Showing papers in "New Writing in 2010"

Teaching Creative Writing to University Level Second Language Learners in Pakistan

Abstract: As a subject offered at the university level, ‘Creative Writing’ does not elicit a very enthusiastic response from the Pakistani students, unlike their counterparts in Western schools. Primarily apprehensive because of weak language, the students feel pressurised at the very onset. This is owing to the 12-year school and college education that is characterised by rote-learning and a text-book centred approach in all disciplines. Creative Writing, on the other hand demands a more independent approach on behalf of the students. The teacher thus faces an uphill task since his/her job becomes manifold, i.e. a teacher has to help the students in the areas of vocabulary development, minimising first language interference, in developing a practical approach to grammar that assists in sentence construction as well as an innovative, liberated, out of the box way of thinking and expression and in retaining the interest of the students. This article endeavours to explore these hurdles and suggest writing ac...

Creative writing as a communicative act - an artistic method

Abstract: In my research project, I have interviewed students and teachers on a two-year university study programme in creative writing about how they perceive their own work and their own roles as authors. With Habermas' theory of communicative action as my starting point, I have devised a theoretical model to explore the act of creative writing. This article discusses writers' work procedures in a communicative network of institutional and everyday practices, in the light of established notions of literature and authors. In my informants' references to their own writing, the metaphor of ‘space’ – specifically, how an ‘inner’ creative space interacts with an ‘outer’ public one – is crucial. This metaphor applies to several levels of communicative action: individual, institutional, public and textual. Owing to its limited length, this article comments solely on the individual and institutional levels.

Cohort-based supervision of postgraduate creative writers: the effectiveness of the university-based writers' workshop

Abstract: The paper examines the benefits and efficacies of cohort-based supervision of creative writers through the case study analysis of two creative writing cohorts established at the Queensland University of Technology. Surveys of and interviews with participants suggest in completion times and in the quality of work improvements arise principally through the mechanism of positive peer interaction and monitoring. There are three implications flowing from the study: i) cohort-based supervision is practical; ii) that the creative writing workshop is a long established and now refined mode of cohort-based supervision; and iii) that cohort-based candidature suggests authorship is a more collaborative task than is usually conceived.

Some Remarks about Semi-Automatic Writing: Between Constraints and Possibilities in a Writing Workshop

Abstract: This article illuminates a number of issues related to semi-automatic writing, and it is based on my long experience conducting writing workshops. Despite its complexities, this activity is generally thought to be spontaneous, primary and unplanned. In this article, semi-automatic writing emerges as a form of intensive writing practice that could stimulate discussion of both theoretical and practical issues related to textual communication. One of the results of this writing experience is that it leads to the de-automatisation of accepted reading and writing habits. Instead of totally freeing the written expression from cultural bonds (as it could be supposed to do), it presents it for examination, thus allowing discussion of what we take for granted regarding text and its shaping. The writing workshop encounter is presented here as a case study.

Creative Habitats and the Creative Domain

Abstract: It feels timely here in New Writing 7.1 to introduce two terms, terms that I felt the need to coin some time ago, but have just begun to truthfully explore. These two terms come from a personal need to explain something to myself, and to others. Thus this personal introduction; experiential evaluation is, after all, frequently the starting point for the creation of new knowledge. These two terms are: ‘The Creative Habitat’ and ‘The Creative Domain’. The first term emerged after the editing of a book with a colleague, Professor Ceri Sullivan. The book is entitled Authors at Work: the Creative Environment (2009), and it is the ‘English Association’s 2009 Annual Monograph’. Ceri’s based in a School of English. I’m based in a School of Creative Studies. Working on the book was fabulous, and the good Professor Sullivan was truly great to work with, a real star. But something remained for me, after the activities of editing, so that even when the book emerged I was beginning to think that I had quite a deal more to say. Indeed more to say, but not about creative ‘environments’; rather, more to say about something similar but distinctively and determinedly nuanced. Perhaps it is partly that the word environment (like the word creative, unfortunately) has been adopted, commissioned, captured even, as a widely used political tool; that it carries with it now baggage filled with so much public rhetorical urgency that its personal meaning quickly slides away and what can be left (though not in the book, thanks to the openness of my colleague) is little more than a skeletal vision in natural environmental terms, much like a forest that has been ravaged by a bush fire. It’s not that the word environment has become unimportant as a measure or guide, in that manner of all established linguistic signification. Far from it: its importance is unequivocal. But perhaps it is a word that has effectively become unhooked from its original meaning. It no longer embraces individual connection unless tinged with a form of public advertisement, and its ability to encompass so many applications, determinations, positions and declarations makes it more of an umbrella term than a specific reference point. The environment, then, is indeed all around us (in so many contemporary senses), but in being all around us linguistically it has become generic, merely there,

Bottling the Imagination: Writing as Metamorphosis in Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy

Abstract: This article discusses ideas about creativity in the context of a recent work by Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy. It follows Pope in theorising a view of creativity that sees it as re-creation and demonstrates the extent to which the context in which Smith's novel is produced, as well as the acknowledged sources underlying it, helps to shape it as text. In examining the relationship between Smith's source texts and the target text she produces, it seeks to point to her creative capacity in re-imagining and re-working an ancient myth in a contemporary context. It focuses, in particular, on her embedded critique of the debasement and commercial packaging of language in marketing and advertising contexts and of a worldview that would see everything, including the imagination, as a commodity capable of being bottled and sold.

Heidegger, Creativity, and what Poets do: On Living in a Silent Shack for Three Months and not Going Mad

Abstract: This article reflects on a three-month solitary writing retreat, and contains a poetics based on Heidegger's essay, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. I investigate Heidegger's distinction between the world's framing essence, poetic dichtung, and the manifestation of dichtung in poetic language, what the philosopher names poesie. I arrive at a range of insights through reflecting on my season in an isolated shack, deep in the Australian Alps; Heidegger's essay helps clarify some of the creative processes at work while there. This cross-disciplinary article identifies how creativity and theories of creativity can connect and interrelate, and explores how theories like Heidegger's can benefit creative thinkers and writers.

Rhetoric's Stepchildren: Ancient Rhetoric and Modern Creative Writing

Abstract: This article attempts to connect modern issues in creative writing pedagogy with the ancient theories of rhetoric. Specifically, I engage the ideas of tribe (natural ability), techne (art or craft), and empeiria (learning by doing) in relation to creative writing theory. The modern concerns with writers, and the positioning in the classroom of teachers who either look for the class ‘star’ with natural ability, or those who attempt to teach all of the students with a fundamental belief that writing is a craft that can be taught to everyone with practice. These views are not that uncommon in the texts of ancient rhetoric. In teaching oratory in the Greek city-states, and in the Roman Empire, the great teachers of the day – Aristotle, Isocrates, and even Quintilian wrestled with the problematic views of natural ability in the orator. These issues have plagued teachers for the past two thousand years. Drawing on both classical rhetorical theory, and modern creative writing pedagogy, my essay addresse...

The poet in the art gallery : accounting for ekphrasis

Abstract: This paper reports on the experience of composing a book of poems about visual art and on the ways in which this was affected by the institutional circumstances pertaining to its funding. Underpinning the AHRC's support for creative writing is the notion that creative writing should be conceived as a form of practice-led research. The case for support therefore stressed the ways in which the modes of writing about art would also form a subject for creative practice and critical reflection and the author offered both a critical preface and a critical article in this context. A project which involves ekphrasis, however, brings the relationship between the creative and critical components of the creative act into the sharpest possible focus and the author found himself engaged on a project which had the Academy's understanding of creative writing at its heart. This paper examines how the reading of an unusual critical text – itself a hybrid of critical prose and poetry – impacted the intellectual te...

Among Barbarians. Ovid, The Classics and The Creative Writer

Abstract: Despite still being viewed as a non-legitimate subject, Creative Writing has injected life into areas once considered essential to an education, but now under threat in many universities. At degree level it has created an opportunity to re-engage with the classics by its insistence on its own history, while its non-traditional methodologies provide a different way for students to engage with early texts. Ovid's Metamorphoses lends itself to Creative Writing development. Such students, who are used to engaging with a subject practically, will have been equipped with the tools necessary to work with this. Their creative mindset allows the main work of reinterpretation necessary for the study of such early stories. The study for clues which point towards earlier methods (repetition, formal patterns, framework structures) which occur in such primary literature allows students to realise the evolution of a story, and understand that this is never a static process, but one of continuous engagement whic...

Who Wants To Be a Nerd? Or How Cognitive Science Changed My Teaching

Abstract: When I began teaching, I assumed that my creative writing students had similar childhood and educational experiences to my own. Their lack of experiences with poetry and their varied subject majors in college led me to look at cognitive science to better understand how creativity develops and, by extension, how I could teach my students, especially those who would take just one introductory creative writing course. This essay shares what I have discovered about talent, inspiration, community, and revision. In the end, one of the primary goals of a creative writing course must be to encourage habits of mind, particularly curiosity, that lead to creativity.

Writing on Water, Murmur of Words

Abstract: Our project was initiated by a simple, straightforward desire: to write on water, to put a poem on a pond. In this essay, I will discuss the subsequent ‘writing on water’ projects undertaken in conjunction with university classes offered on visual and concrete poetry, its history and application. Here, the students and I were together presented with the challenge of imagining (and manifesting) alternative forms of text, alternative means and methods (other than upon paper or computer screen) of inscribing language onto the environment. The poetic and pedagogical repercussions from these projects proved quite illuminating, as language itself was materially and conceptually re-enlivened, re-imagined as liquid resonance, as floating form.

Stress Weight: Unwilled Order, Clothes Lines & Crowned Teeth

Abstract: There are many ways of describing rhythm in poetry, all of them to some extent artificial and none of them giving the absolutely true picture of what is happening. What follows is another such; it is one poet's way of hearing how language interacts in the tradition and the dialect out of which that poet works. At best, it describes a different way of hearing the rhythm; at worst it is the nearest this poet can get to describing how he hears language interact. In the paper that follows I intend to present and explain the interaction of words across the poetic line in a number of examples chosen from the work of poets with a Hiberno-English or Irish Language background and attempt to find reasons for those interactions in terms of their linguistic heritage. The paper will discuss how the line functions within this system as both the basic musical unit and the base unit of sense in a poem, exploring how tensions between the two can be exploited. Starting from two basic premises: that poetry is an au...

Several Faces of Creative Writing

Abstract: In October 1992 Burton Weiss, a dealer in manuscripts and rare books, was alerted by a friend to a potentially significant archive, purportedly a collection of undiscovered writings by the novelist...

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator: Rewriting Arise Evans

Abstract: The theme of the reliability or unreliability of narrative is important in both early modern and postmodern texts. The Welsh prophet and Royalist propagandist Arise Evans (1607 -?) is a prototypical unreliable narrator: his autobiographical writings contain many unbelievable events, including miracles and visions. Evans seeks to establish the reliability of his account by personal revelation and experience, by appeal to scriptural authority and by magical lore. Nevertheless, much of its attraction to a contemporary reader lies in the fragility of its narrative authority and the comic and imaginative possibilities this opens. This unconscious feature of the text can be compared to the deliberate narrative strategies of postmodern novels, such as Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire. I am using Evans's story as the basis of a novel-in-progress, The Book of the Needle, employing him as an unreliable narrator like Nabokov's Charles Kinbote. Drawing on both postmodern and earlier metafiction, I am creating a ...