Creative Writing Commons^™

Bad Grades, Making Bank, And Hating Piano: The Divergent Trajectories Of Two Creative Writers’ Semiotic Becomings, Jon Udelson

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This article challenges lore-based conceptions of creative writers’ becomings by showing how creative writers establish their literate and disciplinary identities not only through modes of learning characterized by curricular-based advancement in their field, but also through complex social and material negotiations with communities, institutions, and engagements outside of the disciplinary domain of creative writing. Drawing primarily from case study interview data, this article argues for a theoretical and empirical approach to studying creative writers’ “semiotic becomings” in order to further inform creative writing studies research, creative writing pedagogy, and the disciplinary benefits of validating creative writers’ extra-literate and extra-disciplinary experiences.

Public Promises, Hazy Vision: What Program Learning Outcomes Tell Us About Creative Writing As An Academic Subject, Tanya Perkins, Lisa Marling

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

: Although creative writing entered undergraduate curricula in the 20^th century primarily as a way to teach literature, the range of current programming suggests that original intent has evolved, as has opinion among faculty and writers about the nature of creative writing as a subject and its role within English programs. This study applies content analysis to 271 creative writing program learning outcomes (PLOs) from 51 undergraduate programs across the US in order to identify prevailing patterns and themes related to creative writing as a teaching subject. As measurable (and public) statements of content, PLOs are informative and accessible …

The Mind And The Self: A Preliminary Analysis Of Handbooks Written By Women And Men On How To Write Fiction From 1900-1940, Mitchell R. James

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This article conducts a comparative analysis of books published by women and men on how to write fiction from 1900-1940. The analysis reveals three unique distinctions between men and women writers. First, when women talk about the effect of writers’ minds on the work they produce, they do so in internal and self-reflexive ways, while men tend to encourage writers to reflect on how exterior factors affect authors’ minds and writing processes. Second, in order to become better writers, women encourage writers to focus on themselves as the primary source of their writing, while male writers envision the exterior world …

The Extracurriculum Of Creative Writing, Nancy Reddy

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

So far, the scholarship in the emerging field of Creative Writing Studies has focused primarily on creative writing workshops in colleges and universities. This article argues that Creative Writing Studies should broaden its focus to also include what scholars call the extracurriculum –the writing that people do when it’s not required by school or work, which takes place across a range of community, nonprofit, private, and digital spaces. Qualitative and archival research in the extracurriculum can help us develop a longer and more complex history and a more inclusive pedagogy.

Utilizing Digital Literacy In The Creative Writing Classroom, Sam Meekings

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This paper will examine contemporary approaches to utilizing the pre-existing skills and knowledge of students in order to reconceptualize the process and reception of writing. Using social media platforms in the Creative Writing classroom presents a range of possibilities for experimenting with character, voice, structure, tone and world-building. This paper will share examples and exercises from a range of resources, and discuss ways of using the technical, formal, and cross-platform innovations of online applications to extend lessons beyond the classroom. Consideration will also be given to the problems inherent in using social media platforms for storytelling.

Toward An Erotics Of Reading: Three Hypotheses On Pleasure From Barthes's "The Pleasure Of The Text", C. Connor Syrewicz

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

In this paper, I argue that it would be pedagogically useful to investigate the psychological processes which lead readers to like and dislike texts, and I offer an initial set of hypotheses on the pleasures of reading which can be gleaned from Roland Barthes’s short monograph, The Pleasure of the Text. I begin by briefly addressing the origins of this research before I discuss the concept of writing “expertise” as it has been conceptualized by other fields of writing research. I argue that understanding those factors which lead different audiences to like or dislike texts as they read could …

Looking While Reading I, Ii, Iii, Sarah Minor

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This article introduces the term “visual essay” by tracing the genre’s history through the concrete poetry movement and the rise of the lyric essay. In describing the aims of visual essays, Minor distinguishes between “illustrative” and “non-illustrative” shaped texts, and suggests connections between “non-illustrative” examples and the aims of “Intersectional Form,” a term coined by scholar Jen Soriano.

How Creative Writers Can Work With Archivists: A Crash Course In Cooperation And Perspectives, Erin Renee Wahl, Pamela Pierce

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This article connects the creative writing discipline to archives, and talks about why and where these areas intersect. Topics covered include: common struggles of researchers coming into the archives, concepts necessary to understanding archives that creative writers may not yet know (for instance, how archives apply copyright, use fees, etc.), how to approach archives for help with workshops or classes, and how to approach archives for creative writing projects. The authors also surveyed a handful of writers with experience working with archives. The result is a portion of this article that compiles the best advice from these writers on using …

Whose Line Is It, Anyway?: Doing Harm In Disability Memoir, Teresa Milbrodt

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This paper examines disability memoirs, and the author's responsibility to their community versus their personal story. While telling stories of disability can be a means of sharing one's truth, authors may be wrongly interpreted as speaking for a diverse community of individuals, or they may do harm to other disabled people by devaluing an entire group. Some memoirsts have avoided this potential for harm by expanding their notions of disability and community to embrace intersectionality, but it is vital to read a wide variety of disability memoirs to gain this complex picture.

Cultivating Convergence Through Creative Nonfiction: Identity, Development, And The Metaphor Of Transfer, Wendy Ryden, Danielle Sposato

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

The authors explore the role of the creative nonfiction course in the development of a writerly self and propose a paradigm of developmental convergence to supplement composition studies’ metaphor of traditional transfer tied to outcomes-based education and assessment culture. The paper further considers the idea of CNF as method rather than genre and its ties to expressivism in composition studies and pedagogy.

Mainstreaming Creativity: Creative Writing Enters General Education’S Advanced Writing Requirement, John Paul Tassoni

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This essay describes twenty-first century general education reforms that create opportunities for creative writing studies proponents to negotiate a central role for the field in the core curriculum. This essay draws on existent research in creative writing pedagogy to make a case for “Introduction to Creative Writing” as part of the advanced writing requirements appearing now in liberal education plans. The essay also draws from scholarship and anecdotes describing new directions in general education at the author’s own school as well as colleges and universities nationwide to identify trends that can curtail or facilitate CW’s status as mainstream curricular business.

Statement Of Creative Practice: Creative Making And Vr Literature, Mez Breeze

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

Editor's Note
Mez Breeze authored her artist’s statement in virtual reality. You can view Mez’s artist’s statement even without a VR headset. Just click this link: https://bit.ly/2Kov372
You’ll need this password to access it: XR_PlayG

Abstract
Constructing creative writing in XR (aka Extended Reality: an umbrella term that covers Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality, and a fourth category called Synthetic Reality), and VR in particular, is an exciting and recent phenomenon in the Electronic Literature field. This proposed Statement of Creative Practice will examine the scope and reach of XR artforms while focusing in particular on the subset of …

Basho & Friends Literacy Game For Tablet, Joshua Korenblat

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

Basho & Friends is an in-progress prototype for an interactive children’s book. Here, children ages 8-13 collaborate with young Basho, the legendary founder of haiku poetry, to become poets themselves. This project exemplifies a “convivial tool,” defined by philosopher Ivan Illich as a platform designed to promote creative expression. Here, we imagine new possibilities for reading, sensemaking, and creative writing based on past forms and ideas. Through poetry, Basho promotes meaningful principles of literacy and sustainability today. Children can engage with Basho’s story in an historical context and practice haiku to see themselves as authors of their life stories.

Fanfiction As Performative Criticism: Harry Potter Racebending, Khaliah A. Petersen-Reed

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

Fanfiction anatomizes a text and in this textual nakedness fanfiction writers recognize gaps in their chosen source texts and seek to supplement these deficiencies through literary disruption. This essay focuses on the kind of fanfiction that critically disrupts through artistic cultural production—a practice that I am labeling performative criticism. I look at Racebending fanfiction that intervenes in the gaps of the Harry Potter series—specifically the gaps related to race. Using fanfiction produced by Harry Potter fans, I will show that by reading and writing fanfiction these writers are blurring demarcation between creative writing and literary criticism.

This Is (Not) A Game: The Adjunct Experience As Playable Fiction, Lee Skallerup Bessette

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

How can a never-ending running 8-bit game be a piece of protest art? In examining her own experience in a related netprov protesting the treatment of adjuncts, the artist explores issues of agency, exploitation, and the very nature of games and playing in her artist’s statement on her game, Adjunct Run: https://adjunctrun.readywriting.org/.

“The Machinic Author” Artist’S Statement: The Reading Club, Annie Abrahams, Emmanuel Guez

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

The Reading Club is an online venue for simultaneous, collaborative reading and writing, both of which occur within a precisely defined framework: «reariters» are invited to read a given text and to rewrite it within a set number of characters. The public also gets involved, reading and commenting in a chat field. Performances have been held in various languages (sometimes simultaneously), including the language of code.

Machine Co-Authorship(S) Via Translative Creative Writing, Aaron Tucker

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This paper argues that machine translation and a symbiotic ecosystem of authorship are central to the poetic works of Aaron Tucker and reveal larger ethical paths for machine-human relationships. In particular, the elements of chance alongside the intersemiotic translative acts that are the nature of human-computer relationships give space to a potential futurity that challenges a human-centric understanding of “reading” and “writing” and generates a type of literature that encourages a reader to better understand their own interactions within their daily digital environments.

The Many Authors Of The Several Houses Of Brian, Spencer, Liam, Victoria, Brayden, Vincent, And Alex: Authorship, Agency, And Appropriation, Zach Whalen

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

The Several Houses of Brian, Spencer, Liam, Victoria, Brayden, Vincent, and Alex is a computer-generated children’s book of 53,651 words and 350 unique illustrations arranged over 800 pages. The text is a cumulative poem in the style of the nursery rhyme “This is the House that Jack Built,” but with a house for each of the eponymous seven individuals, and with each of their houses containing many more types of things. These houses, these things, and these words were chosen by a Python script that I wrote, and the resulting novel--which can be viewed on my Github repository--is …

Atari, Creative Making & Zombie Computers: Robbo. Solucja., Piotr Marecki

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

In 1989, Janusz Pelc wrote the game Robbo on an 8-bit Atari, one of the first personal computers, which enjoyed a cult-like status in Poland before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Robbo, a small robot, collects screws and has to get through 56 planets. The game has achieved cult status, spawning hundreds of remixes and modifications. Beginning in the 1980s, fans (once mainly young boys, today adult men) played this game, collecting screws and running away from enemies such as bats, flying eyes, devils etc., while drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, eating crisps and telling jokes. One …

Digital Participatory Poetics And Civic Engagement In The Creative Writing Classroom, Liza D. Flum, Emily Oliver

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This article explores the ways a team-taught course, “Public Poetry in a Digital World,” supported community-building through participatory action and digital creative making. Using digital texts responding to current events, this course fostered students’ civic imagination and invited them to make connections among their own lives, their communities and poetic civic media. This class facilitated critical community engagement through digital pedagogy and final projects in which students performed public scholarship. Ultimately, this course serves as a case study of how teaching born-digital texts with digital tools can expand the capacity of the creative writing classroom.

Toward Disruptive Creation In Digital Literature Instruction, Michael D. Clark

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

Given the multimodal and collaborative nature of digital literature along with the ways it often embodies the theories informing its artistic production, approaches to exploring both the creation and study of the form must abandon legacy pedagogies in favor of disruptive, student-driven course experiences. This work must further include explorations of digital culture, means of production, multimodal literacies, and connections with various definitions of literature ranging from print to auditory to visual forms. To accomplish this, instructors must move from more traditional hierarchical roles to those of facilitator and participant, committing consistently to returning decision-making work to the students.

Creative Writing Across Mediums And Modes: A Pedagogical Model, Saul B. Lemerond Phd

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This is a creative practice (pedagogy) paper outlining the current formulation of my multimodal introduction to creative writing course. In this paper, I describe the course in detail, address the tensions, tradeoffs, and workarounds inherent in abandoning the traditional workshop model, describe instances of student engagement and success to illuminate this process, and endeavor to explain why high amounts of engagement and enthusiasm I get from my students concerning the content of my course is justified. My multimodal course is a generative course where my students are required to produce work in different creative modes on a near weekly basis. …

Introduction: What Is “Creative Making As Creative Writing”?, Kathi Berens

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This special issue of the Journal of Creative Writing Studies centers on how creative writing changes when writers actively engage computers as nonhuman collaborators in “creative making.” Using examples from McGurl’s The Program Era, Emily Dickinson, and the crowdsourced “translation” of Melville’s classic into Emoji Dick, Berens suggests that creative writing methods have long been procedural and technologic.

There are many forms of creative making. This special issue features creative writers that

• Write code to output novels
• Redefine how we think of writing’s “container”
• Demonstrate aspects of the digital-first, multimodal writing classroom
• Modify or remix existing artworks

Berens supplies three …

Serious Interactive Fiction: Constraints, Interfaces, And Creative Writing Pedagogy, Robert Terry, Lisa Dusenberry

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

To better understand how serious interactive fiction (IF) fits into creative writing pedagogy, we first consider how interface offers both affordances and constraints to the writer. Second, we discuss the ways teaching serious IF foregrounds the benefit of digital tools for creative writing. Third, we examine the interrelationship among research, interface, and procedural rhetoric. Fourth, we present findings from our research study by summarizing and discussing examples from roundtable feedback. We focus on students’ perception of serious IF’s affordances, concluding with how serious IF provides productive constraints for creative writing practice.

Before The First Draft: Cultivating Inspiration And Creative Insight In The Classroom, Brandi Reissenweber

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

Creative writing courses often overlook the work that takes place before any writing occurs. Indeed, this creative thinking is elusive and not entirely understood. Still, it is essential, and more time spent attending to it helps students navigate a broader base of the creative process. This essay details relevant findings from neuroscience to lay the groundwork for this approach, describes some of the techniques used in the classroom to shift focus to the early stages of the creative process, and shares preliminary findings from a research study regarding this approach.

More Than Skin-Deep: Reading Past Whiteness In Hemingway’S “Hills Like White Elephants”, Laura Valeri

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

The author argues a much neglected element in the seminal Hemingway's story "Hills Like White Elephant." Reading the story by taking into context a subtext of racial bias lends new interpretation to the story.

A Humanized View Of Second Language Learning Through Creative Writing: A Korean Graduate Student In The United States, Kyung Min Kim

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This case study traces the journey of a Korean graduate student’s English learning experience, drawing on autobiographical poetry, self-narrative, and interviews. Through a series of snapshot recollections, it illustrates the participant’s evolving subject position with English over the years from his childhood to graduate school. The article concludes that language learning is a transformative experience of constructing translingual identities which entails a wide spectrum of emotion, desire, and dedication: desire to understand the world; to be included in the world; to empower oneself as a user.

In The Group Home: Disenfranchised Youth And The Creative Writing Workshop As Intervention, Alyse Bensel

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

Nationwide, creative writing outreach programs serve marginalized groups in the community, empowering participants to regain a sense of control through non-verbal creative outlets. In striving to maintain the humanity and dignity of participants, pedagogies for underserved groups call for workshop facilitators to accompany rather than instruct. Using the group home adolescent population as an example, this article advocates for future alliances between the academy and the community to serve local at-risk populations. This collaboration will foster interdisciplinary cooperation and develop service learning coursework opportunities for positive social change.

“That’S My Boy”: Challenging The Myth Of Literary Mentorship As In Loco Patris, Neil Surkan, Robert Mcgill

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

Literary mentors have long been mythologized as serving in loco patris: i.e., in the place of their mentees’ fathers. Focusing on depictions of such mentorship in Tom Grimes’s Mentor (2010), the anthology A Manner of Being (2015), and Debra Weinstein's Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z. (2004), we observe that these depictions repeatedly cast mentorship as dyadic, hierarchical, and homosocial. We argue that such depictions rehearse patriarchal norms with respect to literature, gender, and parenthood while fostering fraught psychological dynamics. Consequently, we identify a need for greater self-reflexivity about mentoring relations and a greater focus on alternative forms that …

Transatlantic Détournement? An Institutional Perspective On François Bon’S Reception Of Kenneth Goldsmith’S Uncreative Writing, Gert-Jan Meyntjens

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This article investigates the ambivalent reception of Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing by the French author and writing workshop facilitator François Bon. Although admiring Goldsmith’s radical poetics, Bon hesitates when it comes to integrating digitally-driven uncreative writing methods in his own workshop. In one entry on his personal website, Bon proposes a détournement of Goldsmith’s experimental practices in the form of a return to the novel. To account for this ambivalence on the part of Bon, this article takes the contexts of American creative writing and the French atelier d’écriture into account. It argues that the novelty of Goldsmith’s project can …