Dispatches from the Classroom: Graduate Students on Creative Writing Pedagogy

by Chris Drew, Joseph Rein, David Yost

Overview

With emphasis on practical classroom application, this up-to-date and refreshingly honest collection of essays is a wonderful resource for teaching creative writing. The original and utterly contemporary essays that accurately portray the reality of the teaching experience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781441156808
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	12/08/2011
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Chris Drew is an Associate Professor of English at Indiana State University, USA, where he supervises the English Teaching program and teaches creative writing and teaching methods courses. He previously taught ELA and theatre at Heritage Hills Middle School and Mater Dei High School, both in Indiana. His work has appeared in publications that include English Leadership Quarterly, The Journal of Creative Writing Studies, Minnesota English Journal, Wisconsin English Journal, Mad River Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and Quarterly West. He is a co-editor of Dispatches from the Classroom: Graduate Students on Creative Writing Pedagogy (Bloomsbury).

Joseph Rein is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls, USA. He is the editor of Dispatches from the Classroom and his fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in such publications as The Pinch Literary Magazine, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Ruminate Magazine. He is also an award-winning short-film screenwriter.

A former Peace Corps Volunteer, David Yost recently returned from his second trip to Thailand working with Burmese refugees to pursue a PhD in fiction writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His fiction has previously appeared in more than twenty journals, including The Southern Review, The Sun, Pleiades, Witness, and Asia Literary Review, while his critical articles have appeared in MELUS, Studies in American Indian Literatures, and War, Literature, and the Arts.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I- Laying the Ground Rules
Workshop, Revision, and Grading in the Creative Writing Syllabus

Preventing Tears in Workshop:
Teaching Students How to Give and Receive Criticism
Kristen Gottstein, Georgia State University

Eradicating Reviser's Block:
Bringing Revision to the Foreground
Ashley Cowger, University of Alaska Fairbanks

Confronting the Unavoidable:
Grading Creative Writing
Ashley Wurzbacher, Eastern Washington University

Part II - What Is "Appropriate" for the Workshop?
Censorship, Trauma, and Memory in the Creative Writing Classroom
Invoking the Muzzle:
Censorship and the Creative Writing Workshop
M. Thomas Gammarino, The University of Hawaii

Dear Diary:
Violence, Confession, and (Creative) Writing Pedagogies
Laura Madeline Wiseman, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

What Time Was I Supposed to Remember That?:
Memory, Constraint, and Creative Writing Pedagogy
Michael Dean Clark, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Part III - Teaching "Technique"
Craft Elements and Exercises

Exercises in Authority:
Teaching Fiction and Poetry in the Undergraduate Classroom
Jeremy Lakaszcyck, University of Massachusetts

Write What You Don't Know:
Teaching Creative Research
Joseph Rein, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Making the Parts of the Workshop Come Together:
A Practical Example
Yelizaveta P. Renfro, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Avoiding Meaning:
A Classroom Exercise to Improve Students' Homophonic Sensibilities
David Bartone, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Unleashing the Nemesis of Genre Fiction
Karen Gentry, Georgia State University

Specificity of Dialogue:
A Coke is a Soda is a Pop is a Cola
Liane LeMaster, Georgia State University

So Much For That Happy Ending:
Rendering Complex Emotion in Fiction
Anthony J. Sams, University of North Carolina Wilmington


Part IV | The Hybrid TA
Literary Theory, Writing Centers, and the New Creative Writer

Something to Push Up Against:
Using Theory as Creative Pedagogy
Kimberly Quiogue Andrews and John Belk, Pennsylvania State University

Adapting Writing Center Pedagogy for the Undergraduate Creative Writing Workshop
Janelle Adsit, Colorado State University

Composing Creatively:
Further Crossing Composition/Creative Writing Boundaries
David Yost and Chris Drew, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee