Dispatches from the Classroom

Joseph Rein is currently the assistant coordinator of the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he is pursuing his PhD. His fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in The Wisconsin Review, Concho River Review, Fiction Weekly, Ampersand Review, Twisted Ink, and New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. A former Peace Corps Volunteer, David Yost recently returned from his second trip to Thailand working with Burmese refugees to pursue a PhD in fiction writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His fiction has previously appeared in more than twenty journals, including The Southern Review, The Sun, Pleiades, Witness, and Asia Literary Review, while his critical articles have appeared in MELUS, Studies in American Indian Literatures, and War, Literature, and the Arts. Chris Drew is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a writer who focuses on the rural and small-town places of southern Indiana. His writings have appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review, Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley, The Evansville Review, The Sycamore Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Concho River Review, and The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association.

• Introduction; Part I- Laying the Ground Rules; Workshop, Revision, and Grading in the Creative Writing Syllabus; Preventing Tears in Workshop:; Teaching Students How to Give and Receive Criticism; Kristen Gottstein, Georgia State University; Eradicating Reviser's Block:; Bringing Revision to the Foreground; Ashley Cowger, University of Alaska Fairbanks; Confronting the Unavoidable:; Grading Creative Writing; Ashley Wurzbacher, Eastern Washington University; Part II - What Is "Appropriate" for the Workshop?; Censorship, Trauma, and Memory in the Creative Writing Classroom; Invoking the Muzzle:; Censorship and the Creative Writing Workshop; M. Thomas Gammarino, The University of Hawaii; Dear Diary:; Violence, Confession, and (Creative) Writing Pedagogies; Laura Madeline Wiseman, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; What Time Was I Supposed to Remember That?:; Memory, Constraint, and Creative Writing Pedagogy; Michael Dean Clark, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Part III - Teaching "Technique"; Craft Elements and Exercises; Exercises in Authority:; Teaching Fiction and Poetry in the Undergraduate Classroom; Jeremy Lakaszcyck, University of Massachusetts; Write What You Don't Know:; Teaching Creative Research; Joseph Rein, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Making the Parts of the Workshop Come Together:; A Practical Example; Yelizaveta P. Renfro, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Avoiding Meaning:; A Classroom Exercise to Improve Students' Homophonic Sensibilities; David Bartone, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Unleashing the Nemesis of Genre Fiction; Karen Gentry, Georgia State University; Specificity of Dialogue:; A Coke is a Soda is a Pop is a Cola; Liane LeMaster, Georgia State University; So Much For That Happy Ending:; Rendering Complex Emotion in Fiction; Anthony J. Sams, University of North Carolina Wilmington; Part IV| The Hybrid TA; Literary Theory, Writing Centers, and the New Creative Writer; Something to Push Up Against:; Using Theory as Creative Pedagogy; Kimberly Quiogue Andrews and John Belk, Pennsylvania State University; Adapting Writing Center Pedagogy for the Undergraduate Creative Writing Workshop; Janelle Adsit, Colorado State University; Composing Creatively:; Further Crossing Composition/Creative Writing Boundaries; David Yost and Chris Drew, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.