Graeme Harper is Professor
of Creative Writing, and
Director of Research,
in the College of Arts
and Humanities, at Bangor
University. He is Chair
of the NAWE Higher
Education Committee and
edits the journal New Writing.
His latest works are, as
Brooke Biaz, Moon Dance
(Parlor, 2008) and, as Graeme
Harper, The Creative
Writing Guidebook
(Continuum, 2008).
1 This project began with a discovery. This discovery appeared to be as important as it was simple. The discovery was this: that university students of Creative Writing were not the same as university students of English. Students of Creative Writing appeared to read with different intentions, for different results, and they did so in a way that was not always recognised by their English tutors. There was, in lay terms, some kind of ‘mismatch’, something in the process of developing and exchanging knowledge between the subjects of English and Creative Writing that was going awry. Students of English treated as if they were students of Creative Writing were not always benefiting from their university experience, and students of Creative Writing, treated as if they were students of English, were likewise missing out on something. But what was it?
The first forward steps in this project were, thus, taken around the relatively expansive notion of exploring the relationship between the subjects of ‘English’ and ‘Creative Writing’. And the initial, more specific, observation was simply that the understanding and knowledge at play among either English or Creative Writing students was not of poorer comparative kind, but that it was different. These were not, as such, weaker ‘creative’ students or weaker ‘literary criticism’ students – though this was the shorthand often used if, as was reasonably common, they were performing better in one or other part of their university studies.
To present a somewhat typical example: these were students who might score a 78 on a piece of creative work and a 53 on a literature-focused essay, or vice versa. Often, the ‘intelligence’ of the strongest students in either of these subjects was entirely obvious, in the way they approached higher learning, in their willingness to explore ideas, in their capacity to shift planes of reference. But the Creative Writing student’s ability to engage with a set of critical ideas that asked them to respond to ‘completed’ English texts or the English student’s ability to produce and consider creative works in progress was not the same.
All this, of course, is anecdotal, and the control groups, if there could be said to be any, were those encountered on what is now, frighteningly, 25 years of teaching Creative Writing students in English departments, in departments of Creative Studies, Media and Film, Creative and Performing Arts – at BA, MA and PhD level, in the UK, Australia and the US. A quarter of a century of thinking: ‘something is not right here’. Perhaps it takes its toll!
The clue to ensuring the success of this English Subject Centre project largely appeared to be in how one or other set of students responded to the tasks around them: tasks of reading and tasks of writing. Creative Writing students did so in a different way to those studying English, and they did so in a way that drew on the natural processing activity occurring when anyone (student or not) is engaged in high-pressure activity, deadlines, or work that will be assessed by others. Certainly, English students did appear to be able to train themselves to be better students of Creative Writing, and Creative Writing students could become better students of English – but the students who interested me most were those who were not willing to train themselves. I was also particularly interested in those students who felt enlivened by Creative Writing in a way that the ‘post-event’ study of completed works in English did not seem to enliven them. By post-event, I mean ‘after the production of the text’; thus, focusing on completed works, largely written by others (regardless of any complications we might see in this word ‘completed’). These were students who were likely to respond ‘I’m doing Creative Writing’, if asked what degree programme they were pursuing, even if they were combining Creative Writing with other subjects, such as English.
None of these initial observations equated entirely with any notions of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’. Rather, they appeared to be about human dispositions. These were individuals who – if it doesn’t murder the language too brutally – had an ‘epistemological disposition’ toward creative practice as their primary outreach, and a critical understanding that worked best when it fluidly informed this disposition. I called this kind of understanding critical responsive understanding. Critical responsive understanding is a kind of critical understanding that responds to a need. In the case of the creative writer, that need is to produce their next work of Creative Writing – whether poem, story, screenplay or otherwise. It is responsive because it is responding to this need with a degree of critical and creative openness that means it is difficult to harness to one of the shiny buggies of modern, Western university education. Or, in other words, it is not usefully served by our long-held tendency towards departmentalisation.
Creative writers, using their responsive understanding to the fullest of their abilities, draw on whatever fields of structured knowledge that exist around them and, indeed, as evidence would come to prove on this project, they often draw on vast areas of unstructured knowledge in ways that defy any university structuring (or, at every least, that kind of structuring prevalent in the West during the previous century). The fact is, we might not even have come to notice this kind of responsive understanding had the cultural moment not moved on from that seen in the vast majority of the 20th-century when we witnessed increased university ‘departmentalisation’, built on the foundations of exploring ‘scientific’ specialisms. Here in the 21st-century, the sense of interrelation is already far stronger, with many universities in the UK actively encouraging what is referred to as ‘cross-college/department’ or ‘cross-institution’ collaboration, and even those research councils that fund academics talk increasingly about the importance of ‘cross-disciplinary’ research. New technologies, most of them launched from the early 1990s onwards, have emphasised such connectivity and brought about new modes of human exchange. Just think of the mobile phone, the computer game, the Internet and World Wide Web. These are technologies of our cultural moment.
2 The English Subject Centre Critical Responsive Understanding project began with a series of seminars in London, followed by others in Bangor, Oxford and Norwich, and it incorporated video-linked seminars to the US and Australia. The majority of people involved in the seminars were actively engaged with the subject of Creative Writing, as either staff or students. However, in Oxford and in London, there were also participants whose principle work was in the subject of English. To keep this exchange balanced, seminars were organised by myself (a specialist in Creative Writing) and by Dr Samantha Rayner (whose doctoral background is in English).
Seminars focused on different aspects of the English-Creative Writing exchange, but the primary interest was in exploring types and styles of critical understanding. To take some contrasting examples: the British Library seminar (April 2007) looked at the artefacts of Creative Writing and how these were represented in culture, and the ways in which critical apparatuses have been built up around certain aspects of these artefacts. The relative importance of fame in defining what has been, or has not been, preserved as part of our literary heritage was explored during this seminar. Likewise, the seminar looked at how our preferences for certain styles, presentations or modes of dissemination had brought to the fore certain kinds of writerly texts and responses to them. A discussion was also launched around the Creative Writing process, and there was an extensive exploration of how any act of Creative Writing not only potentially produces a core, final work, but also produces preliminary works, complementary works and post-works (such as reviews and critical articles, writers’ letters to friends and publishers).
The British Library seminar contrasted with the international video conference, co-ordinated at Bangor (October 2007), and with the seminar at Oxford Brookes University (April 2008). The international video conference looked more widely at knowledge in the subject of Creative Writing, and considered how this knowledge compared and contrasted with the knowledge in the subject of English. Participants included members of staff and students from West Georgia University (USA), Bangor University, the University of Bedfordshire, Flinders University (Australia) and the University of Gloucestershire.
And so the comparisons continue: in New York (January 2008), discussions focused on understanding rather than knowledge, and considered how understanding involved both certain acts/actions, thoughts and, indeed, critical positions. This seminar, involving around 40 members of the Creative Writing community from the UK and USA, highlighted how the subjects of English and Creative Writing were developing at various points in their national histories, while the subject of Creative Writing was beginning to communicate more frequently internationally, in a way that now matched the international communications in the subject of English.
In Norwich (November 2007), the seminar looked more closely at acts of practice, and largely involved students of Creative Writing, from undergraduate and postgraduate courses; while in Oxford, where Professor Rob Pope played a key role and where many participants had backgrounds in the study of English, the seminar focused on responsiveness, ideas about the nature of creativity and the purposes and trajectories of contemporary criticism.
3 The original proposal for ‘Responsive Critical Understanding: extending the possibilities in the relationship between English and Creative Writing’ defined the direction of the project well, throughout. However, because in the initial seminars the participants were largely in agreement that the disciplines of ‘English’ and ‘Creative Writing’ were different, but related (this often depended upon on which genre of Creative Writing was being considered), additional discussions around critical understanding, and responsive criticism, were later included, to encourage further explorations of what the relationship between the two disciplines entails.
These discussions then informed a presentation at the English Subject Centre Renewals conference, in July 2007, where a large audience for a session, conducted by Graeme Harper and Graham Holderness (who was not part of the project, but presented work on creative-critical writing), were engaged with ideas of process-based knowledge and post-production knowledge. Of particular interest to that audience, were notions of pre-texts, complementary texts and post-texts – that is, works made before, during and after the core Creative Writing.
At sessions in London in April 2007, participants were keen to explore actual writing acts and actions – noting that much of what they did as creative writers was not recorded, and that much of it would not be considered, necessarily, to be worthy of ‘literary study’. Discussions here adopted a fairly teleological ethos, concentrating on the Creative Writing acts that contributed to the goal of completing one or other writing project. On the other hand, in Oxford, discussions ranged more widely across the approaches that might be taken to the idea of a ‘final’ creative product, with participants eager to emphasise that the question of what was a ‘completed’ work was itself highly vexed. In Norwich, questions of what constituted ‘discipline-focused’ teaching and learning were raised, with quite a number of the Creative Writing students present (BA- and M-level) not having a background in English – many of them having linked to visual arts subjects.
Many of the project seminars – whether live or by video link – were recorded as notes, directly onto a laptop, or onto flipcharts or, occasionally, on whiteboards (and transcribed later). Different venues initiated different approaches. For example, at the Norwich venue (in the conference centre of Norwich’s city centre site called ‘The Forum’, which also houses the city library, regional offices of the BBC and a range of stores), discussions were more free-form, and the interactions more like a public lecture and discussion. In Oxford, discussions were more like a seminar: with a formal presentation and structured questions and answers based on PowerPoint slides. At the Swedenborg Centre in Bloomsbury (the venue for two London events), a workshop approach was taken, with participants working in smaller groups and then opening up their discussions. Broad topic areas defined each of the events, such as ‘acts and actions of Creative Writing’, ‘the nature of critical understanding in Creative Writing’, ‘varieties of practice/varieties of criticism’, ‘types and roles of theoretical analysis’, ‘the nature of Creative Writing experience’, ‘the place of the writer in culture’, ‘the institution and the creative writer’, ‘the history of Creative Writing and English in universities’, ‘practice-led research’ and ‘kinds of understanding and the nature of Creative Writing knowledge’.
Participants noted such things as:
‘Creative Writing is about the practice of writing.’
‘English can be helpful in understanding literary history and context.’
‘There are no truly completed texts, really.’
‘The nature of authorship is one of the bigger questions here.’
‘Creative Writing draws on many bodies of knowledge, not just literary ones.’
‘I don’t have a background in English literature, but I am a creative writer.’
‘There are some things that go unrecorded in the writing process.’
‘Self-knowledge is part of Creative Writing.’
‘There is a body of knowledge about Creative Writing that is not always easily shared in universities at present.’
4 After what became around 18 months of seminars, discussions and occasional readings (used as starting points for discussion), the results were as lively as they were thought-provoking. Of particular importance were the following:
1. Creative Writing students and staff felt that their engagement in acts and actions of practice involved a wide range of critical understanding and a considerable breadth of knowledge. Not all of this, they felt, was contained in what some universities currently call the study of English.
2. English staff and students recognised that an informed understanding of Creative Writing practice was certainly valuable, but felt some aspects were not necessarily avenues for easy exploration through the university subject of English, and made particular note of changes in critical or theoretical perspectives over the last 50 years that had sometimes helped the exploration of Creative Writing and sometimes hindered it, particularly in relation to the place and significance of ‘the author’.
3. Both subject groups felt they could gain from continuing to talk to each other. However, both also recognised that universities allowed for the exchange of ideas and knowledge across a vast range of subjects, and that such broad areas as ‘the creative arts’ might have important relationships to build with the subject of Creative Writing, while other areas in the Humanities might have important relationships with the subject of English, all of which might benefit from additional exploration.
4. Creative writers outlined in some seminars those kinds of things they do in their day-to-day lives as writers that did not seem to be the subject of critical study from within the subject of English.
5. English specialists noted some aspects of their critical understanding that helped to inform their analysis of texts and contexts, but did not seem to relate directly to how authors might personally view their acts and actions.
6. ‘Appreciation’ was a word that featured in a number of discussions, and both staff/students of English and those of Creative Writing made a point of showing appreciation for the perspectives and approaches adopted by their alternate-subject colleagues, while maintaining the considerable importance of their autonomy.
7. Finally, the notion of responsiveness was extensively explored and was seen as a potential way of defining the activities of both groups and, perhaps, of encouraging both groups to see their subjects as engaging with the world in specific ways.
The project revealed a great deal about the ways in which we assume certain knowledge is, or isn’t, valid in universities and about how we develop our levels of understanding. It added some flesh to the bones of an idea: the idea that English and Creative Writing can operate in a collaborative way without absorbing one subject into the other or, indeed, without suggesting critical knowledge of creative activity is contained only in post-event analysis, or creative knowledge only contained in practice-led activities. Continued discussion between the National Association of Writers in Education and the English Subject Centre is adding further weight to such positive collaborative enterprises.
Further Information http://nieci.bangor.ac.uk/recrun/www.nawe.co.uk
