach based on structured learning and one based on unstructured learning. But such a simplification hides some key elements of their discussions. In his chapter, ‘Creating an Integrated Model for Teaching Creative Writing: One Approach’, Nigel McLoughlin investigates ‘the various ways in which research and scholarly activity, creative and critical processes and practices and pedagogical theories and methodologies interact within the discipline of Creative Writing,’ while Nat Hardy’s ‘Gonzo-Formalism’ seeks to enhance technique and interpretive understanding. In many ways, the similarities of view present in these two chapters are more important than the differences.

In Chapter 10, ‘Acting, Interacting, and Acting Up: Teaching Collaborate Creative Practice,’ Jen Webb analyses how her students work together on cross-media projects as a vehicle for investigating collaborative practice. In addition, in that reflexive circle that seems to result from so many teaching practices in the creative arts, she finds her own understanding of the possibilities open to her altered by her students’ experiences. Allusion to self-understanding and collaboration is similarly found in Aileen La Tourette’s Chapter 11, ‘The Writer as Teacher, Teacher as Writer’. In this chapter she discusses mentors, craft and the needs of creative writers, while also alerting us to the social context of many experiences in the university Creative Writing classroom.

In Chapter 12, Rob Mimpriss focuses on a key issue in his own Creative Writing research, relating specifically to the creation of short stories and, in a somewhat different fashion to Aileen La Tourette, refers to notions of something that could indeed be called writerly mentoring (in this case, the influential role one author’s work can have on another). His discussion of the nature of the short story, and the apologetic discourse he finds connected to the writing of it, is thought-provoking, especially given some mainstream publishers expressing a preference for the novel in the 21st century. Finally, in Chapter 13, Greg Fraser considers a number of theoretical positions and their possibilities for Creative Writing practice and discusses how models of what he calls ‘critical consciousness’ relate to a general writerly curiosity about the world. He suggests that ‘creative writers (poets especially, perhaps) tend to be unsatisfied with pre-established grids. They tend to want to let language itself bring about reconceptualisations and expansions of reality.’

Creative Writing Studies: Practice, Research and Pedagogy addresses the lack of international publications concerned with the discipline of Creative Writing at university level, offering a platform to a range of individual voices. The creative writers in this book explore those issues they believe most significant, yet these explorations are decidedly interconnected, charting the progress of how far the discipline of Creative Writing has come in the USA, the UK and Australia to date. In effect, they have engaged, either explicitly or implicitly, with who they are as creative writers, teachers and researchers and what permutations these identities have undergone within the academy.

Chapter 1

Creative Writing in the University

GRAEME HARPER AND JERI KROLL

1.

A triumvirate of practice, research and pedagogy defines Creative Writing as a subject in universities around the world. Writing is first and foremost a studio art, like its siblings – music, drama, dance, visual arts, and so on. The teaching of the arts and attendant critical understanding about how to communicate the intricacies of specific disciplines followed on the heels of their introduction into the academy at all levels. Although the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in the US is still, to some extent, thought of as primarily a practice-based (studio) degree, Masters and Doctoral study, generally, moved the discipline on to another plane because here the concept of Creative Writing as research began to be interrogated most vigorously. The movement of ideas between practice, research and pedagogy has now come full circle. Definitions of research and about the production of the type and forms of knowledge Creative Writing generates have begun to filter down to affect how Creative Writing is taught at undergraduate level in many institutions.

Witness the number of books published in recent years about the discipline. Likewise, research-led debates that in earlier times found their way occasionally into The Writer’s Chronicle, the long-established organ of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), and slightly more so perhaps into Writing in Education, the publication of the UK’s National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE), are now able to be carried on regularly in independent specialist journals such as New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. Newer organisations have also developed their own international journals with tertiary education focuses, such as TEXT: the Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP, founded 1996), published biannually. Concomitantly, the research interests expressed in publications by NAWE, whose brief covers all levels of education from primary to tertiary, and in AWP publications as well, have increased.

The teaching of arts practice, and the attendant critical understanding of it, has long been a part of academe – in fact, since the birth of Higher Education. Yet, the formalising of education in The Arts – in Creative Writing in this specific case – has often led to questions about the nature of the intersection between practice, research into practice and the critical knowledge connected with it, and teaching. Constant movement of ideas between these three aspects – Creative Writing practice, university research and university teaching – is now more common in institutions worldwide, but it is not yet firmly established generally. Much work still needs to be done on the relationship between Creative Writing as a practice-led activity, critical understanding drawn from investigating that practice, and modes of teaching Creative Writing at university level. In other words, the principles, methodologies and theories underpinning the discipline are still emerging in a variety of cultural and institutional contexts.

Definitions of, and about, the production, types and forms of knowledge developed and used in Creative Writing have only just begun to filter down to the way Creative Writing is taught. With a strong international network now in place, new discipline-based knowledge can travel widely. That said, different arenas – international as well as within national borders – have seen alternative emphases at various times, and one of the most exciting elements of the now international sense of Creative Writing in universities is the scope and strength of debate.

2.

Prior to writing this chapter, we generated a number of questions. These were mostly concerned with what we might achieve in such a chapter in a book that would also present contributions about Creative Writing as a university discipline from the perspective of three geographical locations. Here are some of those questions that helped to demarcate what we believe are critical areas of investigation in the development of that site of knowledge called ‘Creative Writing’.

What do we perceive as the subject content of Creative Writing in universities? What is its specific subject matter and what is related to it, but perhaps not core to its interests? Who chooses to study it, and what are their expectations? What indeed are the results of this studying? Where within the university is Creative Writing activity most often taking place? What sort of activities does it cover? How is it defined in light of other subjects in the university? How is it valued, and by whom? How do we conceive of research in Creative Writing, and what is the relationship between creative practice and critical understanding that is integral to that research? What is knowledge of, and about, Creative Writing, and to what ends is it used? How does what occurs within universities relate to Creative Writing activities beyond universities? The list could go on.

Readers should note the inclusion of the word ‘studying’ in the paragraph above, as well as the word ‘within’. The reasons to use these two words are themselves twofold. Firstly, this is a chapter concerned with Creative Writing as it is studied in and around universities. Needless to say, it is not necessary to study Creative Writing in order to undertake some Creative Writing. Now and then, the question has been raised as to whether Creative Writing even benefits from being studied within universities at all. We’d be the last people to answer that question without bias. So, bias in hand, we might simply rephrase the question: ‘Does any field of knowledge not benefit from being studied within a university?’ There’s little doubt that Creative Writing in and around universities is impacted upon by the nature of the university environment, and that the discipline, in turn, impacts upon that environment. There is a myriad of ways that writers (and their students) are affected by this interpenetration and how, as a result, the discipline as well as the general practice of Creative Writing is advanced. Secondly, how Creative Writing is studied most often involves two elements: the act of writing creatively, and the act of critically considering that act and its results. In both cases, the ‘studying’ raises questions about how to marshal ideas and actions, how to employ discoveries, how to communicate information and how to evaluate understanding. In this sense also ‘within’ seems an appropriate addition to use in our discussions, and gives some indication of our focus and purpose.

3.

Let us explore the three areas of connected interest – practice, research and pedagogy – a bit more to illuminate the ideas being suggested here.

Creative Writing ‘practice’ is an all-encompassing term, and perhaps is the first that needs to be unpacked in order to reveal some elements of Creative Writing’s nature. Practice, in this case, means the practice of writing creatively; but this can, of course, entail a great many practices, some simple acts of inscription, some acts of recording, some acts of invention, interpretation or distillation, some acts of revisiting, rewriting or editing, and so on. And yet, in talking of practice there is some indication that we are not talking, as the primary focal point, about the finished artifacts that result from that practice. This is important. Creative Writing can refer to an action, or set of actions, and a consideration of both action and artefact. However, the focus in the subject of Creative Writing on action and process differentiates it from the critical study of ‘Literature’, ‘Theatre’, ‘Film/Media,’ for example, all of which can involve analytical acts regarding pieces of Creative Writing but are subjects largely undertaken without creative practice involved.

Thus practice here means an approach to a subject based on knowledge acquired through the act of creating. This knowledge is not superficial. It results from sustained and serious examination of the art of writerly practice and might include not only contemporary theoretical or critical models but the writers’ own past works as well as predecessors and traditions. In some incarnations, practice as research functions as the formal autobiography of an individual’s craft, taking into account the significant influences and methods. Even the relationship between a doctoral student and supervisor can be understood in this manner.

This knowledge, while intersecting with that acquired by the post-creation act of criticism, is fundamentally different in attitude because its purpose is primarily to inform the practitioner (and, by extension, other practitioners), and therefore give her or him better access to ideas and approaches that might enhance their own practice. Artists outside of an institutional context might do this sporadically or systematically, but they are not necessarily interested in disseminating their findings (contributing to a body of knowledge as a primary purpose, for example). Within the academy, writers function in the private sphere of their own practice, but also in the institutional sphere as teachers and in a more public sphere as authors. These identities interpenetrate and reflect back upon practice.

Some of the resulting knowledge could perhaps be called ‘applied knowledge’; however, such a term in Higher Education has tended to fall foul of a perceived intellectual hierarchy, with the ‘applied’ second in importance, and what might be called ‘blue skies’ knowledge situated in first place. What we are talking about here, to be clear, is higher learning attained through creative practice. It is in no sense second in importance to critical analysis detached from practice (what some might call ‘intellectual’ activity), and it is in no sense less capable of investigating the nature of the world, the individual or the culture. Practice here is taken to be an active engagement with knowledge producing creative results that embody levels of understanding and modes of communication. Perhaps here Creative Writing and other art forms have much to contribute to each other; however, in some cases Creative Writing has been excluded from relevant debates about practice as research. What Australia-based Paul Carter (2004: 177) deems ‘the balkanisation of creative arts’ has had negative consequences in some arenas, because this phenomenon has prevented the arts ‘entering into dialogue with one another’ and, thus, building on each discipline’s insights. Nevertheless, Creative Writing scholars, as the ensuing chapters demonstrate, have not only been keen to explore resources both within and outside academe but have been innovative in their application.

The developing concept of practice situates itself well in the current history of Creative Writing in places of higher learning. The growth of the subject in universities over the past 10 to 15 years, and the slower but still considerable growth for the 40 or so years before this, has meant that Creative Writing practice is now undertaken in the university by individuals with a range of backgrounds and expectations. Universities were once far more elitist places; mass higher education has introduced notions of ‘access for all’, which naturally has opened up the number of possible individual ‘life plans’ that might exist in any one university.

So, for example, on the one hand most university students of Creative Writing – whether students in the sense of actual members of the university student body, or ‘students of the field’ in the more general sense of those Creative Writing proponents in academe – consider some element of recognised publication or performance of Creative Writing testimony to achievement in the subject. Practice therefore might be said to embody an ‘industry’ or ‘consumption’ ideal connected with ‘making a living’. On the other hand, this is one of the most debated areas of Creative Writing study, and there would be any number of those connected with Creative Writing in universities who would question whether the market is a defining component of practice and whether the considerations of the market for finished pieces of Creative Writing should be the motivation behind undertaking them – or indeed for benchmarking creative work. In higher degrees, in particular, ‘publishable’ as an evaluative term has been questioned, and in many cases discarded, in recent years. Part of the reason for this is the desire to develop courses where there are a variety of recognised ‘successful outcomes’ (i.e. from publication or performance, to simply a far greater understanding of the nature of excellent creative writing).

It is interesting to note that in the past decade or two, particularly with the evolution of doctoral degrees in Creative Writing, authors with established reputations in the market have returned to universities, or in some cases turned up for the first time, to undertake higher degree study. Something similar was seen, prior to the birth of the Creative Writing doctorate, at Masters level. This is undoubtedly connected with the idea of achieving formal qualifications that bolster the chances of a writer obtaining university employment. But it would be cynical to believe this is where the interest stops. There is much evidence, albeit often anecdotal, that supports the idea that writers with