Comp vs Creative Writing Students
To what degree is the laissez faire of creative writing enabled by the fact that most of our students want to be there?
Student Feedback: Encouragement and Professionalism – a Binary?
Greco S. writes about his experiences taking Intro to Fiction and Poetry (both I and II) at Johns Hopkins. I commented on his post a couple years ago as a teacher, but I never really commented on my own experiences as a student. Looking back at my experiences at Case Western, I wonder if the positive…
Craft, Critical, and Social – The Workshop
Quoting Harold Singerman, Amato and Fleisher strongly critique pedagogical approaches that position creative writing as (mere) craft, particularly in the MFA workshop, where the focus on language and style can lead to a dangerous degree of homogeneity.
Positivist Expressivism?
When I envisioned my teaching internship (Fall 2013 ENG 247.02), I was thinking that I would help students learn to better use (and appreciate) social media as a tool for reaching readers. Yes, I did want them to engage in genuine interactions with potential audiences beyond the classroom, but I was still looking at social…
MFA vs Ph.D. – Learning Diversity
In my MFA program, the fiction workshops included one classmate from Pakistan and one who was Asian-American. They did bring in helpful cross-cultural perspectives – especially the descriptions of the rain and urban relationships in Pakistan, which I will never forget. In my own writing, though, I think I’ve gained more perspective on diversity from…
The classroom and the mysteries of art
Amato and Fleisher ask “Is the creative writing classroom a place simply for fortifying the mysteries of creativity, or can something more concrete, more palpable, more critical, more urgent therein be attended to?” (“Prelude,” authors’ emphasis). They go on to write that “current compartmentalizations of English Studies…can only produce narrowly self-identified writers, writers likely to acknowledge…
