Nigel McLoughlin is Reader in
Creative Writing at the
University of Gloucestershire
and Course Leader for the
MA in Creative and Critical
Writing. His areas of interest
include the pedagogy of
Creative Writing, new media
and pedagogy and the
creative process. His fifth
collection of poetry is
Chora: New & Selected Poems
(Templar Poetry, 2009).
As part of the MA in Creative & Critical Writing at the University of Gloucestershire, students may take a module on Teaching Creative Writing, which covers both the hands-on practice of running workshops and the academic study of important texts related to the pedagogy of Creative Writing. Much of what is written deals in a very practical way with the teaching methods employed by teachers of Creative Writing. Case studies of successful exercises and teaching methods abound. It is much less common for books and articles to deal with the educational and creative theories that underpin these practices.
In order to help my own students (and others facing similar questions) I decided to apply to the English Subject Centre for project funding to set up a central resource which would provide a focus and a locus for these discussions. I knew that colleagues were interested in research and scholarship related to the pedagogy of Creative Writing, and I knew of several colleagues who had also published articles, and I knew that there was a need for an outlet which specialised in the area. I felt that such an outlet could prove invaluable not just to students but to early career lecturers also, since there had, until fairly recently, been no formal training available in the pedagogy of Creative Writing.
In the early stages, I saw a new resource – a database – as a way of gathering together articles related to the pedagogy of Creative Writing in a way that would make them easily accessible to students and new lecturers. Discussions with English Subject Centre st
aff Nicole King and Brett Lucas helped me to focus the idea and to think through its structure. I wanted to attract contributions of scholarly articles and to stimulate debate on how Creative Writing is taught and discussion of the theoretical aspects that underpin the way the discipline is taught. I saw the resource as a sort of ’one stop shop’ for students and new lecturers, which would provide a store of information that could be developed and added to over time. This information could include exercises colleagues had found successful, book reviews and hints and tips as well as articles.
Screenshot for the Creative Writing resource
As the project progressed however, the journal became the centrepiece with the resources section forming a satellite around it. The main reasons for this appeared to be that the journal offered the opportunity to publish new scholarship and research, which contributors found attractive and, initially at least, the people interested in the site were predominantly experienced teachers. I obtained an ISSN number for the journal, since that was crucial to Australian colleagues. The biggest problem faced in the early stages was one of profile. I had no tangible product, merely the promise of an online, peer-reviewed ’something’. Academics tend to be fairly cautious creatures and they needed to be sure that their articles could be entered into their respective research assessment exercises. The list of peer reviewers also helped to assure contributors that the journal would publish articles of a high calibre and that if their article was accepted, that it would be in good company.
The peer review panel was recruited from colleagues whom I knew to have a strong interest in Creative Writing pedagogy. I was lucky enough to bring on board a number of senior academics from the field, all of whom had both extensive teaching experience and a strong profile in area of pedagogy. I wanted to have a panel that was balanced in terms of the epistemologies that the reviewers shared and their particular areas of expertise and interests. International representation was also important in order to encourage interest and contributions from North America, Australasia (key locations for the teaching of Creative Writing) as well as the UK.
The first call for papers went out in March 2008. The articles trickled in. After approximately six months, almost two dozen articles were received and circulated for peer review. As hoped for, the six articles selected included contributions from Australia and the UK, and they covered key pedagogical issues such as the emergence of the Creative Writing industry within the academy; whether Creative Writing can be taught; the strengths and failings of the workshop model; the place of theory in Creative Writing and the tensions and synergies between Creative Writing in the academy and the publishing industry. All the articles can be found in the first issue at www.cwteaching.com.
– Rosemary Dun, Creative Writing Teacher, UK
As the journal developed I set about conceptualising the ’satellite’ pages of book reviews and articles published elsewhere, and eventually purchased a stand-alone website to house everything rather than incorporate the journal into the English Subject Centre website. I felt it was crucial to have some form of product online as quickly as possible, as the journal would not really attract sufficient volume of contributions until it was ’live’ and prospective contributors could see exactly what sort of articles were being published. My idea to include book reviews of the major texts that relate to the pedagogy of writing, links to other journals and organisations, which, collectively, may be of general use to postgraduate students or new lecturers involved searching online sources for articles and book reviews which had already been published. These sources included other online journals and pages from university websites, which held articles that could be viewed by the public. What struck me most as I reviewed what was available was just how little theoretically based discussion related to the pedagogy of Creative Writing was actually available online. In part, of course, that is related to the fact that the debates have only fairly recently emerged, but also because, no doubt, most of the articles are published by the print journals such as New Writing and Writing in Education.
Encouraged by this online gap in the market, I also set up a Facebook group, which was used to publicise the calls for papers and to create some wider interest in the resource among writers and teachers of writing elsewhere in the world. This group quickly garnered over 1,500 members, and that reassured me that what I was doing was necessary, even though the initial numbers of article submissions were small. After circulating the website to the journal’s peer reviewers for feedback, I alerted the membership of the Facebook group to its existence too. The response was better than I could have hoped. People contacted me through the feedback page on the website to say ’thank you’ for building it. In the first two months there were over 2,000 unique visitors to the website from 64 countries.
The second edition of the journal is currently in preparation and on course for upload in October 2009. Fortunately, I have also secured some internal funding at the University of Gloucestershire, which means the journal can continue operation and the resource can expand. This funding is part of a wider initiative involving students on the postgraduate Teaching Creative Writing module who will use the current generation of the website to act as a starting point for a research project as part of their studies. The students will generate articles as part of their assessment and submit them to conferences and other journals for publication. Part of the money will be used to make a contribution towards conference expenses of students taking the teaching module in 2009/2010. Two students who did the module in 2008/2009 had conference papers accepted at ’Great Writing’, University of Bangor, while two others from the 2007/2008 cohort used the resource to refine previous assignment essays into conference papers and had those papers accepted to the postgraduate conference, ’The Playful Paradox’, University of Bedfordshire. These articles will be added to the resource part of the site, on a page dedicated to student conference papers, where they will be available to be read by the following year’s module cohort as well as by students from other institutions. In future, students will also have the opportunity to work on the journal as interns and to continue to use the resource to get involved in pedagogical research and scholarship through the production of conference papers and book reviews.
I am happy that the resource continues to develop: in addition to the website, a members-only online forum exists to provide a space for debate and discussion. So far, this has only been lightly used as a means for exchanging book recommendations etc. but, as the number of members grows, the potential is there to provide a focus for rich discussion. At the moment the volume of material makes browsing easy but, as it grows, the website will require reorganisation perhaps in relation to various ’themes’ and it will need to be made fully searchable. I’d like to see some video and other media in use on the site too, perhaps taped interviews with experienced teachers, all aimed at expanding current debates in the pedagogy of Creative Writing and perhaps initiating new ones.
