Afterword Disciplinarity and the Future of Creative Writing Studies

Abstract

Back in the early 1980s, I was fresh out of a master's program in creative 'writing and a doctoral program in composition and rhetoric.Having taken numerous writing workshops for the BA (Uta h) and MA (SUNY Buffalo) in Creative Writing, I appreciated the flow -the give and take of the 'writing w orkshop, yet I wondered why creative writing teachers didn't experiment with alternative pedagogical approaches, why my academic tra ining included so little literature, particularly contemporaxy fiction.The standard approach of the writing workshop -the te~cher leading a critique of a work w hile the a uthor remained silent and the alpha students fought for the class' attention or teacher's approval seemed like loads of fun to me yet ultimately \-veak if more than socia l entertainment was the goal.I yea rned for train ing in specific genres of fiction, wanted to learn to conduct research for future fiction, and hoped to learn craft moves from modern literature.How could I best de r elop ideas for new work?What could I learn from the practices of successful novelists?Then, as now, creative writing pedagogy seemed limited 'to put raw pain on the page, with the only substantive critical ques tions asked being those concerning imagistic clarity' (Andrews, 2009: 248) .In contrJst, from m y doctoral studies, I was inspired by w riting process research, and I wond ered w hy the creative writing facul ty or RhetComp faculty didn 't research the creative processes of established writers or research the efficacy of the workshop model.As a result, hoping to stimulate research and scholarship in the field of creative w riting -and hoping to take the first step in my career -I edited Creative Writi ng in America: Theory and Pedagogy (1989c: 25).In this book (as well as a related essay in The AWP Chronicle), I argued 'the general segregation of creative 230

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