Key Issues in Creative Writing

Dianne Donnelly, PhD, is the author of Establishing Creative Writing Studies as an Academic Discipline (2011) and the editor of Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? (2010). She is a regular contributor to the theory and pedagogy of creative writing and a frequent presenter at CCCC and AWP on creative writing pedagogy. She is on the editorial board for New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing and Writing Commons, referees for the online peer-reviewed journal TEXT, and teaches writing at the University of South Florida. Graeme Harper, DCA PhD, is Professor and Director of The Honors College at Oakland University, Michigan. He has held professorships in the UK, USA and Australia, is an honorary professor in the UK and the Editor-in-Chief of New Writing: the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. He recently also published On Creative Writing (2010), and is currently working on Creative Writing Challenges. A winner of the National Book Council Award for New Fiction (Aust.), and a Commonwealth Scholarship, he is Editor of the New Writing Viewpoints book series.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Dianne Donnelly and Graeme Harper: Key Issues and Global Perspectives in Creative WritingPart IChapter 1: Dianne Donnelly: Reshaping Creative Writing: Power and Agency in the AcademyChapter 2: Mimi Thebo: Hey, Babe, Take a Walk on the Wild Side—Creative Writing in UniversitiesChapter 3: Graeme Harper: Creative Writing HabitatsChapter 4: Steve Healey: Beyond the Literary: Why Creative Literacy MattersChapter 5: Katharine Haake: To Fill with Milk: Or, the Thing and ItselfChapter 6: Graeme Harper: Research in Creative WritingChapter 7: Dianne Donnelly: Creative Writing KnowledgePart IIChapter 8: Stephanie Vanderslice: Teaching Toward the FutureChapter 9: Indigo Perry: Holding on and Letting GoChapter 10: Program Design and the Making of Successful Programs10.1 Nigel McLoughlin: Building a Better Elephant Machine: A Case Study in Creative Writing Program Design10.2 Patrick Bizzaro: The Future of Graduate Studies in Creative Writing: Institutionalizing Literary Writing Conclusion: Dianne Donnelly and Graeme Harper: Investigating Key Issues in Creative Writing

Creative writers studying, researching and teaching in universities are facing deep unsettling change, as are universities themselves and the economies in which they are embedded. Writers as individuals know about the creative value of uncertainty, experiment, bold thinking and embracing contradictions; this provocative collection points to ways of doing this for the discipline as a whole. With perspectives from the US, the UK and Australia, this is globalized thinking in the good sense – not homogenized but expanded by considering their deep differences as well as their shared interests. Here is an array of possibilities by which creative writing may not simply survive but positively evolve.