Creative Writing Innovations

Essential reading for undergraduate and graduate-level creative writers who teach ... [It] advance[s] the rigor of creative writing as an academic discipline with deep ties to the sister world of composition and rhetoric while nudging teacher-writers toward innovative, process-oriented pedagogies and heuristics. - Journal of Teaching Writing

"Clark (Azusa Pacific Univ.), Hergenrader (Rochester Institute of Technology), and Rein (Univ. of Wisconsin, River Falls) have produced a compelling follow-up to their edited collection Creative Writing in the Digital Age (2015). This new offering assembles 16 essays with the shared goal of rethinking and restructuring university-level creative writing curricula. The essays are organized in four sections--'Rethinking the Workshop, ' 'Expanding Genre, ' 'Creative Collaborations, ' and 'Identity and the Creative Writing Classroom'--and many of the contributors express dissatisfaction with the hallmark of creative writing instruction in the US: the creative writing workshop. For example, in his manifesto 'The Unworkshop, ' Graeme Harper radically revises the workshop method by prioritizing intellectual curiosity and student autonomy above expectations for traditional academic coursework. By contrast, Derek Harriell proposes a sequenced graduate writing workshop that improves rather than dismantles the traditional workshop. Another remarkable essay, Ching-In Chen's 'Gender Identity and the Creative Writing Classroom, ' articulates an approach to creative writing pedagogy that values and affirms the work of genderqueer and nonbinary writers. Taken together, the essays in this collection expand the emergent field of creative writing studies and provide thoughtful, replicable strategies for guiding and supporting student writers. Summing Up: Highly recommended." -CHOICE