38 minute read
A selection of book reviews
REVIEWS
Moore, M. and Meekings, S. (eds) The Place and the Writer: International Intersections of Teacher Lore and Creative Writing Pedagogy, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, ISBN 9781350127159, hardback, £85.00
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In the English-speaking world, and indeed in institutions in English-speaking countries, the availability of creative writing courses is extensive. The Place and the Writer offers a global perspective on creative writing pedagogy, something that is still in its infancy in many countries. One of the book’s strengths is its focus on different viewpoints from myriad places—and the pairing of theory with practice makes this a valuable addition to a bookshelf belonging to anyone working in the field.
Each section has a different approach, from local literature influences on creative writing in Greece, through to the issues of teaching creative writing through a threatened language—in this case, Icelandic. Not only are the plethora of approaches extremely thought-provoking but those connected to creative writing can learn from such variable practices. Without a doubt, this is a healthy and proactive way of developing skills.
In ‘Workshopping to Better Writing and Understanding’, Fan Dai and Ling Li—of Sun Yat-sen University in China— discuss the relative nascency of creative writing courses there with comparisons made to Iowa, in the mid-twentieth century, where such courses have their origins. Dai and Linh comment that their practice is ‘holistic’—and students are taught through ‘reading as a writer… crafting from previous students’ work.’ Clearly, there are complexities with writing in one’s native language alongside a second language. ‘Cultural elements’ paly a large part here—and connected points are discussed in the second section, about language use in a South African creative writing seminar. Holly Thompson, in ‘Creative Portfolios’, explains the nature of EFL creative writing courses in Japan, and the links these have to the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs).
Many of the sections explore interesting concepts in sufficient detail, with signposts and references to further research. Maria Taylor, of De Montfort University, writes about reflective writing, and offers suggestions about how this can be implemented throughout the academic year. Hanna Sieja-Skrzypulec explores ‘lore and pedagogy’ in Poland’s creative writing courses. In ‘Playing Catch-Up’, Bernardo Bueno explains the situation in Brazil, in particular ‘finding a voice’, in institutions where creative writing is still relatively new.
The global approach throughout this book highlights how creative writing courses are not unique to the behemoths of American and British institutions. However, in ‘An American Walks into a Bar (with her British Creative Writing Students)’, University of Gloucestershire lecturer Lania Knight write about the differences between US and UK undergraduates, and how she approaches teaching (as an American). One of her main points is about encouraging group ownership—and Knight takes her students to a British pub in order to do this, something that she would not do in the US, which opens up interesting notions about cultural differences in developed countries—an issue much larger than restricting it solely to creative writing.
The Place and the Writer is useful, practical and academic in its approach, as a guide for writers and those working in education, as well as those who want to learn about there is significant variation in approaches. Even though some sections, such as ‘Creative Portfolios’, include some examples of creative output, it would be helpful to have more evidence like this in other sections. However, as Jen Webb comments on the back cover, ‘… contributors…
Review by Matthew Tett.
Matthew is a freelance educator and writer living and working in Wiltshire. He is Writing in Education’s reviews editor and he coordinates Corsham’s StoryTown festival.
Monica Suswin, Shifting Boundaries: Creative Therapeutic Writing on Family Life and Friendship, Cabin Press, 2020, ISBN 9780995688223, paperback, £14.00
As Monica Suswin points out in her timely book, the past year has given us all an object lesson in boundaries. “Emotions are spilling over psychological boundaries into panic and anxiety,” she writes. “Never in my life have I gone out into the street with my smile hidden behind a barrier.”
Human relationships make us who we are; yet they are fraught with misunderstanding and difficulty. Suswin aims to show how creative and therapeutic writing “can help us achieve a fluidity in how we approach others”. The title reflects a similar fluidity: how boundaries change, over time and under different pressures; and the work we ourselves can do to move them.
The book is arranged in four main sections: looking at dreams; physical and non-physical boundaries; relationships and emotional truths; and writing fiction from a real-life event.
In the first section, Suswin explains how to investigate the rich and fertile territory of a dream. She describes how a difficult relationship with her parents was made concrete, and resolved, through the imagery of a dream house, where boundaries (lacking in the past) could be clearly observed. When transcribing a dream, she is alert to words which can spark a new piece of writing: in this case, a crossroad became a “cross road”, reflecting the anger and disappointment on both sides of the relationship.
The section on boundaries examines those that are fixed and unfixed, including time; space; language, and the boundaries of words. She also considers the ultimate boundary, between life and death, in the context of the untimely death of a friend through cancer. Suswin comes to understand how her teenage dislike of boundaries can be addressed in her creative life; she can alter her own boundaries “within the safety of my own writing process”. Writing “naively” in a young child’s voice, using simple language, enables her to access her “impetuous and mischievous inner child”, and to create a safe place for that child: work that can be done only by herself, as an adult.
“Wall fictions” looks at the ability of metaphor to break through the boundaries of literal thinking. The image of a crumbling wall enabled Suswin to understand a friend’s defensiveness and hostility. Writing about the wall “managed and then dissolved the anger” – after a break, the relationship was resumed. “It is impossible to really get inside the boundary of another’s skin,” she says, “yet this writing allowed me to do so imaginatively. And then the impasse I felt in real life dissolved into compassion.”
The final section deals with fictionalizing upsetting real-life events: in this case, a birthday celebration. By transferring, not the characters, but the emotional undercurrents, Suswin found insights into puzzling behaviour. It’s fun and easy to read: even the tablecloth, covered in wine and crumbs, gets a voice. And a surprising emotion is revealed.
Each chapter is followed by helpful notes and exercises to aid creativity, including the use of mind maps and freewriting. Suswin points out that, if using such freewheeling methods, it’s in the editing process that the boundaries of concise thought and a distinct style can be achieved.
By fictionalizing difficult relationships, “respect for writing about them may bring more understanding and a deeper revelation. And allow for a letting go of irritated feelings.” Such an approach takes time. But Suswin shows clearly how beneficial the investment can be: “Writing helps me to make sense when I have grappled with areas of my life
The benefits of creative therapeutic writing are already well known in the caring professions. As society slowly gets back to normal, and we resume our busy lives, there has been much talk about learning the lessons of the past year, and becoming more mindful. In Suswin’s view, “We will have to encircle ourselves with living as well as we are able, whilst acknowledging the interconnectedness of all our boundaries: looking after our bodies, living with each other respectfully, placing our feet on this earth with awareness.”
Hopefully, this accessible book will bring the practice of creative therapeutic writing to a wider, and receptive, audience.
Review by Sarah Hegarty.
Sarah’s short fiction has been published by Mslexia, Cinnamon Press and the Mechanics’ Institute Review, and shortlisted for the Fish and Bridport prizes. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Chichester and is writer-in-residence at George Abbot School, Guildford. www.sarahhegarty.co.uk
Dixon, J. Purl, Shoestring Press, 2020, ISBN 9781912524716, paperback, £10.00
Jo Dixon’s first full collection is organized into three definitional striations, but its storied voices and whirling choreography offers myriad intersections, cyclicities, and dances between the daily and the sacred. Dixon’s poems feel equally at home in both the cardboard boxes of memory-soaked attics, but also upon shorelines and atop glacial valleys. We venture from the Grand Canyon, Moonstone Beach and South Africa to the National Memorial Arboretum, Terry’s Fish ‘N’ Chips, and cigarette-bathed family rooms. The poems’ voices and vantage points purl between bisto-infused loungescapes, wading birds, and whales, ranging across timelines but always through a pleasingly incantatory arc of threaded narratives.
Purl, as the book’s section structure outlines, variously means a craftsperson’s ornate thread, a swirling, murmuring sound, largely of water but also of breath, smoke, voice, and music, and finally, a destructive force enough to send one tumbling head over heels. Each poem is found under one particular meaning of the word, and yet the threading, whirling, up-ending versions of the word are in rampant cross-pollination across the collection. Many of the first section’s poems seem to contain moments of the other two sections’ primary forces, both forceful waters, and murmuring voices. The loss of human contact in ‘The Neighbour’s Shoes’, captured visually through the italicized dialogue of the lonely neighbour interspersed within the speaker’s fourth-wall breaking narration, so beautifully comprises the susurrant music of remembering “she”, with an upcoming return to his homeland, after “she kept me here.” This plunging backwards and forwards in time pivots on a simple but loaded detail of the exchange: “at the bottom of the stairs, he talks half an hour more.”
Dixon often uses the axis of two poems side by side to allow the poem pairs to influence one another, and one of the most effective uses of this juxtaposing is across the space of pages 12-13, where Bridge Slide/ ‘And The Phoenix Has Come’, a collage poem layering pieces of a New Civil Engineer article regarding a bridge’s construction over Nottingham Station with snatches of Ted Hughes’ ‘And The Phoenix Has Come’, lays next to Haida Chief, an ekphrastic encounter with a cedar-wood Totem pole.
These unexpected pairings come in many shapes and forms, and another fascinating balancing act is that of human and beast. There are eco-poetic interrogations sown throughout the book, with observance and knowledge two crucial elements suggested to ensure the preservation and experience of wild species and spaces. Animals often appear twice or several times in the poems, but their roles as characters and motifs constantly morph, never staying in the same role, nor becoming stale. In one moment, the breach of a whale leaves the white-spray watermark of ‘a dahlia in full bloom’, but another whale in another poem is discovered with ‘quid scars on the box-shaped head/an amputated jawbone and conical teeth.’
The short Merwin-esque poem ‘Green’ rejects prior knowledge as a crucial facet for a meaningful encounter. The speaker admits to not yet knowing what names the fish swimming in the tarn go by, and has to guess at the name of another bird, yet the sacred act of witnessing is at the heart of meaning here; to see the ‘heart-shaped hole’ made by ‘two cormorants poised/ back to back’ and the sight of an unconfirmed avian, ‘merlin or sparrowhawk/freewheels into the scrub’ is to know them. Moths sometimes mirror an oppressively same-old domestic life, yet in the next poem, a rescued moth heralds the teeming possibilities inherent in the present and future tenses of a character entering a new moment in her life. Knowing and unknowing is also enacted constantly through language choices; this collection contains a trove of delightfully strange new terms, words, and names, cleverly coupled with regular lashings of intense accessibility.
To see and to be seen are two methods of eternal presence in these poems. There are epiphanies, once seen and never forgotten, but also cyclical commemorations, acts of returning to see again and again. Purl holds the ability to remain tangible in its questioning, whether it opts to gyre into a close relation’s photo albums and a neighbour’s old belongings, soar skyward and seaward into cetaceans and seagulls, or pull a piece of explorative research into the consciousness of the poet’s contemporary climate. Dixon seems occupied with the act of looking, not what is found, and the various mentions of persons and creatures being variably seen and unseen, seem a clarion call to this greater concentration on the pursuit of such vantages; only in doing so will what is seen at the finish line be considered treasure.
Review By Cameron George Stuart.
Cameron is a poet and teacher originally from, and now back residing in, Bedford. He received his Poetry MFA at Saint Mary’s College of California and has taught writing at St Mary’s College of California, Bedford College, and Berkeley. He is a lecturer in English at Bedford College, and also serves as poet in residence at Bedford’s Eagle Bookshop, where he runs a creative writing group. He believes the poem is you.
Monica Suswin, Rope Mates – creative therapeutic writing on companionship for writers, Cabin Press, ISBN 9780995688230, paperback, £14.00
Those working with creative writing for therapeutic purposes—either as a facilitator for others or for their own benefit—will, I think, find this book an enjoyable read, although the precise nature of its usefulness within this field is difficult to pin down. That subtitle, ‘creative therapeutic writing on companionship for writers’, gives us a clue: here we have author Monica Suswin—whose background is in humanistic psychotherapy—presenting her own piece of ‘creative therapeutic writing’ (with both comments about it, as well as entertaining deviations), on the subject of ‘companionship for writers’. She begins her examination of this sense of companionship by considering the benefits of writing groups and mentoring options—things that most people who write, either as a hobby or with a more serious focus on publication, begin with and progress to. She then introduces her own cast of other ‘companions’, including childhood memories, dreams, spiritual belief and her curiosity about the world around her and her inner world. All of these would, I suggest, sum up the areas most writers plunder for their writing, though the author’s honest, open-hearted sharing of her own journey through them is both entertaining and, especially for writers still grappling with the question ‘what should I write about?’, undoubtedly useful.
Each chapter offers a number of page-length panels entitled “Writing to do”, encouraging readers to explore their own writing for therapy and, perhaps, offering practitioners ideas to use with students/clients. The starting point for many of the prompts is rather vague—for example “Take a theme which you find interesting”—and beginner writers might feel a little daunted. This is a pity, because, midway through the book, there are some excellent page-length panels giving spot-on advice for those new writers, including guidance about “The Timed Write” and redrafting and editing. In some ways, it is the editing of the book itself which is a little off-key—we are past the halfway point before we reach the enormously helpful panel for new writers, detailing essential things such as the fact that “paper for writing” can be simply “Backs of used envelopes at the kitchen table”.
It is fair to assume that some of the book’s potential readers might be those embarking for the first time on writing for their own therapeutic purposes, and may come to it with some vulnerabilities. It is worth mentioning, then, that the author’s choice of the ‘rope mates’ metaphor of the title (taken, she tells us, from the mountaineering world and the support amongst climbers from those to whom they are roped) might not be universally positive. That Suswin admits in the book that she has been “near suicide” makes us wonder why she does not also explore here the negative connotations which the word ‘rope’ brings with it (even the terms ‘roped-in’, ‘on the ropes’ and ‘feeling ropey’ are not positive ones). Similarly, anyone using this book as a source of prompts for their therapeutic writing groups will sometimes need to use caution—Suswin herself admits that for her, “some events are too painful to write about”, and prompts such as “Write up your own taboo subject” and “Imagine the umbilicus attaching you to your mother” clearly require sensitive handling.
Suswin’s own journey of self-nurturing and enlightenment through therapeutic writing is the thread—or , dare I say it, rope—of joy running through this book. She is, in effect, her own guinea pig for the positive effects of creative therapeutic writing, and her affirmations about her practice are inspiring and motivational. She celebrates the fact that “being heard” in a writing group can in itself be therapeutic—”the more I shared with others, the more I felt truly myself”—admits that all her writing, whether private journaling or more ‘public’ pieces, about either her inner or outer life, “makes me more me, more whole”. And, ultimately, the companionship she both seeks and recommends is the words themselves: “Writing makes everything more real. My whole being becomes infused with my own words. The ones I choose to explain who I am and what motivates me. When I write like that I am never lonely. I am accompanied invisibly on my journey of words.”
Review by Dawn Gorman.
Dawn uses creative writing and aural history work for therapeutic purposes with groups and individuals, and is a poetry mentor. She presents The Poetry Place on West Wilts Radio, is Poetry Editor of Caduceus magazine, organises the nationally-acclaimed poetry reading series Words & Ears, and collaborates widely with writers, visual artists and musicians. Her poetry books include Instead, Let Us Say (Dempsey & Windle, 2019, winner of the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize), and two Pushcart Prizenominated books, Aloneness Is A Many-headed Bird (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2020, collaboratively written with Rosie Jackson) and This Meeting of Tracks (Toadlily Press, 2013).
Elkin, R. The Leading Question, High Window Press: Swindon, ISBN 9798696331614, paperback, £10.00
Despite the Great Irish Famine of the mid-1800s not being in our lifetimes, this does not mean it is irrelevant today. Many readers may have ancestors who were affected by such a tragic period in Irish history; others will likely know about the terrible blight and pestilence that impacted on thousands of people. The Leading Question is a collection of poems written by prize-winning poet Roger Elkin. The book is part of a significant sequence (The F Word) which explores the famine through different approaches.
Elkin’s collection stems from a visit to Strokestown Park House, in County Roscommon, which is home to the Irish National Famine Museum. His poetry is eclectic; it is heart-wrenching and thought-provoking; it takes readers to a place in history, but also focuses on contemporary issues that can affect so many of us today. The opening poem, ‘Holding’, is comprised of triplets which explore the simplicity and beauty of potatoes— ‘… rounded, smooth pebble-like’. In some ways, it is reminiscent of Seamus Heaney’s work, with the uncomplicated at its core. ‘Stable Truths’ is a beautifully-written homage to The Irish National Famine Museum. Elkin forces readers to consider this terrible period in history, and makes us question if we are ignorant of this through no fault of our own, or is it more intentional, a bury-our-heads-in-the-sand approach?
explains what ‘booleying’ is: a time when young people accompanied cattle to the mountains in the summer months. Contrastingly, ‘The Potato Blight: Phytophthora infestans’ is much rawer, a poem that explores the impact the blight had on potatoes, with the ‘… fungus spores…’ as well as the immediate beauty of the ‘… whitish fringe of growth/ furring down like the leaf’s contours’ juxtaposed with ‘… the pall of decomposition-stink…’ There is little doubt that this is devastating and certainly unforgettable, regardless of one’s knowledge about the famine.
Some of Elkin’s poems play with form in unconventional ways, such as the bullet-pointed listing in ‘Official Remedies’ and ‘Recipe for dealing with diseased potatoes’. Here, readers are advised how to tackle the challenges that would have affected so many people at the time. In ‘Cooking Cabbages’, Elkin deviates—the focus here is not on potatoes but on the importance that cabbages would have played in people’s diets. The cabbage, underrated and often abhorred, is portrayed as a beautiful thing, from ‘… the plusher, fuller Savoy…’ to ‘… the fatter, January King’—it is fascinating how a vegetable, perceived by many to lack interest or excitement, can be something alive, personified in many different ways: ‘skin leather-crinkled’ and ‘surrendering/its heart’ are two such examples.
In ‘The Big Issue’, Elkin adopts a free-verse form, contemporary and anaphoric in style, consisting of questions without answers— ‘when does hunger become famine become starvation.’ In ‘Dan Byrne’s Hunger’, the series of sections allows readers to go on a journey with the central character, and by the end of the tenth section, the overarching theme of movement and migration really comes to the fore, entitled ‘Going West’ and written in a dense, concentrated stanza, where, despite the intensity of the journey being described, there is hope that ‘New Edens would begin’—this is suitably uplifting. In contrast, the collection’s final offering, ‘This Silence’, is upfront and candid with telling readers about ‘… the thrown-away nameless generations without headstones, something that is often, very sadly, the result of conflicts the world over. More recently, perhaps, we could liken this to the pandemic and the horrific images we have seen on our TV screens, of coffins piled up in impoverished countries without the infrastructure and support to cope. Terrible, in so many ways. Elkin’s title poem plays with the form, from the conventional opening stanzas through to listing ‘Bills of Entry’. This, perhaps, allows readers to consider the true impact of the Irish Potato Famine, whilst remembering how fortunate we are not to have experienced such a tragedy. It is important to remember what happened in the past—it is the adage of ‘history repeating itself’ but we can certainly learn a lot from long-ago episodic events.
The Leading Question is an intense read, and one which should leave readers with answers to some questions about this period in history, as well as a desire to find out more. Don Paterson says about Elkin’s work that [the poems] ‘… burst with sharply observed and well-chosen detail…’ and one cannot argue with this.
Review by Matthew Tett.
Matthew is a freelance educator and writer living and working in Wiltshire. He is Writing in Education’s reviews editor and he coordinates Corsham’s StoryTown festival.
Thomas, M.W. Under Smoky Light, Oswestry: Offa’s Press, 2020. ISBN 9781999694340, 35 pages, £5.95
West Midlands based Offa’s Press has developed a very strong list of regional poetry over recent years, with some excellent anthologies and single author collections. Under Smoky Light is the eleventh book from Worcestershire writer Michael W. Thomas, a widely published poet, fiction writer, and playwright, with the delightful and intriguing title of “Poet-at-Large in the Navy of the Conch Republic of Key West”.
It is mostly a book about beginnings and endings, viewed through the lens of maturity. The interest in beginnings can be seen in poems like ‘The Willenhall Road’, which reflects on a redeveloped region of Bilston, in the Black Country:
All I was is now an island on a late, over-budget expressway.
He goes on to explore his emotional attachment to the place as it was, and the significant moments that shaped his boyhood identity—the “first hesitations of summer”, his “first ever kiss”—lamenting the loss of that world, and a past he can now only glimpse in “the small hours”:
Only the small hours call back to the island the shimmer of walls and coping-stones, the brush of smoke and laughter. Only a single fox commanding the moon-bled lanes has care enough to step over my heart, to skirt around my beginnings.
The language reflects the elegiac tone of the book, but Thomas avoids mawkish nostalgia: here, as elsewhere, the imagery is strong, and we feel that memory and emotion have been through the full imaginative process. He continues the theme in poems like ‘Impresario’, about his father’s unrealised dreams, and ‘Old Boys’, where two childhood friends meet up in later life. The latter explores the nature of friendship, and how time erodes that bond:
Now we look each other up and down as at some long-surrendered coat glimpsed on the far side of all that’s gone.
The boyhood friendship was a union of convenience between two “baffled souls”, each creating a shadow in which the other “could noiselessly hide”.
Reflections on the past register a sense of loss, and sit alongside poems that contemplate a limited future: ‘A buck and two bits (after Edward Hopper’s “Gas”)’ creates a monologue for Hopper’s underworked gas pump attendant, with the title of the poem, ‘A buck and two bits’, denoting his day’s takings—it skilfully details his predicament in 1930s America, the failure of the New Deal, and hassles from “the Company” who phone him twice a day to ask “how the figures do seem/to be laying themselves out”. The attendant’s world shrinks as the money dries up: “Less and less I take in / the trees across the road. Every night, it feels, /they drag a yard closer”. Thomas also explores loss and impending demise in more personal ways, as ‘In a postscripted summer’, where he ponders “the silence/that will at last come in shadows”, and seems reconciled to the loss of the past, and the “silence” and “shadows” it casts: “you may do no more than stand in it”, he tells us,
as in a postscripted summer when this time around the days ask nothing of you save that you gaze deep into them and do them the kindness of letting them gaze back.
The past is irrevocable, except insofar as we can learn from it. Elsewhere, in ‘Coda’, the speaker gradually loses himself, fading from the world until he’s merely “a fidget of wind among the yet-to-die”, with just enough presence to make the living “tug their collar”. Despite his focus on endings, the end itself is always deferred for Thomas. We saw in ‘Old Boys’ that “all that’s gone” can still be “glimpsed”, and this remains so, even in death: the final poem, ‘Shepherd’, imagines his father in the afterlife, assisting souls in transition to whatever lies beyond—they are “tipped out/into his waiting arms/for the brace-up/the soothing murmur/the slow-step/the road after road/with the first of night/ already at the sky”. While we glimpse “the first of night” in many Thomas poems, then, it never falls completely dark: he always creates a compelling space in which the remains of light can be seen, and savoured. A delightful collection.
Review by Paul McDonald.
Paul taught at the University of Wolverhampton for twenty-five years, where he led the creative programme. He took early retirement in 2019 to write full time. He is the author of twenty books, including poetry, fiction and scholarship, the most recent of which is Allen Ginsberg: Cosmopolitan Comic (2020).
Ash, A, Clark, M.D. and Drew, C. (eds) Imaginative Teaching through Creative Writing: A Guide for Secondary Classrooms, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, ISBN 9781350152694 £85.00
This book landed in my mailbox just at the right time. I’ve recently embarked on a creative non-fiction unit with my Grade 11 students at the Shanghai American School and was searching for inspiration. Our English Department set ‘creativity’ as a priority three years ago and we’ve stuck with it ever since, come hell, high water—or Covid. Imaginative teaching is always running a bit threadbare as this time in the term, so I was excited to get an injection of fresh ideas and perspectives. And I wasn’t disappointed. Piecing together accounts of teaching creatively from 25 teachers and professors, the guide is more than a practical handbook and rewards a bit of time investment.
The book is divided into two halves—the first being a rationale and pedagogical defence for including creative writing in the classroom. Whilst we appreciate that creative writing can foster student voice and control of the narrative, there remains a systemic bias in favour of teacher-led expository and analytical writing in the US and UK curricula which can be hard to push back against. I recognize my own deep-rooted preferences here: at the back of my mind lurks the worry about the viability of the ‘writing workshop’ model with its relegation of the teacher to the sidelines. How do I sell it to a class of nineteen 15-year-olds who, every year without fail, react with surprise and horror to the idea of ‘creative writing’ like it is something they have never done before? And when they actually start writing, how do I orchestrate the draft writing process to prevent the class turning into a boring ‘study hall’ type session as students engage with the computer but not with one another? How do I foster a supportive, irony-free environment—one where they will they be open to sharing feelings—amidst a chorus of “I don’t know what to write!” and “This is no good”? And, scariest of all, how can I (an IB Lit, AP Lit and past IGCSE English teacher deeply immersed in the analysis genre of student writing) feel confident assessing creative writing against a rubric? This book addresses many of these questions and helpfully plots creative writing activities against their matching US Common Core standards for English Language Arts. Whilst this is less relevant for UK teaching professionals, the imaginative approaches shared here will spice up the GCSE classroom no end, as long as you’re open to a bit of creative chaos.
The second half is where teacher creativity really kicks in, as experiments and experiences with creative writing in the classroom are recounted through a series of essays sprinkled with humour and empathy. I was intrigued by “The Poetry of Maths and Science”, where we are introduced to the idea of using Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophioe Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) as fodder for student creativity. Step One: Rip out the pages of the book. Step 2: Students admire the beauty of their given page—variables, sentences, lines, angles and formulas, noticing details like repetition (‘surface’, ‘valleys, ‘hollows’, ‘space’) and word structure. Step 3: They write a reflection on what they noticed— about the page, about Newton’s principles. Step 4: Everyone shares one sentence that stood out for them. After that, Krieger (a teacher at Union-Endicott Central School District) suggests, you can do a “black out poetry” activity or have students develop creative non-fiction around Newton’s language. Sticking with science, another activity she suggests is “blindfold sensory writing” by having students run their hands over and around a model of the brain borrowed from the Biology Department and write about the experience, with ‘anatomic specificity or metaphorically’. As schools are increasingly targeting 21st century skills, rather than discrete bodies of knowledge, it makes sense to integrate English writing skills into other domains in creative ways. Another idea I am excited to try out is ‘fake translations’ shared by Amanda Clarke and Na Cohen at Viewpoint School. The concept is simple—take a poem in a language students don’t know, such as Finnish, and have them translate it. Then, compare translations for what they noticed about the shape of the poem—in particular, the technical elements such as repetition, lineation, stanza form and punctuation which they have translated to their own poems. I am curious to see if this works. I can see it might be a nice intro activity to looking at structure in English poems.
At the back of the book is a small, but handy, section on ‘workshop’ procedures and ‘peer feedback’ forms that can be used with poetry and fiction writing activities. Indescribably more valuable to me were the mentor texts referenced by many of the contributors and I have already shared some with my own students. Oona Marie Abrams’ essay on incorporating creative writing into her AP Lit course yielded many gems including Penny Kittle (https://pennykittle. net/) and her wealth of free online resources for teachers. “There’s a man buried in your kitchen”, writes Rick Reilly in “Next Time, Stop the Freaking race!” A successful hook for creative non-fiction, if ever I saw one.
Westbrook, S. and Ryan, J. Beyond Craft: An Anti-Handbook for Creative Writers, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, ISBN 9781350152021, paperback, £21.99
As a teacher of creative writing and a teacher-educator of creative writing teachers, I found this a fascinating and important book. The authors are Steve Westbrook, who teaches creative writing at California State University, and James Ryan, who is editor-in-chief of Journal of Creative Writing Studies. They are well placed to critique current creative writing pedagogies, particularly ones that are happening in the United States. They see the teaching of creative writing as being inhibited and harmed by the obsession that many tutors have on ‘craft’: the idea that students can be taught creative writing by practicing a set of writing strategies. Westbrook and Ryan write: To our thinking, the problem lies not in the concern with craft itself but in the exclusion of nearly everything else. Too often issues of craft are not placed in relation to a whole host of other subjects. In fact, the impression most handbook authors give is that the discipline of creative writing seeks to somehow artificially isolate formal issues of craft from larger contexts, concerns and functions related to writing (3) This ‘anti-handbook’ seeks to address this central problem for much teaching of creative writing by exploring the historical roots of creative writing pedagogies (Section One Where Creative Writing Comes From); the identities of creative writers (Section Two Who Creative Writers Are); how and why writers ‘find their audiences, or how publishing works’ (Section Three); and the future of creative writing (Section Four).
This structure is very helpful for the reader in terms of navigating what is a complex theoretical and practical set of issues. In the historical section, Westbrook and Ryan lay some of the blame for narrow minded pedagogies on the Iowa creative writing workshop, set up in the late 1930s in the United States. Here the much-imitated format of the Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) creative writing workshop was established, with ideas such as sharing participants’ work, gagging the author being workshopped from saying anything as they listen to the critiques, the focus upon ‘craft’, i.e. orthodoxies like ‘show, don’t tell’ and so on, being established. It is still the approach taken by many creative writing courses today throughout the world, but it can be problematic when there is both an implicit and explicit assumption that the author is a solitary writer who is alone in their quest to improve their work and that they can control the meaning of their work. As Westbrook and Ryan point out, by exploring the post-structuralist Roland Barthes’ notions of the ‘death of the author’ (79-82), it’s theoretically questionable that a writer can control the interpretations of their work and that the author is the shaper of meaning.
They unpick highly problematic notions of certain authors being perceived as ‘solitary geniuses’ who spontaneously produce masterpieces, and seek to ‘re-purpose’ spontaneity by drawing upon the academic research of Hayes and Flower, and Wendy Bishop. They argue for a ‘process pedagogy’ (65), a way of learning to write that values process as much as product, which involves writers giving themselves permission to write ‘shitty first drafts’ (66) rather expecting fully-formed masterpieces to emerge straightaway. They could have drawn upon the important work written by Peter Elbow (1998) and the National Writing Project (2021 US and UK) in this regard, which suggests a similar approach.
In a series of illuminating case studies, they show how some of our most famous writers such as T.S. Eliot and Raymond Carver benefitted from high degrees of collaboration with editors, who were practically co-authors in the end. Eliot famously worked with Ezra Pound, who took a hatchet to the first drafts of Eliot’s seminal poem about alienation, The Wasteland (1974). Pound, like Carver’s editor Gordon Lish, was more than an editor; their cuts were so draconian that they were essentially co-creators. Their roles were hidden from a reading public, which was in thrall—and possibly still is—to the myth of the ‘single author’. Ryan and Westbrook write: ‘As we envision the future of creative writing, we envision one that treats collaboration less as a dirty little secret and more as an accepted and normal part of the writing process’ (97-98).
A particularly powerful case study is their discussion of ‘A Collaborative Poem for the Hazara’, a victimized people in Afghanistan, which combined the work of 23 poets from 16 countries. They show here the power of online publishing and collaboration. The second half of the book is devoted to how creative writing is now published. Again, with some
fantastic case studies they debunk some familiar myths which corrupt the discourses around the teaching of creative writing: they show how the mainstream publishing world operates and how its machinations inevitably lead to important voices, particularly voices from marginalized groups and communities, being downgraded, marginalized and erased. They show that publishing work is an intricate and time-consuming game. Refreshingly, they do not condemn self-publishing or posting work on blogs, but rather show some authors can really benefit from these modes of publication.
Overall, I would strongly recommend this book for teachers and practitioners of creative writing. It is geared at the US market but so much of what is said here is relevant both in theoretical and practical terms to the English market. There could have been more focus upon the reasons why people write and a discussion of ‘intersectionality’ (Crenshaw 1989): the ways in which the different issues of race, class, ethnicity, gender intersect to create inequality and oppression. But possibly this will be something they could consider for their next book.
References Crenshaw, Kimberley (1989) “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol.: Iss. 1, Article 8. Available at: http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8 Elbow, P. (1998). Writing without teachers (Second ed.). Oxford: OUP. Eliot, T. (1974). Collected poems. London: Faber. The National Writing Project UK (2021) URL accessed 17th March 2021: https://www.nationalwritingproject.uk/ The National Writing Project US (2021) URL accessed 17th March 2021: https://www.nwp.org/
Review by Francis Gilbert.
Francis is a senior lecturer in education at Goldsmiths, University of London and head of the MA in Creative Writing and Education. He has published many books, mainly focused upon educational themes, including ‘I’m A Teacher, Get Me Out of Here’ (Short Books 2004) and ‘The Last Day of Term’ (Short Books 2011). Most recently he published a novel, ‘Snow on the Danube’ (Blue Door Press 2019).
Clark, F. A Practical Guide to Creative Writing in Schools: Seven Creative Writing Projects for Ages 8-14, Routledge, 2021, ISBN 9780367562649, paperback, £29.99
Improving children’s knowledge and understanding of the English curriculum while having fun and being creative is the focus of this collection of school creative writing projects. Fiona Clark has worked as a teacher and school leader for over two decades, has been writer in residence in schools across the UK, and has a particular interest in young people’s emotional resilience and wellbeing. This experience is evident throughout this practical and inspiring book which offers seven tried-and-tested projects to use with KS2 and KS3 children.
Each project in the book explores a different literary genre or writing style. These are: poetry; autobiography; detective stories; gothic conventions; responding to drama; producing a school newsletter; and responding to prose. Each project chapter includes detailed instructions and resources for a series of one-hour workshops which end with pupils publishing an anthology of their writing on that topic. This means they can experience the journey from planning to publication and see themselves as writers—something Clark says can be, “a significant and hugely positive moment”.
Everything is clear and well thought out—from the choice of texts and themes covered to the instructions on how to run workshops and publish the collections—which means each project is ready to deliver. Clark takes care to include information gained from testing the activities in real life classrooms, for example suggesting ways they might be
adapted for different situations or highlighting areas where pupils may get stuck or feel overwhelmed. There are time-saving “helping hand” sections which provide lists of answers, suggested prompt questions, and background information on texts and Clark is good at breaking down projects that may otherwise seem daunting, such as publishing a school newspaper, into easy-to-follow steps. As well as the seven project chapters, the book contains a section on evaluating your project which would be especially helpful if you needed to demonstrate its success and impact to secure funds or support.
I enjoyed the emphasis on writing for enjoyment and reinforcing positive messages, including by using the motto #wearewriters #weareenough. As such, I thought the most useful exercises in the book are those designed to show pupils that their own ideas and experiences are important. For example, the poetry project includes exercises where pupils could discuss what things are special about their family and prepare a presentation on what they love about their city/town/village. There are also some excellent resources around planning stories, particularly in the detective stories and gothic conventions sections, these being a good way of letting pupils experience and understand the different ways writers begin pieces of writing. If anything, I would have liked more exercises that would let pupils experience how writers work, particularly in being able to experiment and take risks without feeling it has to be right first time. For example, using personal notebooks for writing or doodling that aren’t shared or assessed or examining the messy first drafts and plans of writers as well as their final published books.
The book would be ideal for teachers looking for creative writing projects that can be delivered as part of regular English lessons or in other ways, for example during an after-school writers’ club. It would also be a useful and adaptable resource for anyone working with young writers in schools, particularly those wanting to make sure that projects fitted with the English curriculum and were appropriate and workable for particular age groups.
Review by Amanda Quinn.
Amanda is a writer and tutor who lives in the northeast of England. Her short fiction has been published by Shooter Literary Magazine, Open Pen, Ellipsis Zine, Butcher’s Dog, Neon Literary Magazine, and others. She teaches creative writing for various organisations including the Workers’ Educational Association. She is currently working with local schools and Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums as creative writing artist practitioner for the Museums and Galleries Partners in Education (MaGPiE) Project funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Teacher Development Fund. She can be found online at www.amandaquinn.co.uk and on Twitter @amandaqwriter.
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