Abstract

This book explores creative writing and its various relationships to education through a number of short, evocative chapters written by key players in the field. At times controversial, the book presents issues, ideas and pedagogic practices related to creative writing in and around education, with a focus on higher education. The volume aims to give the reader a sense of contemporary thinking and to provide some alternative points of view, offering examples of how those involved feel about the relationship between creative writing and education. Many of the contributors play notable roles in national and international organizations concerned with creative writing and education. The book also includes a Foreword by Philip Gross, who won the 2009 TS Eliot Prize for poetry.

In Creative Writing and Education leading scholars and teachers offer students and faculty illuminating new perspectives on creative writing in the university setting. The book bypasses old debates about whether creative writing can be taught to instead examine how creative writing is and might be undertaken and taught at a time where universities and the wider cultural industries experience rapid change.

Graeme Harper is a Professor of Creative Writing at Oakland University, Michigan, USA. He is Series Editor of New Writing Viewpoints, as well as Editor of New Writing: the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. Graeme was the inaugural chair of the Higher Education Committee at the UK's National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE). He is an award-winning fiction writer and a former Commonwealth Scholar in Creative Writing.

One of the main contributions of this book is in the comparison of different approaches to the pedagogy of creative writing and their application to a wide range of institutional contexts. In particular, the conversation updates research papers in creative writing pedagogy…I recommend this book to teachers of creative writing in High Schools, Teacher Training Colleges and Universities. I recommend it to writers who conduct workshops in Writers’ Centres. And I recommend it to students, especially PhD students interested in working out pedagogies of creative writing.

This is a tremendously stimulating and timely book. Global in scope yet sensitive to local conditions, this is a collection that will help recast the future of Creative Writing in Education at large. Teeming with expert dialogues and punctuated by synoptic commentaries, the volume is unusual in spanning school, college and university, and in exploring the relations between Creative Writing, research and teaching. I thought I had thought a lot about these things. It makes me think again – afresh.  

Creative Writing and Education recognises the complexities involved when imaginative activity is captured and framed by the educational establishment, and by prevailing ‘myths’ around such an awkward convergence. This book’s varied and provocative international insights broaden and deepen the possibilities for creativity in writing and teaching, fusing experience, method and inspiration.