Teaching creative writing the essential guide

Teaching
Creative Writing


Teaching
Creative Writing

The Essential Guide

Stephanie Vanderslice

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First published in Great Britain 2024

Copyright © Stephanie Vanderslice, 2024

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Names: Vanderslice, Stephanie, author.
Title: Teaching creative writing : the essential guide / Stephanie Vanderslice.

Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023030919 (print) | LCCN 2023030920 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781350276482 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350276499 (paperback) |

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Subjects: LCSH: Creative writing (Higher education)

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Your task is not to see the future, but to enable it.

—ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPERAY

To generations of writers and creative writing
teachers to come.


Contents

Preface  Stephanie Vanderslice  ix
Acknowledgments  xx

1 How We Got Here: The History of Creative Writing in
Higher Education 1

2 Research and the Teaching of Creative Writing: Why It
Matters 11

3 Reading and Writing: Helping Students Make the
Connection 27

4 Processes of Composing: Teaching and Modeling
Generative Processes 35

5 Creating an Inclusive Creative Writing Classroom 41
6 “Literary” Writing, “Genre” Writing: Teaching Beyond

the False Dichotomy 57
7 The Creative Writing Workshop 63
8 Revision, Responding, Assessing 73
9 Digital Creative Writing 85
10 Special Issues in Creative Writing: Trauma-Informed

Teaching, Mental Health, Disability-Informed
Pedagogy 91
11 Teaching Creative Writing in General Education and
Across the Curriculum 107

viii Contents

12 Literary Citizenship and Professional Issues 113
13 The Sustainable College Teaching-Writing Career 119

Appendix A: Further Resources 129
Appendix B: Your Teaching Statement 133
Appendix C: Your Syllabus 141
Bibliography 156
Note on Contributors 161
Suggestions for Teaching This Book 163
Index 168

Preface

Stephanie Vanderslice

Creative writing has been taught in higher education for over
a century; however, only in the last few decades has it been
accepted as a teachable subject. Indeed, there are still some holdovers
from the “Old School” Creative Writing establishment who cling to
the belief that creative writing cannot be taught, that community is all
a creative writing classroom can provide, that all they can do is wave a
magic “guiding” wand over their classes or send their students home
to slide Proust under their pillows. Fortunately, that establishment is
on their way out.

Moving right along. If creative writing is a teachable subject, it is
worth our time and reflection as creative writing instructors to study
and think about how to teach it well. I have designed this book to help
you in that goal, to give you a starting point for thinking about what it
means to teach creative writing effectively, a starting point that I hope
will inspire you to keep learning about it for the rest of your career.

x Preface

Early Teaching Guides

In 1990, Wendy Bishop, a leading figure of the creative writing studies
movement, published Released Into Language, a slim but powerful
guide to teaching creative writing that continues to inform the field.
In 2002, when I taught the first Teaching Creative Writing course on
my campus, Released into Language was already out of print but I was
able to purchase twenty copies from Bishop’s own stock for my future
classes. Now it is available in full on the ERIC clearinghouse website
and worth a look to get a sense of Bishop’s influential method of fully
interrogating a subject as well as to understand how much the field
has changed since then.

In 2007, after we published the first edition of our edited collection
Can It Really Be Taught? Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy,
Kelly Ritter and I decided our next step should be to write a quick,
accessible guide to actually teaching the subject. This book, Teaching
Creative Writing, was eventually published by Fountainhead Press
and once name-checked by Roxane Gay as the best guide in the field.
Whenever I remember that little factoid, I always feel a little giddy,
but then I also remember that it was the only guide in the field. It
was a fine basic guide but also slim, slimmer even than Released into
Language, and every time I teach with it, I am reminded how much
more content is needed in order to truly capture creative writing as a
teaching subject as we peer out from the dawn of the third decade of
the twenty-first century. Much, much more. Truth be told, Dr. Ritter
and I put that guide together rapidly, to fill a need. It was more of
a placeholder than anything else, for a larger, more comprehensive

work. It was a good start.

Comprehensive work takes time, of course, and a certain amount
of desk and calendar clearing before you can begin it. Creative writing
pedagogy also isn’t the only kind of writing I do—I also write fiction

Prefa ce xi

and nonfiction—and like most of my colleagues, I’m always juggling
a number of projects. But as I taught year after year with that same
slim guide and the field of creative writing itself exploded (more
about that in the next chapter), it began to feel more urgent to clear
that space and time in my writing life, to try and make sense of this
ever-expanding field for those just starting out in it.

The Reflective Creative Writing Teacher

When I started out in creative writing pedagogy, the field was relatively
small, small enough that I could figuratively get my arms all the way
around it and stay current on what had been written on the subject,
at least in the United States. Fortunately, the field quickly grew out of
my embrace and continues to expand, almost exponentially, around
the globe. Nonetheless, this kind of growth can be intimidating, and
can, as it continues apace, result in teachers throwing up their hands
and doubling down on the practices they’re comfortable with instead
of exploring new ones.

I’m asking you not to do this, not to give up in the face of new
research and scholarship, when it’s tempting to say, “what I’ve been
doing works pretty well; I don’t need to think about anything else.”

I’m not saying you need to abandon what’s working in your teaching;
but I do think it’s important to stay abreast of the theories and
practices of teaching your subject, bearing in mind what you can use
to build upon and tweak what’s working for you. I’ve been teaching
creative writing for thirty years—experience I bring to this book—
and I am continually, though pleasantly, daunted by the growth of
the field. But I try to keep up because I care so much about it, about
giving my students the best learning experience I can. I know I can’t
read every single book, every single journal about the creative writing
classroom, but I can certainly read the ones I’m most interested in, or

xii Preface

the ones I think are the most important right now. Fortunately, most
teachers have varying teaching interests, so if we each stay abreast of
our own, I think we can keep developments covered.

Another way of looking at staying up to date on an exponentially
growing field is to look at it the way bibliophiles look at reading. I’m
going to assume that if you’re a writer, you’re also a passionate reader.
At a certain point in every passionate reader’s life, we realize that we
are never going to be able to read all the books we want to read in our
lifetimes. If you’re like me, once you have this realization, it taunts you
on a regular basis. But it doesn’t mean we give up reading. It means
we keep going forward; we keep doing the best we can.

What’s most important, then, about teaching, is also the most
important thing about anything we care about, that we approach it
with a growth mindset: that is, as something we will be learning about
for the rest of our lives. I ask you, then, to be open to new theories and

practices today and ten and twenty years from now, to continually
revisit your courses and to consider, especially, what you can learn
from other instructors and from your students themselves. One of the
things that makes teaching an exciting field is that it is never static;
in fact, it is a living, breathing entity, one we can become a part of by
pledging to remain reflective and open to change. Not change for the
sake of change’s sake but change that makes sense to our teaching
philosophies and our classrooms. The best part: I promise that if
you accept this approach, if you use this book to become a reflective
creative writing teacher, you’ll never be bored and you’ll know that
you’re doing your best work for generations of writers and, in fact, for
the future of literary culture.

I’ve planned this text to serve as the foundation for a course in
teaching creative writing. But I’m also hoping you will keep it and
dip in and out of it over the years, to refamiliarize yourself with the
many topics related to this subject and to give yourself a springboard

Prefa ce xiii

for further reading and reflection. At least until the revised edition
comes out.

With that in mind, here’s what to expect from the rest of this book.

Chapter 1: How We Got Here: The History of
Creative Writing in Higher Education

From the first classes taught in Verse-making at the universities of
Iowa and Harvard in the late 1890s to the current explosion of the

field, I happen to think the journey creative writing took to establish
itself in higher education, with all its twists and turns, is pretty
interesting. I think you will, too, especially if you ever wonder how
American writing culture came to be what it is. This chapter will give
you some idea, as well as factoids to regale people with at cocktail
parties. After all, where else do the G.I. Bill, communism, and the
Open Admissions movement waltz together through history?

Chapter 2: Research and the Teaching of
Creative Writing: Why It Matters

Chapter 2 will examine the reasons why the knowledge and the
practice of research in creative writing are important for teaching
it, with specific emphasis on how research into the development of
the creative writer might influence the classroom. It will also discuss
the phenomenon of lore (knowledge shared by word of mouth) and
teaching creative writing as well as how teachers can use research to
support their own practices.

Because it is related to research, this chapter will also explore and
debunk a number of myths that swirl around the practice of writing
in our culture, myths like, “great writers are born, not made” or “great

xiv Preface

writers never need to revise,” that can seriously limit your students’
development as writers. From there, it will suggest how and why the
first step of teaching creative writing is often freeing students from
these untested myths that actually inhibit their writing development
because they’re not based in fact.

Chapter 3: Reading and Creative Writing:
Helping Students Make the Connection

We all know how critical reading is to a writer’s development. The
trick is communicating that to our students. In our increasingly
visual society, moreover, nascent writers often come to us with
wildly different reading backgrounds. Many are relatively well read;
however, some may not understand the importance of reading at all.
This chapter will consider the role of reading in the development
of writers and will also suggest ways teachers can cultivate readerly
writers and help students understand where reading fits in their
twenty-first-century digital lives.

Chapter 4: Processes of Composing:
Teaching and Modeling Generative

Processes

Beginning and experienced writers alike often find it challenging
to face the blank page; experienced writers have usually developed
ways of composing that get them out of this situation. This chapter
will look at how and why to teach the many processes writers use
to generate material, including how to teach students who may be
resistant to generative practices at all.

Prefa ce xv

Chapter 5: Creating an Inclusive Creative
Writing Classroom

In order to ensure that the literary world reflects the world we live in, in
all its diversity, and because teachers of creative writing create the next
generation of writers, editors, publishers, and teachers, we must ensure
that the creative writing classroom is an inclusive space for all students.
How do teachers create that space? This chapter will describe the basic
assumptions and practices that support an inclusive creative writing
classroom and, by extension, an inclusive creative writing program.

Chapter 6: “Literary” Writing, “Genre”
Writing: Teaching Beyond the False
Dichotomy

Fiction writing has long divided itself between “literary” writing and
“genre” writing. In recent years, however, the lines between these two
types of writing have increasingly blurred. Students, moreover, come to
us with interests in both, but often with more of a background in genre
fiction. How do we teach in ways that honor both forms of storytelling
and in ways that can encourage students to explore the porosity of the
boundaries between them to make new art that transcends them both?

Chapter 7: The Creative Writing Workshop

Anna Leahy has defined “the workshop” as the signature pedagogy
of creative writing. What does that mean and how can we look at the
ways the workshop has evolved to think about how best to structure
the workshop for our students? This chapter will also suggest new

xvi Preface

forms of workshopping and consider when and how much the
workshop should feature in an undergraduate creative writing class.

Chapter 8: Revision, Responding, Assessing

Even though most writers agree that revision is a critical part of writing,
teaching students why and how to revise can be challenging. This
chapter will describe various ways to teach students the uses of revision
and its importance in the writer’s practice. In addition, it will also look
at the ways in which creative writing teachers can respond to student
writing in ways that foster revision without inadvertently creating for
themselves an untenable paper load. Finally, it will consider the best
ways to assess student creative writing that will also drive learning.

Chapter 9: Digital Creative Writing

Teaching students to work multimodally and to compose in ways that
take the digital landscape into account is essential in the twenty-first
century. How do we adapt creative writing classrooms to give students
experience in these kinds of writing? This chapter will also feature
remarks from novelist and screenwriter Dr. M. Shelly Conner, who
centers multimodal/digital composing in her creative writing classroom.

Chapter 10: Special Issues in the Creative
Writing: Trauma-Informed Teaching, Mental

Health, Disability-Informed Pedagogy

The education landscape is complicated these days and creative
writing is no different. In fact, because creative writing teachers are

Prefa ce xvii

often aware of personal issues students share in their work, such as
trauma, mental health, and disability, it is incumbent upon us to
recognize and address these challenges in our courses. This chapter
will talk about how we can address these challenges in ways that
support and foster our students’ development as people and writers.
It will feature suggestions by Dr. Jennie Case, who has studied and
written about trauma-informed teaching.

Chapter 11: Teaching Creative Writing
in General Education and Across the

Curriculum

Introductory creative writing courses are increasingly becoming
a part of general education and are used to teach other subjects
across the curriculum. What does this mean for how we teach these
subjects? How do we teach both serious beginning writers and
students who may be encountering creative writing for the first time
to fulfill a distribution requirement? How can we use creative writing
to help students learn other subjects more intimately? Finally, how do
we capitalize on the opportunities both of these situations present to
reintroduce the idea that everyone should have access to creativity in
a society that devalues it?

Chapter 12: Literary Citizenship and
Professional Issues

Lori May, author of The Write Crowd: Literary Citizenship and
The Writing Life, defines Literary Citizenship as, “engaging in the
[literary] community with the intent of giving as much, if not more

xviii Preface

so, than we take.” How do we teach students to find ways to engage
in this community? Moreover, how do we build literary communities
on our own campuses as creative writing program administrators,
through literary magazines, reading series, and other programs.
This chapter will suggest a range of ways to introduce students to the
literary community.

Chapter 13: The Sustainable College
Teaching-Writing Career

If you’ve read this far, you might be feeling a little overwhelmed. You
might be wondering if a life teaching creative writing at the college
level is even possible without burning out. It’s certainly a full life and
one that attempts to merge two careers—that of a writer and a writing
teacher. This chapter will look at how the creative writing teacher can
manage those careers productively to avoid burnout.

Special Features of This Book

But wait, there’s more. This book will also feature two appendixes
designed to provide sample creative writing syllabi and sample
teaching philosophies as well as an appendix with lists of further
resources. Finally, each chapter will end with a summary of takeaways
as well as a series of questions for you to reflect upon as you consider

the kinds of teaching you experienced related to that chapter’s content
and the kind of teacher you want to be.

Understand, however, that this is just the beginning. Throughout
this book I endorse kindness as a teaching philosophy. It’s also a
philosophy I recommend you train on yourself. Becoming the

Prefa ce xix

teacher you want to be is a lifelong process. With this book, you
already have more of a head start than your teachers did, most of
whom had to learn on the job. Stay humble, keep learning, and be
patient—with yourself as much as with your students—and you’re
off to a good start.